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 »
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 »
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.
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, More »
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.
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.
Company Profile
Google appears to be moving into prisoner rehabilitation with a new initiative called Google Jail for Communities, reports 
Facebook overtook Google as the most visited site in the US last week.
