NEW INFORMATION LEAKED ABOUT GOOGLE'S FAVOURITING SERVICE, CALLED 'GOOGLE STARS'

Google is working on a Pinterest-like service, called Google Stars, which allows users to favourite pages, images, and videos. It also has Google Search integrated with it, which adds another layer of personalisation that we will have to take into consideration. We can think it'll also have a part in Google's plan to make authorship a more prominent ranking factor.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/new-information-leaked-googles-favoriting-service-called-google-stars/104629/

COMPARE LINKS BY TOPICAL TRUST FLOW

Majestic SEO has just rolled out a new service, Topical Trust Flow, which allows you to look up and compare up to 400 URLs (on site) or 100k (via download) and see whether or not the respective pages are actually relevant to the topic you want them to be. This is incredibly useful for deep-dive backlinks analysis and gives new findings to add to your documents, as you can now tell if a client (or a competitor's) backlinks are relevant to them. As we all know, relevancy is a pretty major factor to look at. I know I'm definitely going to play around with this new tool!
http://blog.majesticseo.com/general/compare-links-topical-trust-flow-new-stuff/

MATT CUTTS' REGRETS!

It seem unlikely that Matt Cutts would openly state failure by Google, but he has come out and said he has a few regrets during his time at Google. Firstly, he regrets that Google allowed the impact of paid links to go on for as long as they did and that they had the impact that they had. Secondly, for not acting sooner on content farms based a lot on his own past good experience when visiting one about how to fix a toilet. Find the video in the link below but let's hope he showers us with more regrets soon.
http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-regrets-acting-faster-paid-links-content-farms-191146

MORE LINKS WORTH A LOOK...

Google's official advice on making your site international:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/creating-right-homepage-for-your.html

Wayback Machine adds 160 billion pages a year:

http://blog.archive.org/2014/05/09/wayback-machine-hits-400000000000/

LINK OPPORTUNITIES BEYOND BLOGGERS

A very interesting article from James Agete in Moz Blog got our attention last week. Bloggers will always be controversial in the SEO world, not only because they can carry value that we can recycle over and over again but also because of the different techniques behind them that can be proclaimed dead or toxic. The fact of the matter is that other opportunities shouldn't be missed and it is key to our job to go back to basics and test again… and again!

To be honest, some of the techniques mentioned in this article are not very attractive to me (directories submissions or Forums) but as James says links from blogs can be "overcooked" and the reality of SEO 2014 is to always diversify the ways in which you get links - irrespective of which colour hat you think you wear. You need to be proactive about what your link profile looks like.

Here are just some of the wealth of link opportunities in almost every market:

• Resource pages
• Forums
• Directories
• Professional organizations
• Events
• Submission-based
• Press

Using the same Link building technics just because it is cheap or in our comfort zone will only get us so far. So exploring more options and ways to work with or without bloggers is where we should be at.

http://moz.com/blog/link-opportunities-beyond-bloggers

UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENCE IN BLOGGING COMMUNITIES

And going back to blogging as part of your techniques - if you are going to do it, do it right. Your content can get lost in the wrong crowd if you lose focus and try to target blogger communities just to reach the numbers that you feel you need to achieve. So the smaller the group the more relevant and sharable your campaign is going to be.

Have a look at this article and see how they've segmented this community in 5 interesting groups that you can keep an eye on:

• Small private blogging communities
• Large blogging communities
• Forums
• Blog parties
• Blog challenges (my favourite)

http://www.sueblimely.com/top-5-types-blogging-communities/

DESKTOP SEARCH IS DECLINING, MOBILE ADVERTISING IS KEY

There's a big focus on the importance of mobile buzzing around the marketplace as advertisers are still struggling to combat the decline of desktop search and the continued rise in mobile browsing especially when you consider multi-screen users. But can you just slap the same ad into mobile that you use for desktop? It seems not. Mobile browsers expect a different type of ad and extensions especially the use of call extensions where appropriate. PPCHERO put together this handy webinar to give you a steer on mobile ad best practises.

http://www.ppchero.com/why-not-mobile-best-practices-for-smashing-mobile-ppc-ads-webinar-recording/

25 PRINCIPLES OF MOBILE SITE DESIGN

Once those mobile ads are tailored to a mobile audience your clients need to turn their attention to their user's mobile site experience especially as consumers rely on mobile search to make their purchases on the go. Google partnered up with Answerlab to conduct a study on mobile users & conversions and put together "25 principles of mobile site design" which gives you help on building mobile sites that give good consumer experience and drive conversions.
http://www.ppchero.com/how-to-find-and-easily-exploit-ppc-advertising-opportunities-in-foreign-languages-and-global-markets/

QUALITY SCORE - WHAT DO YOU NEED TO KNOW!

Quality score remains a big factor for everyone in PPC and there are a multitude of factors that marketers need to take into consideration. Last year we were told by Google that ad rank would be calculated differently and ad extensions were being chucked into the equation. So we emphasised this to clients and made sure we had as many ad extensions as possible as well as our usual best practise tactics. But it doesn't end there. We also have to take quality score history into account which means a retailer that is constantly "on sale" could get penalised for a high ad turnover. Landing page experience is also important but not so easy for us marketers to influence and it's difficult to quantify how much impact this will have on ad rank and CPC's. For more info on what we need to be aware of, how much we can influence QS you can read more here:
http://blog.traffick.com/2014/03/quality-score-isnt-actionable-heres-what-you-can-do-about-it/