News and Blog

Google is undertaking a new effort to better identify content that is potentially upsetting or offensive to searchers. It hopes this will prevent such content from crowding out factual, accurate and trustworthy information in the top search results.

The effort revolves around Google’s quality raters, over 10,000 contractors that Google uses worldwide to evaluate search results. These raters are given actual searches to conduct, drawn from real searches that Google sees. They then rate pages that appear in the top results as to how good those seem as answers.

Quality raters do not have the power to alter Google’s results directly. A rater marking a particular result as low quality will not cause that page to plunge in rankings. Instead, the data produced by quality raters is used to improve Google’s search algorithms generally. In time, that data might have an impact on low-quality pages that are spotted by raters, as well as on others that weren’t reviewed.

Today's consumers are more sophisticated than ever. They expect interesting content, personalized marketing, and a seamless site experiences.

It doesn't matter how creative your style is or how clever your infographics are; if your pages take forever to load or your site looks obnoxious on smartphone screens, people will not engage.

The human element is the most important part of any marketing strategy. You're trying to get people to click, read, share, or buy, and the only way to accomplish that is to get inside their heads and uncover their unique tastes. Accordingly, all your content and user-experience (UX) designs should reflect the type of experience you want people to have every time they interact with your company.

Pay attention to your user data, and you'll know which direction to head in:

The SEO industry has been watching an unconfirmed Google ranking update that seems to target more of the link quality aspects of the overall algorithm.

Many are calling this the Fred Update, a name we’re also adopting. That came from Google’s Gary Illyes, who has jokingly suggested that all updates be named “Fred.” It’s sticking with this one.

We’ve seen more chatter and reports of changes from within the “black hat” SEO community, which generally means that this is a spam algorithm update around links. Last time we reported a link spam-related update was in early February, and that update also was unconfirmed by Google.

There was also a large content quality Google update on February 7 that was never confirmed. As you expect, Google is very unlikely to confirm algorithm updates these days — but that won’t stop us from reporting large shifts in the search results that convey an algorithm update has happened.

PayPal has entered into a global partnership with B2B ecommerce company Oro, an open-source business applications firm started in 2012 by founders and employees of Magento, the B2C ecommerce startup acquired by eBay a year earlier.

One of Oro’s core offerings is OroCommerce, which was officially unveiled a couple of months back to serve mid-size and large companies with a myriad of B2B ecommerce tools that make it easier to manage price-lists, customize catalogs, manage corporate accounts and relationships, and automate workflows.

With PayPal in tow, the duo have now created a “fully integrated payments solution” that enables Oro’s clients to provide their own customers with an easy way to pay for goods and services.

Courtesy of VentureBeats