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Posted by Antony Mayfield | September 5th 2008
Smart folks are already gearing up their PR and comment opportunities for the end of the year review articles and blog posts, so I had one of those questionnaires through from a friendly agency the other day. The questions got me thinking, so I thought I’d share my answers here too…
Posted by Antony Mayfield | September 4th 2008
Photo Credit: Flickr userB D Solis
I’ve just completed the second of our client briefing podcasts around social media trends. I think soon we may make this something we publish on the open web.
For me it’s already serving a useful exercise in pausing and thinking about the broader sweep of things going on over the month and collate some of the interesting thoughts and links I may not have had the time to blog about.
Twitter, Twitter, Twitter…
There’s been so much Twitter-related items over the last month. The service is going through an exciting phase where it has enough members (2 million) to experience powerful network effects.
Posted by Jonny Stewart | September 2nd 2008
In addition to Adam’s post…
Today Google will officially launch Google Chrome, their first foray into the world of browsers. In a hugely competitive market that is dominated by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers, it will be exciting to see what the advent of a browser by a second Fortune 100 company will do to the market.
Google is clearly hoping to make a dent in Microsoft’s lead, having long enjoyed a friendly relationship with Mozilla. Google have actively promoted Firefox on their homepage, and it’s estimated that up to 80% of Mozilla’s revenue comes from search tie-ins with Google: the I’m Feeling Lucky search from the address bar, the Google search box in the top right of the browser, and the default Google homepage.
Posted by Adam Skalak | September 2nd 2008
HTML Links, Google Web Spider, Google Toolbar, Google Analytics, iGoogle and now Chrome.
I would like to be wrong but I can’t help it but think that Google Chrome, a brand new web browser from Google, is just another way for Google to collect data for their index and feed more information into their organic and paid search algorithms. I am not saying it’s a bad idea, in fact I am a big fan of other (not hyperlink based) factors impacting the search results.
If an ugly, unfriendly and slow-to-load site ranks number one primarily due to a heavy link building campaign, then I would like to see that site go down in rankings based on metrics like high bounce rates or too little time spent on site. If people do not like the website, do not find it relevant and it is hard to use, then Google needs other factors to improve the ranking algorithm.
Posted by Paul Doleman | September 2nd 2008
Just coming back from holiday and catching up on some reading, I caught a Google agency update summarising the search Gorilla’s changes to Paid Search bidding - “Quality Based Bidding” as Google call it. The changes have been known about for a while now, but when reading this particular summary it occurred to me that all the emphasis Google has put on advertisers who build a great customer experience will get low bid prices and high positions has to be taken with a very large box of “Malvern Rock Salt”.
Posted by Paul Doleman | August 11th 2008
For many months Google has analysed search queries and carried forward or customised one set of search results in Paid Search with information from the previous search.
For example, a search for “Brighton Car Parks” followed by a search for “Cheap Hotels” results in the top paid listing being a Brighton Hotel listing, rather than a generic cheap hotel business, like the example below.
Posted by Dax Hamman | July 24th 2008
BT recently announced that they would be trialling the Phorm ad network on their ISP backend, and join the ranks of Virgin Media and ‘Talk Talk’ from Carphone Warehouse.
Put simply, Phorm is an ad network that works by recording the pages that ISP customers visit and then serving ads that are more relevant to that user. They use a sophisticated system of unique code numbers as opposed to identifiable consumer data, and will categorise the sites visited in pre-determined buckets.
But there has been consumer backlash, most recently highlighted in a New Media Age survey. It states that 65% of UK adults would leave their ISP if it adopted ISP-based behavioural targeting, and 81% wanted the ability to opt-out.
But I think consumers have got this wrong.
Posted by Adam Skalak | July 8th 2008
Back in May, I reported Google was testing green backgrounds above and below the search results. This test happened on a weekday. As far as I can remember most of the tests have always been noticed on a weekday. I guess Google do not really need too much attention to their SERP tests so they decided to trial a new design at the weekend.
Posted by Antony Mayfield | July 4th 2008
I presented at the WARC Advertising & Consumers conference yesterday on “Social Media: Innovation and Earning Attention”.
My theme was around the need for brands’ marketing teams and agency partners to invest resources in innovation to find new ways to engage with people in social media
One of the bonuses of speaking was that I got to hear from other speakers like Faris Yakob, Naked’s Digital Ninja (”what happens when geeks get to make up their own job titles”), DDB’s Andreas Moellmann and Mark Earls - a celebrity in adlan, appears, though I just know him through his book Herd and blog of the same name.
Posted by Nilhan Jayasinghe | July 1st 2008
Today Google announced they can better index text content in Flash files. With the help of Adobe, search engines are able to navigate a flash file and extract text and links, which on the surface sounds great.
I agree it’s a lot better than not indexing it, but, this has definitely sent the wrong message to Flash happy web-developers. If you think this opens the door for Flash in search, then think again.
Google has indexed, PDF files along with several other non-HTML file formats for many years, but you only see them in search results, when there’s a shed load of external anchor text pointing to the file or for a long tail query with little competition. Our e-Book on Social Media has ranked consistently in the top 3 for several years, but it’s little to do with Google’s ability to index PDF, and everything to do with the 600+ links pointing to it with the words ‘’Social media’.
So why should this be?
1. Flash files won’t have the same HTML mark-up which in regular pages, Google use to judge relevance.
2. A lot of Flash navigation use non-text buttons, so no value from important internal anchor text
3. Deep links contribute heavily to Google rankings in regular sites. But most Flash sites are contained in a single file, and people generally link to the file and not to deeper pages
Add to these, clicking on a Flash listing in Google is unlikely to take you to the place returned in the search results, unless the file is broken into lots of unique URL sections – providing a very poor user experience. And let’s not get started about mobile.
Don’t get me wrong, it is great that search engines are trying to keep up with web technologies, but until they can provide the same opportunity for Flash files to rank as regular sites and provide a similar user experience, they must send the right message to the web development and creative community.
I’ll still continue to advice clients to use Flash only where necessary. But, for those stuck with their Flash site, at least we can make it a bit more search friendly.
But my concern is that a lot of traditional creative agencies will use this development as a blank Chequebook to continue building expensive Flash sites which may be search friendlier but has no real chance of competing with a regular website.
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