Most of you will have heard the story about how the FBI has shut down several of the largest online poker websites as part of a money laundering investigation. This is clearly big news as these sites are no longer able to trade until this investigation is complete.

The actual story is very very complicated and beyond the scope of this article for me to explain but the result is very interesting from an SEO perspective…

Since the Panda / Farmer update hit the UK earlier this week most people with a website have been monitoring visitor numbers very closely for changes. A lot of people were well prepared for the update having seen their US traffic drop on 25th February but it’s still a big shock to lose 50% of your non-brand SEO traffic overnight.

Rank tracking companies such as Sistrix and Search Metrics have performed some analysis of rankings with the big losers aggregated in league tables on their blogs…

Late last night Google rolled out the Panda / Farmer update in the UK and confirmed the update on their official blog.

The latest update goes further than the original with 14% of queries now affected rather than 12%. They are also taking user data for blocked sites into account which wasn’t directly the case before.

We are seeing big changes for a lot of “how to” queries that we track…

Google has announced the +1 button which allows users to vote for specific search results, AdWords ads and (in a few months) pages on your website. The button is a vote to say you like the page, think it’s cool and would want to recommend it to your friends.

The key about this button is that your friends only see the recommendations when they are searching for the same thing you were searching for…

The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising is advising members to exercise caution before carrying out competitor brand & trademark bidding on search engines.

The statement comes after the Interflora vs Marks & Spencers case earlier this week.

Advertisers and their agencies are advised to exercise caution before purchasing and using competitors’ trademarks as advertising key words via internet search engines…

The Panda Farmer update has not hit the UK yet but when it does the effect it will have on everyday websites could be huge. Ecommerce sites are particularly at risk.

We’ve been analysing quite few sites by looking at their Google Organic non-brand traffic from the US via the Custom Report below (click here to use) and there are some very worrying signs.

The image below is via SEObooks Panda preparation post – we have seen much bigger drops using the method above for certain sites…

Way back in December 2008 a story broke about how Interflora was taking legal action against Marks & Spencer for bidding on the keyword “interflora” using Google AdWords.

The story has received lots of mainstream coverage over the last two years with even the BBC picking up on the story last October.

Today the Advocate General has issued his Opinion on the matter and found in favour of Interflora…

Today we came across an interesting example of how to decorate search results to maximise CTR. This example is perhaps a bit extreme but it shows great innovation and will no doubt have a big impact on the number of people who click on the link.

The use of the word “recommended” is particularly clever.

If you have any other examples please post them in the comments…

For anybody interested in attending the excellent SMX Advanced London in May, I have a 15% discount code BLOGSTORM011

This conference has a very interesting session on day 2 where some top SEO’s are given 3 months to transform a site and then present their results. Should be a great session.

Extreme Makeover, The SEO Edition – Is it really possible to take a site from nowhere to top rankings in 3 months? That’s the challenge we issued to each intrepid speaker on this panel, who volunteered to work on a small business or charity website, each in a different niche, that was ranking on page 5 (or worse) on Google for the site’s main search term…

Google has been explaining today that sites hit by the Panda update are likely to be hit on all pages on the site, even if some pages are good quality. They are also telling site owners that the way to get out of the update is to remove any low quality content.

To have a copywriter check through thousands or millions of pages is a time consuming task and even then it’s hard to know whether the changes you make are to the right pages…

European laws are being brought in to make it illegal for websites to use cookies without a users explicit consent after 25th May this year.

There are no specific guidelines in place on how websites are supposed to gain this consent but the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive laws will be enforceable after this date although it’s unlikely anybody will actually take action…

This is perhaps the most audacious thing Google has done but it seems they have bought the financial comparison site Beatthatquote.com for £37.7m

BeatThatQuote.com today was sold to Google for GBP37.7 million. We think this deal is a tremendous opportunity for our company to develop new and innovative options for personal finance in the UK.

Our team is excited about becoming a part of Google…

There are a few posts out at the moment discussing whether SEO is a viable marketing strategy for startups.

We’ve had the chance to work with some great startups and seen the important part that SEO has played in their growth but I don’t think investing heavily in SEO is the right strategy for everybody.

For me there are two levels to SEO. The first is doing the on-site aspects and basic keyword research/link-building which every startup simply has to do in order to be visible on the web…

The system behind Demand Media is an automated topic suggestion tool which finds keywords & topics and compares them to metrics such as search volume, competitiveness and likely profitability of running ads on the pages. Topics that reach a certain threshold of profitability are queued in the system and writers choose and publish content accordingly.

In view of the negative view Google has of content farms it might surprise you to hear that Google has applied for a patent doing much the same thing…

Last week Google announced a major update which affects around 11.8% of all search queries on Google.com. The update was intended to reduce rankings for low-quality sites commonly known as content farms.

As yet the update has yet to hit the UK however as most of the larger content farm type sites are US based it’s probably not going to have as big an impact over here…

This week I’ve been at TFM&A talking about link-building strategies and also at the Some Comms conference in Manchester talking about our Twitition.com site and how we get 1.2m visitors per month to it.

Presentations are below via Slideshare, any questions drop me a note in the comments.

Link Building Strategies TFM&A 2011 Patrick Altoft
View more presentations from patrickaltoft…

Following on from the JC Penney story Google has penalised another of Americas largest ecommerce sites, Overstock.com for apparently offering .edu sites a 10% discount if they placed a link on their pages.

Apparently Google was responding to a complaint from a competitor last week. Google contacted Overstock to explain the problem. A thread has been running on WMW for over a month about this and full details are here…

Google appears to be testing a new type of rich snippet today derived from a combination of the sites telephone number and the “alt” or “title” attribute of the sites logo.

An example of this is shown in the screenshot below, you can see how Superbreak has managed to make use of this to get a very nice snippet for quite a few different keywords including “theatre breaks“…

A very interesting story broke this weekend involving JC Penney (a big US retailer with 1000+ stores and $17.8 billion in revenue) and the New York Times. The retailer was basically outed for apparently using TNX to set up thousands of links on very low quality “spam” sites.

It seems that the campaign worked so well the site was ranking for pretty much everything, until the NY Times outed it and the site was moved down to 60th or worse for all the queries after Matt Cutts got involved…

Finding good quality small & intimate SEO training sessions isn’t always easy these days as most of the big popular conferences are packed with hundreds of people.

For those of you in the London area we have a good discount for you on an upcoming Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) conference coming up near Heathrow. This isn’t affiliated with Branded3 or Blogstorm but a reader pointed it out and it looks like a pretty good deal…

Just been reading an interesting article about Demand Media following the IPO earlier this month.

For those of you that haven’t heard of the company they are a content farm using outsourced writers to produce 5000 articles per day on sites such as eHow and various other informational resources.

On January 25th Demand Media sold 8.9 million shares at $17 each in an initial public offering…

One of the most important reports an SEO agency gives for a large site is the one that breaks down the traffic to the different sections of that site. This allows you to analyse whether traffic rises came from product pages, product types, category pages, sub-category pages, blog posts etc.

For most sites you can produce this report by looking at the top Google Organic landing pages and filtering by an appropriate folder or file name from the URL…

2011 has been a busy year so far at Branded3 HQ, we had 5 new people join the SEO team at the start of the year and after a very strong 2010 we’re looking forward to an even better 2011.

One of the reasons we’ve been winning business recently is the fact we focus 90% of all our efforts on link-building, in line with the fact that 90% of the Google algorithm is based on link data…

We’ve been working on a few projects recently where it transpired that a significant amount of AdWords traffic was being miscounted as Google Organic which meant skewed figures and incorrect conclusions.

The way Google Analytics tracks AdWords clicks is via the gclid parameter which is added to your landing page URL when you enable auto-tagging in AdWords.

If you don’t enable auto-tagging (and haven’t set up manual tagging) then your visitors will be miscounted as organic rather than paid and the number of AdWords “visits” being reported by Analytics will be a lot less than the number of “clicks”…

Google has added a new method of refining certain search results – “Top References”.

This seems to be a very limited bucket test at the moment as we were not able to replicate it on any further searches. We will update the posts if/when we can get some better screenshots!

The functionality seems to be that the filter allows you to search through all the existing search results for “roses” to show “Pages mentioning” the reference used to refine the search…

Google Local works based on citations and the more citations you have the higher your listing will rank. A citation is basically a mention of your business address of phone number on a website that Google trusts as a data provider.

The standard advice is to list your website in as many of the major citation providers as possible which is a good strategy until all your competitors do the same thing…

Google Places is the single biggest change to the natural search results this year and considering the resources Google are investing in making the system work its something that every single website needs to start using.

At present Google Places results are shown for geographical queries such as “plumber in Leeds” as well as the more general “plumbers” query…

In the last few months our Twitition.com site is continuing to grow and it’s getting quite a bit of recognition in the industry – yesterday we won the innovation category at the Some Comms awards in Manchester and a couple of weeks ago we scooped the top award at the GoldenTwits in London.

Below are some stats showing just how big twitition has become:

• 388,000 followers
• 1,996,816 signatures (almost 2 million!)
• 59,164 petitions on the site
• 830,000 monthly visitors
• 2…

Google has made a couple of interesting announcements today about how social media signals and “customer experience” affect rankings in the main organic search results.

The social media signals information was revealed in an interview with Danny Sullivan.

To paraphrase, Google looks at the number of people tweeting a link as well as the authority of the people doing the tweeting…

When I broke the news that Google was showing full page previews in the search results most people thought it was an interesting test. I doubt many of the 25,000 people who read that post actually thought it would become a real feature.

Today Google has announced that previews will be rolling out across 40 countries in the next few days.

Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine…