Posts by Nichola Stott

Nichola Stott is owner and co-founder of theMediaFlow; online revenue optimisation and audience services (including SEO, SEM and SMM). Prior to founding theMediaFlow, Nichola spent four years at Yahoo! as head of UK commercial search partners. More articles and bio from Nichola Stott
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Pouring Water on the Panda – UK Observations and Data Cautions Regarding Price Comparison

panda-water

Google Panda update – communicated as an algorithm update designed to de-prioritise sites that were deemed to be low on user trust, sites that lack original non-commercial content, and sites that create, or copy content as something to chuff around commercial content. Live end of February in the US and rolling out to the UK April 11th/12th with seemingly a major target in the crosshairs – that being the price comparison sector.

Says who?

Well SearchMetrics, and Sistrix, in their “visibility” analysis which was neatly summarised on Holistic Search (more on “visibility” later). However I have my doubts as to the true business impact to the price comparison sector, having worked closely with many of the sites reportedly affected. In addition whilst there’s a lot of popular media coverage about the 94% drop in “search visibility” reported for Ciao; there’s yet to be a formal statement from Ciao themselves. Plus eHow owners Demand Media; in a statement issued yesterday are keen to point out some cautions about the measured data… (more…)

Did Google’s Gaga Moment Obscure Court Settlement

gaga-google

In a rather bizarre yet brilliant piece of external communications last week, Google released a YouTube video of a visit to Mountain View from Lady Gaga.

The video itself is an absolute triumph of humanising search, technology and Google by juxtaposing the data-effect with Gaga’s spectacular rise to fame. Marissa Meyer (who interviews Gaga) appears warm, interested and immediately relaxed; plus Gaga herself gives one of her best, most open interviews. It’s also apparent from some of her opening comments that she is a big Google fan, and talks about how she personally uses Google regularly to research her fans and the content they produce. (more…)

Solving Duplicate Content Issues

duplicate-content-twins

Yesterday I read an extremely useful and practical walk-thru on Page Level Search Engine Indexation, by Richard Baxter at SEO Gadget. In the post Baxter looks at a variety of data sources from the simplest, such as Webmaster Tools, which will tell you how many URLs are in your sitemap and how many of those are indexed – (the difference therefore being of interest;) to more robust methods of actually identifying which of the total site pages are errant, in this case by building a Mozenda agent scraper. Definitely worth a read for anyone working on large websites (particularly ecommerce sites) with multiple instances of similar page- type e.g. product- level.

Setting aside issues of information architecture, internal and external linking; one of the most common issues we see at theMediaFlow when presented with sites that have page-level indexation issues, is one of duplicate content. Cross domain duplicate content carries related and additional challenges, however in this case I wanted to share some experiences of solving page indexation issues when duplicated content is present on product level pages. (more…)

Facebook $50 Billion Valuation Means No IPO Anytime Soon

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For the second year running “Facebook” was the number one search term on the web. In 2010, a movie “The Social Network” was released, documenting the origins and rise to international domination (save for parts of Asia) of Facebook, as the social network of choice. Late Sunday night the New York Times’ DealB%k , broke a story about Goldman Sachs offering their clients the chance to invest in Facebook, in a deal that values the company at $50 Billion.

According to the DealB%k article… “the email sent to Goldman clients warns recipients who trade in secondary markets where private firms like Facebook trade may want to steer clear of participating because if they opt-in they may receive material non-public information on the unnamed company that will restrict future trading.”

Essentially, private investment in a non-public company gives the investor access to company information, and secondary market information that would exclude the investor from trading in the company are they to go public. Whilst Goldman decline to comment, DealB%k reference a source stating that investors “would be prohibited from selling their shares until 2013”. (more…)

Facebook New Feature: The start of a Beautiful Friendship (Page)?

Facebook have released a new, slightly creepy feature, apparently around a week ago. I’m not sure if this is a phased roll-out, or if I’m just not watching closely enough, as I discovered this feature yesterday. Hang tight and I’ll take you on a little pedestrian journey through my social sphere and then we won’t be strangers any more.

Lunchtime – I see that my friend and fellow SEO Chicks and State of Search blogger Lisa Myers, has posted a new picture of baby Isla. I click on the picture and write my comment, then go to Lisa’s profile, to update myself on what she’s been up to in the past few days of maternity leave. That’s when I spotted this… (more…)

Launching an Affiliate Business on a ShoeString – A4U Expo London 2010

Dixon Jones – MajesticSEO and Steve Brown of ShareMyPlaylists

It’s the “doing it in your bedroom session”, is Dixon’s opener. (Cool!)

Dixon hands over to Steve, who tells us he will be talking about ShareMyPlaylists (SMP) and how it achieved such quick and early success.
Steve is co-founder of Buy.at and is now advising and working with Kieron Donoghue as Director of SMP.

SMP – launched March 2009, focused on Spotify, enabling users to discover and share, so adding an additional social dimension to Spotify.
Launch budget was precisely nil.
Today received 300k uniques per month.

(more…)

Microformat and Datafeed Optimisation – A4U Expo London 2010

Panel – Richard Baxter of SEOGadget, Jonathan Stewart of ReviewCentre and Will Critchlow of Distilled.

Richard steps into Jon Myer’s shoes to help moderate as well as speak, so starts with the intro:

Information types are understood by humans in a certain way. Address formats, time and date formats are instantly recognisable to us. Not so for machines. Micro Formats, therefore, mark up code in such a way to make such data types instantly recognisable as that type – to be thus understood and presented in a more useful way.

Rich shows us an example of marked up html using hCard – which is used for understanding address data. (more…)

Social Media Readiness Tips for Affiliates

Social Media can be a bit of a difficult space for an affiliate business. An affiliate website acts as a conduit to a merchant website; thus by that very nature much of “the story” belongs to somebody else. It must therefore seem to some that the only opportunity is the following: create multiple profiles – use automated software, or rent-a-fan packages to generate an audience of followers – publish automated messages containing links to your site – get clicks.

If short-term traffic and revenue boosts are your goal, then this may look like success to you. I’m not here to debate the morality of the numbers game or lament “there goes the neighbourhood”. I have no interest in lecturing an audience on the proper way to use a product which does not belong to me. I do however, know through experience that there are more benefits to participating in social media to be had.

At theMediaFlow we help develop affiliate websites into brands. We’ve seen how a true social media strategy brings many rewards and opportunities time and again. Many successful affiliate experts do this well, and generating an identity and buzz to an affiliate business seems to come naturally to them. On the other hand, some affiliate site owners may not feel disposed to social media or may not feel comfortable measuring “guru-touted” conceptual benefits of the conversation. It is not true that social media is difficult to measure, or that returns are less tangible.

Here are just a few of the immediate additional opportunities and benefits social media has delivered for one client… (more…)

Six Ways to Increase Internal Links

Be honest with me… how often does this happen?

“Yes hello, we’d like to buy some of your optimisation please. We have the business idea, clear objectives, brand values, and loads of shit-hot original content of all types. We’d like to get you involved right now, before the design RFP goes out and we’d like you to advise on everything from choice of domain onwards.”

I suspect the answer to my question may be “never.”

More often than not we’re engaged as online marketers somewhere down the line and we inherit a website or business that whilst functional; might not be optimal. Not every client or business has a web team or a generous budget for an extensive re-build, so at times we may find that we’re making do. In such situations there are two areas I find most sorely in need of attention and these are Information Architecture and content. In this case I wanted to look at some ways to boost internal linking for when the site Information Architecture isn’t ideal. (more…)

What BrightonSEO Tells Me About Search-as-Discipline

On Friday I went along to the second #BrightonSEO conference. It’s a free SEO conference organised by Kelvin Newman of Site Visibility and despite being a free conference, there was certainly a lot of information packed into a hot and stuffy afternoon. In fact; attendance was such that more than a handful of people had to sit on the floor. Although nobody seemed to mind!

There have already been a number of great round-up posts, and if you are looking for an overview of all the presentations then check out Peter Handley’s run through (as guest) on Holistic Search and also Robin Houghton, at Eggbox Marketing. In addition Paddy Moogan’s overview offers a considered review of many of the presentations, along with a summary take-away tip. I wanted to take a slightly different approach, and reflect on what the presentations (when considered together), tell us about the state of the search marketing industry using key points from the speakers.

It seemed to me that there were two consistent recurrent themes; which were that social media is already firmly on the search agenda and that our marketing activities must be underpinned by process and measurement. Definitely a coming of age event. (more…)

State of UK Search: Guava and Econsultancy Launch 4th Annual Report

Yesterday afternoon was a hot one in the city. I was making my way through Soho Square towards the Groucho Club, for the launch of the fourth annual Search Marketing Report and I was pleased to see that Soho Square was packed with media types catching the afternoon sun and chucking back champagne. When I say pleased; I really mean jealous, (don’t you people have work to do?) but I took this as a good sign that perhaps things are really bouncing back for digital media.

I got to The Groucho (quick celeb check… Lenny Henry, Ross Kemp, Danny Dyer) and was greeted by our Econsultancy hosts; Senior Analyst, Jake Hird, Research Director, Linus Gregoriadis and a very nice Guava Champagne cocktail from the sponsors (nice touch Guava!) We chatted about the report and the general state of the industry (consensus – search up, display down), as the room filled up and the cocktails went down. Guava’s Martin Dinham began to round us up, so we took our places. Now in it’s fourth year this report, (from over five hundred respondants), is rather extensive and now includes social media; so I’ll highlight a couple of points that stood out for me. (more…)

Ranking Matters? Some Additional Key SEO Metrics

There has been a lot of thought-provoking debate and discussion of late, (both here and elsewhere) around the issue of the importance and validity of keyword ranking as a sole measure of success in search engine optimisation.

As personalised search is now default for Google users, rank variations and swings can be witnessed first-hand by anyone trying a few searches; interacting with certain results, rinse and repeat.

Whilst I personally, think that rank checking; (providing clients are informed and educated as to the individual and variable effects of personalised search) is still a fundamental benchmark for SEO campaign effectiveness, I thought it might be useful to mention some other complementary measurements. (more…)

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