A Smattering of SEO News: 6/3/13

Hello everyone, and welcome back to our Smattering of SEO news. Since last week started off with a holiday weekend here in the U.S., there wasn’t as much news as there usually is, but we still have some great tidbits for you. Here’s your news to get your week started, and I hope it’s a great one.

Google News:

Matt Cutts Details How Google Looks at Advetorials – In a recent video, the Google Engineer laid out the guidelines for how webmasters should approach the practice of paid editorials, or “advetorials”. Essentially, the article should pass no PageRank by using nofollow attributes in links, and these should be clearly marked to consumers and sponsored editorials. Violating these could have the content removed from the search engine, Google News and elsewhere.
EU Wants More Concessions before Settlement of Antitrust Investigation – Recently, in talks with members of the European Parliament, EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said that Google would need to “improve its proposals” with further concessions before the EU decides to settle its antitrust investigation. This is likely in response to strong lobbying efforts from Google’s critics FairSearch.org and SearchNeutrality.org.
Google Adds New Tool to Make Structured Data Easier to Implement – Google has made adding structured data to one’s website much easier than ever before, thanks to the revision of an existing tool and the addition of a new one. First off, their existing data highlighter only allowed the addition of information about events, but now allows information on products, apps, movies, TV episodes and much more. Going further, Google added the new “Structured Data Markup Helper” tool. This allows you to tag specific pieces of data on your page. The tool will then give you HTML code to implement into your website.

Other News:

SEOMoz Changes Name to Moz – In a surprising move, long-time staple of the SEO industry, SEOMoz, has changed their name to simply Moz. This seems to denote a branching out from just SEO to search, social, content and branded marketing channels, as well as further development of their various software tools such as Moz Analytics, which go beyond just SEO. We’ll have to see if it pays off.
Bing Launches XML Sitemap Plugin 1.0 – Bing has brought it’s XML sitemap generation tool out of beta and into a final release state. This plugin, installed on a host server, creates XML sitemaps and then alerts Bing and Google that the sitemaps are updated. This would be handy for sites that have no plugins of their own to generate sitemaps.
Facebook Adding Verification to Celebrity and High Profile Pages – Facebook is following in the footsteps of Twitter by now certifying the validity of celebrity-owned pages and other high-profile pages. This is unlikely a result of more and more complaints by both celebrities and their fans of fake pages.
Email is Tops in Conversion Rate for Ecommerce Sites – In a recent study by Monetate called the Ecommerce Quarterly, they studied over 500 million shopping experiences and found that email had the highest conversion rate at 3.19%, beating out search (1.95%) and social (0.71%). Email was also found to be the top referrer of most pages on Ecommerce sites. However, search engines still brought in the most traffic.