Archive for the ‘Industry News’ Category

So there you have it, I am not a hamburger, I am a high quality translator! Or at least Google is now.

Announced on their blog is a new high speed ‘translate as you type service, along with some other changes to the google translate service.

The service actually had 3 services introduced (more in the above link), although I have to ask, how many people actually use it? Other than to learn how to swear at people in their own language

Close on the heels of the Google announcement that the keywords meta dat is no longer used in the rankign algortithm, Yahoo! have come out and said pretty mucht he same. This is something us seasoned webmarketers have been saying for a long time, but despite this, there are ‘SEO’s ‘ out there who are still pedalling KW meta optimisation.

 The admission came at an Ask The Search Engines session at SMX East in New York this week. When asked about Support for the meta keywords tag, moderator Danny Sullivan stated that only Yahoo provided support of the tag, which prompted  Cris Pierry, (Senior Director of Search at Yahoo), to announce that support actually had been ended unannounced “several” months ago.

So there you have it the tag is dead, so move along please…. nothing to see here !

This is something that is coming up more and more often these days. In fact this blog comes up highly for some of those phrases since I published the Google adwords telephone numbers in may 2008. One thing to note here is that now you need to have your adwords account ref (top right of the screen inside adwords) to get through. Methinks they are filtering who they speak to and who has to go the long route!

Anyhow, if you need help, then try the telephone path, if not, here is a real good place to start for adwords help in some areas there will be a yellow ‘chat box’ on the screen,  if it is there, then use it.

Next is the long route path adwords support page or go to this form select whatever your query is about, scroll down to the bottom and select ‘email adwords support.

People in the UK can email adwords-uk@google.com

I am sure that I am not the only SEO who’s inbox and PM box on forums has been full of ‘My site has gone from the rankings’ type messages during the last few weeks. This is always the case when Google ‘stir their secret sauce’.  This latest incarnation appears of have had far more wide ranging impact that they might have envisaged, Possibly this is the only problem with having such a wide ranging interconnected algorthim.

One of the big changes has been the ‘slackening’ or perhaps lowering of the bar on non UK specific domains appearing in the UK SERPS. Read the rest of this entry »

The big buzz around the SEO world is Google Caffiene! Is it new, is it different, is it better is it worse, is it knee jerk reaction to Microhoo Bing .  On the webmaster central blog, Google  Software Engineer Sitaram Iyer and Senior Software Engineer Matt (I love cats I do ) Cutts wrote  :-

” For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions ”

Read the rest of this entry »

So here they go again, first it was search advertising, then it was printed, then it was billboards, then it was a browser, now they have made the logical step, and announced on the official google blog that they will be releasing an operating system to work hand in hand with Chrome browser, but aimed at notebooks.

To me this shows that Google are seriously attacking Microsoft etc at the next gen of online growth, the notebook.

So is this a good thing? A bad thing? or a nothing?

Time will tell, but personally I have no problem with it. I search using google, I mail using google I am happy to run a google operating system on a notebook that is not likely to have many apps on it.

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Read the rest of this entry »

Lots of things going on with Google at the moment.

1. Google earth street view has launched in the UK. 

2. Google mail (GMail.com) went down again for the second time this month

3. Google keyword tool went nuts, showing all sorts of results due to a ‘glitch’

4. I have seen more instances of Google confusing dropping index pages.

So onto the detail Read the rest of this entry »

The cases are unpacked, the tans are fading, the memories of a great honeymoon are still fresh in the mind, then BOOM!!! The bomb drops as the credit card bill arrives, and you realize you now have to get back to reality and start paying for everything.

YES. The Honeymoon is over!

The same is now true for all those people who married Google’s payment system (Google Checkout) to their shopping cart checkout systems. Lured by the HUGE carrot of 10 times their ad spend as free processing, they switched. Well now that honeymoon will be over from may 2009, and the loving willing bed-mate you had for that brief period, has turned into a distant, selfish money grabber, same as all the others… Read the rest of this entry »

Odd as this may seem, Google.inc has applied a penalty to google.co.jp with its pagrank being downgraded from PR9 to PR5 (Googles words) . In a recent interview Matt Cutts said that unfortunately, while promoting a new gadget, google used the outside agency services of a company who used paid blog posting as the method of SEO!

As anyone knows, Google frown on unnatural link building, and have a war on paid links. Because of this,  Google.co.jp was nailed, and the reputation of Google has been damaged