Budgets were high and search-engine-optimization professionals worked longer hours, but they also handled more tasks for in-house marketing departments and agencies.

Independent digital agency Wpromote focuses on helping brands define, understand and predict the lifetime value of customers. This has become one of the more innovative search strategies in 2017.

How does a marketplace justify offering ongoing sales, even after Thanksgiving Day and Christmas? Invent a holiday. That's exactly what Amazon did to keep Prime members buying. The need to check in frequently also should be good for smaller brands that rely on advertising to attract consumers to their products and services.

Brands are concerned about how much artificial intelligence and machine learning they should use when buying media and creating campaign strategies. Voice search, brands competing with search platforms, and other tech concerns present challenges in the new year.

The series introduced Thursday by Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller will cover topics such as 404 errors, whether fixed penalties affect SEO, how and when crawling works, and a site's URL structure.

Optimization is important for keywords in campaigns running on a variety of platforms, not just for Google and Bing. Early this year Mazda began running a campaign with 170,000 keywords in Adthena, a search platform running on artificial intelligence and machine learning, according to Ian O'Rourke, CEO and founder at Adthena.

Kantar's Millward Brown published a set of predictions Wednesday. Most are expected -- for example, voice will spur adoption of smart devices -- and some will have a much larger impact on search marketing and advertising.

A dissertation released Nov. 14 reveals a new type of threat, analyzing how skillful voice impersonators can fool state-of-the-art speaker recognition systems, as these systems generally are not yet effective in recognizing voice modifications and inflections in the human voice, writes Rosa Gonzalez Hautamaki.

Ask for a "like" or "share" on Facebook and the company said it will downgrade, rather than increase, the post's reach. Facebook is on a roll to reduce the amount of spam and fake news running in its News Feed, similar to the way that Google will address the problems. But rather than reduce the reach of the post, Google said it could delist the publisher's sites.

Publishers have relied on referral traffic to gain readership for years. Now nine European media companies are calling on Google, Facebook and others to pay copyright fees for using the content on which they make a profit and send readership to publisher sites.