General Search Engine News

Welcome (back) to the Legal Search Marketing Blog (2019)

Featured Content, General Search Engine News, Google Search Engine, Lawyer Marketing Tips, Legal SEO Marketing /

Re-Launch of Legal Search Marketing Blog Welcome to the relaunch of the Legal Search Engine Marketing Blog. We will bring you the latest news on the search engine industry with a specific focus on the legal community.   We will help your law firm be able to rank in the Google search results and improve your law firms Organic SEO, Local SEO, and even video SEO results! Holy Shit this Blog has been going since 2005! Thats frigging almost 15 years now.    So Im going to update this post with today’s date of February 5, 2019, and make this the relaunch of the Legal Search Marketing blog.  This blog in the past was just put up in order to link to my lawyer clients sites and to just blog about the latest search engine related news, mainly Google SEO for lawyer news. SEO FOR LAWYERS Yet over the past year, I’ve made this into an SEO marketing blog for Lawyers, posting not only the latest Google news and other search engine marketing related news but also SEO tips for lawyers.    I am going to be posting as many valuable tips as possible for the legal community. We will focus on everything related to search engine optimization for attorneys including Keyword Research for lawyers, organic seo marketing, latest Google my business tips and everything else related to getting the best possible results for your law firm. SEO CHANGES OVER THE YEARS SEO is always changing and evolving each and every year it seems.  Yet some things remain the same as they were in 2005. Back then it was very easy to get ranked and you just had to optimize your TITLE and meta tags, and get a few links with exact match anchor text, and you would probably easily be in the top 3 at Google for most of your keywords. Yet Google has made it MUCH harder to get ranked and to get quality traffic to your legal site.  YET if your a lawyer who writes a lot of content and has a good brand, then your probably going to be in good shape and don’t even need to do that much. There are so many new things though that you must do in 2019, over 2005.  Social media accounts for one, earning backlinks from a lot of different sites, creating videos and the list goes on. LAWYER SEO IN 2019 Today it comes down to a few different things as far as “how do you get your lawyer website ranked #1 at Google”.   First off there are a few different places to be #1.   The Local SEO Map results is one place, the organic listings is another, and then Google has all kinds of other ways they show content in the search engine listings. You must create high-quality content that is 2000 words plus and is relevant to your legal practice.   You must get listed in the right legal directories and make sure your Name, Address, and Phone # (NAP) are all exactly the same.  You must have social media accounts set up and get social signals to your content. This means people are sharing your content and engaging in it by making comments.   Your site must be mobile friendly and fast in order to rank higher these days.    Then getting links from other sites is usually what the secret sauce is going to be, but the right sites.  You need links from high authority relevant sites and they should be using your law firms brand name in the anchor text. Updating Your Lawyer Blog Posts from Past One of the many SEO techniques that you need to do in 2019, is to go back through your older blog posts and check for a few different things including: Duplicate Content – (You can use the tool of siteliner.com to check your site for duplicate content) Thin Content – This means content like this blog post that was maybe 100 words total.  I now am updating it to add another 600-1000 words of content, this way its not so thin.  I am also updating the date to let Google know this is new fresh content! Non Relevant Content – Sometimes over the years your content might not be as relevant or might be a post that you just would like removed.   So what you need to do is 301 redirect these older posts to a new post or page that makes sense for user to find.   This way any link juice that these posts have, will be carried over to the new post or page. Then also you might have blogged about the same thing 10 times over the years, so it might make sense to combine those posts into one main post. You can also do a 301 redirect of older duplicative posts where you are talking about the same subject as in a new post. Nathan Gotch of Gotch SEO talks about the importance of not cannibalizing your keywords.  So I am going back through all of my older posts and making a number of updates and probably going to redirect like 150 posts or more.  Then maybe 50 of the posts will be deleted and 50 of them will be updated for 2019 lawyer Search Marketing. I am in the process of doing project for a few different personal injury lawyers, as well as updating my Chicago SEO website. If you need any assistance with improving your law firms SEO results, contact us for a free SEO audit of your legal website.

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SEO For Solo Lawyers

General Search Engine News, Google My Business, Law Firm Marketing, Lawyer Marketing Tips, Legal Internet Marketing, Solo Lawyer Marketing /

Search Engine Marketing for Solo Attorneys Are you a Solo Lawyer that needs SEO help?  You really should do all you can with SEO in order to give yourself a chance at beating the big guys of the world.  Its possible for a solo attorney or small law firm to achieve as good or better SEO organic and local seo rankings. Its not easy but it can happen! The key is want to create a shit load of high quality content and just write your ass off.   Just like if you were preparing a brief for a big case and needed to do weeks of research, same thing here. Just write it all down and put it into blog posts. Keyword Research for Lawyers  You always want to do some keyword research to see exactly what keywords make sense to focus on.    Also if you are a personal injury lawyer who lives in Pennsylvania, then there are a lot of possible keyword combinations you could be ranked for.   You want to find keywords related to your practice and location, but also that you can rank for.   You cant rank for personal injury lawyers usually, or just ynt to create a LOT our town and lawyers. Sometimes you have to find long tail keywords and get multiple blog posts ranked for many different keywords. Longtail Keywords for Attorneys Longtrail keywords are just simply searches that contain more then 4 keywords, sometimes 10-12 keywords.    You want to try and rank for all things a user might search that relates to what you do. SO a good thing to do is check a site like Answer the public and find out what questions people are asking.  These are usually longer searches like “What do I do after a car accident?” or “how do I find a great personal injury lawyer? SEO Audits for Attorneys and Law Firms You want to have an SEO audit of your law firm website done and see where you stand right now.   You want to see where your ranked, how many links you currently have how many citations you have and a number of other factors that go into getting your lawyer website ranked at Google.   We can do a video audit that shows where your site is ranked and other key metrics using top paid search marketing tools.      ** Fill out the FREE Consultation Form Content is King and Queen Writing content for your solo law firm website should now be your side job.  Write articles related to your law firms practice areas and what you do in real life.  Do videos where you are talking to people and answering questions potential clients might have.   People like to see real people when hiring a lawyer and if someone sees you talking, it might make a big difference.  You want to write content, create videos, create images and infographics for your law firm practices. Getting Links for Your Solo Law Site You want to make sure you get links to your website and not just to your homepage.  You want to get authority links and relevant links, and hopefully they are DO Follow links, which means link juice passes to your site and you get credit for the link.    If you are a criminal lawyer, you want links from other legal sites, criminal law sites are best.   Yet you want links from everywhere you can get. Social accounts, client sites, directories, legal directories and everything else where you could possibly get a link.  This IS NOT EASY and it usually doesnt happen on its own, UNLESS You create great content that people find and decide to link to because its a great resource.

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2018 New Google SEO Ranking Factors for Lawyers – Part 3

General Search Engine News, Google Search Engine, Google Updates, Internet Marketing News, Law Firm Marketing, Lawyer Marketing Tips /

Google SEO For Lawyers Ranking Factors – #41 – 75 Google recently released a document which shows that there are at least 200 Ranking Factors, 200.   Some obviously are more important then others, and some have almost no influence.   So its key to know what works in 2018 and 2019 to get your lawyer website ranked higher, so you can start getting more leads from clients looking for your legal services. I have gone over the first 40 in other posts and am listing the next 35 here.  Then I will create a post on what the TOP 20 overall ranking factors are out of these 200 possible factors.   Bottom line is there are a LOT of different things that go into ranking your website, so you cant go overboard on any 1 thing, other then creating high quality unique content.    If you do that, you will have a big advantage. Yet if everyone else is doing that, then it will come down to who is doing the most of these 200 different factors. Previous Post ====> RANKING FACTORS 1-20 – Google SEO Ranking Factors 21-40 SEO Ranking factors from Google for Lawyers: 41. “Hidden” Content on Mobile: Hidden content on mobile devices may not get indexed (or may not be weighed as heavily) vs. fully visible content. However, a Googler recently stated that hidden content is OK. But also said that in the same video, “…if it’s critical content it should be visible…”. 42. Helpful “Supplementary Content”: According to a now-public Google Rater Guidelines Document, helpful supplementary content is an indicator of a page’s quality (and therefore, Google ranking). Examples include currency converters, loan interest calculators and interactive recipes. 43. Content Hidden Behind Tabs: Do users need to click on a tab to reveal some of the content on your page? If so, Google has said that this content “may not be indexed”. 44. Number of Outbound Links: Too many dofollow OBLs can “leak” PageRank, which can hurt that page’s rankings. *** So this is interesting because it makes sense that you dont want to include a ton of links, BUT it can help to include a couple of outbound links to authority websites.   45. Multimedia: Images, videos and other multimedia elements may act as a content quality signal. For example, one industry study found a correlation between multimedia and rankings: *** No doubt having more images and videos will help you rank better and keep people on your site longer, which is key.   46. Number of Internal Links Pointing to Page: The number of internal links to a page indicates its importance relative to other pages on the site. *** So this means you should make sure that you links other pages together, especially when they make sense.  So if you do a blog post on divorce law, link to the divorce law practice page, and other related posts.   47. Quality of Internal Links Pointing to Page: Internal links from authoritative pages on domain have a stronger effect than pages with no or low PageRank. 48. Broken Links: Having too many broken links on a page may be a sign of a neglected or abandoned site. The Google Rater Guidelines Document uses broken links as one was to assess a homepage’s quality. 49. Reading Level: There’s no doubt that Google estimates the reading level of webpages. In fact, Google used to give you reading level stats: But what they do with that information is up for debate. Some say that a basic reading level will help you rank better because it will appeal to the masses. But others associate a basic reading level with content mills like Ezine Articles. 50. Affiliate Links: Affiliate links themselves probably won’t hurt your rankings. But if you have too many, Google’s algorithm may pay closer attention to other quality signals to make sure you’re not a “thin affiliate site“. 51. HTML errors/W3C validation: Lots of HTML errors or sloppy coding may be a sign of a poor quality site. While controversial, many in SEO think that a well-coded page is uses as a quality signal. 52. Domain Authority: All things being equal, a page on an authoritative domain will rank higher than a page on a domain with less authority. *** So here you want to get quality links from authority websites in your niche, this will help raise your domain authority score.   53. Page’s PageRank: Not perfectly correlated. But pages with lots of authority tend to outrank pages without much link authority. 54. URL Length: Excessively long URLs may hurt a page’s search engine visibility. In fact, several industry studies have found that short URLs tend to have a slight edge in Google’s search results. 55. URL Path: A page closer to the homepage may get a slight authority boost vs. pages buried deep down in a site’s architecture. 56. Human Editors: Although never confirmed, Google has filed a patent for a system that allows human editors to influence the SERPs. 57. Page Category: The category the page appears on is a relevancy signal. A page that’s part of a closely related category may get a relevancy boost compared to a page that’s filed under an unrelated category. 58. WordPress Tags: Tags are WordPress-specific relevancy signal. According to Yoast.com: “The only way it improves your SEO is by relating one piece of content to another, and more specifically a group of posts to each other.” 59. Keyword in URL: Another relevancy signal. A Google rep recently called this a “a very small ranking factor“. But a ranking factor nontheless. 60. URL String: The categories in the URL string are read by Google and may provide a thematic signal to what a page is about: 61. References and Sources: Citing references and sources, like research papers do, may be a sign of quality. The Google Quality Guidelines states that reviewers should keep an eye out for sources when looking at certain pages: “This is a topic where expertise and/or authoritative sources are important…”. However, Google has denied that they use external links as a ranking signal. *** Everything Ive heard is that this is a ranking signal, if you link out to the right sites that

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Big Facebook Changes for 2018

Facebook, General Search Engine News, Law Firm Marketing /

FACEBOOK MARKETING FOR LAWYERS Facebook is making a big update to how its going to rank and show sites in the news feeds.  Lawyers should take notice here. Every so often another social media channel changes their algorithms and leaves marketers scrambling to find the best ways to get maximum views and engagement. Usually, this creates a huge problem – like when Google changes their algorithm – but for this change, I think a lot of us have been expecting some of it. Facebook announced that the new feed will have display more updates and posts from friends and family rather than from the pages that you follow or from Facebook ads. What’s really interesting is that they are predicting that this will decrease the average time that people spend on Facebook? What? Why would Facebook want people to spend less time on the platform? The feedback from people has been pretty standard – that there are way too many sponsored posts and meaningless ads on their newsfeeds. And what ends up happening is that people endlessly scrolling through their feeds and not interacting with any of the content. So Facebook decided to increase their user engagement, decrease the newsfeed zombie effect, and show their support and appreciation for their diehard fans. Mark Zuckerberg explained it in a formal statement: “We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us. That’s why we’ve always put friends and family at the core of the experience. Research shows that strengthening our relationships improves our well-being and happiness.” “But recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other. … Based on this, we’re making a major change to how we build Facebook.” So what does this mean for marketers? A few things. First, this signals the almost certain death of organic reach for branded content. What companies need to do is to put more money into Facebook ads in order to get the same reach. Alternatively, brands need to put more time and energy into creating content that will truly engage with their audience and peak their interest. Remember, Facebook is going for engagement so if your friends are all commenting on a catchy post by Pepsi, chances are that you will see it. Smaller brands need to get better at creating engaging content and using Facebook ads. What’s really vital is for each company to really study their audience and understand what they are looking for. Learn their interests and problems and learn to provide the right solutions. What can brands do with this information? Strategically use influencer marketing Brands can best help counter the decrease in organic reach by strategically using influencers to promote their product, service, or message. Influencers have an engaged audience with specific interests, hobbies, and forms of content that they regularly consume. If a brand works with an influencer whose audience matches their ideal group of people that they want to promote to then they will be able to get more engagement and more sales in a shorter amount of time. Think about it, no organic reach means people will only see the post from the brands (or influencers) that they really engage with. So the best way to still get traction on Facebook is to work with those influencers. What other ways can you adjust to the algorithm change? Collaborate with others Facebook is switching to a ranking system where they rank those posts with the highest engagement (likes and longer comments) at the top. Find other brands or businesses and work with them to create thought-provoking posts that will get the engagement of both audiences. Focus on live video Zuckerberg announced that Facebook video reach will decrease because most people watch videos and never actually engage with them. That being said, it is very probable that a Facebook live feed, that actually brings engagement, comments, and conversation will get a lot of organic reach. So focus on live video, make it part of your content strategy. Also, always ask for comments and feedback in every video that you do, this will bring your rankings higher. Learn how to work Facebook ads It is going to be vital to learn how to advertise. Facebook Ads is a separate system than organic content and it looks like it won’t be affected by this algorithm change. So, learn how to advertise, you can higher a freelancer, learn it yourself, or even get a marketing agency to do it for you. Diversify your social media strategy Finally, please do yourself a favor and get on as many social networks as you possibly can. Make Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Snapchat part of your social media strategy and learn how to maximize your reach and engagement on each platform. Remember, you need to honor the rules of each platform. Learn the best content types that work on each social media channel, learn the common forms to write things, learn how to display your content visually. Don’t just post the same piece of content on all of your networks, make it fit each one. Recap Facebook is changing and in a lot of ways, it’s becoming a more fun and more meaningful platform. That being said, lawyers need to learn how to navigate the new changes and shift their social media strategy to achieve the same engagement and reach.      Bottom line is that you need to do more here with Facebook, both with creating engaging content and doing more with Facebook ads.

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Google Removes Right Hand Sidebar Ads

General Search Engine News, Google AdWords, Google Search Engine, Legal Internet Marketing /

GOOGLE NEWS FOR LAWYERS – PPC MARKETING Starting on February 19th, Google began phasing out sidebar ads from their search engine results pages. They will now show one to four ads before the organic search results, and the rest will be pushed to the bottom of the page. SO This only effects Pay Per Click advertisers, because now there is less ad space. No more ads on the right side seems like a waste of space, so who knows what Google is doing here, yet you can bet it has something to do with MOBILE. Google is all Mobile, all the time. The update – which is described as “global and permanent” will only apply to desktop searches, which may affect the traffic you see from desktop devices. According to Search Engine Journal: “High volume and general search terms have been most severely affected by the update so far. Long-tail and niche terms will begin to see their right hand ads disappear in the coming weeks.” This change hasn’t yet rolled out to mobile, so it remains to be seen if/when that will happen and what the results will be… Search Engine Journal

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Google Launches Webmaster Help For Hacked Sites

General Search Engine News, Google Webmaster Tools, Hacked Sites /

Has your lawyer site been hacked or compromised? If you are in doubt about the chances of your site getting compromised, the recent release of Google’s webmaster help for hacked sites should be a good indicator on just how widespread this problem is. If you have a website, be advised that it does not matter if it is big or small, your site stands an equal chance of being compromised. Perhaps, the more popular ones are more prone to attacks, but then again, those popular sites are likely to have increased “defenses” and proper “recovery plans” in place, in case something happens. How about your site? Google knows that this is not a small risk to site owners and in lieu of the ever increasing threats out there, has created a whole new section on how to tackle matters if your site has sadly been compromised. Start by reading these articles on how to increase your websites security, specially in you are on WordPress… WordPress Security Plugins, Protect Your Online Business WordPress Security For Blogs and Small Business, Why care? Create A Strong And Unique Password (oldie but still works) Password Management Guide (downloadable for free) The articles (and guides) above, if you have read and implemented some of the suggestions, will not guarantee 100% security. Nonetheless, it will help to increase your websites security and prevent as much as possible attempts to hack your site. Now, in the likelihood that those suggestion have failed to avoid your site from being compromised, this is where you may want to head over Google’s Hacked site help section for further information on how to deal with the problem. WATCH VIDEO FROM GOOGLE ON HACKED SITES Following the discovery that your site has been compromised, follow through the next steps, as provided on Google’s help for hacked sites. 1 Watch the overview (completed – you just watched it, right) Beginner 2 Contact your hoster and build a support team Beginner 3 Quarantine your site Intermediate 4 Touch base with Webmaster Tools Intermediate 5 Assess the damage (hacked with spam) or Assess the damage (hacked with malware) Advanced 6 Identify the vulnerability Advanced 7 Clean and maintain your site Advanced 8 Request a review Intermediate If you need assistance with your lawyer site that has been hacked or compromised, contact us today. [si-contact-form form=’1′]

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Bing Pay Per Click Marketing for Lawyers

Bing, General Search Engine News, Pay Per Click Marketing /

Pay per click (PPC) marketing is pretty key in todays competitive Internet marketing market.  Getting people to your website is done in a variety of ways.  Obviously you would prefer if you could just depend on your organic traffic but usually you will need to do many forms of online advertising, including Pay per click marketing. Many lawyers seem turned off by the concept but its a good way to get people to visit your site that potentially may turn into new clients.   Google Adwords is the main PPC player but Bing / MSN Ad Center is another good option.  In many cases you might find the keywords are much cheaper then at Google, and its another avenue of traffic to your site. WHAT IS PAY PER CLICK MARKETING? Pay per click (PPC) (also called Cost per click) is an Internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, where advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system. PPC “display” advertisements are shown on web sites or search engine results with related content that have agreed to show ads. This approach differs from the “pay per impression” methods used in television and newspaper advertising. BING PAY PER CLICK MARKETING Microsoft was the last of the “Big Three” search engines (Microsoft, Google and Yahoo!) to develop its own system for delivering pay per click (PPC) ads. Until the beginning of 2006, all of the ads displayed on the Bing (formerly MSN Search) search engine were supplied by Overture (and later Yahoo!). MSN collected a portion of the ad revenue in return for displaying Yahoo!’s ads on its search engine. As search marketing grew, Microsoft began developing its own system, Microsoft adCenter, for selling PPC advertisements directly to advertisers. As the system was phased in, MSN search showed Yahoo! and Microsoft adCenter advertising in its search results. Microsoft effort to create AdCenter was led by Tarek Najm, then general manager in MSN division of Microsoft. In June 2006, the contract between Yahoo! and Microsoft had expired and Microsoft was displaying only ads from adCenter until 2010. In January 2010 Microsoft announced a take over of Yahoo! and the combination of Bing, formerly MSN Search, to form the Microsoft Search Alliance. A complete transition of all Yahoo! sponsored ad clients to Microsoft adCenter occurred in October 2010. BING PPC FOR ATTORNEYS If your law practice is considering doing a PPC campaign, contact us for assistance. We will help you with all PPC including BING PPC.  We can help you find just the right keywords to focus on and increase your traffic with potential clients searching for your legal services.  You can set a budget and a cap on your per bid amount, as well as your daily or monthly amounts.  FREE PPC MARKETING PROPOSAL Visit our pay per click marketing for lawyers page and fill out the online contact form.

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Reports: Google CPCs Continue To Decline And Yahoo/Bing’s Rise While Spend Overall Grows In Q1

General Search Engine News, Google Search Engine /

By all accounts, paid search spending rose in Q1 2012 as compared to the previous year, but by how much depends on the source, and the sector. Covario, which serves mostly high-tech clients, says paid search in the Americas grew 15% in the first quarter, while Adobe’s Efficient Frontier, which serves clients in a variety of verticals, says it saw a 16% year-over-year increase in the U.S.. Meanwhile, the retail-heavy and U.S.-focused Rimm Kaufman Group (RKG) says search spend rose 30 percent as compared to the 2011 period. All three companies recently released reports that give insight into how paid search did in the last quarter, and predict what spending might look like for the rest of the year to come. Cost-per-click rates on Google continued to decline, according to Efficient Frontier. The company says Google CPCs fell by 5 percent year-over-year, and was down from the fourth quarter, as well. Still, by increasing clicks overall, the company has managed to hang onto its market share. It probably helps that Yahoo-Bing CPCs increased by 18% year-over-year, giving the Search Alliance less of an ROI advantage. According to Rimm Kaufman, Google CPCs fell 7% year-over-year in Q1, while CPCs on Yahoo-Bing rose 15% as compared to the year-ago period. Though Efficient Frontier said cost-per-click pricing was down in the automotive and finance sectors, the company found that CPCs dropped most precipitously (by 17%) in the retail sector. Covario also noted a drop in CPCs, saying they declined 3% from Q4 ’11. The company’s analysts believe search engine algorithm changes are behind the decline and predict pricing will stabilize in the second half of the year. The biggest trend noted by Efficient Frontier is paid search on smartphones and tablets. The company says spend on mobile devices in the U.S. represented 7.7% of all search spend in the first quarter, mostly driven by growth in spending on tablets. Tablet spend has grown from nearly zero in May of 2011 to 4.25% of all search ad spend by March of 2012. Spend on tablets is now greater than that on smartphones. The company predicts that overall mobile device spend will account for 15 to 20 percent of search spend by the end of this year. Part of what’s driving the move to tablets especially is that conversions on tablets exceeds that of desktop devices, yet CPCs on tablets continue to be lower. Rimm Kaufman said it saw mobile traffic share at just under 14% at the end of the first quarter, which was nearly double 2011 levels. Tablets represented nearly 8% of paid search clicks and 57% of mobile clicks. Google was the deliverer of much of that mobile traffic, and it continues to be the dominant player overall. The company commanded 78% market share in Q1, according to Covario. Spend on Google was up 1% from the typically-busy Q4 period, and up 23% over the year-ago period. The Yahoo-Bing Search Alliance showed 2% growth from the fourth quarter, but it’s still down 20% from the first quarter of 2011 and has 13% market share. Baidu, the leading player in China, grew 4% from last quarter and 142% year-over-year. The company rakes in 9% of global paid search spending. Of the three companies, only Covario and Efficient Frontier made predictions about the rest of the year. Covario forecasts 18 to 22% annualized growth globally in 2012, while the Adobe unit only gives a U.S. number, saying growth will come in between 10 to 15 percent this year. SOURCE  

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How Serious Is Facebook About Search?

Facebook, General Search Engine News /

An article in BusinessWeek suggests that Facebook is planning a deeper push into search. Will that be limited to improving search for the site — or will it be something more comprehensive? It’s clear that Facebook needs better internal search. Right now the search function at the top of the page is not very useful. Improving Facebook site search seems to be the first objective of an internal team, led by former Googler Lars Rasmussen, according to BusinessWeek; Searching the social network could get a lot better in the near future. About two dozen Facebook engineers, led by a former Google engineer named Lars Rasmussen, are working on an improved search engine, say two people familiar with the project who did not want to be named because the company is in a quiet period ahead of its IPO. The goal, they say, is to help users better sift through the volume of content that members create on the site, such as status updates, and the articles, videos, and other information across the Web that people “like” using Facebook’s omnipresent thumbs-up button. Better Site Search Would Increase Query Volumes There’s no question that an improved search capability would benefit Facebook in several ways. It would encourage more search activity among users, who would be rewarded with a better experience, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. It would also create a PPC ad opportunity that is probably too lucrative for Facebook to ignore. Facebook could sell contextual or keyword-based PPC ads in search results. There’s probably pent-up demand for such a program. It’s a natural for the site and a monetization opportunity that Facebook will be compelled to adopt. Facebook Not Likely to Directly Challenge Google It’s unlikely in the near term that Facebook would seek to challenge Google directly in web search. The first reason is the company’s relationship with Bing, which prevents the move in the near term at least. The second reason is that it would take a huge resource commitment from Facebook. There’s enormous exposure there; consider how much Microsoft has been losing over a period of years in trying to catch Google. Yet Facebook doesn’t need to challenge Google directly in web search. Improving search on the Facebook site — including a better layout and presentation of results — wouldn’t be anywhere as difficult as general web search. It would also be welcomed by users — and certainly by advertisers, provided there were PPC opportunities. And I would almost guarantee some version of paid-search advertising on Facebook is “on the roadmap.” Hundreds of Millions in Revenue “on the Table” According to the BusinessWeek article (using comScore data) Facebook users performed 336 million search queries in February.  If Facebook fixed search that number would immediately go up and could translate into hundreds of millions of dollars in new annual revenue for the company. Institutional investors will all but demand such a move after the IPO. In the recently released Local Search Usage Study from comScore, Localeze and agency 15 Miles, the data reflect that “use of social networking sites for local business searches has increased 67 percent since 2010.” With better Facebook site search those numbers would likely only get bigger. Source   

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Google Eliminates Another Link Network

General Search Engine News, Google Search Engine, Link Building /

The battle between Google and those trying to artificially manipulate its search results is an ongoing battle. Google on March 19th took down one of those blog/link networks named BuildMyRank.com. BuildMyRank.com confirmed Google has deindexed an “overwhelming majority” of their network as of March 19, 2012. The management of BuildMyRank.com has decided to immediately shut down their service and provide refunds to customers. BuildMyRank.com thought that Google would allow their network since they felt they provided “better quality service,” which was a “bit different from other networks.” But as they admitted on their blog, “this was not the case. The bottom line is that Google has been cracking down for awhile now and its a new era of SEO.  You need to create good content, include videos and work harder to obtain links then in the past. Jennifer Ledbetter at PotPieGirl has a lot more on this network being hit by Google on her blog. It might also just be one of several networks hit.  

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