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Company opts back in to rich snippets but calls Google a monopoly.

 

Axel Springer, Germany’s largest publisher and the owner of Europe’s largest newspaper, has said it wants back in to snippets.
According to Reuters, the German publishing giant revealed that traffic to its four largest online properties from Google search results “had fallen by 40 percent” and referrals from Google News had dropped “by 80 percent in the past two weeks.”
We previously reported on the decision by VG Media, a consortium of German publishers including Axel Springer, to opt back in to snippets because of a significant traffic decline that would have potentially caused some of its members “to go bankrupt.” 
Google has long maintained in its disputes with publishers that it sends valuable traffic their way. This episode seems to vindicate that argument. Yet, the decision to opt back in to snippets is not a truce but a temporary cease fire as the German publisher bitterly acknowledged its dependence on Google traffic.
In the wake of the controversy surrounding the country’s relatively new “ancillary copyright” law, Axel Springer had opted out of Google snippets for properties welt.de, computerbild.de, sportbild.de and autobild.de, according to the Reuters report.
This followed a complicated back and forth under the copyright law regarding how much publisher content would be included in Google results. VG Media had sought to compel Google to include its content but also to pay for it. Google opted to reduce publisher content to headlines to minimize its potential liability under the new copyright rules.
Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner previously wrote an “Open Letter to Eric Schmidt” in which he said his company was “afraid of Google”:

Google is a prime example of a market-dominating company. With a seventy-percent global market share, Google defines the infrastructure on the Internet . . . there are search engines with market shares of up to 6 percent. These are pseudo-competitors.
The market belongs to a single company . . . Google is not only market-dominating but super market dominating.

Doepfner’s acknowledgement of the importance of snippets was evidence of this market dominance, he argued. And, he called again for regulatory intervention by the EU.
There’s a general consensus among regulators and politicians in Europe that Google is a “monopoly.” There’s a corresponding desire to restrain Google in some fashion; however, no one has been able to agree on a precise remedy, and Google’s rivals have kept the political pressure on, thwarting previous settlement proposals.
Spain recently followed Germany in passing a similarly restrictive copyright law. That will likely cause a similar snippets drama to play out in that country. Yet, newly installed Digital Economy Commissioner Günther Oettinger wants to see a Europe-wide version of Germany’s ancillary copyright law.
The ultimate ambition of all these efforts is to freeze Google search results and compel the company to index and showcase publisher content while legally forcing it to pay for that content — essentially a link tax.
That may seem outrageous. However, PC World previously discussed the possibility that any attempt by Google to de-index or completely delist publishers from search results could be a violation of European antitrust law.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/german-publisher-axel-springer-says-removal-snippets-caused-80-percent-traffic-drop-207500

Head of Google's web spam team opens up more about decision to extend his leave through 2015.

 

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Last week, the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts announced that he was extending his leave. Now, Cutts has opened up a bit more about it, further suggesting he won’t return.
Cutts also suggested that having himself or anyone be a public face for Google in terms of publisher issues might not be a good use of time, because that role tends to be a “lightning rod” that attracts negative energy.
Cutts made his comments while participating in “This Week in Google” yesterday. Host Leo Laporte asked Cutts about his current leave and if he would go back to the same role at Google.
From Cutts roundabout response, it doesn’t sound like returning as Google’s head of web spam holds much interest for him:

Well, I really have been impressed with how well everyone else on the team is doing. It’s created a little bit of an opportunity for them to try new things, explore different stuff, you know, approach problems from a different way, and so, we’ll have to see how it goes. I loved the part of my job that dealt with keeping an eye on what important news was happening related to Google, but, it’s not clear that having me as a lightning rod for unhappy black hat SEOs, or something, is the best use of anybody’s time compared to working on other things making the world better for Google…so we’ll see.

Cutts said that Google has been really generous, and reconfirmed that he was extending his leave into 2015.
Cutts addresses whether or not he’ll return to the same position at Google in the following video around the 9:50 mark:

Bing has made small gains in search share, but not at Google's expense.

Microsoft’s Director of Search admitted this week that Bing isn’t likely to put a significant dent in Google’s search market share.

Stefan Weitz appeared Tuesday at the Web Summit conference in Ireland, where he told attendees that Bing instead wants to focus on making its search technology an important part of mobile apps and other things that people use every day. The Register quotes Weitz as follows:

It’s unlikely we’re going to take share in [the pure search] space, but in machine learning, natural language search… and how we can make search more part of living. For us, it’s less about Bing.com, though that’s still important. It’s really about how we can instead weave the tech into things you’re already doing.
For pure keyword search, we’re around 30 per cent in the US, not so much in Europe,” he said. “But search in different areas of life? That mix is to be determined. I’m committed to making sure we have our fair share of search in the future.

That 30 percent figure is a combination of the estimated market share for Bing.com and Yahoo, which gets its organic search results from Bing. In its September 2014 report, comScore estimated the two combined for 29.4 percent search share, compared to Google’s 67.3 percent.

You can look at Weitz’s comments as a waving of the white flag, or just as a reflection and admission of reality. The comScore numbers above haven’t changed significantly in a long time. Consider that a year ago — September 2013 — Google was at 66.9 percent while Bing/Yahoo combined for 29.3 percent. Bing’s market share estimates have inched up slowly over the past couple years, but it’s been taking share away from search partner Yahoo, not from Google.

Bing’s recent search focus seems to be on things like conversational search, which it launched in August, its role in Microsoft’s Cortana virtual assistant/predictive search service and in mobile apps — both its own apps (which no longer carry the Bing name, however) and a recent win when it replaced Google as the search provider for Apple’s Spotlight on both the desktop and mobile devices.

 Source: http://searchengineland.com/bing-unlikely-well-take-search-share-away-google-207606

 

Move will complete the transition to compatibility with AdWords enhanced campaigns.

To complete its path to compatibility with Google AdWords, Bing Ad has announced that explicit OS targeting will be retired in March of next year.
No longer will you have the option to target ads to a specific mobile operating systems as you are now.
Instead, what advertisers will see beginning in March 2015 is this:
This change rounds out Bing Ads’ adoption of Google’s enhanced campaigns. After showing some initial bravado when Google announced it was taking away tablet targeting from advertisers, Bing Ads backed down from that stance and decided it was better to join ‘em.
The effort to bring parity between the two platforms has been underway throughout this past year, with the thinking being that advertisers will be willing to spend more time in Bing Ads if they don’t have to learn how to navigate and manage campaigns in a completely different environment from the one they spend most of their time in, namely AdWords. In September, the ability to bid separately on tablet traffic was removed and, as on AdWords, desktop and tablet traffic is now combined. However, Bing Ads did give advertisers a concession here by providing a bid modifier on tablets, something that Google does not provide in AdWords.
At the same time, Bing Ads announced that App Extensions will roll out just as the explicit OS targeting goes away.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/bing-ads-retire-explicit-mobile-targeting-march-2015-207641