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This day in search marketing history: March 17
Posted On 20 Mar 2023
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Google AdWords further dilutes exact match, plus: DMOZ officially closes, Matt Cutts hints at HTTPS ranking signal and more.
Danny Goodwin on March 17, 2023 at 12:40 am | Reading time: 8 minutes
Google AdWords further dilutes exact match
In 2017, Google announced a change to how exact match targeting would work in AdWords.
Matching for close variants – plurals, typos, abbreviations, adverbs, etc. – would be broadened to include variations in word order and function words in the coming months.
With this change, Google would ignore word order and function words when determining whether an ad should trigger for an exact match keyword.
Google introduced close variants in 2012 to broaden reach and coverage and save time building out keyword lists.
Read all about it in Google to further dilute exact match in AdWords; will ignore word order & function words.
Also on this day
Google blocks 3.1 billion ads in a tumultuous 2020, says annual Ads Safety Report
2021: The report listed misinformation around COVID-19 and the political climate, as well as ad fraud, as top concerns.
Schema.org adds coronavirus-related structured data types in version 7.0
2020: “SpecialAnnouncement” and “eventAttendanceMode” could help businesses provide event updates in the search results.
Yahoo and other Verizon-owned search sites favor Verizon media properties [Study]
2020: Study compared rankings for the same queries across six Bing-powered search sites, including Bing itself.
Sellers start feeling the strains on Amazon’s fulfillment systems amid coronavirus buying frenzy
2020: The company had halted shipments of non-essential items to its warehouses and stopped most of its ads on Google.
Google receives search warrant for identities of everyone who searched crime victim’s name
2017: Police in Minnesota obtained a court order requiring Google to divulge the identities of people who searched for the name or images of the local victim of financial fraud.
DMOZ has officially closed after nearly 19 years
2017: The closure marked the final end of a chapter of humans trying to organize the web.
Search in Pics: Green GoogleBot, Google swings & hammock & a mini Google pool
2017: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.
Google Strongly Encouraging Webmasters To Adopt Autocomplete On Forms For Mobile
2015: Google said webmasters should implement autocomplete markup to improve mobile user conversions but didn’t say it would be a ranking factor.
How Big Will Google’s Mobile-Friendly Update Be? Bigger Than Panda Or Penguin
2015: Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji said the mobile-friendly algorithm would impact more sites than the Panda or Penguin algorithms.
AdWords Top Movers Report Gets A Makeover
2015: Google updated the Top Movers report with a summary to make it easier to spot areas for improvement.
Play The Google Feud Game & I Bet You’ll Lose
2015: Google Feud adapted the popular game show, Family Feud, by using Google autocomplete suggestions.
Ranking Benefit To Making Your Site SSL? Not Yet But Google’s Cutts Would Like To Make It Happen.
2014: Cutts did not say this was or would be a ranking factor. He said that he would like to see it become a ranking factor.
Matt Cutts: Google Mobile Queries May Surpass PC Search This Year
2014: Google’s Matt Cutts said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if mobile search exceeded desktop queries by the end of the year.
Google Testing New Sponsored Shopping Boxes, With 3D View
2014: Google continued to experiment with Google Shopping displays beyond the traditional thumbnail box panel of Product Listing Ads.
Google’s Matt Cutts Gives SEO Advice For Times When Your Products Go Out Of Stock
2014: Cutts answers: “What should sites do with pages for products that are no longer available?”
Study: Researchers Blame Google Flu Trends Inaccuracies On Ongoing Algorithm Updates
2014: Researchers claimed the problem revolved around Google’s constantly updated algorithms and the inability of big data to produce, “Valid and reliable data amenable for scientific analysis.”
Bing Ads Now Shows Zero-Click Search Queries, Offers 20 To 40X More Data Than Before
2014: Bing Ads updated the Search Term Report (formerly known as the Search Query Report), which housed the data on the terms users actually typed before clicking on an ad.
Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors: How To Get Detailed Data From the API
2012: The data was tricky to get to and the specifics of what was available varied based on how you retrieved it.
Hidden In Google Profiles: More Social Network Connections On The Way?
2011: Was Google readying several new “connect an account” options in Google Profiles?
Google Tweaks AdSense Code To Speed Loads
2011: The company estimated that its helping pages load faster by a half a second or more, when, previously, Google acknowledged that its code could delay page loads by 12% on average.
YouTube Down, But Still Dominates Online Video; Netflix Owns Movie Watching
2011: Video watching was down on YouTube during February, but it still held a seemingly unsurmountable lead in viewers, video views, and time spent per viewer.
Pew: Yahoo And Google Rank High On List Of Online Political News Sources
2011: Of the 24% of Americans who got most of their political news from the Internet, 20% cited Yahoo as their main source of news. Google came in next at 13%.
Microsoft More “Ethical” Than Apple, Google, Yahoo, Facebook
2011: That was according to the Ethisphere Institute, which produced an annual list of “world’s most ethical companies.”
Facebook Asking App Developers To Stop Using Google AdSense
2011: Some Facebook developers were receiving emails from Facebook to remove the Google AdSense ads they had on their apps.
FTC Commissioner: Google’s Buzz Launch Was ‘Irresponsible Conduct’
2010: “Google consistently tells the public to ‘just trust us.’ But based on my observations, I do not believe consumer privacy played any significant role in the release of Buzz.”
Google TV Platform In Testing, Says New York Times
2010: More details on Google’s plans to gain a stronger foothold in people’s living rooms.
Now View The Night Sky In Bing Maps
2010: Microsoft’s “WorldWide Telescope” was integrated into the Silverlight version of Bing Maps.
Facebook Adds Auto-Suggest To Search Box
2010: You would see results of the people, events, groups and Pages you were connected to plus the connections of your friends and globally relevant results.
How Many 301s Are Too Many?
2009: Google’s Matt Cutts answers “Is redirecting a large number of domains suspicious?”
Google AdSense Ads Making Their Way To iPhone Apps?
2009: The Urbanspoon iPhone app had what looked like Google AdSense ads on them.
Twitter Adding Advertisements?
2009: Twitter was promoting Twitter Search.
Making Sense Of All The Data: Google, Hadoop & Cloudera
2009: The very interesting history behind Hadoop – an open-source version of proprietary software developed by Google to process and analyze massive volumes of data for search.
Dennis Woodside Fills Tim Armstrong’s Position At Google
2009: Woodside, a Googler for five years, was previously Google’s Vice President for the UK, Ireland and Benelux.
Early Yahoo Postmortem And Google CEO Eric Schmidt On The Prospect Of MicroHoo
2008: Yahoo’s failure to recognize Google as a threat was partly responsible for the company’s predicament.
Yahoo Partners With 3rd Party Click Fraud Company, Click Forensics
2008: Yahoo and Click Forensics partnered to combat click fraud together.
Microsoft Launches New adCenter Community Site
2008: Features included product/service specific blogs, categorized user forums and more.
The State Of Search Engine Marketing 2007
2008: The future looks bright for search, according to SEMPO’s annual State of Search Engine Marketing report.
Search Biz: Google Pays More For DoubleClick, Benefits More From Online Ad Shift, AOL’s Platform A Coming Together, & More
2008: Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick closed at $3.24 billion, a mere $140 million more.
SES NY 2008 Day One Live Coverage Recap
From Search Marketing Expo (SMX)
- 10 Key Takeaways From Meet The Search Engines @ SMX West
- Video: Google’s Susan Wojcicki Keynotes SMX West 2012
