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.
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.
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.
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
It’s more than a week since Google announced it will be encrypting searches made by logged-in users, but the debate about what this means for natural search rumbles (rather loudly) on. 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%.
Yesterday, Google announced their latest development in their social strategy with the integration of Google+, their own social offering, into their search results. Users, who are logged into their Google+ account, will now start to see comments from the connections appearing in the search results for relevant queries.
Most commented