Greplin: Search your Social Timeline

There’s search and there is social search. Usually “social search” stands for search through social media or searching with social elements embedded within the search, think the “x-many people +1 this” in the search results. Since a few weeks ‘social search’ stands for everything which is shared via Google+. At least, if you are logged into Google.com

In the shadow of Google there are a lot of small search engines who each try to beat Google at the social search game. Or at least they try to take a piece of the search pie. Can they be successful however?

“Personal search engine” Greplin is one of the social search engines which tries to grab a part of social search. It looks through your social accounts to find that one message or topic you lost or couldn’t remember who said it. I decided to take a good look at this search engine. To see if it is useful and if it is capable of being a Google competitor. … Continue Reading

Review Snippets in Google: what about the current situation?

This is a guest post by  Jan-Willem Bobbink, who is an SEO consultant at Internet Advantage in the Netherlands.

Since two weeks, Google has thrown its whitelisting policy regarding the display of rich snippets overboard. By accident I found out that review snippets appeared next to some results in Google for a sideline project. A reason for me to see where the boundaries are and how this affects the traffic. … Continue Reading

Google Showing “Sources” in Preview Area

Another Google Test has been spotted. The preview-section which Google uses on the right hand site of results in the SERPS, is in this test used for a different kind of information: sources.

Meanwhile Google also consists on pushing their own products, especially Google+ and YouTube. There is some nice integration of Plus and Google being rolled out. … Continue Reading

8 Development Mistakes to avoid when migrating a website

There always tends to be a little bit of an “us vs them” attitude between SEOs and developers. A lot of developers think SEOs = spammers and a great deal of SEO’s don’t understand enough about architecture, language and data structures to have a meaningful conversation about development.  So when things do go wrong it’s very easy to point the blame at the other party.

The aim of this post is to hopefully bring us a little closer together and provide a checklist for a site migration, if you avoid these issues you will go a long way to not destroying your clients search performance followed by that dreaded phone call. I personally consider these to be in the remit for both developers and SEOs and they should definitely be checked on the testing environment. … Continue Reading

The Problem with Testing in SEO

Let me start by saying I’m a huge fan of testing in SEO and other online marketing disciplines. Proper tests can take away a lot of the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that exists in the online marketing industry.

And there are several search engine prophets out there that are doing a superb job testing SEO myths and the impact of new search features. David Harry at SEO Dojo has done some great stuff, and so has the crew at SEOmoz (though a bit hit and miss).

The problems that exist with testing in SEO aren’t deliberate. I’m convinced that pretty much all tests performed by SEOs start with the best of intentions: to help uncover truths and add quality information and best practices to our methods. … Continue Reading

Above The Line, PPC and SEO – It’s a “Brand” New Game

First up, an apology. This is less of a informative post and more of an open-ended question to all marketers, and not necessarily for just those that focus on online or search marketing. I’m looking at brand, budget, media and ROI. And testing. Lots of testing.

Being an SEO at OMD, a full service media agency born from a purely offline media buying and planning service, for the past 11 months has been an eye-opening experience. Only half the people in the agency work in “digital”, so getting down on a campaign level as far as  ”search” or even more granualar “SEO” can be tricky.  I hold my hands up, I understand next to nothing about how offline or “above the line” marketing works. It’s too easy to become siloed and work almost completely separately. You get so used to assuming that my link building has no relation to their outdoor advertising that integration is something that needs hard hard work, daily hard work, in order to make it happen. … Continue Reading

Using MajesticSEO for a quick competitor analysis

MajesticSEO is one of the tools I use most when doing competitor analysis. From my perspective its origins as a search engine index puts it ahead of other link analysis tools in that the sample size of data is often superior. That said I have noticed that there is a large amount of link decay in the historic index so if you would like more accurate data use the Fresh Index. … Continue Reading

Search Engine Accessibility: Easily Missed Checks That Make a Huge Difference

I’m not kidding about this – I recently came across a website that was blocking a user agent from a very well known search engine. No one at the company had any idea of the situation, and this particular situation had been costing them a ton of traffic over weeks and weeks.

Image credit: Arthur Chapman

Time to get the honesty box out: When was the last time you switched user agents? Checked a 304 not modified response? Made sure your canonical www redirect was working correctly? Some things are so easily missed in todays “out of the box” code world. Here are 5 quick checks that are so easily missed, but can save hours of head scratching! … Continue Reading

The Real Time Hype: take it or leave it?

Search is changing rapidly. Search Engines are looking at user intent and what users want. And speed is one thing which users want badly. Get information as fast as you possibly can. It doesn’t matter if its not accurate or if its ‘only’ written in 140 characters, as long as its fast.

The need for speed makes that new tools are developed which makes information go around the web, and with that the world, faster by the second. Status updates on Twitter and Facebook off course are the best examples of content going around the web in split seconds. A continuos conversation. But what can we do with that information? Do we really care? … Continue Reading