Social media now affecting Google search
… Google is baking “friends” activity on Twitter, Flickr, and other platforms (other than Facebook) into the top search results users see. In some cases, “The social search element will change a page’s ranking — making it appear higher than ‘normal,’” reports Search Engine Land. “The ranking impact will be different based on how strong your connections are, and different people will see different results.”
Via MediaPost News. Read more.
Bing search share up; Google down
Microsoft’s Bing search engine captured 13.1 percent market share, grabbing an entire percentage point from Google, which dropped from 66.6 percent through December to 65.6 percent through January.
ComScore said Bing, whose share climbed from 12 percent in December, enjoyed its greatest single-month boost since its inception in June 2009, when the service started at 8 percent.
Via eWeek. Read more.
New rotation in Adwords lets you optimize for conversions
Google has announced a new rotation option that shows the best converting ads more often. Google’s default setting shows the ads with the highest click through rate most often. Best conversion rate makes more sense. However, you’ll need to factor this into your ad testing plan.
Via Inside Adwords. Read more.
Longer headlines available on Google
Google has begun changing the placement of the first description line for certain ads that appear above the search results on Google. For some ads where each line appears to be a distinct sentence and ends in the proper punctuation, description line 1 will be moved to the headline and separated by a hyphen. As a result, some top placement ads will have longer headlines. Search agencies report increased click-through rates with the longer headline.
February 25th, 2011 at 10:01 am
Thanks, I liked this blog post. I found this site through Bing, and certainly enjoyed it, so I’ll probably drop by again within a month and read up on what’s new