Several important pieces of research have been published over the past few months from Forrester, Gartner,...
There's been a lot of questions in blogs for ages wondering why Google loves Wikipedia so much and
It's been a busy year for the Development team. In 2011 we designed, built and managed a number of important...
How much traffic does Google+ get has been closely scrutinised since its private launch in June 2011
Posted By Sam, February 8th, 2012

wikipedia logoThere’s been a lot of questions in blogs for ages wondering why Google loves Wikipedia so much and why it is so dominant in Google and how dominant it actually is. Everything we search for in Google seems to have Wikipedia on at least page one. So we thought it was about time we did some research to get some clarity.

I’ve seen previous research done in this area in one instance the searches conducted were for actual Wikipedia page titles, which of course it would do well in. So we searched nouns (Def. A word used to identify any of a class of people, places, or things) from a couple of random noun generators. A full list of the words we searched are below. Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted By Andy, January 30th, 2012

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!?

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Posted in Bing, SEO and Search | 2 Comments »

Posted By Sam, January 20th, 2012

hunter welliesWhat 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 »

Posted in SEO and Search | 2 Comments »

Posted By Sam, January 14th, 2012

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 »

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Posted By Clare Dann, January 12th, 2012

Pepsi TLD SaleAfter 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 »

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Posted By Andy, January 9th, 2012

Google Logo 2012

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….

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Posted in Google, SEO and Search | 1 Comment »

Posted By Andy, January 5th, 2012

Google Logo 2012

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…

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Posted By Sam, January 4th, 2012

How much traffic does Google+ get has been closely scrutinised since its private launch in June 2011 and launch to the mainstream at the end of september 2011.

Hitwise has reported in a Tweet that Google+ gained 49m US users in traffic last month (December 2011) which equates to a 55% increase from traffic to the social network site in November where it achieved 30m which was up 20% on the previous month of October 2011.

Hitwise also linked to this pretty grainy chart in their Twitter post, showing the rise in Google+ traffic since its launch.

how much traffic does google plus get

 

 

 

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Posted By Sam, December 20th, 2011

Google Logo 2012Digital 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 »

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Posted By Sam, December 19th, 2011

When we are all old and grey and watching BBC17′s “The Best Things of the 21st Century” the year 2011 will probably be highlighted as the year Social Media really hit the mainstream.

Everywhere we look there are representations of social media (and told about how big it is). And it’s no real wonder, half the population is on Facebook and it is due to be floated for an eye-watering $100billion in 2012 (already giving Bono $800m profit). Social Media really isn’t new any more, it’s here and it’s absolutely massive.

Social Media and Politics

2011 saw social media have a real impact on global news as well as on the worldwide lexicon. At about the same time that The Social Network was winning Oscars and Golden Globes the countries of North Africa and the Middle East were starting to call for regime change in what has become known as the Arab Spring. Social Media outlets such as You Tube, Facebook and Twitter were utilised to make these calls, highlight the plight of the people and gain media momentum from Tunisia, Egypt and Libya through to Yemen and Syria. Read the rest of this entry »

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