Yesterday, Google announced that they would be rolling out seller rating extensions for AdWords advertisers. For those who opt in or meet the automatic activation requirements (see below), web users will now see star ratings as well as a link to your reviews along with your pay-per-click ads. The star ratings are aggregated from review sites across the web, much in the way they are for Google Product Search and Google Places.

Using data collected via expo-MAX analytics, we’ve calculated a breakdown of the search term lengths that bring in the most traffic. The findings? Using a sample size of about 1.4 million visits, our study shows that 56.98 percent of all search traffic comes from two-word searches. Runners up were three-word queries at 18.2 percent followed by four-word queries at 10.6 percent. Unsurprisingly, one-word queries only garnered about 6.89 percent of the traffic.

The takeaway for search engine optimization professionals and web publishers from these stats has mostly to do with confirmation. SEOs have long targeted niche phrases with a certain balance of specificity and broadness. The two to four-word search engine query length seems to comport with most assumptions over how users search. For instance, a website devoted to JDM Honda motors might have a shot at capturing a larger slice of pie if it optimized for "motors, ... Read more »

This weekend, the hacker group known as Gnosis released a database full of usernames and passwords associated with accounts at the popular blog network Gawker. The hacking attack apparently stemmed from Gawker’s alleged mocking of hackers associated with the forum 4chan who previously attempted to bring down Gawker’s servers. The previous attempt, which failed, was reportedly spurred on by Gawker’s coverage of a harassment campaign launched by 4chan members against an 11-year old YouTube user known as Jessi Slaughter, who had provoked the ire of trolls on the web. After the first attempt to intimidate and harass bloggers for Gawker, the blog posted a derisive report of the 4chan hacker’s failed attempts. The next round of security attacks, however, were successful, and thousands of email addresses, usernames and passwords were released to the public via a torrent published on PirateBay. In addition, the dump included a list of usernames and email addre ... Read more »

Google recently announced a new change to its search engine results pages. A new feature that Google is calling "Google Places Search” will automatically detect when you are searching for a local business or point of interest and provide you with listings relevant to your area. Effectively, this basically brings together geographically based search results that you’d get from Google Local or Google Maps searches and mixes them with organic results, which you’d get regardless of your location.

What does this mean? For users, this represents only a subtle change, for now. If anything, it should save them a step by putting locally relevant results right in front of their face immediately. But for search marketers, this could be a game changer. Now, it’s more important than ever to ensure that your web page gets indexed for the right location. That’s because Google will now include 30 to 40 local listings in addition ... Read more »

Have you ever seen those strange, pixilated graphics and wondered what they were? It turns out that they are QR codes and they are the next evolution of bar codes. Unlike bar codes, which are strictly one dimensional (the data is read according to the gaps between the bars), QR codes have data encoded across the entire height and width of the code. That means it can hold much more information, including messages, URLs and other data.

QR codes are becoming more important for one good reason: smartphones can recognize them incredibly easily. From apps like Barcode Hero to visual searches like Google Goggles, QR codes represent treasure troves of information for smartphone users. In essence, a QR code can be like a hyperlink in real life. You can place one on a business card, product packaging, pamphlets, billboards, direct mailers, newspaper advertisements or any other place where a smartphone user may be inclined t ... Read more »

The next big thing coming for Google may also be the next big thing for television as we know it. Back in the spring, Google announced that they were developing Google TV—a digital box that would work with your cable, satellite and Internet to bring you a richer, more intuitive multimedia experience. Google TV is not a service, rather, it’s a device that brings the best of the Web, TV and your own digital media collections all into one place. This, of course, isn’t the first attempt at marrying TV with the Web. But now may just be the perfect time for Google TV to come to the market. Here’s why:

Americans Are Watching More Shows Online Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon on Demand, YouTube, Veoh—the list of places where you can watch TV on demand and/or for free are growing every day. And while there are many gaming devices and web-enabled TVs that allow you to access these hubs from your television, the majority ... Read more »

Wal-Mart has long offered prepaid mobile calling plans for thrifty customers, but now it’s venturing into new territory: post-paid cell phone plans. Wal-Mart coined the term "post-paid” itself in a conscious effort to sidestep the stigma of the much loathed "contract” cell phone plan. Traditional contract-based cell phone plans have received countless consumer complaints and even FTC criticism over their restrictive (and sometimes downright punitive) early termination fees and overage penalties.

As an alternative, discount cell phone plan providers—such as Wal-Mart—began offering no-contract plans where minutes were purchased upfront, thus preventing unanticipated charges for going over a monthly limit or cancelling service. For heavy cell phone users, however, an unlimited calling plan may be more economical than a prepaid plan. Plus, unlimited cell phone plans don’t carry the risk of running out of minutes unexp ... Read more »

Yelp, Foursquare and Gowalla have received their fair share of media attention and tech geek buzz, but none of these apps have reached critical mass in terms of audience. The notion of being able to check in, see where your friends area checked in and get information about nearby businesses with a location-aware app has long been heralded as the future of social gaming, proximity marketing and an all-around exercising of the full potential of smartphone technology. Facebook Places—the social network giant’s new feature that allows users to check-in places and see where their friends are checked-in as well—may be the one to make it reality. With over 500 million users, Facebook is nearly as universally subscribed as email, which is good news for socially-minded applications, where it’s always "the more the merrirer.” For Yelpers and Foursquare users outside of metro areas such as Los Angeles and New York, lack of activity has seriously affected the fun ... Read more »

What Foursquare and Yelp did for visits to local business, restaurants and tourist attractions, Barcode Hero is doing for, well, just about everything else. The smartphone app developed by Kima Labs has a simple premise: players scan barcodes of items they are interested in and are rewarded with points, badges and "dukedoms.” For example, you can walk into Best Buy and go through scanning netbooks and quickly become the duke of laptops. Or you can walk about scanning barcodes on iPods, Macbooks and iPhones and make yourself the duke of Apple products.

It’s a bit like creating a mix tape with the stuff that you buy. Your activities as a consumer help build your public profile for all of your friends to see. This notion has already gained somewhat of a foothold. Just like we used to align ourselves by genres of music—from punk and indie culture to the largesse of made-for-TV hip hop—camps have been emerging around p ... Read more »

It’s an inconvenient truth that the strategies of Internet marketers and black hat SEO practitioners sometimes overlap. This is because some legitimate strategies work for shady sites and some shady tactics work for legitimate sites. The problem is that the search engine spiders can’t tell if you’re intentions are pure—they can only tell if your methods smack of foul play. Because of this, it’s important to avoid some of the most common black hat SEO tricks, no matter what that consultant tells you. Here are some examples:

Webpage flooding is akin to building a cardboard army. A script randomly generates hundreds or thousands of pages of gibberish stuffed with keywords and interlinks it so that your site seems bigger and more substantial than it is. This tactic may have short term benefi ... Read more »