Oculus just announced a number of branded PCs that will be fully "Oculus Ready," and which will soon be available for pre-order in bundles with the Rift headset starting at $1,499. “Best Buy, Amazon, and the Microsoft Store will all start taking pre-orders on Rift-and-PC bundles starting on February 16, ahead of shipping to ‘select countries’ in April,” ars technica reports.

It may be easier said than done to avoid giving searchers a negative first impression when your ads serve up alongside query results. Erin Sagin reminds marketers of 10 search advertising tips to follow, to avoid common mistakes such as over-capitalization in ads, and neglecting to use commas just because you want to save the character space for a letter and not punctuation. Sagin explains.

Love and loyalty as they apply in the local business can become daunting. Moz points to KISSmetrics data that estimates it costs seven times more to acquire a customer than to retain one, although 63% of marketers participating in a study felt that new customer acquisition is the most important advertising goal. Miriam Ellis analyzes 15 locally owned businesses to see whether they had created loyalty programs, and then checked Google and Yelp to see if any of these programs had generated mentions in reviews during the past year. Here's what she found.

Google appears to be rethinking its ban on ad-blocking browser software from the Google PlayStore. Following an appeal from Rocketship, the developers behind Adblock Fast, Google has re-approved and republished its app to Google Play, according to TechCrunch, which details the history of the decision for desktop and mobile ad-blocking add-ons.

Google has developed technology that automatically filters traffic from three of the top ad-fraud botnets that affect the advertising industry. This move improves defenses against invalid traffic generated by ad fraud malware, such as Bedep, Beetal, and Changthangi. Together these three botnets are comprised of over 500,000 infected user machines. This filter is also available to marketers on DoubleClick Bid Manager and Google Display Network (GDN).

Google has added Safe Browsing capabilities in an effort to protect users from malware and social engineering scams. “Google's Safe Browsing technology will now warn people using Google Chrome, Apple Safari or Mozilla Firefox Internet browsers of image ads and other embedded content in Web pages that the company deems as being malicious or potentially unsafe,” EWeek reports.

Google’s longtime search chief Amit Singhal is retiring, Bloomberg Businessweek reports. Taking his place is John Giannandrea, who is best know for his machine intelligence prowess. “With Giannandrea’s appointment, the technology may get smarter,” Bloomberg suggests. “The executive has overseen recent artificial intelligence efforts, including RankBrain, which saw Google plug an AI technology called a neural network into its search engine.”

On Wednesday the world learned more about John Giannandrea, the artificial intelligence and machine learning expert, who will step in at the end of February to run Google search after Amit Singhal leaves to take on philanthropy. Now Eric Enge tells us how machine learning will impact SEO. He explains some of the technical detail about how machine learning works and its practical impact on SEO and digital marketing.

Moz put together a Local Search Expert Quiz for 2016 to determine whether you're ready for SEO in 2016. The quiz, written by a local SEO expert, contains 40 questions designed to test both your general local SEO knowledge and your industry awareness. It takes less than 10 minutes to complete. Not only do you discover the level of your preparedness, but it will provide insight to Moz to better develop content and services that in turn will help marketers do a better job.

If Eugene Kim's analysis is correct, the downfall of Yahoo Labs could become been the downfall of Yahoo the advertising company. In the first half of the article Kim provides backstory, but skim down to the section on "Strong research work but losing its luster" to find the crux of what could ultimately force Yahoo to spin off its advertising business. The article suggests people question whether Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was ever really committed to reviving The Labs and keeping up with technology.