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.

I see a lot of websites ranking well in search engines because of low-quality, manipulative tactics on the part of unscrupulous SEO agencies that are focussed on the short term opportunity to make some money. These tactics often work but they’re what we call ‘dirty’ and they’re against Google’s terms of service.

Unfortunately, if your agency has achieved good rankings for your website, it’s quite possible that they’ve done so using spam and over-optimisation – especially if those rankings were achieved within just a few weeks or months. If you’re not sure exactly what your SEO agency has been doing, there are ways to spot a bad seo agency and diagnose a spammy SEO campaign.

Examples of bad SEO tactics ripe for penalisation by Google include:

• Having an unnatural or unbalanced link profile
• Excessive highly targeted links
• Keyword stuffing
• Large-scale link exchanges and blog networks
• Blog and forum spam

The key to a safe, long-term SEO strategy lies in the hierarchy of fundamental SEO principles. At the heart of genuine SEO is the creation and ethical promotion of high quality content. You need to:

• Understand your audience
• Tailor your content to them
• Make sure they know about it.

If you are concerned about your website’s exposure to bad SEO and would like some free advice, call me on 0207 845 9951. I’ll be able to take a look at your SEO profile and tell you if you’re at risk within two minutes.

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.

Google’s social network has already proven successful at engaging users on specific areas of interest. Intelligent features such as Circles and Hangouts (group video chats) offer rich opportunities for brands to engage fans who have expressed interest in their product or niche.

The winner in this latest social media face-off remains to be seen. Google+ has yet to encourage its reported “tens of millions of users” to follow brands, but with the might of Google Search and YouTube’s community behind it, numbers may soon not be enough to give Facebook the advantage.

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.

Then the Daily Mail splashed the headline “Traffic plunges for Google+ as 60% of users log off”. The hyperbolic reportage followed figures released by data analytics company Chitika, which should be taken with a pinch of salt. One might well expect to see a plunge in traffic as usage levels off after a dramatic post-launch spike.

With its innovative content-sharing features such as +Circles and +Snippets, the opportunities for social marketing on this network are undoubtedly exciting. It is now down to the users to decide whether Google+ is just a storm in a teacup or a serious contender in the social space.

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.

3. No information overload

Perhaps as a response to Facebook’s often-overwhelming News Feed, Google has created Stream. Continuing the user-friendly theme, one can filter inbound updates to keep out irrelevant information, as well as directing one’s own feeds towards just those contacts who wish to read them. The potential for social media marketing via this tool seems a little hazy right now, but it’s bound to be there.

4. Bright ‘Sparks’

According to searchenginejournal.com, Sparks – streams of regularly updated search results designed to match users’ interests – is Google+’s ‘most promising feature’. Content generated from a Spark search is different to a Google search – with highly ranked websites, fresh and visual content ranking highest. The SEO world waits with baited breath to grapple with Spark’s evolving algorithms and link-building opportunities.

5. Distinguishes between people and brands

Nobody appreciates the irritating stream of event invitations and general bumph that seems the price of accepting brands using aggressive Facebook marketing. With brands still waiting offstage in an as yet unidentified place, Google+ is deadly serious about keeping its social experience strictly personal. Still under wraps, the social media marketing opportunities are bound to be sleek and innovative – will company pages be open to being +1’d?

Speculation is rife, but for the meantime, the best you can do is apply for one of the limited company test profiles and start taking Google+ seriously.

Source: adapted from searchenginejournal.com

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.

The ads sit just the right side of cute and quirky, and we love the seamless incorporation of Google’s brand colours into the animation. And what does the digital community think? Last night, ‘Introducing the Chromebook’s’ top YouTube comment read: ‘One of the best adverts I have ever seen’. Who needs awards?

Company Profile

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.

In many cases, patients come to the practice via the Bellingham Smiles Place page in hopes that Dr Prager can save a tooth that has been targeted for extraction by another dentist. It also helps him publicise his niche expertise in laser procedures that help patients avoid painful gum surgery.

The Results

With the realisation that customers want information about a business before they call or visit, the dental practice has built a strong online presence to help target potential clients.

The free business listing and Place page has delivered the highest return on investment (ROI) of any marketing that the practice has previously implemented. Dr Prager says “Google Places has been very helpful in getting people who want to save their natural teeth to find me. The thing that counts in marketing isn’t what you spend, it’s the ROI.”

Source: Google Small Business Blog

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.”

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’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: