Bing Ads has released a new feature, "dynamic sitelinks," which create annotations for ads that have not set up sitelink extensions. Microsoft explains that it provides another way for potential customers to evaluate what the site has to offer prior to clicking on the link. It could reduce the cost of accompanying paid-search ads, while increasing click-through rates from organic listings by up to 14%. The option will not appear when marketers have enabled sitelink extensions.

Google is officially adding knowledge graph data within search results snippets. “Google calls these ‘structured snippets,’ where Google will show snippets of data, relevant to the query, within the snippets of the search results,” Search Engine Land reports. “Google says the data is ‘powered by the Knowledge Graph and other data sources.’” 

Google responded to a News Corp with a statement "joking about eating hamsters as a response to a strongly worded letter from the chief executive of News Corp in which he accused Google of being a 'platform for piracy,'" per the Business Insider. The statement references a 1989 newspaper story published in the News Corp-owned The Sun that describes comedian Freddie Starr being accused of eating a hamster in a sandwich. It emerged years later that the story was created by British publicist Max Clifford, currently serving an eight-year prison sentence for indecent assault.

With his back against the wall over consumer privacy issues, Tim Cook is stepping up encryption efforts at Apple, while subtly suggesting that it’s Google that is the real privacy offender. “Cook didn’t have to name Google as the company that profits more than any other from selling customers to advertisers … Charlie Rose had already done it for him,” Fortune writes, referring to an interview that Cook did with Rose this week. More broadly, “Apple played its security card this week — in the media, on the Web, and in a 43-page white …

Julie Joyce is worried that webmasters think slapping on a nofollow piece of code to a link somehow relieves them of the need to be relevant and actually provide readers with a good resource. She believes this is a growing trend, and tells us about the 50 sites she encountered this week with advertising policies that state all links will be nofollowed, although the sites are more than willing to sell the links. They will sell a link without disclosure, she says. Joyce also contemplates whether this is a smart practice or one that may lead marketers down a path …

David Kirkpatrick shows us a case study on the challenges on producing high-quality leads to get the most return on investment. The case study explores a process developed by CloudEndure's VP of marketing. The campaign includes a deep dive into prospects' Web sites, a content piece based on that analysis structured as a report, and a personalized email, which not only achieved a 58% open rate, but also helped generate high-quality leads that produced immediate results.

Google has introduced a way to allocate a marketing paid-search budget to higher-performing countries: Location Bid Adjustment to help marketers allocate more of their budget to specific regions, and Schedule Bid Adjustment to specific times in those regions. Log into AdWords to find the campaign. A video guides marketers through the process of making the changes and scheduling bids and regions.

IBM on Tuesday released a cloud-based application it calls Watson Analytics to bring sophisticated number crunching to the average business user. The underlying backbone of the platform, like the ability to process natural language queries, is built on Watson technology. IBM will offer a scaled-down free version.

Jay Taylor gives us a list of seven reasons why SEO campaigns fail and explains what marketers can do to identify and correct the mistakes. Whether you manage a campaign in house or hire an outside SEO professional, he suggests asking and answering these seven questions to determine whether the campaign is on the right track. The themes covered include setting realistic goals, time frames and budgets. Did you choose the correct keywords, audience, and traffic? Taylor explains.

Bing predicts 48.1% of Scotland's residents will vote yes for independence, while the remainder will vote no. Jasper Hamill tells us the latest prediction came from a list of pro- or no-independence terms, as well as using sentiment analysis to eliminate neutral voters. The latest poll from independent research firm ScotCen, per CNN, suggests that 51% will vote no and the remainder yes.