Good morning search marketers, are you keeping up with the changes?
654,680: That's how many search experiments Google says it ran in 2017. Those tests resulted in more than 3,200 changes to its search systems — an average of more than eight changes per day. To give you a sense of how things have changed, a decade ago, Google said it made about 350 to 400 changes per year. Changes include new features, regular updates to results algorithms "as content on the web changes" and responses to issues identified internally and externally. While it's not actually possible to identify, much less keep up with, every change, it's a good reminder that SEOs and site owners must stay actively engaged in continually improving their sites if they want to gain and maintain search rankings.
Search Engine Land's Barry Schwartz sat down with SEO veteran Mike King of iPullRank last week to chat about growing his own agency, getting comfortable speaking in front of large audiences and how link building has (or hasn't) changed. Mike says the mechanics of unpaid link building haven't changed much and that the process is "a lot like sales." Hear what tools he uses to help scale link building outreach, improve personalization and create and repurpose content to fill in the gaps in the user journey.
DuckDuckGo has added a dedicated Maps tab to its privacy-focused search engine along with some new map-related search features. Maps on DuckDuckGo are powered by Apple. (And you may not know, search ads on DDG are syndicated by Microsoft Advertising.) The search engine's share of traffic is still tiny, but does continue to grow. Daily queries have doubled from last year to surpass 43 million.
Keep reading for a Pro Tip on tracking e-commerce spend efficiency with a script and more.
Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief
