We packed the conference room in San Francisco’s Hotel Vitale for our first ever executive marketing conference, titled “SEO, Content Marketing and Analytics: 3 Pillars of Online Marketing Success”.  We had a full house and a tight schedule. We packed as much value into a few hours as we could (with a little fun too, of course). We partnered with the amazing folks at Searchmetrics to put on this fully catered day of sessions and networking. Marcus Tober, the CTO of Searchmetrics, was on hand to deliver an in-depth presentation about search ranking factors in 2014 and how they compared to last year’s ranking factors.

Last week, we reported that Google is improving their reconsideration request rejections with more feedback. Well…

Yandex announced (in Russian) today that they have now went 100% secure, encrypting all search queries, resulting in a huge jump in the [not provided] count. This was first reported by Anna Oshkalo who shared a screen shot of her analytics detailed the bulk of her Yandex keyword data now shows [not… Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Paid search continues to get exceedingly complicated, but the expert panel, the last session of this year’s SMX Advanced, blew the audience away with understandable and valuable tips.

Google has created Google My Business, a one-stop shop for small business owners looking to increase their visibility within Google search, Google Maps, and Google+. Users will also be able to access their applications in one place

“Submit!” Um, no thanks, I’m not really a submissive person.

As I reported from the airport Thursday night at Search Engine Land, Google’s Matt Cutts said the Payday Loan Algorithm was rolling out but truth is, I haven’t seen signs of it. In fact, I’ve asked many folks in the black hat and spammy categories about this and they’ve seen nothing.

Every year is the year of mobile, and 2014 hasn’t been a disappointment. Mobile screen time now exceeds TV in the United States. Fifty percent of paid-search clicks on Google will come from mobile devices in 2015, according to one forecast. So what do advanced SEMs need to know about mobile, and…

Sometimes you can move the needle — and dramatically — outside of obsessing and laboring over obtaining improving rankings in search engines.

A new Policy Center will be coming to AdWords this September. Google says that policies will be streamlined and that there will be more transparency into why policies exist and what advertisers should do to comply.