Google has started the year by encouraging us to take more notice of our friends while simultaneously upsetting some of its other <cough> ‘friends’.
The launch of Search Plus Your World on Tuesday makes sense of some of the moves we’ve seen over the past few months, notably the creation of the Google+ network and encrypted search via SSL connections. Read More
Forget doing barrel rolls… And the fact that Sir Martin Sorrell has told us “not to underestimate the power of Google or online”…
This is old news and, for my money, the big announcement of the week in search is all about keeping things fresh. Read More
High-quality content is a “competitive must” for businesses looking to up their customer acquisition figures via SEO, especially in Google’s post-Panda realm, according to the marketers at Brafton.
The following infographic shows a case study of a sales management business that increased its organic search traffic, amid Google’s Panda update, by use of frequently updated blog posts and Tweets, while also boosting its number of referring keywords by 150%.
Let’s face it: most PRs probably don’t have a grasp on search engine optimisation. They might have heard of the term and may know a little bit about Google’s Keyword Tool and on-page optimisation, but how many PR firms could actually hold their hand up and say that they could offer a full SEO programme beyond just content creation?
By this I mean website re-architecture, link building, keyword position tracking and all those other things that help organisations compete effectively on search engines? Read More
Last week Google announced their +1 service to the usual mixed fan fair of simultaneous excitement and derision. Gordon has already given an overview of the product- in essence Google are attempting to replicate the success of Facebook’s ‘Like’ functionality by giving users the ability to ‘+1′ content they like. Whilst initially constrained to Google search results (both natural and paid) the plan is to roll it out to other Google properties as well as third party sites. Read More
You can imagine a few red faces at Mountain View right now. It is one of those stories that refuses to go away – Google accuses Microsoft of copying search results yet they are the ones who end up looking silly.
Originally broken by Search Engine Land the story detailed how people within Google had harboured suspicions for a year that their search results were being copied by Bing after they found both engines were returning similar results for unusual misspellings. Unlike Google, Bing seemingly makes no attempt to correct the misspellings yet still somehow returns the same list of sites, even though these contain no references to the misspelled words. You can understand why Google’s suspicions were raised.
Image: Jeffrey Beall
Google are carrying out what seems a test of their local results – Google Places – within UK results for “car insurance” today. This will have an impact on the traffic advertisers receive for this high-volume term, which is often used at the start of consumers research cycle.
But is this useful for consumers, and how will it impact brands?
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When PR agency Webber Shandwick recently launched a ‘crisis simulator’ called Firebell, it made me think about the effectiveness of damage limitation strategies deployed by companies facing negative feedback from social sites like Facebook.
There’s been many a time when I’ve seen people ask why there isn’t an ‘I don’t like this’ button on Facebook. There are some two million plus Facebook users who ‘Like’ the idea of having one, and it illustrates the weight of opinion which the community can create. Read More
Google’s latest change to their search engine restuls pages (SERPS) have seen local listings appearing for a far wider range of search queries. But is this change actually to the benefit of their users or is it producing a poor user experience? Changes introduced a few weeks ago use IP addresses and other locality factors to identify a searchers physical location and are now dedicating a much larger area of the SERP to results from their Google Places programme and attempt present results near to the searcher. Read More
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