July 2015 SEO Newsletter

Featured Threads

• Yahoo! is testing using Google to power some of their organic search results and search ads.
• Here are some tips about running membership websites.

SEO Tools News

• Ahrefs added a keyword research tool & a rank / position tracker.
• Google updated Google Trends to offer more real-time data & made it easier to add charts to their Sheets. They are trying to position themselves as a friend of news organizations through the launch of Google News Lab.
• Yoast created a plugin to build better community features into Wordpress comments.
• Google updated their cached page layout to include a link to a "view source" option.

Apple News

• Tim Cook attacked Google and Facebook on user privacy. In line with the privacy message, Apple is moving to block the ability of ad networks to leverage using apps installed on a device to drive ad targeting.
• Apple announced their music streaming service. They are launching in over 100 countries with a free 3-month trial & will allow offline downloads. They will charge $9.99 a month & offer a discounted family subscription plan for $14.99 a month, which competitors like Spotify aim to match. Apple is claiming "the human touch" as a point of differentiation between them and other online music streaming services. They are sharing over 70% of revenues with music publishers. Taylor Swift pulled her most recent record from Apple Music because Apple originally planned on not paying musicians for the streams during the free 3-month trial, which caused Apple to quickly reverse their position and pay (~ 0.2 cents per song) for streaming during free trials. After paying for free trial streams, Apple was able to sign deals with many independent labels. Apple revoked Monster’s ability to make licensed Apple music products after Monster sued Beats.
• Apple added some store-specific cards to their Apple Pay service & is expanding Apple Pay to the UK.
• Apple is expected to lower their revenue share rate on recurring subscriptions in the App Store.
• Apple launched a Flipboard-like news reader with human editors. It comes bundled in iOS9 and 50 major publications have already signed on.
• iOS 9 features proactive assistance which parallels Google Now, offer app deep linking and provide split screen support on iPads. The newest version of iOS will also make it easier for developers to create ad blockers for Safari. iOS 9 also disintermediates chat apps by allowing them to be used in a single unified interface without requiring users go to the associated apps.

Algorithm Updates

• In the middle of June there was another large Google update, though it wasn't Panda or Penguin. It appears to have been associated with boosting the impact of query deserves freshness (QDF).
• The local directories hit by Google in May quickly recovered.
• Google's Gary Illyes stated it would be months and months of work before they could consider automating Penguin updates, but a Panda update should roll out sometime this month.
• Maile Ohye hinted Google was looking to devalue the rankings of content hidden behind interstitials.
• Google rolled out app indexing on Apple devices & is turning Android into search phones through a highlighting search feature in Chrome & Google Now on Tap.

Google+ / Scrape-n-displace

• Google is testing making their mobile search results less "mobile friendly" by moving the logo to a separate line & add more whitespace (to push the organic results below the fold). Google mobile SERPs are testing a "slow to load" warning notification near some listings. Google tested showing large image thumbnails in mobile search results.
• Google is expanding their news source carousel on mobile to other sites like Pinterest, Houzz, Vine & Food Network.
• Google tested moving their flight search results to the right sidebar of the SERP rather than inline with the organic search results.
• Google's scrape-n-displace continues to generate controversy on religious related search queries. Google is also stealing quotes-related content without citing which sites they've stolen them from. They've also expanded featured snippets to book results and the knowledge graph to fast food related calories. Google also filed a patent for estimating the caloric content of food based on a picture of it. Bill Slawski looked at a patent related to how Google may trigger answer boxes.
• On Android devices Google is displaying women's FIFA world cup results.
• Google removed the Google+ post highlighting feature from their knowledge graph.
• Google created a share button for their Classroom educational offering.

More Google News

• Google snuck in a stealth update to Chrome & Chromium which turns on passive audio monitoring, though the feature was removed from Chromium after a backlash from programmers and privacy advocates. Google is also launching a health tracking wristband.
• The BBC listed pages they've had removed from Google due to right to be forgotten.
• Google created a GitHub competitor.
• Google is adding a form where people can request revenge porn be removed from the search results.
• As Google's antitrust case continues, the EC "intends to set the fine at a level which will be sufficient to ensure deterrence." Google has until August 17th to respond to the antitrust charges. Getty was added as a party of interest to the EU Google antitrust investigation. Privacy & security app maker Disconnect filed a complaint in the EU against Google. Yelp partnered with Tim Wu to conduct a study showing Google's search bias.
• French privacy regulator CNIL gave Google 15 days to extend "right to be forgotten" globally. A Canadian court also required Google to censor their results globally. Russia is pushing through legislation for their own version of RTBF which is rather strict.
• Google has mistakenly labeled many sites as being harmful.
• Google published a post about using AI to generate artistic images.

AdWords News

• Some dynamic search ad headlines are as long as those associated with organic listings.
• Google expanded their display ad network to include Google Play Music.
• Google made bulk account management easier by adding some account-level campaign management features within manager accounts.
• Here are some tips to improve the performance of AdWords remarketing ads.
• Google added a feature to Chrome for Android which turns words into clickable search links which send users to associated Google search pages.
• Google updated their shopping feed specification and product taxonomy.
• Frederick Valleys shared some Google keyword matching type tips here. Countdown ads can significantly increase ad conversion rates.

AdSense News

• AdSense now reports invalid click activity in the payments history section.
• Google made a couple changes to mobile display ads to lower accidental ad click rates: blocking clicks on app icons, blocking clicks close to the edge of an image & adding a delay before ads can be clicked.

Local & Mobile Search News

• While apps install ads are spreading across the web, Google is moving to extract more content and more of the user experience out of apps and back into the Google ad ecosystem.
• There's ongoing carnage in local. YP spun out their print directory business into a separate company & Local.com went through chapter 11 bankruptcy.
• Yelp shows consumers alert boxes when they uncover attempts at review manipulation.
• Google Maps now warns users if a place they are driving to is scheduled to be closed before they are anticipated to arrive.
• Google is unverifying some local businesses when the associated accounts are not logged into within the past 6 months.

Video / Music / Broadband News

• Merrill Lynch research estimated YouTube's valuation at $80 billion.
• Vimeo launched a VOD rental feature where content creators can charge a monthly subscription fee.
• YouTube shared more granular localized viewing stats with musicians. In the US Google launched a free Play music streaming service a week ahead of the Apple Music launch.
• YouTube launched a gaming vertical to take on Twitch. Here is an early preview.
• Russian search engine Yandex launched an online radio service.
• Netflix will launch in Italy, Spain and Portugal in October. Alibaba will soon launch a Netflix competitor in China. Hulu will sell digital Showtime subscriptions.
• FCC Net Neutrality rules stopped Sprint from throttling traffic. Commercial Network Services filed a formal complaint stating Time Warner Cable was charging them unreasonable rates for delivering their streaming video. The FCC fined AT&T $100 million for their unlimited data claims.
• YouTube is launching more interactive card features for creators. YouTube also partnered with Storyful to launch a YouTube Newswire service.

Yahoo! News

• On July 1st Yahoo! tested using Google to power some of their search ads & organic search results.
• Yahoo! replaced Ask in partnering with Oracle to bundle changing user search settings on Java security updates. Google still bundles on Flash updates.
• Yahoo! updated their mobile search results to include more action item buttons in them.
• Tumblr announced the launch of a GIF search engine.
• Yahoo! is paying at least $20 million to stream a NFL game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and Buffalo Bills.
• Yahoo! is shutting down Yahoo! Pipes, Yahoo! Maps, and some local regional media services.

Yahoo! Ads News

Bing offers a weekly report of what percent of Yahoo!'s search ads they are powering.

Bing News

• Bing is moving to secured search, which will stop passing keyword data to organicly ranked sites.
• In January of 2016 AOL will shift their ads & organic search results to being powered by Bing. As part of the deal, AOL will sell Microsoft's online display ads. A Microsoft executive stated Bing is a profitable & sustainable stand alone business.
• Bing upgraded their video search results page layout.
• Bing added file sizes and download counts to software downloads.
• Bing is adding knowledge-graph like highlights of search relationships between initial and subsequent searches.
• Bing is testing adding visual rich captions to search on some branded search terms.

Bing Ads News

Bing is testing adding call to action buttons on some of their ads.

Twitter News

• Twitter's CEO Dick Costolo stepped down & is being replaced by interim CEO Jack Dorsey. Chris Sacca shared his strategic advice for Twitter here. The NYT's Farhad Manjoo followed up Sacca's suggestions with a shorter, more condensed commentary.
• Twitter added an app targeting feature which allows app install advertisers to advertise based on what app categories are already installed on the device.
• Twitter blocked a tool which tracked Tweets which politicians deleted, a move Matt Cutts didn't like.
• Twitter upgraded their conversation threading features, made it easier to share blocked lists, added curated lists about products & places, expanded the character limit in direct message to 10,000 & set video ads to auto-play.

Facebook News

• Belgium's privacy commission sued Facebook over privacy violations related to using like & share buttons on third party sites for ad targeting. Meanwhile Facebook shared information about an experimental AI algorithm they built which can identify most people in pictures even when they are not looking at the picture.
• Instagram is now pushing app install ads.
• Facebook Messenger stopped constant tracking of user locations, but still shares user locations when messages are sent, though users can opt out of sharing that information. The messenger app has been downloaded over a billion times on Android devices & now allows people to sign up without a Facebook account. Facebook Messenger payments are available across the US.
• Facebook announced an authorship tag for website publishers.
• Facebook expanded their buy button to Shopify merchants.
• After the initial launch of Facebook Instant Articles, no further articles were published for a month, but the New York Times and a few other news publishers are now ramping up production. Facebook is now considering the time spent consuming a piece of content as a ranking factor.
• Facebook canceled a satellite ISP project due to the costs and lack of anticipated economic return.
• Facebook is taking into account more video relevancy signals on self-hosted videos & is offering marketers the option of only paying for video ads when they've been viewed for at least 10 seconds. Facebook's video ad split will be similar to YouTube's, with the content creator getting 55% of revenue.

E-commerce & E-books News

• Amazon launched retail operations in Mexico.
• Amazon is improving their customer review rating system by putting more weight on recent reviews, reviews from verified buyers & reviews which receive many helpful upvotes.
• Amazon expanded free shipping to non-Prime members for smaller & lightweight items, with no minimum order amount. Amazon is testing adding advertisements on the outside of their shipped packages & is already testing having some third party merchant items (not stored in Amazon warehouses) available as a part of Prime. Amazon launched one-hour delivery in London. Amazon is also exploring paying individuals to deliver packages, a market Uber has struggled to break into.
• The EU is investigating Amazon's ebook distribution deals. Amazon is testing shifting the author payouts on Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners Lending Library to be based on ebook pageviews rather than downloads. Some self published authors have seen their sales fall sharply when they added their books to Kindle Unlimited. Apple lost their federal e-book case appeal.
• Amazon increased their commission on Mechanical Turk orders by up to 300%.
• Amazon tested another take on local daily deals with a service they call Treasure Truck, which allows users to purchase on their app & then pick up at a pre-determined time and location.
• Amazon applied to become a root certificate authority.
• Etsy tested adding a crowdfunding feature.

More Goodies from Around the Web

• VCs benefiting from the global asset bubble referenced the need to share the wealth, but failed to mention their beneficial carry trade exemption.
• The WSJ covered how startups use fuzzy math to justify sky high valuations. Andreessen Horowitz maintains there is no tech stock bubble, while AngelList CEO Naval Ravikant believes there is a high likelihood there is a global bubble in all asset classes. Y Combinator filed with the SEC to get into the late stage growth funding market. Softbank invested $1 billion in South Korean mobile commerce company Coupang at a $5 billion valuation. Delivery Hero raised $110 million at a valuation above $3.1 billion. Food delivery service Blue Apron raised $135 million at a $2 billion valuation. Spotify closed a $526 million round at a $8.5 billion valuation. Duolango raised $45 million at a $470 million valuation. Union Square Ventures and A16Z funded Silk Road competitor OpenBazaar, which rebranded to that name after they realized the public relations and jail risks associated with their original Dark Market name. Alibaba's spun out Ant Financial (which owns the Alipay payment service) was recently valued at $45 billion. Alibaba and Ant Financial joint venture invested nearly $1 billion into local Chinese marketplace Koubei. Dollar Shave Club raised $75 million at a $615 million valuation. Postmates raised $80 million at a $400 million valuation. Credit Karma raised $175 million at a $3.5 billion valuation. Palantir is raising up to $500 million at a $20 billion valuation. Airbnb raised $1.5 billion at a $24 billion valuation. WeWork raised $400 million at a $10 billion valuation.
• Sean Parker backed Brigade, an app which will allegedly use social media to boost democracy engagement.
• In California Uber's drivers might need to be considered as W2 employees rather than 1099 contractors, a disaster to the sharing economy. Instacart converted many of their contractors into part-time employees. Sharing economy companies are pushing to create a third worker classification between 1099 contractors & W2 employees. Uber has been spending aggressively to establish itself in China, but it warned its drivers to stay away from taxi protests & local competitor Xiaoju Kuaizhi is raising $1.5 billion to fend off Uber. Chinese fund manager Hillhouse Capital Group is investing in Uber & previously invested in their biggest competitor in China. Uber recently lost $470 million on $415 million in revenues. Uber launched a boat service in Instabul & acquired part of Bing's mapping assets. Uber management were arrested in France for running an illegal taxi company.
• Here is a list of 50 things to A/B test.
• PayPal's new user agreement opts users into robocalls, a follow on to the bad press they got for various financial violations they were fined for by the CFPB the month prior.
• The FTC took action against a fraudulent KickStarter campaign.
• Paul Ford wrote an introductory guide to code.
• US airlines continue cutting back on capacity & restricting data licensing to third party sites to expand margins.
• Snapchat tested allowing McDonald's to sponsor custom stickers which users can add to images created there.
• The US Senate passed TPP fast track authorization.

SEO

• This is a *fantastic* background article on using search clicks as a relevancy signal.
• Here is an interview of Yandex's Alexander Sadovsky about their recent link penalty.
• Debra was on a recent Copypress podcast.
• Tom Demers shared tips on how to get more value out of profitable keywords.
• Bill Slawski reviewed a Google patent on determining site quality based on link quality.
• Here are some tips for using spreadsheets in link audits. Some sites are removing their home pages while leaving internal pages published to look like dead sites to people disavowing links. Here is an interesting post on mapping out the internal structure of a site.
• Google once again recommended AdWords over SEO.
• Here are some tips for building links with images.
• Thumbtack, another Google investment, was recently engaged in a link scheme & was promptly penalized after it was disclosed. They quickly sent out link removal requests & recovered within a week (analysis on CognitiveSEO, TheSEMPost, Local SEO Guide & SEL). When Google isn't invested in the company (especially a small business), they continue to obfuscate their penalty-related messaging to webmasters. Quick recoveries are anything but common for smaller businesses.
• Raven published a comparison of Bing's vs Google's algos here.
• While the Google mobile update was nowhere near as harsh to individual sites as Panda or Penguin was, Stone Temple highlighted a significant trend in downward rank movement for sites which were not mobile friendly over the month subsequent to the mobile update (though much of this is likely due to Google's increasing brand bias & a selection bias to where those sorts of large, trusted brands were more likely to have mobile friendly sites; while lesser known and smaller sites were less likely to use mobile-friendly designs).
• Matt Cutts extended his leave from Google through the end of 2015.

Publishing

• Google, Microsoft, Mozilla & Apple came together to announce WebAssembly, a new binary format for compiling applications for the web.
• IAC's About.com launched their native advertising content studio.
• With $146 million in ad revenues, Huffington Post didn't generate profits last year.
• As ad blockers grow in popularity, publishers are trying to squeeze revenues out of people who block ads. Sourcepoint is a new tool which blocks ad blockers.
• Reuters published their 2015 Digital News Report.
• A European court ruled websites could be held liable for user comments, even if they promptly removed the comments when they were complained about.
• Pinterest launched their buyable pins, which will charge advertisers for the traffic rather than a commission on sales.
• Google highlighted how search sessions are getting significantly shorter as more search moves to mobile. Mobile conversion rates continue drastically lagging desktop performance.
• The NYT published profiles of Russia's online trolling agency & Nick Denton's Gawker.
• Gannett spun off their TV channels and newspapers into 2 separate companies.
• Medium is pushing more toward being a social network.
• GameFly is testing streaming subscription bundles of video games on Amazon Fire TV.

Tracking & Security

• The NSA and GCHQ reverse engineered anti-virus programs and tracked emails to the companies to find new attack vectors. Some documents were recently unsealed which showed the US Justice Department gagged Google when accessing Jacob Applebaum's Gmail. Edward Snowden wrote an editorial in the New York Times about popular opinion swaying against surveillance.
• Hackers gained access to personal data about all US federal employees & investigation information on current and former government employees.
• Reddit is shifting to HTTPS by default. Wikimedia is moving all their sites to HTTPS. This did not apply to the parallel commercial company Wikia.
• Hundreds of millions of Samsung mobile phones had a security exploit because they looked for language pack updates over unencrypted lines, in plain text. A radio bug can get crypto keys from laptops based on the radio waves leaked by the processor's power use.
• Individuals can get hit with Sarbanes-Oxley for clearing cookies, even if they didn't know there was an ongoing investigation.
• LastPass's server with account information was hacked into. The US Justice Department claimed the St. Louis Cardinals hacked into the Houston Astros computer system.
• Apple had a major security issue with Mac OS X and iOS, which allowed apps to pull personal user data fro other apps.

IPOs

• eBay scheduled their PayPal spinoff to happen on July 17th.
• IAC is planning on spinning off Match.com & their other dating sites into a separate company in Q4.
• SunGard Data Systems filed to go public.
• Canadian tea retailer David's Tea was up 40% on the day of their IPO.
• Cybersecurity company Rapid7 filed their S-1.
• Antivirus and firewall company Sophos raised $125 million in their IPO, giving them .
• Wingstop's shares closed up 60% on the day of their IPO.
• Investment bank Houlihan Lokey filed confidentially for an IPO.
• Fitbit IPOed at $20 a share & was up 48% in their debut.
• Alarm.com IPOed.

Acquisitions

• The UK Competition and Markets Authority is doing a phase 2 review of BT's planned acquisition of EE.
• Geeknet terminated their acquisition by Hot Topic & instead sold themselves for $140 million to GameStop.
• Google acquired native mobile app streaming startup Agawi. Google's Sidewalk Labs acquired Control Group & Titan, startups aiming to build out city-wide free fast Wi-Fi services.
• Twitter acquired machine learning startup Whetlab.
• Intel acquired wearable tech company Recon Instruments for $175 million.
• Cisco acquired OpenDNS for $635 million.
• Shopzilla / Connexity acquired PriceGrabber.
• IBM acquired private cloud company Blue Box.
• Martha Steward Living Omnimedia was acquired by Sequential Brands Group for $353 million.
• Comcast acquired TV ad targeting firm Visible World.
• Spotify acquired music analytics service Seed Scientific.
• Sprinklr acquired predictive analytics software company NewBrand.
• Simplilearn Solutions acquired Market Motive for $10 million.
• AOL acquired & shut down predictive analytics startup Velos.
• Brit + Co acquired DIY site Snapguide.
• The founders of GoFundMe sold a controlling stake at a $600 million valuation.
• Vivendi acquired 80% of Dailymotion for $242 million.
• Razer acquired Ouya.
• Microsoft acquired application management service BlueStripe.
• Music rights licensing firm Kobalt acquired royalty rights collection agency AMRA.
• Adobe acquired 3D company Mixamo.

Domain Names

• Ringtones.com sold on NameJet for $105,000 after selling for $750,000 back in 2010.
• The MPAA & RIAA are trying to push ICANN to get rid of domain privacy.