google+ Sign-in

Last Tuesday Google launched Google+ Sign-In for third party developers, they can now allow users to sign into applications using their Google+ account. This is Google’s latest attempt to get ‘normal’ people using the social network, it will also give the search giant plenty of user data to slobber over.

Google is claiming that its new sign-in functionality is more secure than the likes of Twitter and, in particular, Facebook. It also gives users sharing options so that their social networks aren’t spammed with app updates and activity. Google+ director Matt Waddell released an image taking an indirect (but quite obvious) shot at Facebook with the tagline ‘Try the red pill.’ Facebook have received criticism in the past for ‘social spam’, however, Danny Sullivan took a closer look at Google’s new feature and decided that it’s not too dissimilar.

Take a look at Google’s launch video:

Google: how search works

A busy week for Google, it also released a stunning interactive infographic called ‘How Search Works.’ If you haven’t seen it yet and are thinking, ‘urgh, another SEO infographic’, take a look it’s pretty cool. The infographic itself gives a pretty basic and general overview of how Google indexes and ranks websites, but it also has some useful stuff for professional SEOs.

The coolest part is probably the live spam screenshots which show examples of ‘pure spam’ that Google has penalised. This is updated in real-time and some of the examples are pretty humorous.

These pages are examples of ‘pure spam.’ They appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking and scraping content from other websites.

This page also goes on to list the types of spam that Google looks for and takes action on such as cloaking, keyword stuffing and unnatural links to/from a site.

Google also published data for the first time on manual actions, webmaster notifications and reconsideration requests. The data in these graphs is really interesting. The graph below shows the number of websites that have had manual action taken against them over the last 8 years and is broken down by the different spam types.

YAHOO CEO BANS WORKING FROM HOME

Marissa Mayer, the Yahoo CEO, sent an email out to thousands of her employees last week in which she announced she was banning them from working ‘remotely.’

As a result, several hundred staff must relocate to their nearest Yahoo office by June or quit. Mayer’s said ‘to become the absolute place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we all need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices.’

Those who only work one or two days in the office will have to submit to the new regime. ‘Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings,’ she says, ‘speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.’

groupon send andrew mason packing

It came as little surprise last week when Andrew Mason was relieved from his post as CEO of Groupon. The company has been going through a rough patch since going public just over a year ago, and its poor 4th quarter earnings sent its stock reeling.

Rumours of Mason’s exit have been floating around for a while now, and he seemed to be expecting it as on Thursday he released this letter to his employees on Twitter.

For Groupon Employees: jottit.com/v5wux/ (Apparently, sharing oranges is necessary but insufficient #leadership)

— Andrew Mason (@andrewmason) February 28, 2013

‘After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding – I was fired today.’

Mason took full responsibility for his role in Groupon’s recent poor performance and told his former employees; ‘You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I’m getting in the way of that.’

Groupon, now valued at less than £2 billion, is searching for Mason’s replacement. In the meantime, Executive Chairman Eric Lefkofsky and Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis are taking the reins.

That’s our weekly RoundUP of industry news, I’ll leave you with this little treat from Qualcomm:

The post Digital RoundUP 04/03/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Masses of traffic is pointless if you don’t convert it into sales, leads or repeat visitors. It’s so easy to find what you want online, if you make it difficult for your users, then they will go elsewhere and they won’t come back.

Justin Palmer has written an excellent checklist to help improve your E-commerce conversion rates.

Another thing to consider is creating useful, regularly updated content for your users.  This has a three fold benefit:

1. You have the opportunity to appear in search results for a larger quantity of search terms related to your industry/products/services
2. People will come back later to see what other useful stuff you have to offer
3. People will link to you (this helps increase the number of referrals you get & your search engine rankings)

The post Improve Website Conversion Rates appeared first on PushON Ltd.

It’s not only through Google Maps or Google Local Search that Local business listings are shown, it’s also through the normal search and mobile search results.

Google will check your location using your IP address, or if you’re signed in to a Google account, will use your address and will often show results closest to your location above the rest. Mobile Internet usage is on the increase, so getting your site established in the local mobile results can only give you an advantage. With your listing, you’re also getting a link from an authority site, and results are often ‘mashed up’ and displayed on different websites.

At a minimum, you should aim to get your primary business address into the listings, but if you add your alternative branches or locations you can cover a greater area – leading to greater levels of traffic. (You just need to make sure you can pick up the mail from there).

This is particularly important for businesses that service certain geographical locations, but you still benefit from greater traffic – even if you don’t expect to see your customers in person.

On a similar note, I read a great article which summarises the main ways to improve rankings for UK based sites in ‘UK only’ searches. The same principles apply to other countries too – so don’t be disheartened if you’re not in the United Kingdom.

And as Jan Klin states, with the introduction of Google Universal “Anyone not on the map is effectively non existent as far as the searcher is concerned. As you may remember from previous posts over 75% of all visits come from the ‘above the scroll’ positions.”

You can see his example here:

The post Improve Search Engine Rankings With Google Local appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Apparently results are compiled from a combination of web based algorithms, human editors and pigeons… (well, the latter was perhaps based on a Google April fools from a couple of years ago…).

After seeing some dramatic changes in traffic volumes at the end of December for a number of our clients, it inspired me to write a post on the subject. However I came across some bizarre web pages when typing in my search phrases.

Google was probably the worst culprit, but Ebay also interrupted my research, by offering great deals on search volume… Silly Ebay – whoever is sorting your Pay Per Click campaign has an interesting approach.

Some of the search trends that Google highlighted were quite sweet, it seems more and more people are turning to search engines for advice rather than agony aunts.

The post This Was Supposed To Be A Sensible Article – 2007 Search Trends appeared first on PushON Ltd.

So are there any PR 10s?
Well yes, Google.com is a PR 10 with Google.co.uk being a PR 9 and there are more, and here’s a full list.

What’s interesting is apart from a few, all the sites are directly related to the Internet and Internet technologies.

Googles explanation of PR

Tags: Marketing Google Page Rank

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