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Digital RoundUP 18/03/2013

Arjun Naik — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:11:11 +0000

Google Reader

Last week via the Google Reader blog it was announced that Google Reader would be shut down as of 1^st July.

The statement said;

usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products.If you want to retain your Reader data, including subscriptions, you can do so through Google Takeout.

This has upset and affected a lot of its current users such as myself! It’s clear that Google want us to be using Google + as a resource for any news feeds we have. However at present there is no way to export your subscription list without doing it manually into G+.

I like many users use Google Reader on a daily basis; it’s the way I get all my news first thing in the morning all in one place. On the other hand, will we really miss it?

RSS feeds have been around for a long time and how we digest our news has changed, these days people check Twitter for the latest goings on, or follow people/ groups on social media.

But what are the alternatives when Google Reader closes?

Feedly

Since the announcement that Google Reader is going to close I tried out Feedly and have not been alone with around 500,000 new users signing up for the service in the last few days.

The best feature is the fact that by signing using your Google account all your Google Reader subscriptions transfer over, which is great if you have a large number of subscriptions. The layout is simple and easy to use and it does what Google Reader does and will satisfy most users.

Flipboard

Currently Flipboard is stricty an app for Tablets and smart phones. It uses RSS feeds much like the way Feedly does however it is presented in an aesthetically pleasing way.

By ‘flipping’ between your stories the layout is much like a magazine. Flipboard presents your information in a cool and interactive way and is a really nice app to use. Its juts a shame that it currently doesn’t have a desktop version however for those times you’re away from your computer this could be the perfect partner.

What are you going to use when Google Reader closes down on July 1st?

BBC Penalised by Google

This week we saw Google penalize the BBC news site for having Unnatural Links. It was reported in The Search Engine Roundtable that they had managed to find a BBC News employee who had posted in the Google Help Forums.Nick was looking for advice from Google and fellow SEOs on how to find those unnatural links they were penalised for, so they can then be removed and submitted for reconsideration. Nick wrote:

“I am a representative of the BBC site and on Saturday we got a ‘notice of detected unnatural links’. Given the BBC site is so huge, with so many independently run sub sections, with literally thousands or agents and authors, can you give us a little clue as to where we might look for these ‘unnatural links’.”

New Pinterest layout and Analytics

With the new Pinterest layout being rolled out on Monday, Pinterest decided to include a surprising new feature that would allow Pinterest Analytics to be used. The new layout includes a subtle update of the newsfeed which allows larger images to be shown and a less cluttered.

With the new analytics tool, you can now access statistics of your Pins, Pinners, Repins, Repinners, Impressions, Reach, Clicks and Visitors, this now allows users to identify their most influential followers and engaging content.

ebay dismisses paid search

A story that triggered a lot of discussion last week was eBay’s claims that Google AdWords has little or no impact on traffic or sales. eBay conducted a study on the effectiveness of paid search in which it paused a certain proportion of its ads containing both branded and unbranded keywords. The company claims that the results of the study show that SEM for branded terms are ‘ineffective’ because users click on its organic links. For non-branded keywords, eBay only found a marginal impact on traffic, stating that:

Large ﬁrms like eBay with powerful brands will see little beneﬁt from paid search advertising because most consumers already know that they exist, as well as what they have to offer.

eBay’s indictment of the entire SEM industry can only be sniggered at by those who have seen the company’s paid search strategy in action. eBay’s use (abuse is probably a better word) of Dynamic Keyword Insertion, or DKI, has seen them run some of the most ridiculous and nonsense ads you’ll ever see. With this carpet-bombing approach it’s no wonder eBay is deeming paid search ‘ineffective.’ But rather than blaming AdWords or paid search marketers maybe they should take a look at their ad strategy.

google rolls out panda update

Matt Cutts announced last Monday that a new Panda update was coming over the weekend, seven weeks after the last one. Cutts also revealed that after this latest update, Panda #25, the algorithm will be updated on a rolling basis. Until now Google have always manually pushed out updates, giving webmasters and SEOs a bit of pre-warning. Updates are now likely to be less transparent and more frequent. It’s also fair to assume that the changes in the algorithm will be less significant and have less of an impact on the search results.

That’s it for our Digital RoundUP this week, come back next Monday for more industry news!

I would like to mention that Roy our Creative Director is doing the Bupa Manchester 10k in May its all for a good cause and money goes to Macmillan Cancer Support.

If you would like to make a donation you can do at;

http://www.justgiving.com/roy-wilding/

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Digital RoundUP 25/02/2013

Arjun Naik — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 15:34:51 +0000

PlayStation 4 Announced

On Wednesday night the worst kept secret in video gaming was finally revealed with the announcement of the Sony Playstation 4. During a two hour presentation the assembled media were told and shown the capabilities of the ‘most powerful platform ever’. However we did not get to see the console and were only shown the ”DualShock 4″ controller.

Interestingly there was an acknowledgement from Sony that the previous console was difficult to develop for. This time round they contacted games developers whilst the console was being made, hopefully this means that more games companies want to get involved on the PS4.

So what can we expect with the PS4?

A highly powerful AMD x86-based 8-core CPU, an enhanced GPU and amazingly 8GB of DDR5 RAM. This all means this will be the most powerful games console ever made and would go toe-toe with most gaming PC’s on the market.
Games will still be on Blu-ray discs but all games will be fully downloadable, and can be played instantly with downloading continuing as you play.
The PS4 will have an ‘Instant On’ feature which means the console never turns off but rather hibernates. This means that the user can instantly return to whatever was being played prior to turning off the console.
The controller features a ‘share’ button which means gameplay can be instantly uploaded to Facebook and video streaming sites.
The “PlayStation App” will enable iPhone, iPad, and Android based smartphones and tablets to become second screens
PlayStation 4 Eye – 1280 x 800 camera (Xbox Kinect style feature)

During the conference there were some game presentations that were truly astounding. Killzone and Watchdogs were graphically impressive.

Overall the PlayStation 4 is a smart piece of kit, the biggest disappointment was the fact the console was absent from the press conference. However this means it will most likely get shown at E3 in June. We are looking forward to it, now its over to Microsoft.

The PlayStation 4 is scheduled to be on sale in December 2013.

Google Glass

Google have been developing their revolutionary augmented reality head-mounted display for quite a while now, with little being shown apart from the headset over the last few years.

Now they are trying to push the sales in a social campaign by asking the question, ‘What would you do if you had Glass?’. To enter the competition you have to answer in 50 words of less with #ifihadglass using Google+ or Twitter, photos can be used and a short 15 second video can also be included.

The main drawback is that this is only available to U.S residents, meaning we will just have to write our own #ifihadglass tweet:

‘#ifihadglass I would visit the Wonders of the World and compare them using Glass to show the originals compared to 2013’s Wonders of the World.’ – Pedrom Pourkashanian

‘#ifihadglass I would go to a new city where I couldn’t speak the language and try and get a date by the end of the day’ – Jonny Pennington

‘#ifihadglass I could finally be on time for stuff without getting lost for 2 hours’ – James Whitelock

So I pose this question to you… What would you do if you had Glass?

Find more details here – if you are in the US you can enter on Twitter or Google+

interflora DISAPPEARS

Last Thursday, Martin Macdonald broke the news that Interflora had effectively been ‘wiped off the face of the Internet.’ Google hit the flower delivery service with a penalty which saw it virtually disappear from the SERPs for prime keywords it was previously ranking #1 for, including its own brand name. The company was sitting at the top of the search results for search terms such as ‘flowers’, ‘flower delivery’ and ‘florist’, but now finds itself buried in the 5^th or 6^th page.

We can only speculate the full extent of Interflora’s bad behaviour, but it appears a long history of bad link building practices has caught up with them. A quick Link Detox showed over 70% toxic and suspicious links, this includes advertorials, link networks, web directories and paid blog posts on abandoned networks.

Reminder: Google’s guidelines on paid links that pass PageRank also apply to “advertorial” pages. See goo.gl/PhwsY for more info.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) February 22, 2013

Following this incident, last Friday Matt Cutts posted a polite reminder on Google’s Webmaster Central blog that selling links is naughty and can lead to a penalty. It will be interesting to see how, and if, Interflora recover from this nightmare, whether they move to a new domain or start a long and gruelling recovery process, it won’t be easy.

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A Massive Change For Google Local Business Listings

Nikki Stasyszyn — Thu, 31 May 2012 16:36:00 +0000

This week, Google announced that it was incorporating local search into Google+. If it hasn’t already, you will soon notice your Google Places listing turn into a Google+ page as Google continues to roll this change out to both verified and unverified listings.

The listings will need updating to make the most out of the new format

Local pages will be accessible in Google Maps as before, as well as the new Local tab in Google+ and Google Search as they will be unique pages. These pages will therefore be able to be optimised and indexed in their own right, as well as meaning that you will be able to direct people to these Local pages through PPC adverts.

The Local tab on Google+ suggests businesses in your local area to explore. This is based on what is popular and recommendations, so having reviews on your listing could prove to be more important than ever, especially if they are made by people in your circles.

The review system is also being changed from the familiar five star rating to a system developed by Zagat, which was acquired by Google in September 2011 and gives your business a score out of 30. This ranking is to take in to account different aspects of the service that your business offers. For example, it was originally designed to rate restaurants, allowing for a different score for the food, the service, the price, etc, giving a combined score out of 30. This should mean that scores are more spread out and give a better reflection of the service offered.

One impact of this change is that if you are reviewing a business, you can now do this as a business rather than an individual. It will also allow you to filter reviews by those that you have in your circles, making it easier to find reviews from people that you know.

To see how these listings are going to look, check out Pomegranate Cafe (shown below) which was part of the Google+ Local Pilot scheme.

You can’t link this page with your Google+ page just yet, but we would expect this update to be imminent. For now, you can still edit your listing as before in Google Places For Business. However, it looks as though Google are set to add more features to the Local pages over the coming months, meaning that it will become a much more social platform where businesses will be able to interact with their customers.

In the meantime, we recommend creating your own Google+ business page so that you are ready when this update is made. As updates like this continued to be rolled out, it is looking like Google+ is going to be a very powerful tool for businesses.

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MCFC Honours List

Simon Wharton — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:05:35 +0000

One of my colleagues who supports the Evil Red Empire suggested I Google “MCFC Honours List”. Ha! Google Bomb I thought. Something along the lines of the Miserable Failure Google Bomb that hit George Bush in 2004. But no. It’s Google suggesting an alternative result “MCFC Honours List” being “MUFC Honours List”. Funny I suppose.

Funnier if you can jump on top to capture the (irrlevant) traffic.

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Pay Per Click Marketing Management Exams

Katrina Gallagher — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 20:46:36 +0000

Fantastic day for the PushON team… OK, so it was a long and boring day, but the great news is that Mark qualified as a Google AdWords Professional, and I’ve qualified as a Microsoft adExcellence Member.

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Google Indexing Audio

Sam Rutley — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:28:27 +0000

It has been a while coming and many have seen it as a predictable move but Google has finally promoted Google Audio Indexing to Google Labs. At the moment the only videos in the application are political, however Google will be expanding its archive in the future.

This development indicates how Google will attempt to monetise YouTube, which has been relatively unprofitable since its $1.6bn acquisition in 2006. At the moment search on YouTube relies on the additional meta data provided by content publishers to rank the videos. This is obviously open to abuse. The addition of Google Audio Indexing would allow YouTube to rank videos even more accurately and potentially translate videos into many languages using Google Translate.

The potential for search engine marketing is great, already we produce videos to promote clients products which generate relevant traffic to their sites. Google Audio Indexing has the potential to reduce the amount of additional work involved in this process and broaden the range of users viewing this content.

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Is The Googlebot In Hibernation?

Mark Mayne — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:50:15 +0000

It would certainly seem that way as crawl rates seem to have plummeted dramatically in recent months. I came across the problem when working on a scrap car website for one of my clients and noticed that the changes I had made were taking a ridiculously long time to index. This prompted me to look at some of my other sites and low and behold it was happening on some of them too.

The graph below is from webmaster tools and shows crawl rates from month to month. As you can see crawl rates have slowed down for some reason.

So why are crawl rates so slow recently? Google has not given any official line of the recent trend but after doing some research on the topic some people are suggesting that Google’s bots have become more efficient and there is no need for them to crawl as frequently. I am not sure if I buy into that but will be interesting to see what happens over the coming months.

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Google Analytics v Urchin

Katrina Gallagher — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:06:44 +0000

Google & Urchin Analytics Background

A common misconception is that Urchin is simply the old name for Google Analytics and is no-longer around. However Urchin is a product in its own right and has some key differences to its free cousin.

Urchin On Demand was an Analytics tool bought from Urchin Software Corporation by Google. To use this Analytics tool, you signed up with an account and copied and pasted a piece of code into each page of your site.

After some time as a paid for product, in around November 2005 Google offered users this tool for free. At this time, Urchin On Demand was also re-branded as Google Analytics .

Urchin 6 was developed by Google as an analytics software tool that you installed on your own servers.

This server side tracking tool graduated from Beta on April 16th 2008.

Google Analytics/Urchin Comparison

Google Analytics and Urchin software rely on different code and track visitors in slightly different ways. Here’s a comparison table adapted from an illustration by Benjamin Mangold:

Features	Google Analytics	Urchin (version 6)
Install and manage on your own server
Hosted and maintained by Google
Reprocess historical data (from logfiles)
Track content behind firewall
Track search engine robots/spiders
Goal tracking
Campaign tracking
Automatic Google AdWords tracking
E-commerce reports
Cost	Free	£1495 ($2995) for up to 1000 domains

Results

The differences in the results that you are likely to see are:

With Google Analytics, page views are recorded when the external JavaScript on Google’s servers is executed. Search Engine Spiders and automated bots don’t call this JavaScript file. So Google Analytics may show lower page views as a result.
Google Analytics relies on JavaScript to track results, so users who have JavaScript disabled won’t be tracked, whereas they will be tracked using Urchin.

Benefits of Urchin

You don’t necessarily need to tag web pages with JavaScript code
You can control the processing schedule of traffic logs, including the option to process data immediately
You can re-process and post-process data, which can’t be done with Google Analytics
View all website traffic, including images, downloads, robots, status codes (e.g. 404s, 500s), and referral errors, including outdated links – particularly useful in identifying “Page Not Found” (404) errors
You can create customized reporting for different types of visitation data
Report data can be easily audited by 3rd parties
You can analyze firewall-protected content, such as an Intranet
You can save 5 years’ worth of old server log data
You can integrate your e-commerce logs directly with Urchin

Benefits of Google Analytics

This will be the latest version, and includes advanced features not yet found in Urchin Software
It is updated automatically when new features roll out
It integrates really well with AdWords reports from the AdWords user interface.
Can be set up quickly with limited technical knowledge
It’s free
It is translated into more languages that Urchin
You can drill down to unique visitors – view session/path, platform, geo-location, browser/platform, etc. data for individual visitors

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We are feeling the Google Love again

Roy Wilding — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:25:19 +0000

[kml_flashembed movie="http://blog.pushon.co.uk/imgs/love.swf" height="90" width="160" align="right" /]Google dumped us recently, pulled out our heart, spat into the open wound and walked off into the sunset without so much as leaving us a Dear John.

We sat and sulked for the first couple of days blaming everything and everyone, life is so unfair, we didn’t deserve that, just who does this Google think, he/she/it is? We can do so much better anyway!

After our short period of sulking we finally admitted that Google had fallen out of love with us and set about trying to win back its’ heart.

We discussed, argued, researched, analysed and finally decided that there was potentially a number of factors that might have turned our soul mates affections sour, rather than any single given factor.

Here’s a list of factors we think may have caused Google to give us the cold shoulder:

Unreliable hosting
The change in method of displaying our RSS feed on our main site
Less frequent posting
Our RSS feed not function for a short period.

Here’s a list of things we did to win back the heart of big G:

Fixed the hosting issue
Changed the method we used to display our RSS feed on our main site
Made more regular posts
Fixed all issued with our RSS feed
Upgraded our WordPress install
Changed our permalink structure and used 301 redirects on all the old URLs
Updated our XML sitemap

It now appears that we’ve rekindled Googles love for us and we’re seeing a whole range of posts previously going unnoticed, whilst it was giving us the brush off, hitting top of the Google once again.

It’s nice to be loved again.

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Gaming Google with Sprocket X

Simon Wharton — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:10:17 +0000

I saw very interesting and effective demonstration of gaming Google using a multi layered implementation of Sprocket X. Basically a Sprocket takes data from multiple sources such as Wikipedia, chews it up and spits something out that is actually meaningful and readable. It’s the readability that is the key and differentiates from other Spammy techniques. But wait, it gets really clever. So Sprocket A, if you see what I mean, pulls data in on a topic and publishes to a blog. Done well, the content iscompelling. And then Sprocket B, which is independently deployed and so has differing seed values, takes the published output from Sproket A and makes a meaningful response.. Effectively yuo get a dynamic and interesting conversation. It gets even more interesting when humans get drawn into this spoof conversation and start responding. Effectively they start contributing and generating link love and Digg/Del.icio.us credibility. People start laundering the spam. I wonder whether Google is on the ball with this one.

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