Back in December, Yandex announced they will be dropping link factors from part of their search ranking algorithm. They made that decision because the links were being abused so much that it ruined the overall relevancy of the search results..

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Penalizes Two German Link Networks; One Being efamous Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced on Twitter today that they have penalized… Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Danny Sullivan (Founding Editor, Search Engine Land), Matt Cutts (Distinguished Engineer, aka Head of Web Spam, Google), and Duane Forrester (Senior Project Manager, Bing) held an entertaining and informational “Meet the Search Engines” session at SMX West. The PowerPoint-less open forum format allowed for 90 minutes of solid conversation and question answering. The three gentleman […] Author information Debbie Miller Blogger and Social Media Marketing Professional at Social Hospitality Debbie is the Founder of Social Hospitality, a blog and boutique marketing firm focusing on social media, blogging, and SEO

eMarketer forecasts ad spend on the desktop to decline $1.4 billion this year. This, due to new data emerging that shows desktop spend only yielded 2 percent growth in 2013, while mobile ad spend grew about 121 percent.

Busy week in search, a lot of news coming out of SMX West, I just landed a couple hours ago – so excuse the tired look.

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced on Twitter today that they have penalized and taken action on two additional German link networks. He mentioned one by name: efamous

On Tuesday, March 18, ItsTheROI.com will be hosting a meetup at Airbnb’s headquarters in San Francisco.

At SMX West Matt Cutts of Google announced they are actively working on the “next generation” Panda update that will “soften” the algorithm. Matt specifically said this is aimed at helping small businesses that may be impacted by the Panda algorithm..

Digital marketers spend a lot of time talking about, collecting, and analyzing consumer data, but despite the massive amount and availability of this stockpiled data, there is often a disconnect between the insights collected and the ways they’re used.