Guest blog by Ben Acheson, Head of SEO at Digivate
A terrible search engine bloodbath is on its way. Thousands of websites are going to be affected and your business’ website could be one of them. Over dramatic? Well not if you were listening to Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Webspam at the South By Southwest SEO conference in Texas this year.
The next phase in Cutts’ crusade against spam is a major change to Google’s software. This change will automate the detection and penalisation of offending websites and is expected to be rolled out towards the middle of 2012. Cutts announced the search engine’s plans to, “level the playing ground,” by targeting websites with poor content that rely on “over-optimization” rather than delivering good content.
Google is essentially getting tough on websites that use manipulative practices and these are not just commonplace, they are endemic – particularly among the current crop of aspiring self-styled “SEO agencies”.
Many businesses won’t realise their website is at risk – until their Google traffic dries up. In some cases the damage will be so severe that unravelling it will be practically impossible and a new website domain will be needed in order to escape the Google penalty.
If you don’t understand exactly what your SEO agency has been doing to promote your site then you might need to prepare yourself for a very nasty surprise later this year. If you need customers to find you in Google then the impact could destroy your business. More »
Last week Google+ unveiled its own take on brand and business pages: Google+ Pages. While Google may claim its network is not a Facebook competitor, its latest social marketing offer is a clear parallel to Facebook marketing tool, Facebook Pages. The question is, which brand page offers the most value to both users and advertisers?
Over at ReadWriteWeb.com, we found a comparison of Pages efforts from two leading luxury car companies: BMW and Mercedez-Benz. The verdict is that while Facebook has a first-mover advantage in terms of user numbers and its “comparatively advanced develop platform”, Zuckerberg and co. should not get too complacent just yet.
Engagement is the golden ticket to social marketing success. Let’s look at the BMW Pages as an example. Over on Facebook Pages, user numbers are high. BMW’s Facebook Page had 6.7 million fans as this article was written, compared to 394 BMW followers at Google+ (obviously, this is a fairly unfair comparison, given Google+’s recent entry to market).
Interactivity for BMW on Facebook is also high, with all fans invited to create their own customised BMW and to post to the BMW Page wall. BMW’s Google+ Page, still has a remarkably clean wall by comparison, since fans can’t post directly to it. There is less interaction, but on the plus side, the wall is clean and focused with little spam or irrelevant content. More »
It’s always hard to live up to hype. But it seemed as though Google’s much-anticipated social network launch Google+ was about to.
Techies and social junkies got all fired up when Google+ first launched on an invite-only basis. The mystery and buzz was something akin to Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory opening up to a few lucky golden ticket holders. Speculation was rife – could Google+ be a serious competitor to Facebook?
In the initial days after launching publically on 20 Sept, traffic to Google+ soared 1200%. But things quickly started to look decidedly less rosy for the search giant.
Last week, blogger Michael Degusta posted the potentially embarrassing fact that only three of the 12 people on Google’s management team page have ever posted on Google+. When a product gets such low-level buy in from its own makers (even Google CEO Larry Page has only made a handful of public posts), you have to wonder why you should engage with it yourself. More »
It might be time to believe the hype: Google+ is here to stay, and with nigh on 10 million users, social marketers need to wise up quickly. If you’re panicking about sussing out another social marketing channel after cracking your Facebook and Twitter marketing, here follows a bite size introduction to the quirks and benefits of Google+:
1. The human face of information
Google has stumbled at its previous attempts at social media where it focused on information to the detriment of interaction (remember Google Lively or Google Wave? Anyone?). Proving the nay-sayers wrong, Google’s newest project is ‘scalable’, ‘customisable’ and ‘people-centric’, fulfilling the needs of its users and therefore soon to please the social media industry.
2. Power to the people
Google+ neatly combines the most useful features of all its competitors. Via its Circles feature, users can keep up with friends, Facebook-style, separately from LinkedIn-reminiscent business contact, while also having the choice to follow and post quick thoughts a la Twitter. This is also good news for brands, offering the means to target messages to those interested in particular products or services. More »
Google faced a difficult task when it came to the digital marketing of its new laptop, the web-only Chromebook. A revolutionary product, some might say that the Chromebook is a little ahead of its time. Its reliance on the web is undeniably clever – but are people ready to make the leap to cloud-based computers for personal computing?
Consumers who don’t yet know their cloud from their internal hard drive are bound to have questions about a laptop lacking familiar features such as a desktop background.
To solve this problem, Google has made fantastic use of video with a series of ads that utilise the format’s favourite ingredients: simplicity and humour.
Why keep it simple? This is a complicated product, and consumers demand quick and easy answers. Video is the ideal medium for a potentially complex sell – people ‘get’ visuals.
And why use humour to sell laptops? An ad that manages to educate while also entertaining will be remembered, and potentially become a viral video. While Google may not scoop any marketing awards for this campaign, it deserves recognition for cracking the notoriously difficult task of demystifying new technology for the progress-wary consumer. More »
Bellingham Smiles is a dental practice owned by Dr. Jeffrey Prager, based in Bellingham, Washington, US
The Challenge
Primarily relying on word-of-mouth referrals from existing patients, Dr Prager’s dental practice is looking to increase current marketing tactics and decided on Google Places as a way to build an online presence for the practice.
The Solution
By setting up a Place page for the business, the listing for the dental practice’ appears for free when potential clients search on Google.com or Google Maps for services like “dentist in Bellingham,” As the business evolves, the dentist Dr. Prager updates the page with new treatments and promotional offers. “It’s best to stay on top of it and modify it as you add new services and any new emphasis in your practice,” he says. More »
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:
A terrible search engine bloodbath is on its way. Thousands of websites are going to be affected and your business’ website could be one of them. Over dramatic? Well not if you were listening to Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Webspam at the South By Southwest SEO conference in Texas this year.
Last week Google+ unveiled its own take on brand and business pages: Google+ Pages. While Google may claim its network is not a Facebook competitor, its latest 
It’s always hard to live up to hype. But it seemed as though Google’s much-anticipated social network launch Google+ was about to.
Google faced a difficult task when it came to the 
Company Profile
Google appears to be moving into prisoner rehabilitation with a new initiative called Google Jail for Communities, reports 