Vertical Leap News
ASA powers extended to online marketing
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 at 1:10 pm, by William Hobson
The Advertising Standards Authority will soon be responsible for regulating all marketing communications made online by companies based or operating in the UK. Until today, ASA’s remit for online advertising has been relatively limited. Whilst sales promotions or ads in paid-for space such as PPC display or search engine marketing platforms have been under the regulators purview [...]
October deadline for AdWords certification
Friday, August 27th, 2010 at 5:01 pm, by William Hobson
Any PPC agency or freelancer working with Google AdWords should make the transition to the new Google Certification Program by the end of October, the Inside AdWords crew has declared. The new Google Certification Program was launched this April as a replacement for the now-retired Google Advertising Professionals Program (GAPP). It introduced new training materials [...]
Yahoo still a search engine, insists Shashi Seth
Friday, August 27th, 2010 at 4:18 pm, by William Hobson
With Bing’s technology taking over both paid search engine marketing and organic results on Yahoo, many have seen the Search Alliance as an effective end to Yahoo! Search. However the senior vice president of Yahoo Search Products disagrees. In a recent post on the Yahoo! Search Blog, Shashi Seth writes that “Yahoo! Search will always [...]
Google gives realtime search experiment a home
Friday, August 27th, 2010 at 2:33 pm, by William Hobson
The predictions and hype surrounding Google’s realtime search feature and its effect on SEO may have been largely over-rated. Certainly, despite the buzz of it being the “Next big thing” and the constant furore over access to Twitter’s datastream in late 2009 largely faded into the background noise of the industry when they became a [...]
Yelp succeeds in search engine suicide?
Friday, August 27th, 2010 at 10:07 am, by William Hobson
Last month, an onstage conversation between Yelp’s CEO and Google’s VP of product management at TechCrunch’s “Social Currency Crunchup” revealed an uneasy tension over how the former’s content was crawled for Google’s Place Pages. In short, Google’s new feature for its Maps service was using data crawled from Yelp’s business reviews and listings for relevant [...]
Sunny Fares Freshen Dreams of Arabian Nights with News Content Marketing
Friday, August 27th, 2010 at 10:00 am, by Kerry Marriott
Top UK provider of Managed Search Engine Marketing services, Vertical Leap, has signed leading Dubai travel specialists Sunny Fares Ltd to boost the company’s hotel reservation website through the pioneering News Content Marketing service for www.dubai-reservation.com. Sunny Fares Travel Ltd is a UK-based company that has specialised in hotel reservations since 2007. Drawing upon [...]
Did search peak in the US last year?
Thursday, August 26th, 2010 at 4:53 pm, by William Hobson
According to figures released by Nielsen, as of July the US search market stood at a staggering 8,856,795,000 searches. Yet though this figure demonstrates the huge audience for search engine marketing – at the very least indicative of millions of impressions for PPC ads – it also demonstrates a surprising trend; a year-on-year decline in search [...]
Google take on Skype with new Gmail calls feature
Thursday, August 26th, 2010 at 12:08 pm, by Joseph Jeffries
Google has announced that Gmail users can now make phone calls over the internet, leading some analysts to question the search giant’s motives. Gmail has offered audio and video conversations for more than two years, but the new service now allows users to make calls to mobiles and landlines. According to BBC News, calls in the US and Canada will be [...]
Google acquires Like.com
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010 at 6:06 pm, by William Hobson
Google’s latest acquisition could see a new visual aspect added to retail search engine marketing, as Like.com’s chief executive has announced the company has purchased the visual search engine for shoppers. Like.com is a price comparison site for clothing, jewelry and other accessories that invites its users to “shop visually.” When browsing the site, users [...]
Bing now powering Yahoo searches in North America
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010 at 2:53 pm, by Joseph Jeffries
Microsoft’s Bing is now the sole provider of Yahoo search results in North America and Canada, the two companies confirmed yesterday. The announcement marks the first major event since a deal was signed allowing Microsoft to power Yahoo searches for the next ten years. Under the deal, Yahoo were also given permission to use Microsoft’s AdCenter PPC advertising platform. According [...]
Yahoo/Microsoft complete organic search transition
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010 at 2:32 pm, by William Hobson
After weeks of updates, months of waiting and years of speculation from the SEO community, the transition from Yahoo’s back-end organic search to Microsoft’s Bing is finally over. According to a post on the Yahoo! Search blog by Shashi Seth, senior vice president of Yahoo! Search products, “the transition of organic search between Yahoo! and [...]
Google launches improved YouTube mobile site
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010 at 1:25 pm, by Joseph Jeffries
Google has launched an improved version of its YouTube mobile site, in a move that reflects the growing importance of mobile content marketing. According to ITProPortal, the mobile version of the hugely popular video sharing site will now feature HTML 5 capabilities, improving performance on smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. Visitors to YouTube’s mobile [...]
Bing makes temporary boost to crawl rates
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at 10:51 am, by William Hobson
Yesterday Microsoft announced that it will be making some relevancy adjustments to its search engine marketing platform, adCenter. These adjustments involve a temporary increase to the Bing-bots crawl rates. Writing on the Microsoft Advertising Community Blog, Tina Kelleher of the adCenter team says: “Along with our consistent efforts to increase relevance for your adCenter campaigns, [...]
Google adds more domain results to SERPs
Monday, August 23rd, 2010 at 4:59 pm, by William Hobson
The latest change to Google’s algorithm will make a big difference in search engine results pages (SERPs) for queries strongly linked to content from a particular domain. According to Google software engineer Samarth Keshava, writing on the company’s Webmaster Central blog, the new ranking algorithm will “make it much easier for users to find a large number [...]
Discussion forum for small business AdWords users
Monday, August 23rd, 2010 at 9:23 am, by William Hobson
In a bid to help small business owners improve their AdWords campaigns and the return on their PPC budgets, Google has launched a new forum for those who might be struggling to deal with simple search engine marketing campaigns. The new “Small Business Corner” can be found in the AdWords help forum and all that’s [...]
Microsoft expands negative keyword limits in AdCenter
Friday, August 20th, 2010 at 4:53 pm, by William Hobson
Following user feedback, Microsoft has announced that advertisers will soon be able to add thousands of negative keywords to their AdCentre accounts, allowing them to closely target their PPC campaigns to the keywords which provide the most likely ROI. Whilst Microsoft’s search engine marketing platform may not get the same focus as Google’s AdWords, it [...]
McAfee reports “Cameron Diaz” targeted by blackhat SEO
Friday, August 20th, 2010 at 3:57 pm, by William Hobson
Searching for news, pictures, videos and downloads of Rihanna could put your PC at risk of malware infection, according to security software firm McAfee Labs. This is because like many celebrity related keywords, the RnB and pop star has been the focus of blackhat search engine optimisation on hundreds of malware sites. Of course, celebrity [...]
Yahoo and Microsoft being paid search transition testing
Friday, August 20th, 2010 at 3:49 pm, by William Hobson
Following last weeks test integrations of the Bing algorithm with Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! has announced that it has begun the full transition of the back-end technology behind its organic results as well as begun testing of the technology for paid search. According to a post on the company’s search engine marketing blog, Yahoo and Microsoft [...]
New automated bidding feature for AdWords
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 at 4:14 pm, by William Hobson
A new automated bidding feature has been added to AdWords, aiming to help advertisers improve their ROI on search engine marketing through automatic adjustments based on conversion tracking data. The Enhanced CPC feature was announced this week on the Inside Adwords blog. The new feature uses the historical conversion tracking data found in a users account [...]
Google may join forces with PayPal for easier Android app purchases
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 at 10:44 am, by Joseph Jeffries
Google have approached PayPal about using the payment company’s software to make purchasing Android apps more user-friendly. Currently, users wishing to purchase mobile content generation apps for Android handsets must use Google’s own ‘Checkout’ system. However, the Google service has fewer registered users than PayPal and it is thought that a collaboration would be beneficial to both parties. According [...]
AOL to accelerate growth of Patch service
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010 at 11:42 am, by Joseph Jeffries
AOL is set to launch 500 new websites through its Patch platform, in a move that will see the company edge further into the content generation market. Patch has established itself as the largest network of community-specific blogs on the web since it was purchased by AOL last year. It already has 100 local sites, but AOL plans to add [...]
New AdWords alerts and other options in Google Analytics Intelligence
Monday, August 16th, 2010 at 3:32 pm, by William Hobson
The Intelligence report in Google Analytics is a useful tool for SEO‘s and PPC campaign managers to automate their data gathering, though often its monitoring service is seen as a little limited for more sophisticated search engine marketing activity. Google aims to change that with a recent update which aims to make a big difference in Intelligence’s [...]
Yahoo introduces new search-powered features
Monday, August 16th, 2010 at 3:26 pm, by William Hobson
New features launched by Yahoo driven by search algorithm could see SEO friendly content generation strategies get increased visibility, as the company launches a new search-powered module for Yahoo! News. The first among many promised features for search-driven images, videos, slideshows and query suggestions to be added to Yahoo! over the course of the year, [...]
Yahoo! launch Premier League highlights service
Monday, August 16th, 2010 at 1:47 pm, by Joseph Jeffries
Yahoo! has unveiled a new online highlights service for Barclays Premier League football matches, in a move which could indicate company’s current strategy of focusing on content marketing revenue rather than search. The launch of the new service comes after Yahoo! signed a multi-million pound deal with the Football Association in April, allowing the company to [...]
Brands bothered by new trademark policy for AdWords
Monday, August 16th, 2010 at 11:47 am, by William Hobson
The recently announced change to Google’s policy for trademarked terms in AdWords is causing controversy among brand advertisers, reports Marketing Magazine. From the 14th of September, Google’s policy for its flagship search engine marketing platform for trademark terms in the UK, Ireland and Canada will be brought into line with the policy applied to advertisers in the [...]