January 2016 SEO Newsletter

Featured Threads

• Late in December Yahoo! once again tested using Google powered search results on some of their search queries.
• Here is a post on how Apple is routing some search traffic around Google on iOS, particularly on navigational search queries.
• Here is some advice on Google Local for businesses without a physical address.

SEO Tools News

• Here are a couple different ways to emulate a specific user location for Google search (in addition to using the &near=location parameter in the URL).
• Here is a free tool to use Google Docs to pull in Google SERPs and find brand mentions which are unlinked.
• Here is a quick free tool for generating various sized favicons for different devices.
• Adobe launched a quick & easy to use iPhone app for making social media sharing graphics.

Apple News

• Apple appears to be using their top lists to showcase their own apps.
• Apple created a (surprisingly ugly) $100 battery case for the iPhone 6s.
• Apple decided to walk away from offering a live TV subscription service anytime in the near future, as they were unable to strike a deal with programmers on what channels to include in the service.
• Apple paid Taylor Swift to exclusively stream one of her concerts & use it to promote Apple Music.
• Without a strong software platform to drive lock in, Samsung is facing the same margin pressures which have hit other mobile phone manufacturers.

Algorithm Updates

Google pushed their long promised "soon" Penguin update back into 2016.

Google+ / Scrape-n-Displace

• On Android devices Google is offering more structured entertainment information in categories like TV, movies & music.
• Google's eHow-lite QnA scrape-n-displace offering where they published scraped third party questions and answers into the search results is becoming far more widespread, with 500%+ growth in the past 5 months.
• Google expanded their health knowledge graph cards to brand name medicines.
• Long after dropping authorship, Google now requires author names for rich snippets.
• Google added a bubble leveling feature to the search results.
• Google released a read-only API for their knowledge graph.
• A Google search for [gay fish] showed the Kanye West knowldge panel.

More Google News

• Google is using phone location data to localize desktop search results for the same user.
• The Guardian covered Google's lobbying efforts in Europe. Another study showed Google could have a significant impact on swaying undecided voters.
• Ford partnered with Google to create a joint venture building self-driving cars.
• As consumers use personal assistant & productivity apps, Google is working on building a new messaging app with chat bots.
• Google turned on the Safe Browsing technology by default in Chrome for Android.
• Google is still broadening out support for mobile accelerated pages, which they hope to launch in the SERPs as early as February.
• Two courts in Japan required Google & Yahoo! to delist some search results over privacy concerns.
• Google launched their Cloud Vision API, which can be used to generate image descriptions.
• Google renamed their life science company Verily. Google will also spin out their self driving car startup as a separate Alphabet company next year.
• Google plans to spend about a half billion dollars on a Clarksville data center.
• Google launched a CDN, which may well leverage Google's core global infrastructure.
• During the holiday season Google tried to push through approval for testing Project Loon in the US.
• Google tested a password free login feature based on sending notifications to mobile phones.

AdWords News

• Google launched Smart Goals, which is an automated way of estimating conversions based on signals like visitor duration.
• Google added a second line of structured snippets in AdWords. They also sunset showing Google+ follower counts.
• Google adjusted the format of their local home service ads to further qualify leads with drop down user selections for job types. They are also testing a vertically expanded version of their credit card comparison ads.
• Google added their new app streaming feature to their mobile app install ads & debuted interactive interstitial ads.
• When Google includes their vertical listings on SERPs with 4 AdWords ads it drives the organic search results below the fold on all but the largest of desktop monitors. Google is also testing showing 4 AdWords ads on mobile devices.

AdSense News

• Google updated the layout of AdSense text ads on mobile devices.
• Google ended their AdSense certified publisher program in favor of a new publishing partner program which includes DoubleClick for Publishers & DoubleClick Ad Exchange along with AdSense.

Local & Mobile Search News

• Google expanded Android Pay to work within third party apps.
• Google local remains a spam den. Google is testing a new schema format to markup local business information.
• Google removed local information that appeared near the organic listings.
• Google added a "located in" link for stores located inside malls.
• Here is a look at how aggressively Google has displaced local results on mobile devices this year.
• Yelp and OpenTable ended their partnership.
• 2015 is the first year smartphone sales have grown at under 10%.
• Google added Machu Picchu to their maps.
• Ben Evans highlighted key trends in mobile. Monday Note also published a related post.

Video / Music / Broadband News

• YouTube is seeking streaming rights for TV shows and movies for their paid subscription service. YouTube itself already had something akin to the Panda update when Google shifted from promoting views to promoting view time as a signal of quality, but if they get big media to sign on then this will be a second round of updates on that front, further squeezing out many of the independent YouTube stars. Here is a great article on how much of a struggle it is to make money publishing videos to YouTube.
• Music from The Beatles is now widely available on online music streaming platforms.
• YouTube published some 360-degree spotlight story videos for the holidays.
• Amazon expanded Prime Video by offering Starz, Showtime & others as paid add-ons.
• The broadband penetration rate has plateaued in the United States, with more users relying exclusively on smartphones for their internet connections. YouTube complained to the FCC about T-Mobile throttling their video.
• Google is prodding to extend their Fiber offering to Chicago and Los Angeles. AT&T expanded their GigaPower fiber optic service to 38 additional cities.
• While YouTube has forced musicians into a cross-bundling deal ensuring broad coverage of music on their free & paid sides, Spotify is considering allowing musicians to hold back some of their catalog from the free side of their service.

Yahoo! News

• Late in December Yahoo! once again tested using Google powered search results on some of their search queries.
• Yahoo!'s board decided against doing the Alibaba share spin out. Rather they are planning a spin out of the core Yahoo! business, which could take over a year to do. One investor suggested Yahoo! should fire their CEO & over 3/4 of their employees in a PDF presentation.
• Yahoo! shut down their Dubai office - their final Mideast office - bringing an end to the $170 million Maktoob acquisition from 2009.
• Yahoo! updated their iPhone search app.

Yahoo! Ads News

Yahoo! is testing full-width, autoplay video ads in their SERPs.

Bing News

• Bing added popular menu items from restaurants to their search results.
• Bing tested a result layout which merged location results into regular organic listings on branded search queries.

Bing Ads News

• Bing is testing refining searcher demand by highlighting products which are "Popular on Web."
• Bing removed the auctions insights & opportunities features from their Ad Intelligence Excel plugin, though those features are still available in the Bing Ads web interface.

Twitter News

• Twitter stopped cropping photos in their feed.
• Twitter is now testing monetizing users who are not logged into the service.
• Twitter is experimenting with moving away from a chronologically ordered user feed.

Facebook News

• Facebook launched a local search feature, which may ultimately be more about search than local.
• Facebook rolled out their face recognition tool to everyone outside of the EU and Canada.
• Facebook added events & messaging features to their Page plugin, which allows users to interact with events and message businesses through Facebook while on the business's sites.
• Facebook added a feature allowing users to buy concert tickets from within Facebook.
• Facebook shut down their Creative Labs & associated apps.
• An Indian regulator asked Reliance Communications to temporarily suspend the zero rated Facebook Free Basic service. Facebook's zero rating option was also shut down in Egypt.
• Facebook launched Instant Articles on Android & supports Apple's Live Photos.
  Facebook is allowing publishers of Instant Articles to integrate additional monetization: allowing 42% more advertisements in their articles (one ad per 350 words, rather than one per 500 words), selling Facebook-only ad campaigns & linking to related articles and sponsored articles at the bottom of the articles. Facebook is also testing improving their feed on slower connections by caching stories and allowing offline commenting.

E-commerce & E-books News

• Amazon launched their Fire Tablet in China, partnering with Baidu for web services.
• Amazon bought thousands of semi truck trailers to move items between their fulfillment & sort centers. They are also negotiating leasing 20 Boing 767 jets as they try to lower their dependence on UPS.
• Amazon was estimated to have nearly 36% of ecommerce spending on Black Friday. Their dominance over ecommerce has continually increased: "online retailers not named Amazon are battling for around 50 cents of every new $1 spent online. As if that weren’t enough, Amazon also accounts for about a quarter of every new $1 of growth in all of retail, including brick-and-mortar sales, too." Amazon had over 3 million members sign up for prime in the third week of December & nearly 70% of their customers shopped on mobile.
• Wal-Mart launched a mobile wallet for paying in their store. Target is also building their own mobile wallet.
• India ecommerce plays currently have burn rates akin to those experienced in the first web bubble.
• Dynamic pricing is becoming more widespread across the economy, even reaching many brick and mortar businesses with electronic pricing signs that regularly adjust.
• Amazon.co.uk recently had banned weapons for sale on it. Some of the recently hot selling hoverboards have caught fire & were delisted from Amazon.
• Scammers are increasingly using the holiday rush to return counterfeit products in the place of the originally purchased products. In spite of the still pervasive counterfeiting problem, Alibaba is getting many major international brands to sell on Tmall Global.

More Goodies from Around the Web

• Facebook partnered with Uber to bundle ride sharing requests in their mobile Messenger app. Uber is raising another $2.1 billion at a $62.5 billion valuation. Uber added an API button to allow other apps to embed ride requests, but included a cause prohibiting use in competing apps. Lyft partnered with Didi, Ola And GrabTaxi to counter Uber. In France angry Uber drivers created an alternative app named VTC Cab, which charges a membership fee rather than getting a percent of each transaction. WeChat once again blocked Uber in China. Seattle allowed cab app drivers to unionize. A federal US judge admonished Uber over issuing a new labor agreement during a class action lawsuit case. India-based cab company Ola is offering loans to their drivers. Uber is regionally testing carpooling & bus-like options. Saudi Prince Alwaleed led a $247.7 million round in Lyft at a $4.92 billion valuation.
• Google Ventures published their year in review on a subdomain powered by Medium. They have rising tensions with Uber, and have both pulled back from early stage funding & are encouraging companies to list publicly sooner. They also folded their European fund into their global fund. Google is launching a startup accelerator. Uber competitor Sidecar shut down, as Silicon Valley keeps building a winer takes all environment.
• Alibaba invested $1.25 billion into Chinese food delivery service Ele.me to buy a 27.7% stake. Disney invested another $200 million into Vice at a valuation above $4 billion. Atlantic Media is looking to sell Quartz into the new media bubble. Magic Leap raised $827 million at a $3.7 billion valuation. Korea's Yello Mobile raised $47 million at a valuation above $4 billion. Foursquare saw their valuation fall by over half in their most recent funding round. Some of the signs of the latter days of the prior tech bubble are once again present, like ad-wrapped cars.
• Fortune profiled former Googler Nikesh Aurora.
• Dropbox shut down its Mailbox and Carousel apps.
• A number of tech industry leaders came together to fund OpenAI as a non-profit artificial intelligence startup.
• A New York appeals court allowed fantasy betting sites to run in New York while their cases are heard. The Illinois AG also stated FanDuel and DraftKings constitute illegal gambling, while those firms sued to keep operating in Illinois.
• Airbnb is trying to create a revenue sharing model with large landlords.
• Silicon Valley is cooling as lofty valuations are becoming harder to justify with the slowdown in China & the Federal Reserve lifting rates from zero, ending the cheap money era.

SEO

• Google got caught stealing lyrics from MetroLyrics, publishing them in a lyrics onebox with weird markup from the MetroLyrics site. In response Google removed the lyrics onebox for that individual song.
• Google continues to promote their photos app using large interstitial app install ads the company claimed are a no no.
• The "no country redirect" feature in Google stopped working for many users.
• When Google sees equivalent HTTP and HTTPS pages, they will default to ranking the HTTPS version unless it redirects or canonicalizes to the HTTP version.
• Google updated the verbiage in their reconsideration request emails. Google also sent out a wave of "thin content" penalty emails, for sites which perhaps had inbound link quality issues. An SEO who was too aggressive with disavow saw surging rankings and search traffic after removing their disavow file, though that might have been due to a different algorithmic update.
• Here is a large group interview with SEO predictions for 2016.
• Bill Slawski reviewed patents on locally significant search queries & using knowledge base categories for query substitutions.
• Roger Montti wrote about the impact of user experience on SEO. Here are some user experience tips.
• More SEOs are publicly writing about how Google's approach has broke the web: "major publications have told us that their new policy in response to Google’s algorithm changes is not to link out to sites at all. They warned us that if they put the piece back through editing the link would be removed entirely."
• Google's change of address tool doesn't work for Mediawiki sites.
• Here is a look at some of the top brands that gained or lost ground in Google over the past year.
• Even on highly trusted authority sites the third party link tracking tools have significant coverage gaps.
• Google changed how they log search information, which will cause some data inconsistency issues in webmaster tools. They also started to show information about "install app" buttons.
• Google search executive Tamar Yehoshua was added to the board of directors at RetailMeNot.
• Hacked sites monetized by Google AdSense are still ranking well in Google, even weeks after SEL asked about them. One person wrote a 3-part series complaining about getting outranked by hacked sites which published stolen copies of their content.

Publishing

• In Australia Google lost a defamation lawsuit based on ranking Ripoff Report & the search autocomplete features in Google.
• The FTC published an enforcement policy statement & business guidance on native advertising.
• By the end of 2017 global web ad spend is expected to exceed global TV ad spend, with it also beating out TV ad spending in the U.S. in 2016.
• Mozilla will no longer sell Firefox OS smartphones. As the price of entry-level Android smartphones has declined, it has left Firefox OS without a market niche. Firefox launched a content blocker for iOS 9 named Focus. Rather than blocking all ads, it is built to allow some ads through while blocking user tracking. Mozilla also ended their featured Tiles ad experiment.
• The EFF's Let's Encrypt project is now in public beta.
• A&E partnered with AOL for personalizing ads on A&E websites.
• Time partnered with GumGum to use their image overlay ads.
• Realtor.com ran an attack ad against Zillow.
• TV station owner Sinclair Broadcasting Group acquired mobile news site Circa, which it will relaunch in the spring.
• The Bangladeshi government has kept social media sites offline for an extended period of time. Brazil temporarily pushed telecommunications companies to block WhatsApp for a failure to respond to a criminal case.
• Fig takes a spin on the KickStarter model by allowing people to both back a project & to invest in its outcome. Here is an interview of Double Fine's Tim Schafer on using the platform to fund Psychonauts 2.
• The New York Times profiled Derek Jeter's sports site The Players' Tribune & covered Axel Springer's transition to digital.
• Adblock Plus shared a bit more information on their business model. Asus will integrate Adblock Plus into their mobile browser. The Washington Post unveiled a new native ad unit type, which personalizes story recommendations & ties them to a branded sponsor. They've continued to outperform the New York Times in online traffic. Some publishers are now showing branded content units to people with ad blockers installed & there is even an analytics service for tracking ad blocking.
• European regulators are looking to revamp local copyright laws to allow access in multiple countries, no matter which country content was purchased in. They also passed a new privacy law, which unifies policies across the EU & require large online platforms to delete hate speech within 24 hours.
• The IETF approved HTTP status code 451, which states content is unavailable for legal reasons.
• Blake Ross wrote about how poorly researched much of the mainstream media is.

Tracking & Security

• Google is distrusting certificates from Symantec Corporation.
• A database misconfiguration exposed the voting records of 191 million US voters.
• AVG's Web TuneUp Chrome extension had a security flaw exposing user's browsing history, cookies & personal data.
• Joomla had another zero day exploit.
• Kazakhstan is trying to force their citizens to install a broken security certificates to allow state spying. China passed a cyber-security bill though dropped prior language requiring tech firms to host data locally and hand over encryption keys.
• Juniper Security ScreenOS software had a vulnerability which could allow VPN connections to be decrypted. The vulnerability was exploited by the GCHQ & NSA.
• The FBI is starting to make FOIA requests easier to obtain online.
• The US is working on a plan to scrutinize public social media postings in visa reviews, something which was not done in the recent past. The most recent US budget proposal also included a 1,700+ page rider authorizing further online surveillance. Here is a FAQ guide on the current status of encryption & an explainer of the new law.
• MacKeeper left their user's data publicly accessible & used a broken hashing algorithm for the passwords. The Target wishlist app's API broadly leaked user information. The official site for Hello Kitty left their user database easily accessible online, exposing over 3 million users.
• The CFPB fined a lead aggregator which sold leads to harassing bill collectors which operated in illegal manners.
• The FAA will require drone owners to register their drones & their addresses will be available online in a publicly accessible database.
• Hyatt Hotels recently disclosed a security breach via malicious code designed to steal credit card data.

IPOs

• HipChat maker Atlassian priced their IPO at $21 per share. They ended the first day of trade up 32%, giving them a $5.74 billion valuation.
• Dell filed for their subsidiary SecureWorks to go public.
• Data center software maker Nutanix filed their S-1. Okta, Twilio and Coupa Software are also preparing for IPOs.

Acquisitions

• Chinese tech company Qihoo 360 was brought private at a valuation near $9.3 billion.
• The FTC filed a complaint to stop Staples from buying Office Depot. A prior attempt to merge the companies was also blocked in 1997.
• Audi, BMW & Daimler completed their $2.8 billion acquisition of Nokia's HERE mapping technology.
• Cison acquired PR Newswire from UBM.
• Gaming company SGN acquired game makers Fat Rascal Games & Kiwi.
• Tencent acquired Riot Games.
• IBM acquired video CMS provider Clearleap.
• Salesforce acquired price quoting company SteelBrick for $360 million.
• JAB Holdings acquired Keurig for $13.9 billion.
• Purch (formerly known as TechMediaNetwork) acquired mobile shopping price comparison app ShopSavvy.
• Credit Karma acquired mobile notification startup Snowball.
• Perion acquired pop-up ad network Undertone for $180 million.
• Ingram Micro Cloud acquired Odin from Parallels
• Toshiba sold their image sensor division to Sony for $155 million & is exploring spinning off their PC division as well.
• Pinterest acquired The Hunt & Pext to improve their search functionality.
• Music streaming company Vevo acquired video site Showyou to prepare to launch a subscription service competing against YouTube and Spotify.
• DuPont and Dow Chemical agreed to merge then break into 3 separate companies.
• Vivendi bought a majority stake in Radionomy, the owner of Shoutcast and Winamp.
• NetApp acquired flash storage company SolidFire for $870 million.
• GrubHub acquired competitor Delivery Dish.
• SimilarWeb acquired mobile analytics company Quettra for around $10 million.
• Alibaba acquired the Chinese newspaper South China Morning Post for $266 million.
• TransUnion acquired Trustev for up to $44 million.
• Nutrisystem acquired the South Beach Diet brand for $15 million.
• Tyco acquired ShopperTrak for $175 million.
• CBS acquired 247 Sports.
• Experian sold Hitwise & Simmons to to Connexity (formerly Shopzilla) & the private equity company that owns Connexity for up to $52 million.
• Newell Rubbermaid merged with Jarden.
• Shaw Communications acquired Wind Mobile for $1.15 billion.
• Cerberus Capital Management acquired 80% of Avon Products North America & 17% of the overall company for $605 million.
• Microsoft acquired analytics startup Metanautix & collaboration startup Talko.
• Oracle acquired container startup StackEngine.

Domain Names

• GoDaddy acquired a portfolio of 70,000 domain names from WorldWide Media Inc. (also known as MostWantedDomains.com). Here is Michael Berkens' post on the sale.
• Even TechCrunch is publishing articles on the domain name bubble in China. One Chinese investor spent over $1 million on .club domains & NNNNN.XYZ are nearly sold out as some domainers try to front run the Chinese demand.