Google China President Liu Yun stepped down to pursue other opportunities, and Scott Beaumont -- who currently runs the company's partnerships business in Europe -- will take his place, reports Reuters. Google held 8% market share for page views in June 2011, behind Baidu with 81%, according to Chinese data firm CNZZ. Its share fell 6 percentage points during the past two years.

Eric Enge spoke with Google engineer Matt Cutts about link building, and Google's ability to detect signals, and quality of guest posts that resonate with the audience. Enge's advice is to think and act like traditional marketers. The lengthy post dives into a variety of topics around link building and what Cutts believes search engine marketers should focus on and the tactics they should avoid. Read the article here.

It happens. Sometimes sites lose search engine query ranking to a site with fewer links and poor content. Rand Fishkin looks at why some seemingly high-quality sites lose rank to those that appear less optimized. He takes us through the basics to help marketers understand the inputs affecting the rank in search engine query results. Aside from all the tactical things marketers can do, Fishkin suggests getting inside the heads of the audience by getting to know them better. Read the article here. 

Phrase match terms can produce slightly cheaper leads, according to Amanda WestBook, who tells us how. She starts by using proven winning keywords as exact matches with unlimited budgets to know the keywords working for the account are not limited by the budget. Then she separates other match types into their own campaigns either phrase, modified broad, and/or broad match. Sometimes negative keywords play an important role too. WestBook explains in a detailed post through examples and screenshots. Read the article here.

Bill Slawski tells us about the updated version of Google's patent this week that looks at how the search engine might use directories in URL structures to help it better understand the categories on a Web site and to categorize new pages and directories that might be added to a site. He tells us it's important because he has seen other similar patents from Google that describe how the engine might use categories to do things like create sitelinks for pages in search results as well as re-ranking search results based upon the categories of pages and matching categories for …

Lisa Raehsler created a remarketing guide for search ads based on an ad-targeting method that Google AdWords rolled out in June. The guide aims to help marketers with campaigns that reach consumers in search results pages with a text ad. The consumer would have needed to visit an advertiser's site, receive a browser cookie, and search on keywords that the advertiser bid on. The guide outlines the process of setting up a remarketing campaign, best practices and strategies, how to use remarketing tools, and more. Read the article here.

Too many companies overlook customer reviews. Daniel Burstein analyzed the data to determine the type of content being overlooked by marketers. It all boiled down to the difficulty in creating it. When asked to indicate the degree of time, effort and expense required, 80% of marketers cited mobile apps as the most difficult or somewhat difficult. Online video came in second, with marketers citing the same degree of difficulty. And while creating mobile apps or integrating the data from them might seem daunting, Burstein calls analyzing customer reviews a "diamond" in the rough. Read the article here.

Japan government officials accidentally shared emails on Google Groups, unaware of the site's default settings, reports ABC News. The default settings are automatically set to "public," and the user must change to "private." It turns out that an investigation found more than 6,000 cases where information from Japanese companies, hospitals, and schools were publicly available because of improper settings.

Digital media company Fullscreen introduced a platform to help video creators and brands manage their content and track audiences. The collection of 15 apps gives users channel analytics, earnings reports and features to collaborate. One helps users optimize video posts for search engines, and another allows content creators to connect with others that have similar audience demographics.

Google introduced a new Google Maps app for smartphones and tablets Wednesday. The app has enhanced navigation, and offers the ability to read Zagat reviews. It also means Google will retire Latitude, eliminate offline check-ins, and My Maps. The ability to share location has been added to Google+ for Android, coming soon to Apple iOS.