I noticed earlier in the month that Bing was doing something major with their search results and looking at their results this morning – little has changed. I’m noticing less websites being returned with five pages being the maximum amount of pages the user can select from. So what is happening with Bing!?
What was the biggest ever online retail day in the UK? Answer: The busy Christmas period saw Boxing Day 2011 become the biggest ever day for online retail surpassing the famously busy Mega Monday, regarded as the last online shopping day before Christmas.
As more shoppers do their Christmas shopping paradoxically after Christmas, a 19.5% increase from last year’s figures saw Boxing Day 2011 break online retail records; As UK shoppers spent over 13 million hours shopping on Boxing Day in the UK. Read the rest of this entry »
Dec 2011 – 2 billion visits to online retailers
In the run up to Christmas Google was definitely the search engine of choice in the UK. The December 2011 rankings from Experian Hitwise’s Search Engine and Social Analysis saw Google triumph once again, by vastly increasing its market share of online searches. Google accounted for 91.75% of all searches made in the UK in December 2011, an increase of 0.67% in a month.
Socially speaking, YouTube also had a cracker of a month, being responsible for over a quarter of visits to social networks. Read the rest of this entry »
After six years of negotiations, from today (12th January) a new TLD sale will allow companies to register any web address suffix for the price of $185,000 (£119,000). Companies will have until 12 April to apply for their very own suffix in one of the biggest changes the Internet has seen since its conception 30 years ago.
There are currently 22 generic top level domains (including .com, .co.uk and .gov) as well as 250 country-specific ones. The new regulations, however, will allow companies to use branded suffixes, for example Pepsi are rumoured to be applying for the rights to .pepsi, with the prospect of new sites called drink.pepsi, taste.pepsi, football.pepsi, beckham.pepsi etc. Read the rest of this entry »
Less than a week has passed since Aaron Wall highlighted the fact that Google was buying links to pass PageRank to their Google.com Chrome landing page (directly or indirectly). I saw a tweet from Rishi Lakhani that Google.co.uk was now ranking for the search term ‘Google Chrome’, when it hadn’t been last week (Google.com was).
So what has changed? Should this page be ranking for ‘Google Chrome’ following the controversial purchasing of links? Worse still – it returns a 404 error page…well it did….
Ironic isn’t it? A company that preaches the purchasing of paid links is forbidden only gets caught doing it itself! Yes, the utterly embarrassing and humiliating hypocrisy of Google was on full show two days ago, when Aaron Wall’s blog post gave evidence of a paid link campaign – setup by the big G itself. What could Google and the web spam team do in response? There was nothing much more they could do really…
Digital Marketing has changed more in the last couple of years than it did in the previous 20, SEO has contributed too and has been affected by these changes. 2011 saw the impact of real Content Strategies rather than just throwing links at a site and hoping for positions and high click-through ratios. We’ve felt for years that SEO is more about dialogue and content (the major virtues of a good Social Media campaign) and thus improving the brand offering, and that is now being reflected in Google results. This is ultimately a very good thing and means that SEO can take centre stage in developing an online proposition. Read the rest of this entry »



















