SEO Weekend Update: SEMMY Awards, Caffeine on Scene, and Yahoo! Ads Made Easier

It’s Monday and my feed reader and e-mail inbox are overflowing. (I bet this sounds familiar!) It was enough for me to reinstitute a feature on the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog from before my time: the SEO Weekend Update. Here’s the search news from over the weekend and today.

Enhanced Rich Snippets and Highlighted Answers in Google Results

Google has announced two enhancements to search results through Rich Snippets and Google Squared technologies. The first is a new Rich Snippets format for events, allowing webmasters to identify pages with events through a standard, engine-friendly format. The second uses structured data to deliver “answer highlighting,” seen in search results as boldface text that answers a user’s query.

Google Caffeine Caught in the Wild?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/clayirving/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

A WebmasterWorld forum administrator claims to have identified six Google IP addresses returning results with the Caffeine infrastructure in place. Other SEOs have conducted tests that seem to corroborate the theory that Caffeine is now live for some data centers. Google announced that the rollout of its next-generation infrastructure would occur following the holiday season. Seeming to echo the words of Google’s SEO liaison Matt Cutts, one SEO veteran commented: “Google says, ‘Caffeine won’t change the algorithm’ so the SEO community keeps a sharp eye out for algorithmic changes to note when Caffeine goes live.” The industry may have needed the reminder that no one knows what changes Caffeine might bring.

Advertising with Yahoo! Just Got Easier

The good news for search marketers is that Yahoo! has just made paid search marketing a little easier within the Yahoo! network. One of the improvements is a tool that allows marketers to import campaign data from Google AdWords to Yahoo! Search Marketing formats. Yahoo! has also launched a feature that makes it easy for advertisers to choose which pages may deliver their ads — Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! partner sites, or both. Advanced reporting lets advertisers see which domains deliver the best results, and advertisers can block domains that aren’t performing well. Yahoo! has also raised the limit of negative keywords from 250 to 500.

SEMMY Awards Open for Voting

The third-annual SEMMY Awards, honoring the best posts in search engine marketing, are now open for public voting. The finalists have been chosen by an esteemed panel of judges, and from now until Friday, January 29, members of the search marketing industry are encouraged to vote for their favorite posts in 17 categories. It was a real honor to have a post from the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog nominated as a semi-finalist. Good luck to all the finalists! Clearly it’s going be a close race to the winners’ circle.

That’s the major search news I found while digging myself out today. Stay tuned throughout the week. You and I both know there’s bound to be more.

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.