While forecasting Google's next game-changing move can be tricky (who would have thought they'd get into developing renewable energy?), Hitwise analyst Heather Hopkins has a strategy for predicting which particular industry the giant might choose to make waves in next. By looking at clickstream data, Hopkins finds categories where Google sends large amounts of traffic, but doesn't have its own established property. The giant has properties in all but two of the top 15 categories visited after a user searches on Google.com--including "shopping and classifieds" (Google Base and Google Product Search), "education - reference" (Google Knol, Google Scholar, Google …

Staying on top of everything from the paid and organic keywords your competitors are vying for, to their strategies for using social media, can be vital to understanding your own unique value proposition. Mona Elesseily also says that competitive insights can help you vault to the top of the pile, as well as retain your top spot in the face of a competitor's new marketing campaign--and she offers a review of some tools you can use to gain the advantage. Compete and Alexa both offer reach, rank and page view information for up to five sites, a must …

Effective PPC management isn't just about getting campaigns up and running, it's about sustaining their success for the long haul. And for Chad Frederiksen, getting rid of dead keywords (or keywords with that fail to garner any clicks) is all part of routine campaign maintenance. With keywords and ad groups that number in the thousands, it can be easy to forget about some of the longer-tail phrases that aren't performing at all. But Frederiksen notes that having an abundance of 0% CTR keywords in your account can actually cause the platform to lower Quality Scores across multiple campaigns. …

Google has rolled out some new views in Experimental Search, its testing ground for possible permanent features, and Jordan McCollum offers in-depth reviews and screenshots of the changes, using "The Great War" as the test phrase. First up is Timeline View, which provides a frequency chart to show the number of references to dates in the search results. Users can narrow their time window, and zoom in on a particular time period in the chart above the results. McCollum notes that this iteration of a timeline is not exactly what users may be looking for, especially when searching for …

Instead of working to optimize a site for specific keywords and then seeking to drive traffic through paid search, Tim Schaden says that running those PPC campaigns first is a better way to go. Schaden says that with paid search you can test thousands of terms--from general and branded keywords, to long tail and even competitor's phrases--and run the tests without having to wait for approval from multiple layers of management. In contrast, making changes to the Web site often requires buy-in from the IT department, marketing (for copywriters), upper level management and sometimes even the legal department. …

It feels like today may be Yahoo's D-Day, what with Wall Street analysts predicting poor earnings and the rumblings about widespread layoffs growing into roars. But for you naysayers who think the Web giant should outsource its search to Google (essentially getting out of the game to focus on "something else"), Danny Sullivan thinks you're nuts. "Maybe Pepsi should just license to bottle Coke," Sullivan says. "Perhaps Avis should give up the 'We Try Harder' thing and concede to Hertz." He argues that while Yahoo faces a tough challenge in trying to wrangle more search share from …

So your site was one of the PageRank casualties resulting from Google's recent paid links smack down--and now you want your traffic back. You agreed to play by the giant's rules and got rid of all paid links (possibly severely reducing your alternative cash flow) in the hopes of getting re-included in the main index, and filed a reconsideration request. That was more than a month ago--and no change. What gives? According to Matt Cutts, you might want to make sure that you've found every paid link or post and "no-followed" it, as well as removed any language …

George Michie advocates using ad groups when managing content network campaigns, but when it comes to plain old paid search, he says that running huge campaigns using ad groups may actually be a barrier to success. One keyword can have multiple attributes, from customer targets, to SKUs, to holiday usage--and forcing it into an ad group based on one particular category can limit its flexibility. This is why the search team at The Rimm-Kaufman Group places keywords into ad groups only if they share all of the same attributes, not just one or two, as the PPC management platforms …