Google Penguin 2.1 is launching today, according to Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts. The first update to the second-generation Penguin algorithm designed to target web spam will affect "~1% of searches to a noticeable degree."
Instagram promises it will begin with only occasional ads. It will initially be U.S. only with a limited number of advertising firms. Also, advertisements must have high-quality images and videos, so they look as if they belonged in the stream.
Twitter’s IPO is expected to be among the largest of tech firms this year. During the most recently closed quarter, average ad revenue per timeline view in the U.S. came in at $2.17, while the rest of the world generated just 30 cents.
Competitor backlink analysis is great – you get the initial research into the industry done, it helps you understand the competition, and it gives you a tidy list of high opportunity links. Let's dive into the how of competitor backlink analysis.
The Dimensions tab in Google AdWords has a lot of data that you can tap into to identify insights that will take your account to the next level. Here are five ways to use the information to optimize your campaigns and get ahead of the competition.
Marin Software’s latest feature release, Channel Connect, allows advertisers to track ROI across search engines outside of Google and Bing, as well as brings organic search performance data into one platform for its customers.
A new study analyzes the best comparison shopping engines based on traffic, revenue, conversion rate, return on spend, average CPC, quality of merchant tools, and merchant response ratings to help guide marketing spend for online retailers.
UK development and design firm Parallax spotted the flaw in the latest version of the Chrome app that Google has updated to add support for Apple's iOS 7 mobile operating system and, perhaps ironically, a number of security improvements.
Google has made another technology startup acquisition, with the very interesting acquisition of Flutter, a company that has created gesture recognition technology to interact with online applications by simply using hand gestures.
Facebook's Graph Search has been updated to allow people to search in greater depth on Facebook. The new Graph Search allows users to search for not just the usual people and places, but also to search posts, status updates, check-ins, and comments.
Bing has announced Pinterest boards can be accessed right from its image search results, Now users can find more interesting content in the image results, and businesses and organizations can have another way for their brand to be found.
UK-based MathSight attempted to analyze Google's Penguin 2.0 algorithm update through a reverse engineering process. What that data suggested is that Penguin 2.0 was really about “low readability” levels of content on a site.
Pivot tables can help organize massive amounts of data and pull out only what is needed. This guide will explain pivot tables in plain English, give you a visual breakdown of pivot tables, and give examples of pivot tables in search marketing.
Google unleashed a one-two punch of moving entirely to secure search and rolling out a brand new algorithm known as Hummingbird. Here's why heading forward you need to start building your content with concept and context in mind.
Google's UK division paid a tax rate of 2.6 percent on non-U.S. income because it designates its UK operation as primarily marketing with its Irish operation taking most of the profits, with these profits being channelled to a subsidiary in Bermuda.
Considering expansion into different countries and languages? Google's Maile Ohye offers some great advice and best practices for expanding into additional languages and country-based language variations, plus solutions for potential search issues.
A recent Google webmaster help video from Google's Matt Cutts brings up an interesting question: should a webmaster nofollow internal links within their site or does it not make any difference because they are simply internal links?
Is Google taking a less tolerant stance on "spam"? Which link types are most often classified as "unnatural"? How much can exact match anchor text tactics hurt your site? Here are some conclusions and top takeaways based on recent real world work.
The Service Provider Report is a small but significant report in Google Analytics that offers a lot of value. It's great for finding sales leads and markets to target, troubleshooting, and reviewing cross domain requirements.
Whether it's a publisher, social network, or curation platform, marketers have a hard time figuring out how to grade performance in a black hole of data. What to do? Use these tips as a framework to build your own analytics solution internally.
Google has announced the launch of the Google Web Designer, which was released as a public beta. The free tool enables advertisers to create HTML 5 advertisements and comes with default layouts for DoubleClick rich media ads and AdMob mobile ads.
Webmasters can breathe a sigh of relief. The missing keyword data in Google Webmaster Tools was simply a bug, Google has confirmed. Expect reporting on search queries to return to normal in the coming days. Data through Sept. 25 is now available.
Yelp says that up to a quarter of the reviews the company receives may be fake, and that its automated review filter suppresses about 25 percent of reviews it deems as being suspicious. However, Yelp admits that the system isn't completely accurate.
The company’s latest feature gives more data to users of its application about the competition for the topics that content creators want to write about, promising better decisions about the performance of the content before it’s even written.
While the first position in the organic search results may drive the most traffic, it doesn't drive the most click on ads within the website once a visitor lands on it. Chitika's latest research dives into why this behavior might be happening.
Facebook’s head of network operations has great expectations for software defined networking (SDN), though he may not be relying on commercial hardware vendors to bring SDN to the social networking giant’s own infrastructure. , who oversees Facebook’s production and corporate network. Prior to joining Facebook, Ahmad worked as general manager of global networking services at Microsoft. Ahmad was part of a panel about SDN at the New York Interop New York conference, held this week. He spoke with the IDG News Service afterward. , the future of networking.
This very special Nissan LEAF is a poster car for the company’s pledge to bring autonomous vehicles to market by 2020.
The CBS app, which launched on iOS in March, is now joined by new apps for Android and Windows 8.
The lines that seperate tablets, notebooks, and all-in-ones have increasingly blurred over the past few years—and prices have begun following that trend. , is priced at less than $400, although the company sacrificed some niceties to hit that mark. Thankfully, the $1,000 or so prices that PC vendors used to charge for an all-in-one machine have faded away, thanks to lower prices in the flat-panel market. Now, low-end AIO machines are pushing down below $500, as manufacturers try and drive sales by charging less. Nevertheless, if you’re in the market for an all-in-one PC, it pays to pay attention to what’s under the hood.
Campfire, HipChat and other are popular with distributed work teams because of the ability to communicate in real time via a web browser or mobile app. Cotap, a free iPhone app that launched Tuesday, takes a different tack by forgoing the browser element, opting instead to be a simple group texting app for work that you use primarily on your phone. “We want to be actually easier than texting,” says Cotap CEO Jim Patterson, a former Yammer executive with a background in mobile communication and enterprise software. Patteron notes that while other platforms have focused on creating rooms or groups as well as sharing files, most business communication platforms don’t focus first on mobile. Unlike consumer mobile messaging apps such as , that require you to manually create groups and add contacts, Cotap scans your phone’s address book for anyone with the same work email domain as you, using those addresses to automatically populate your company’s address book inside Cotap. As a result, the next person from yourcompanydomain.com to start using Cotap will have one-tap texting access to not only the company email domains in his own address book but also the ones imported into Cotap by anyone else who uses the same work domain, as well as anyone whose email address is associated with a meeting scheduled with Cotap.
, have been actively trying to defeat the encrypted protection provided by the popular Tor anonymity software. But amazingly, it appears the attempts have failed. The latest Snowden leak suggests that Tor has actually withstood the brunt of the NSA’s efforts thus far. “We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time,” according to a leaked presentation titled ‘Tor Stinks,’ the Guardian reports. “With manual analysis, we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users.” That doesn’t mean Tor is a magic bullet for cloaking your online steps, however.
Here's your first dose of early Halloween fright, with 10 scary movies streaming on Hulu Plus.
As a tropical storm and possible hurricane bears down on the Gulf Coast of the U.S., the National Weather Service's website was churning out weather alerts Friday, despite a partial U.S. government shutdown that has affected citizens' access to other online resources. The National Weather Service's website, Weather.gov, was one officials deemed as essential after a budget fight in Congress led to a partial government shutdown Tuesday. The website for weather service parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, displayed a notice saying it was unavailable during the shutdown. "Only web sites necessary to protect lives and property will be maintained," said a message at NOAA.gov. But Weather.gov displayed a map of the U.S. with current weather alerts Friday, including a warning for tropical storm Karen, with a hurricane watch for the Gulf coasts of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. The weather service expects landfall by Sunday morning.
The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) formally accepted a big change recently that could affect future Web standards—a decision that will either change nothing or destroy the Web forever. It all depends on your point of view. for possible inclusion in the upcoming HTML 5.1 standard. The W3C is the group charged with defining guidelines for Web technologies. (EME). For users, it means no more needing to download a special plugin to view video content. Just fire up your browser, log in to your favorite online streaming video provider, and go. (Assuming providers embrace EME, naturally.)
Microsoft is trying to head off any concerns that the Xbox One's powerful Kinect camera might become a mass surveillance device or a source or privacy headaches. . Most notably, he insisted that users' facial data is locked to the console, and that Skype video chat is programmed not to run in the background. that certain personal data, such as facial expressions and heart rate, will not leave the console “without your explicit permission,” Penello said that actual face data does not leave the console at all. “There could be some cool features we could enable if we stored that data in the cloud, like being able to be auto-recognized at a friend's. I get asked for that feature a lot,” Penello wrote. “But, for privacy reasons, your facial data doesn't leave the console.”
Microsoft's left many pondering the future of third-party Windows Phone devices, but a new report suggests the company is peering over its walls to transform Android into a Trojan horse of sorts. Terry Myerson, Microsoft's newly crowned OS chief, has asked HTC to include Windows Phone as a "second option" on its Android handsets, . To sweeten the pot, Microsoft allegedly offered to "cut or eliminate" its usual licensing fee. Could you dual-boot between the two? Would you have to pick a primary OS up front? The report says the technical details aren't concrete given the preliminary nature of the talks, but one thing's for certain: The tag-team would definitely be an unprecedented move. And if any companies need to shake up the status quo, it's HTC and Microsoft. After rising rapidly during Android's early days, HTC has since been steamrolled by the Samsung-Apple tandem, hemorrhaging money, market share, and executives alike despite , shipping just 6.63 million phones in the second quarter.
The developers of WHMCS, a popular client management, billing and support application for Web hosting providers, released emergency security updates Thursday to patch a critical vulnerability that was publicly disclosed. The vulnerability enables attackers to execute SQL injection attacks against WHMCS deployments in order to extract or modify sensitive information from their databases. U.K.-based WHMCS, released versions 5.2.8 and 5.1.10 of the software to fix the flaw, as well as incremental patches that can be applied manually to older versions without performing a full upgrade. The SQL injection vulnerability was disclosed Thursday on a blog by an anonymous user who also released proof-of-concept exploit code for it.
It's the user experience that matters, not charts and graphs.
Chip makers like Broadcom and Renesas Electronics are ramping up in-car entertainment with faster processors and networks for wireless HD movies and navigation, aiming to keep drivers informed and passengers entertained.
The U.S. has brought criminal charges against 13 persons, said to be members of the hacker group Anonymous, for their alleged participation in cyberattacks as part of a campaign called Operation Payback. The defendants and other members of Anonymous allegedly launched or attempted to launch cyberattacks against government entities, trade associations, individuals, law firms and financial institutions, according to a federal grand jury indictment released Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria division. Among the organizations targeted were the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, the United States Copyright Office of the Library of Congress, Visa, MasterCard, and Bank of America. The method of attack was DDoS (distributed denial of service) which floods web sites with spurious Internet traffic so that they become unavailable, and the weapon of choice was the freely-available and downloadable network stress testing program known as the Low Orbit Ion Cannon or LOIC, according to the indictment.
Twitter made its IPO documents Thursday and in the process revealed some juicy information about the company, like how much money it makes (or loses) and how much its executives get paid. Here are a few of the details we learned about Twitter today. Dick Costolo, Twitter's CEO and a member of its board, received total compensation of $11.5 million last year, including $200,000 in salary and $8.4 million in stock. That was a little more than the company's head of engineering, Chris Fry, whose total compensation was $10.3 million, including $10.1 million in stock. Twitter's revenue ballooned in the past few years. Last year it was $317 million, three times what it was in 2011 ($106.3 million) and more than 10 times what it was three years ago ($28.3 million). But the growth has been slowing and it's still a minnow compared with Facebook, whose revenue last year was $5.1 billion. Twitter lost money in each of the last three years -- $79 million last year, $128 million in 2011, and $67 million in 2010. Things might not get better any time soon: it lost $69 million in the first six months this year, and the "restricted stock units" it has granted will have "a significant negative impact on our ability to achieve profitability on a GAAP basis in 2013 and 2014," the company said.
The battle for your living room could become even more crowded if Amazon rolls out a set-top TV box this holiday season.
You can leave Pinterest any time you like, but you can't leave completely.
With the Surface 2, Microsoft isn't just trying to dominate the tablet market. It's hoping to replace the PC market. The Surface 2 by itself is just a tablet. But when you pair it with its new Power Cover, suddenly you have a notebook PC. And when it’s docked in the Surface 2 Docking Station, suddenly it could emerge as a replacement for a desktop PC. “We’ve said previously that our ambitious vision was to make Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 the most productive tablets on the planet, and that we believe people need great devices for play and getting things done,” a Microsoft spokesperson says. “For Surface Pro 2, it can be the first device that is a tablet, a laptop, and a high-powered workstation.” Why? Futurists have been talking about modular computing for several years, and the Surface 2 may be the epitome of its evolution.
Good digital security inevitably requires some hassle, but the size of that headache is really up to you. If you’re someone who wants to go all out with 64-character passwords, no Facebook account, and a second laptop that never connects to the Internet, because it houses all your deep, dark secrets, well, this guide is not for you. and its surveillance activities), but with a minimum of hassles such as dealing with key fobs for two-factor authentication, juggling complicated passwords, and setting up email encryption. We can’t promise you a completely pain-free experience, but we will show you how to get up and running with a pretty good security setup that keeps your passwords, email, hard drive and sensitive USB drives as secure as possible without going overboard. the best solution we have for keeping third parties away from our data. The problem with passwords is that they should really be random, unique, and relatively long to be of any use. That’s where password managers come in: These programs help you generate random passwords and store them securely, allowing you to remember just a handful of gnarly 10-character random passphrases instead of 15 or 20.
The new Kindle Paperwhite is like the old one, but with a better backlight and upgraded software.
Samsung's lawyers may have provided their clients access to highly confidential information such as Apple's patent licensing agreements with Nokia, Ericsson, Sharp and Philips, according to a court document. The disclosure raises questions whether Samsung and its outside counsel may have broken a "protective order" that is meant to prevent confidential information from falling into the hands of competitors. The documents had been provided as part of a fact discovery between August 2011 and March 2012 in a patent dispute between Apple and Samsung. As fact discovery turned to expert discovery, Samsung's outside counsel sent it a report prepared by an expert about damages to be awarded for Apple's alleged infringement of Samsung's declared-essential patents. The distributed report however contained, intentionally or inadvertently, key terms of each of the four license agreements, according to the court.
Samsung Electronics forecast strong growth in revenue and profit in the third quarter as the company rolled out new models of its smartphones and tablets, including products for emerging markets. The South Korean maker of the Galaxy smartphones and tablets said Friday that its third-quarter sales increased 13 percent to 59 trillion won ($55 billion). Operating income also grew by 25.3 percent to 10.1 trillion won, Samsung said in a stock exchange filing. The company does not provide information for net income in the earnings guidance. Samsung is targeting smartphones at various segments of the market at many price points giving it the lead in large emerging markets like China and India.
Twitter has fewer users and less revenue than Facebook, but in mobile advertising Twitter appears to have dodged the problems that dragged down Facebook's stock after its public offering last year. . it didn't directly generate any meaningful revenue from mobile, causing big problems for its stock. Twitter said it's experienced strong growth in mobile ad revenue because user engagement, as measured by timeline views, is higher on mobile applications than on the desktop.
The leading men of GTA V comment on the controversies surrounding the game.
Adobe reported what it called a “sophisticated” cyberattack on its network where hackers gained unauthorized access to confidential customer information including IDs and encrypted passwords. The hack affects some 2.9 million customers worldwide, the company estimates. Information accessed in the attack includes names, encrypted credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and order information. Adobe does not believe the criminals removed decrypted credit or debit card numbers from company systems, however. , Adobe believes that the two security violations are related. . Adobe also advises changing passwords on any website where customers may have used the same user ID and password as their Adobe account.
The company hopes to raise $1 billion by selling its shares on the public markets, in the biggest social media IPO since Facebook went public last year.