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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google publishes comprehensive guide to featured snippets Jan 30, 2018 by Barry Schwartz Learn more about how Google’s featured work, the variations and some of the challenges Google faces with these snippets. What to get right before launching a global business Jan 30, 2018 by Thomas Stern Columnist Thomas Stern shares how taking care of business at home helps ensure global success. Channel your inner explorer to find link-building prospects Jan 30, 2018 by Julie Joyce Columnist Julie Joyce shares tips and tricks for finding link-building prospects How to use brand mentions for SEO, or the linkless future of link building Jan 30, 2018 by Sponsored Content: Awario Google has used links to determine the authority of websites since its early days: the idea of webpages casting “votes” for other pages by linking to them is at the core of th...

Google has published one of the most comprehensive explanations yet of their featured snippets  in a post on the search blog. Featured snippets, in short, are the quick direct answers you see at the top of the Google search results page that appear in response to some search queries. In this blog post, Google explains what featured snippets are, the various user interfaces and treatments you can get from these featured snippets and how they interact with desktop, mobile and voice search results. Google says featured snippets are important for mobile search and with voice-activated digital assistants. Google said “in these cases, the traditional ’10 blue links’ format doesn’t work as well, making featured snippets an especially useful format.” Google added that they will “continue to show regular listings in response to searches along with featured snippets.” That is “because featured snippets aren’t meant as a sole source of information…. …they’re part of an overall set of resul...

Taking your brand to an international stage is exciting. You reach untapped audiences and expose your brand, product and services to a global market! But with every great opportunity come challenges, and a global presence means time and resources must be dedicated to understanding new buying habits, laws, and, of course, online behaviors. Today, search results are more and more personalized, and they vary by country, even if browsers, devices and search terms remain the same. With the search engines constantly changing and evolving, what happens when you add the international component to your website? Before you kick off a global campaign, it’s important to develop a marketing strategy with a local audience in mind. Consider the following four points on how to best engage your target audience, bridge cultural differences and successfully promote your brand globally. Become familiar with regional laws & regulations When you market to a global audience, your brand should be aw...

Every time I conduct an in-house survey and ask my linking team, “What do you think is the hardest part of your job,” they answer, “The discovery process!” Just to clarify, when they say “discovery,” they are referring to the process of finding new sites to contact for a link. They are right; it is one of the hardest aspects of link building. I feel their pain. When I am building links, I can go through 10 search engine results pages (SERPs) and not find a single website I think is worth reaching out to. Sometimes I get lucky and find five in the top 20 results, but overall, it is getting harder and harder to find good prospects. Coming up with ways to find new sites is tough, my link builders complain all the time.  They brainstorm as a team, but I wonder what solo practitioners do? If you work on your own, how do you keep the creative juices going and dream up new angles for finding prospects? Here are a handful of ways to channel your inner explorer and find quality link-bui...

As you’ve probably already discovered, ranking in Google’s results is easier said than done. No one needs to tell you that there are millions of different websites trying to steal your rankings and, in some cases, many of those competitors succeed. Of course, you don’t want them to. But beating them isn’t a matter of simply publishing content and hoping for the best. In fact, the people who lose are the people who think that SEO is just that simple . Fortunately, you know better. That’s why you’re here, after all. To illustrate my point, I typed “how to win at everything you do” into Google. And how many results came up? Over 39 million. That’s a lot of action surrounding a silly keyword. And how many results actually show on the first page and have a reasonable chance of getting clicked? Ten. Ten results. That’s it. That means you can’t afford to not land on that first page. Putting in a ton of SEO work and landing even on page two doesn’t just hurt your ego, it hu...

Google has used links to determine the authority of websites since its early days: the idea of webpages casting “votes” for other pages by linking to them is at the core of the PageRank algorithm. This led to the rise of numerous manipulative link tactics. Google reacted with the Penguin update and manual penalties; link schemes evolved to outsmart the algorithm. New Penguin updates followed. The story went on for years, until it no longer made sense. First, publishers started to associate links with a risk of getting penalized. Today, many of them (think Wikipedia, The Next Web, Entrepreneur, Forbes and numerous others) simply nofollow outgoing links : They don’t want to be seen as “endorsing” every site they link to or even contemplate what the algorithm might make of it. They’re playing it safe, and you can’t blame them. But what good is the system if the biggest players stop casting their votes? Second, the internet is changing. PageRank’s idea of the web being a graph of pages ...

Bing is launching Audience Segmentation reporting to give advertisers detailed insights about how their search audiences are performing. The new feature also makes it easy to compare audiences against non-targeted users. The new feature applies to Remarketing in Paid Search, as well as  In-market Audiences and Custom Audiences , both of which are in pilot. Advertisers can see audience data by Audience Category or Audience Name from the Segment tab on six areas in the web interface: Account summary, Campaigns, Ad Groups, Ads, Keywords and Ad Extensions. For example, advertisers targeting In-Market audiences in their campaigns can see the performance of each audience benchmarked against users who aren’t being targeted in an audience segment. Looking at data split by Audience Category at the ad group level, for example, advertisers will be able to quickly analyze performance by audience targeting type and compare to those not targeted in “Users not in advanced segments,” as shown...