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Google’s warnings include alerts of traffic drops, traffic spikes, out of date software but also when the search engine is concerned about the quality of the links pointing to the site.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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Recently I’ve been looking at website navigation and how this can fail in being useful to a new user to a website. Sometimes you can get so wrapped up in the rest of the website design that you forget the most important part – the navigation. Read More »

Search Engine Strategies is in London this week. The conference is perhaps the oldest and most established in the industry. SES London has evolved in such a way that it is largely agency presentations to an audience of agencies. This year, however, I noticed an increase in the number of in-house SEO teams in attendance and that is a welcome development.

It may seem rather odd at first but the conference organisers actively encouraged speakers to give their presentations away via social media. In theory, you did not need to pay a dime to learn from Search Engine Strategies as you could have monitored Twitter for the #seslondon hashtag, picked up the shared presentations and studied them online.

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On Wednesday night, Google announced they have changed how average positions are calculated in the Top Search Queries report. These changes are effective immediately.

Average position is an SEO truth that seems to struggle to take hold even though it is far more appropriate to today’s personalised search landscape than the old concept of absolute rankings.

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Just before this weekend Google pushed out yet another feature to support Google+.

The “Ask on Google+” prompt appears for users who are signed into Google.com, .co.uk and other properties in an “11th position” on page one of the search results. Searchers do need to be logged in order to see the suggestion but they do not need to be experiencing Search plus Your World results.

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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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Digital, and especially social media, has disrupted the media industry. The shift from broadcasting to peer-casting; the amount of user generated content; the new paths in which brand related information reaches consumers; the required speed of response and the multiple new brand touchpoints are only some of the challenge brands and agencies are facing today. Read More »

2011 has been heralded as ‘the year of social media’. But can it really offer companies as solid a marketing investment as search?

It is, of course, far too late to suggest that social media is going to be ‘the next big thing’. Social media is very big and very much ‘the thing’ already. But without doubt, the ante has been upped of late, and even the men in suits are taking note. Read More »

Blekko: slashtags make search relevant

“So this guy gave me his card and then I totally went and blekkoed him.”

“Oh yeah, and has he been slashtagged?”

Well, that might be what the founders of the latest new search engine, blekko (rhymes with ‘echo’), are hoping will be a comprehensible conversation one day in the not too distant future. (Actually, I doubt anyone’s going to be asking if people have been slashtagged). Read More »