Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

Google has released the latest in it’s video narratives which tell a story, align with cool events and cleverly sell its products. In this one, our Glastonbury festival goer loses a tent but finds romance, using maps and translate on his phone.

Maile Ohye, manager of Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, laid out her blueprint for a social media, content and SEO optimised website in an interview with TopRank’s online marketing blog last week.

The question that caught our attention was to do with how she sees the role of social media within website marketing activity, particularly in relation to SEO.

Here’s what she said:

“I think having a solid site: great content, good experience for users (intuitive navigation, responsive), descriptive page titles, standardized URL structure, etc., is of primary importance. A strong site is the foundation where you’ll likely make your online conversions. Once this foundation is established, the social media approach helps drive traffic, builds excitement (and inbound links), that you’ll be able to capitalize on with your solid site.”

NB, update from freshegg 3:10pm: “www.timesonline.co.uk is now back in Google’s index.  They went from having 0 pages indexed this morning to a quarter of a million just now.  The SEO guys at the Times are saying there was a technical issue of some sort causing the dropout – I am unconvinced and cannot see how any technical problem (which no SEO I know could detect) could simply take an entire site out of the index and then pop it back in again.  All I can say is I can imagine both Google and The Times offices have had busy mornings with plenty of heated phone calls.”

Coinciding with the launch of Times Online’s much debated paywall, Google appears to have removed the paper’s online site – www.timesonline.co.uk –  from their index entirely.”

According to a report by freshegg, by way of Malcolm Coles, searches for “times online” or for the entire subdomain return zero results.

Freshegg says: “it seems that Google has manually removed the entire timesonline.co.uk site from its index, either at the direct request of Rupert Murdoch (or his best minions), or perhaps this was an initiative from Google itself”

Subdomains such as  business.timesonline.co.uk and technology.timesonline.co.uk are currently still indexed though this may change down the line.

Nod to Garry Davis at WhyCommunicate? for bringing this to our attention.

Google appears to be moving into prisoner rehabilitation with a new initiative called Google Jail for Communities, reports Fast Company, who has acquired leaked information on the programme.

Google’s description of  Google Jail for Communities  reads: ‘Google is planning to launch an experiment that we hope will make prisons better for everyone. We plan to test ultra high-tech incarceration facilities in one or more trial locations across the country. We will deliver Googleplex-quality services 100 times better than what most American prisoners have access to today, including fiber-to-the-cell connections. We’ll offer service to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 inmates.’

Some commentators have noted the similarity of the initiative to Google Fiber for Communities, a high-speed broadband initiative that also aims to reach between 50,000 to 500,000 inmates.

A video of an internal presentation on the project has also been acquired:

Facebook overtook Google as the most visited site in the US last week.

Figures for week ending 13th March, released by Hitwise shows Facebook visits accounted for 7.07 percent of all websites, compared to 7.03 percent for Google.

Facebook has temporarily spiked ahead of Google before, on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 2009 but Hitwise charts show that Facebook, with more than 400 million members, may now surge ahead of Google permanently.

Membership growth is one factor, the rapid rise in social gaming another, with games like Mafia Wars generating nearly 10 million Facebook fans.

Facebook’s marketshare of visits has grown 185% in a year, compared to Google’s 9% rise in the same period.

Microsoft has knocked Google off its top spot in the 2010 Business Superbrands survey.

Google, ranked first in the two previous surveys, changes places with Microsoft who were in fifth spot last year.

New entries to the top ten include BlackBerry, 42nd  last year and British Airways, back to eighth from its worst position last year – 36th. Rival Virgin Atlantic however, also appears, above BA, in fourth position.

Revealing the fall-out from the financial crisis, the list of the top 10 biggest fallers includes UBS and Morgan Stanley, with the Royal Bank of Scotland falling out of the top 500 altogether.

Proving that a re-brand can have a positive affect Aviva, Read the rest of this entry »

Law firms in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. have filed a class action lawsuit against Google Inc, alleging that Google Buzz service shared personal data without the consent of users, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The suit has been filed on behalf of one Eva Hibnick from Florida – chosen to represent the proportion of 31.2 million Gmail users who are unhappy with Buzz.

Hibnick’s lawyers reportedly accuse Google of breaking laws in relation to legal communications with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act alleged to have been contravened.

The lawsuit reportedly asks for an assurance that Google, which says it has not yet seen the lawsuit, will not repeat Buzz Read the rest of this entry »