Blog

If you’ve been meaning to learn about Google Authorship—what it is, how it works, why it’s important for SEO—you can take that off your to-do list. 

In a Google+ post, John Mueller of Google Webmaster Tools wrote: “We’ve gotten lots of useful feedback from all kinds of webmasters and users, and we’ve tweaked, updated, and honed recognition and displaying of authorship information. Unfortunately, we’ve also observed that this information isn’t as useful to our users as we’d hoped, and can even distract from those results. With this in mind, we’ve made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results. We realize authorship wasn’t always easy to implement, and we greatly appreciate the effort you put into continually improving your sites for your users.” 

​

Social media is a great way for a small business to attract interest in its products and services. Once you build your social media community, you can get your prospects and customers excited about whatever it is you’re selling. 

For many customers, there’s a big gap between thinking about buying and actually taking the steps to place the order. Some social media platforms are attempting to close that gap by adding a BUY button. 

This month, Twitter announced plans to “publicly test a BUY button that can be embedded in posts to allow users to buy a product with a couple of clicks.” In July, Facebook started a similar test. 

This is a good time to ramp up your social media marketing campaigns so you’re ready when Twitter, Facebook and others open up these selling opportunities to all businesses. 

​

Google. Still Google. According to comScore, Google holds 67.6 percent of U.S. search engine market share. How can any ad network compete with a company that owns about two-thirds of search traffic? 

Despite the bold claims made by Bing (remember the Bing challenge?) and industry speculation that Facebook PPC could be a threat, no other PPC platform has been able to make a dent in Google’s booming PPC business. 

Facebook is showing some strength in the mobile advertising space. According to this article, “Facebook is nearly monopolizing the growth in the global mobile ad industry, having more than tripled its share of the market from 2012 to 2013...but Google remains the dominant force with just under half of the mobile ad market (49.3 percent).” 

In the midst of developing Amazon Prime Air (drones delivering packages to customers in 30 minutes or less. Really!), Amazon has been working on a new ad platform that's designed to be a direct challenge to Google AdWords. Perhaps Amazon will finally give Google AdWords some real competition. 

​