The SEO community has been in a bit of a buzz over the last few weeks. Google, dominant in so many territories, has begun to email tens of thousands of site owners with warnings.

Google’s warnings include alerts of traffic drops, traffic spikes, out of date software but also when the search engine is concerned about the quality of the links pointing to the site.

This is significant. In the past brands and agencies had to work out from changes to the search results as to whether Google was happy with the links the brand site was attracting.

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Would you buy your social media influence?

If you are feeling lonely on Twitter, with only a handful of followers, or not feeling enough fans like you on Facebook, you could consider buying more friends. There are various services out there offering to get you thousands of fans with prices going up to $4,000 for 10,000 fans.

How much would you pay to increase your social network influence? And who would you buy? Read More »

It is often forgotten that many international consumer markets don’t have the same level of e-retail sophistication as there is here in the UK. This has implications for the way in which international online consumers are targeted.

Some marketing directors incorrectly assume that strong point of purchase sales in a specific country will automatically convert to the same level of online success. Unfortunately, it’s not as straightforward as this – given the comparatively high level of online purchasing behaviour in the UK, it’s sometimes easy to assume that this applies to other overseas markets. Many countries with thriving high-street demand have simply not transferred into digital retail at the same rate. Read More »

Last night Google announced a new update to their search algorithm. It will be one of about 500 this year and comes into effect immediately.

The blog post announcing the update does not mention the series of Panda improvements Google has been making in order to combat content farms but the algorithm update is very much of that family. The tweak punishes those webpages who have content that is too difficult to find.

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Last week the digital marketing world was rightly focused on CES and Google’s latest evolution: Search plus Your World. I call it Search+ and it was in the headlines for all the right reasons.

However, caught between the importance of Search+ and Google’s embarrassing Kenyan adventures and easy to miss, there was also a humble little post about making better use of page titles.

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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 »

Trying to explain Social Media is a bit like trying to describe what an elephant to someone who has never seen one.  It encompasses technologies, humanities (psychology and sociology in particular), but is also critical to marketing and business strategies.  If you are new to the industry, it can feel overwhelming and hard to distinguish signal from noise.

I am by no means an expert in the field.  I started my career as an academic researching into the role of trust in Wikipedia’s success, then spent a few years in Yahoo! which provided me with a fantastic, global perspective on managing and designing for communities of scale.  Currently at IPC Media we have over 50 brands for us to experiment and learn from.   I’ve found that hands-on experience is still the best way to learn.  Here I’m sharing with you my top tips that I wish I knew before I started my career: Read More »

As the saying goes, the customer is always right, which is why marketers spend significant amounts of time and money investigating, through user groups and forums, what it is their customers want. But for the online retailer, whose business success relies on correctly displayed content, understanding what the customer wants is often made more challenging when their actual online behaviour contradicts what they might say in a focus group.

That’s why multivariate testing becomes such a vital tool in the optimisation of websites, removing the guesswork! But without strategic use, the impact will only ever be short-lived. Read More »

This morning I noticed Google have started to try and make sense of the disorganised world of Facebook brand pages. If you punch a brand name, like say, Nike, and accompany it with Facebook, you should find something like this appears.

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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 »