“Why do we fall sir? So we might learn to pick ourselves up”
After my usual reminder from Bas about my blogging deadline fast approaching, instead of wiping the sleep from my eyes and staring into the distance trying to think of a topic, I unusually sprung to life and typed two words onto the open word document:
Google Base
Infographics, you can’t seem to miss out on them these days, they are everywhere. This one, made by Zippycart, is one we couldn’t let go off on this Sunday afternoon. An infographic all about Pagerank. On how it works, which are the best kind and how trading links is useless. Enjoy! (Click for full size) (more…)
The never ending issue: how will newspapers evolve. And how will they make money? Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has a pretty straight forward view on it. He believes there IS a future for newspaper and he believes Google can help out. At the Guardian Activate Summit in London on July 1st Schmidt talked to Alan Rusbridger about this topic. And he was very clear: newspapers will have to change. And Google wants to become the company that offers the pieces of the puzzle.
Watch the entire interview below:
In Belgium a group of search marketers have set up a very interesting initiative: Search University. In different sessions you get informed on all sorts of different topics. And they are doing good. Already in their second edition they managed to get Matt Cutts to talk about SEO. And more. See the video below. Cutts is nice and open, and has a nice and interesting talk.
Most SEOs are focused primarily on organic search results in Google’s ‘standard’ web search engine. However websites that specialise in providing news have a different Google in mind when it comes to optimisation: Google News.
According to data from the Newspaper Marketing Agency the biggest source of traffic for UK newspaper sites is Google, generating over 45% of all visits. This data does not distinguish between the various Google search products, but both Hitwise and my own experiences with the Belfast Telegraph website indicate that the vast bulk of that traffic originates from Google News.
The acquisition of ITA by Google has again drawn into focus not only the vast resource available to Google but also where Google is likely to move over the coming months and years. Since January 2009, Google have acquired 20 companies ranging from high profile acquisitions such as ITA and Admob to smaller ones such as Gizmo5 and Simplify Media. Some of those buys standout as obvious opportunities however do the recent acquisitions present an insight into where Googles priorities over the last 18-24 months
Niche Opportunities
The recent acquisition of the ITA Software would draw obvious assumptions that this may be the next sector targeted by Google following recent successful successful rollouts of Real Estate and Merchant Search. Rumours as far back as 2008 would suggest Expedia may have been on Google’s radar, so it is hardly suprising therefore that Google have taken the leap of acquiring ITA at this stage. (more…)
After a tweet sent out by Digg founder Kevin Rose last week all of a sudden there is another ‘buzz’ (no not the Google one) going around the web about the newest feature in the battle between Google and Facebook. Where Facebook last week announced they were going into search (more on that in a different post), it is now suggested that Google is going into social (again).
Rose’s tweet suggested there might be a “Google Me” on the way. What “Google Me” exactly is, is not clear yet. Google so far hasn’t given any official comment on the rumor. Which off course makes everyone believe its real. On TechCrunch Adam D’Angelo, an ex-Facebook CTO, was quoted saying that the rumors were true and that Google was going after Facebook. On the other hand Kevin Rose already deleted his tweet, which makes the rumor even more strange.
Three things come to mind when you read all the comments and suggestions out there: What is it and (for God’s sake) why does Google go in to the social business again. And finally: what should “Google Me” be?
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First a confession, I’ve not really seen the ‘Mayday Update’ have an impact on any of our clients. That’s not me show boating, I checked all our clients over that period and none of them showed the symptoms that people have been associating with the update.
But enough people I trust have seen the update for me to be fairly confident that something is in play.
So far, in my opinion, the two most revealing pieces I’ve seen on the topic is the interview Bas recorded for State of Search with DaveN and the write up from Red Fly, both seem to imply that the change is away from domain authority being powerful enough to over-ride what could be seen as mild duplication, i.e. content that though not deliberately replicated from another domain is very similar, like manufacturers descriptions of products etc.
As I read this I began to get very concerned a large number of our clients operate in the recruitment sector as job boards. If ecommerce sites were at risk surely so were recruitment site. Many job boards have listings which are available across multiple sites and many even use aggregators like broadbean to bump up their inventory. I would have thought this would make them a prime target of the update. (more…)
It’s not a secret that Google has a high influence on many companies world wide. Many (smaller) companies rely on Google Advertising and on Google search for their business. And there are many sites out there who make money out of Adsense.
Last week in the US it was National Small Business week. A reason for Google to tell the world once again how important they are. And they decided to throw it in their with quite the air: “Google’s U.S. economic impact” was the title of their post. In this post they explain how much money Google is making the US. They even set up a special page where you can not only download the report but also look at different states to see where Google has the most impact.
A look at the map show us for example that Google generated $863 million of economic activity for 25,000 Minnesota businesses, website publishers and non-profits in 2009. In the ‘homestate’ California Google generated 14.1 billion dollars. In total Google ‘made’ the US over 54 billion dollars in economic activity. (more…)
There has been a lot of discussion lately about what happened with the MayDay update Google has done. Many website owners are experiencing a drop of long tail traffic from 30% to 50%. People are still guessing about what happened and how to solve it.
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The question now remains: where will this go? Has anybody experienced these drops in traffic? Let us know!
Stand back, please form an orderly queue. I have recently put myself back on the market.
Similar to dating, the early stages of client relationships are filled with wooing, excitement and so many enthusiastic nods of approval that your neck hurts. BUT just like love, it is hard to find that special person. Along the way you have to face some challenging and unsavoury matches, but just like relationships they equip you to deal with the next one better.
It almost seemed like an April Fools joke: Google introducing a keyboard function within the Google interface. Allegedly they introduced it to “overcome the difficulty in typing in local language scripts”. While it could be useful for people facing these problems, this doesn’t explain why they are going to push it out to such a large group of users. For example, the Dutch keyboard is basically the same as the US version. However, Google shows the virtual keyboard in google.nl. As always there’s probably a secondary goal for Google: data collection.
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