Google has released an algorithm update today designed to penalise websites that have too many ads above the fold (in the visible area of the page). This is a great move by Google because nobody wants to see pages full of ads.
The problem is that Google is being very hypocritical here because over the years the amount of ads on the search results pages have been getting bigger and bigger…
This week Google has announced a major change to their search results called “Search plus Your World” which isn’t a particularly catchy title.
There is an excellent summary of this feature here and examples of how Google favours Google+ here – this post is mainly my thoughts on the service.
When I first tried the system yesterday afternoon I searched for “golf” and Google came up with pictures of myself and some friends on a golf holiday in 2005…
If you were to click on the Google logo on New Years day it would have taken you to the search results for the phrase “New Year’s Day” as shown in the screenshot below. When I looked at this the dailymail.co.uk advert stood out to me because although the Daily Mail isn’t noted for high level journalism I very much doubt they use PPC to promote stories.
Sure enough when I clicked on the ad it took me straight to a really really clever site about some kind of wrinkle treatment…
A little known feature of the latest iOS 5 software for the iPhone is that it disables cookies by default. I wasn’t aware of this until yesterday when I tried to book a hotel and was trying to browse three of the largest travel websites – Premier Inn, Late Rooms and Travelodge and none of them were working.
All these sites detect your user agent, set a cookie and then display the mobile version of the site…
Yesterday I was speaking at Conversion Conference about building conversions using SEO. The slides are below.
How to Build Conversions Using SEO
View more presentations from Patrick Altoft
Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisationHow to Build Conversions Using SEO – Slides from Conversion Conference
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Searchmetrics published some research yesterday showing the winners and losers of the Google Freshness update but in my opinion the issue is a bit more complicated than this.
The freshness update is like an enhanced version of the QDF algorithm. QDF applied to searches that were trending whereas the freshness update applies to searches where a user is likely to need new information.
Brands
The big losers in this update are going to be brands…
Google is displaying some interesting behavior and is indexing Facebook comments even though they are behind a javascript loaded iframe.
The comments don’t appear in the text only cache but are showing up when you search for strings of text from the comments.
I’ve been searching for a few comments from techcrunch and they are not ranking very well. Certainly not as well as I would expect for such a powerful site…
Working in the SEO industry for quite a few years now I’ve talked to a lot of small business owners frustrated by their experiences working with SEO companies. Small business SEO is very different to doing SEO for larger brands and we’ve always focused on working with larger businesses at Branded3.
This week I’m pleased to say that we are launching a new business called Baby SEO to service smaller businesses with respect and deliver the sort of good, honest service that small business owners expect from an SEO company…
There is an interesting post in the Grocer today about how Waitrose is struggling with SEO after a £10m website relaunch earlier this year.
“Waitrose.com is so technically hampered it is going to have a problem ranking for anything – it’s terrible,” said Juliette van Rooyen, a consultant from digital consultancy Reform, after analysing SEO measures determining the visibility of Waitrose, Ocado and the big four’s websites to search engines such as Google…
We are currently hiring for a few SEO & digital jobs in Leeds including a PHP developer. The job advert is below – CV’s to careers@branded3.com (no agencies).
Branded3 is an award-winning digital and SEO agency, working alongside worldwide brands and companies to deliver innovative digital solutions. We’re always on the lookout for experienced and skilled digital experts to add to our growing team; and we’re currently on the search for a talented PHP Developer…
Today I was speaking about link-building at the Searchlove conference. This conference has rapidly become the best SEO conference in the calendar and the quality of tips and information is always excellent. This year was even better than last year.
My slides from the event are below – any questions email me patrick @branded3.com. Please note that these slides have been edited slightly…
Google has today announced that any users that are logged in to Google.com will be automatically sent to the https version of Google. This has the (presumably intentional) side effect that web analytics tools will no longer be able to see data on the keywords that people used to get to websites.
You might need to read that bit twice because it’s a lot to take in.
The net effect of this is that Google Analytics and all the other web traffic & analytics tools are going to get some very big holes in their data…
Panda updates in the past have not really seemed to hurt ecommerce sites as much as content sites and affiliate sites. Last week this seems to have changed a bit and more ecommerce & comparison sites are suffering.
Matt Cutts sent a tweet today saying that we can expect Panda to hit 2% more sites in the near future but there are already quite a few sites contacting us about a major loss in traffic last week…
Recognising the high-quality search results we deliver to our clients, Branded3 has been nominated for eight prestigious Search Awards, including Best Blog for Blogstorm.
Honoured to have even been nominated for just one award, our SEO team here at Branded3 are proud to have our hard-work and innovation recognised on such a large scale and have updated our ever growing awards page with the full details…
The next 6 weeks are super busy for Branded3 and I will be speaking at 3 really great conferences in London.
First up is A4U Expo on the 18th & 19th of October where I have an hour to talk about “How to SEO like a super affiliate” which should be great as we have worked and run training for quite a few of the UK’s biggest super affiliate SEO teams so we really know how they work…
The Court of Justice of the EU has today ruled in favour of Interflora in the brand bidding case against Marks & Spencers.
Interflora had argued that M&S shouldn’t be allowed to bid on the keyword “interflora” via Adwords and it seems that the European Court agrees with them.
The ruling is good news for brands because it could (in my personal opinion) eventually spell the end of controversial brand bidding in the UK, assuming that the High Court in London decides to uphold the European Courts ruling sometime in 2012…
Google Analytics took a step forwards in August by launching Multi Channel Funnels to the general public. This allows users to see all the different methods that customers used to find a website in the days & weeks before they made a purchase.
Analytics by default is based on the “last click” so if a user searched for a keyword such as “sofas” and clicked on an organic SEO result one week and then the next week visited your site directly then that would be attributed to a direct traffic visit…
The screenshot below is from Google Chrome incognito mode with no plugins. It shows how Google has replaced the standard Shopping results with a set of Amazon Results.
The links don’t look like standard Amazon affiliate links so they must be some kind of partnership links.
This is an example link through to the product page.
I’ve never seen this before but it’s very good for Amazon no doubt…
Some of you might remember the Crawl Rate Tracker plugin we released way back in February 2008. This plugin was neglected for a while but we’ve now rebuilt the entire thing and re-released it with a few very nice improvements.
Download the plugin via the WordPress site or search from your Plugins section within the dashboard.
The plugin shows a chart of all the visits by Google & other major search engines to your site for any time period you want and also shows crawl information for specific pages…
Branded3 is currently recruiting for the role of SEO Strategist and also 3 Link Analysts.
We’re expanding rapidly with 29 staff in Leeds & another 25 in Malaysia. Thanks to a strong reputation we’re lucky enough to work on some of the UK’s largest SEO campaigns and are delivering number 1 rankings for some of the worlds most lucrative keywords.
The roles offer quick career progression and are a fantastic opportunity for the right candidate to work with some of the UK’s largest brands and help develop their SEO strategy…
Yahoo has just sent an email announcing that the UK organic results will be powered by Bing from 3rd August. This shouldn’t be a big deal for most sites because they have only a few percent market share but it certainly will double the influence that the Bing algorithm has in the UK.
We wanted to let you know that we are now ready to transition Yahoo! organic search results (the non-paid listings found on the main body of the Yahoo! search page) to Microsoft…
Last week Google appears to have made a significant change to how image search referrals are reported in Google Analytics.
The change means that the traffic is reported as Google Organic rather than as referral traffic like it used to be. This means that you are likely to see a chart like the one below.
It’s not yet clear whether this is a change in Google Analytics or whether the new Google Images design is sending traffic in a different way…
On 24th February 2011 Google was busy with two things; rolling out the Panda update and filing a patent entitled Methods and Apparatus for Employing Usage Statistics in Document Retrieval.
This patent covers methods which could solve one of Googles biggest problems – the fact that older pages with lots of links are outranking newer & more relevant pages which have fewer links just because they are new…
Blogstorm has a new design. Thanks to all the team from Branded3 pictured below (in the Branded3 garden) for making it happen.
Let me know what you think!
Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisationNew design for Blogstorm
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According to Hitwise data Google has now reached 92% market share based on the June figures.
Bing and Yahoo are showing no sign of making any inroads into Googles market share and with the launch of Google+ and the positive feedback it’s getting Bing and Yahoo stand to lose even more market share over the next 12 months.
Blogstorm has had a bit of a redesign and you can look forward to a few more posts in the future…
May is a busy month for me as I’m speaking at the following events:
Please come along and say hello. We have a stand E5062 at Internet World where the hot topic for all 3 days will no doubt be Panda update chats with Panda expert Tim Grice and myself…
Most of the UK has been doing very little for the last couple of weeks thanks to 4 bank holidays but there is still a load of interesting SEO news to wade through.
Firstly Google Analytics now has a page speed report which is very good for finding the slowest pages on your site.
Next up is Village Voice who were caught spamming reddit and then said they were very sorry, blamed an agency and said they knew nothing about it…
You're looking at my set of tools. The custom search engine helps me find the answers to questions more quickly. The RSS aggregator keeps me updated with industry news that matters. And, in the near future, I plan on documenting the major steps and considerations used in SEM as a check list (although it will also work well as a list of tutorials).
While I built (and am improving) the above tools for myself, it seemed like a waste to keep them to myself. After all, good will breeds good will, and perhaps you'll even help me find more great blogs to follow.
In the name of good karma, all my outgoing links on this site are followed. Treat others as you wish to be treated, right? Besides, I think the authors who we read daily deserve all the thanks (links) we can give.
I hope you find the SEM News feed and the free SEO search tool helpful.
- Brett at SEMNewsDaily.com
