Yahoo Search business sold to Verizon for nearly $5 billion

It’s now confirmed that Verizon bought Yahoo search business for nearly $5 billion excluding Yahoo Japan, Alibaba shares and several other non-search related business assets.

What does it mean for Digital Marketing: SEO, Paid Marketing?

For search marketing experts such as SEO and PPC experts, gurus, marketers, managers and performance analysts. There is not big change in what they do in their day to day life activities like digital ad campaigns on Yahoo platform such as Yahoo Gemini and Brightroll. Yahoo organic search is already driven by Google so no need to worry much. Watch this space for any future changes to search engine marketing.

Resource:

Search Engine Land

Mahabharata & Bhagavad Gita Management Lessons

The great Indian epic: Mahabhrata was written ages ago but it still holds a great piece of information and motivation.

Another holy book: Bhagavad Gita as told to Arjun by Lord Krishna during the Mahabharata also serve a great purpose to life.

Image credit:commons.wikimedia.org

Takeaways:

• Turn your weaknesses into strengths.

• Turn enemies into allies.

• Share your responsibilities.

• Teamwork scores over Individual Effort.

• Right Team = Right set of Individuals. The right man for the right job.

• Commitment scores over Competence.

• Team interests over Individual interests..

• Know your enemy/challenges. Exploit its weaknesses. Take calculated risks.

• The Right Managers : To inspire, invigorate, counsel in crisis .

• Know Ground realities. Accept different ideologies. Cooperate.

• Empower Women. The Gender Balance is required for stability and administration

Resources:

http://www.theorderoftime.com/science/sciences/articles/gitamanagement.html

http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/b/bhagavad_gita_and_management.html

http://www.slideshare.net/chiragdarji/management-lesson-from-mahabharat

Google Panda 4.0 Roll out

Have you noticed any changes in rankings or traffic recently?

Matt Cutt just confirmed Google Panda 4.0 roll out today via tweet.

https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/468891756982185985

http://searchengineland.com/google-begins-rolling-panda-4-0-now-192043

Google Webspam Reporter: Scrapper Report

Recently, Google launched a tool to report about Scrapper site

Here is screenshot:

Is this tool important to me?

The answer is yes if you're annoyed with the fact that other sites scrapping your content and ranking higher in Google search results. This is the right opportunity to officially raise your voice against them.

Who are the beneficiaries?

Bloggers
Copywriters
Brands
E-commerce Websites
Product Review Websites
and many more...

Alert for?

Content Scrapper sites


I was digging through search results to find various other forms/tools to report issues such as paid links, copyright content or other apart from Webspam Reporting Form. Following are my findings:


1. Paid Links

2. Objectionable Content

3. Malware

4. Other Google Products

5. Something else is wrong

6. Copyright and other legal issues

7. Personal/private

8. Phishing

9. Rich Snippets

Click here for the Webmaster tools page listing all of them.

Have fun reporting Webspam!!

Google Easter Egg: Blink HTML

Google Easter Egg: You can hunt it in Google search results by typing
"blink html"

Here is screenshot.



Read more here

Happy Easter Egg Hunting!!

Google Hummingbird Australia 2013 | Google Birthday Press Event

Google has new search algo named Hummingbird.

This one is more precise & return better search results according to Google search executive, Amit Singhal.

More here:

http://searchengineland.com/google-hummingbird-172816

Hummingbird is released a month ago. However, I haven't noticed any drop in search traffic in Australia. I believe it's main focus is to show better results for complex queries and also to integrate various things such as knowledge graph, comparison features & improved exploration for answers & songs

There are also some other stuff shared by Google in the press event:

#tags in Google SERP

Comparison feature in search results

Local Store Suggestions

New Design for Tablets & phone with richer answers

Improved Exploration for Answers & Songs

Better Conversation on Android Search App

Notifications, Reminders & "Hotwording" on iOS Google search app

Read more here: http://searchengineland.com/google-birthday-event-172791

Google Bomb: Miserable Failure Back Again in Knowldge Graph results

Just saw this morning, the Miserable Failure search term is showing George Bush picture and link to George Bush search results in Google.

Hopefully, Google will manually intervene and tweak their search algorithm and remove it.

More posts related to Google Bomb:

Matt Romney Google Bomb

Italian Bar Girl In India linking to Sonia Gandhi Wikipedia Page