The Search News Round Up: New Delicious.com, Changes to Ahrefs, Majestic SEO integration in SEO Tools for Excel, Facebook’s Graph Search and iOS mobile domination

This week, the world of SEO has been packed to the rafters with good news, with only a few spanners in the works to be found – hurrah! It’s a rare treat, so without further ado, let’s embrace the positivity of this week’s Search News Round Up.

New Delicious.com

After some beta testing last month, the site’s new owners have launched the brand new version of Delicious.com, one of the most popular social bookmarking sites. New features include the ability to search for Delicious users via the new ‘omnibox search bar’ using the ‘@’ symbol, the ability to search by tags and hashtags by using the ‘#’ character in the same bar. Additionally Facebook and Twitter integration is included to support tagging and the curation of links. What does this mean for SEO? With the improved search functionality, Delicious is becoming an even more viable tool for content discovery and curation. Could this be the start of Delicious’ long-awaited comeback? Head over to Matt McGee’s blog post on Marketing Land to read his take on it.

Image from Delicious blog

Ahrefs removes keyword analysis but introduces new backlink features

In order to comply with Google’s terms of service, Ahrefs have removed their keyword analysis feature (boo, hiss!). “But I thought you said it was all good news this week?” I hear you cry. Well, this is SEO, so not everything can go our way, but there is a silver lining. To make the grieving process that little bit easier, Ahrefs have introduced new features in the form of ‘snippets’ and ‘link baskets’. Thanks to snippets, Ahrefs now shows both the anchor and the surrounding text, making it quick and easy to evaluate the context of links. The link basket feature is still being developed, but as it stands, SEOs can move links into a basket manually for selection and exporting. Plus, it seems that all is not lost for fans of keyword analysis: apparently “several” companies are interested in developing the fallen tool further. Find out more on the Ahrefs news section.

SEO Tools for Excel now includes Majestic SEO integration

Do you love analysing campaign data in Excel? Then you’ll love this. Much of the major functionality of Majestic SEO’s main site can now be replicated directly into SEO Tools for Excel, thanks to Niels Bosma, the developer of the free SEO tools for Excel plugin. Head over to the SEO Tools for Excel now with Majestic SEO post on the Majestic blog for more details.

Facebook announces Graph Search

Unless your head has been buried in the sand (or snow!) recently, you’ll have heard the news Facebook has made its first steps to take down Google…

Okay, that assertion might be a bit strong, but Facebook’s Graph Search is the social media giant’s first real foray into the search sector. Put very simply, Graph Search will allow users to find the people, places, photos and other pieces of content that relate to specific searches such as ‘My friends in New York who like Jay-Z’. It’s currently only being tested in the US, but the potential is there for creating huge competition for local search services like Google+ local. Get the full story from our social media expert, David Somerville, in his Facebook Graph Search post, published on the Fresh Egg blog earlier this week.

iOS continues to dominate mobile web traffic

According to a report from the ad network Chitika, devices running on iOS continue to generate nearly two-thirds of all mobile web traffic, while Android generates just over a third. Unfortunately, this isn’t the best news for us analytical bods, thanks to organic visits made on iOS devices showing as ‘direct’ in Google Analytics. If anything, this study shows us that this headache isn’t going to end any time soon.

And there you have it. That’s this week’s SEO news all done and dusted. See you next time, folks!