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Some of you may have already begun to notice that with the holidays rapidly approaching your web traffic has started to drop significantly. This is typical. During the holidays, we have noticed that outside of e-commerce clients, the traffic to sites is usually down quite substantially.

Mobile advertising is a relatively new phenomenon in world of strategic communications, so it goes as no surprise that some campaigns have recently violated Google’s policy for content guidelines. Known as the “google slap”, this legendary ban is dished out when marketers violate too many rules when using Google’s search engine advertising service: AdWords.

Whenever possible, Google has always customized your search results based on your physical location. That way you can find a local phô restaurant or organic grocery store when you are jonesin’ for some beef & rice noodle soup or a gluten-free pizza mix.

While PageRank is no longer publicly available (as of April 15, 2016), it's still something used by Google and worth understand.

This week I changed my focus with the Volacci SEO blog: fewer posts, deeper thoughts. While there will now be only three posts a week (M/W/F), the posts will be longer, more insightful, and, hopefully, more valuable to you.

It’s another Friday and the Winter Olympics are almost officially over. And both you and I would rather watch the handsome face of Google’s Matt Cutts tap into Google’s brainwaves rather than read our Google Readers. So, without further reading required (maybe some), an SEO video trifecta by Mr. Cutts.. after the jump.

The Super Bowl is practically a national holiday – a record-shattering 106.5 million people tuning in this year, according to some guy named Nielsen, to watch the New Orleans Saints create NFL history. Over the years, there are just as many people who tune for the big game as they do for the commercials. So it came as no surprise that Google finally took advantage of the exposure and ran their first Super Bowl ad on Sunday. Google’s Super Bowl XLIV ad, appropriately named “Parisian Love”, ran during the third quarter and featured a ‘love story’ highlighting Google’s local search offerings by showing viewers search results. The commercial began with a search for “study abroad paris france” and follows the user through a basic search. The subsequent searches walk the viewer through this user’s life and demonstrates how Google can actually have an effect on everyday life. Google’s very own Eric Schmidt tweeted up some hype for their debut, stating quite appropriately that "hell has indeed frozen over". Watch all 53 seconds of Google's Super Bowl XLIV ad again below:

As the holidays quickly approach, more shoppers than ever before will be making their purchases online. Although there are online retailers that are ready for the rush, most Internet swamis agree that online retailers don't dedicate as much resources as they should to optimizing their sites. These retailers are missing out on several key advantages that could make or break their final numbers come January. 
 Google has extended a helping hand with the launch of their newest search solution, Commerce Search, which specializes in crawling online stores to index product price and information. Commerce Search improves “the shopping experience with fast, intuitive Google search technology.” Google has already demo’d Commerce Search for critics, who gave it their thumbs up, raving mostly about improved search speed and efficiency. Here is a list of more initial benefits for both sides of the screen: