The Daily Telegraph reports this week that Google is under investigation over allegations of penalising companies in their search results. This is on the back of three company complaints that have been made to the EU by price comparison site www.foundem.co.uk, Ciao.co.uk (owned by Micrsoft incidentally) and ejustice.fr. Foundem claim that Google implemented somekind of deliberate penalty on them to reduce their presence in the results pages.  In a statement they said… “…whereas these penalties used to be reserved for spam, or sites caught attempting to cheat Google’s algorithms, they are now increasingly targeted at perfectly legitimate vertical search and directory services. “It may not be coincidence that, collectively, these services present a nascent competitive threat to Google’s share of online advertising revenues.”

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Anyone who keeps an eye on the organic rankings for the term “SEO” will not have failed to have noticed this site in the top 3…www.seo-london.com. At first glance it looks from the name of the domain like an SEO company based in London. However a further inspection of the site shows that it is an organisation that offers nothing to do with search engine optimisation but instead places graduates in internships in prestigious industries as well as offering training programs. The reason why the site is ranking so highly for the phrase “SEO” is that the site has good authority, good PageRank and some orthodox SEO links pointing at this site… such as this one

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Just read an excellent article about how the trust of a website, among other factors, can influence the rankings of a website. Whilst this may seem obvious, it is interesting to note the extent to which trust of a domain can compensate for the lack of other orthodox ranking factors such as optimised anchor text or to some extent relevance/authority of inbound links. The article states  “that overall domain authority can play a major role in the ranking position awarded to a URL“. So if you have a trusted domain, even if the URL is not that well optimised you can curry favour in terms of ranking strength. So for example a BBC URL about any given subject could match or out rank a site with a better optmised URL. Although you might think being outranked by the BBC is blindingly obvious, it is interesting to note how the algorithm compensates for trusted domains. Which is why moneysavingexpert.com is sometimes in the top 10 for “car insurance” when other sites would appear to be much better optimised for this term.

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You don’t need me to tell you that social media is a real buzz word at the minute. Every man and his dog is looking to get a piece of the social media pie and big brands are no different. In fact social media is more important for big brand companies as their name and company are already in the public domain. The challenge for them is to exploit this new channel to their advantage, raising awareness and harnessing their marketing message. However, as this article points out, some big brands are finding it hard to adapt themselves to social media. It must be said though, that a few companies seem not only to be struggling to get to grips with the concept, but they are struggling even to take it seriously.

A number of companies have encountered some rather unfortunate banana skins along the way…

1. Habitat and Spammy hashtags

Last summer the Twitter account of luxury furniture chain Habitat started producing Tweets with non-furniture related hashtags attached to them. Hashtags are designed so that Twitter users can quickly and easily search for relevant content. In a miscalculated bid to appear under popular hashtags or hottrends, the company started labeling their tweets with wprds such as “mms”, “Apple” and “iPhone” hoping that those who were genuinely looking for these topics would miraculously want to blow £3,000 on one of their sofa’s. They even quite shamefully labeled one of the tweets with “Mousavi” which relates to 2009 Iranian election candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

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Have you ever heard the phrase uttered by someone that they are “getting a website.” The reason why someone would want a website varies from merely having a presence online (a place where people can find out about a company and their address) to people entering various verticals/markets. There are also people who run sites for information, blogging, charity etc the list is endless.

Of those who intend to make money, some people do genuinely come up with a new service or product and want to launch this as on online venture, which is quite understandable. This is why many start-up businesses are now online companies. However aside from these reasons for getting a website, a substantial number of people who get the idea for building a website with the intention of making a money,  base their desire on misinformation and misapprehension over the ease by which others have already achieved greatness online.

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The rumour mill has it that Apple are on the brink of changing the default search engine on the Apple i-phone from Google to Bing. In the latest round of brinkmanship between the two technological monoliths, Apple are trying to draws lines of demarcation between Apple and Google users. Currently everytime an i-phone user clicks on a PPC ad on an Apple i-phone, Apple are paid a proportion of the revenue from the advertiser. And this revenue pot is growing, with revenues from mobile search set to hit $3.1 billion in 2013, so it is little wonder Bing are eager to get their foot in the door. In fact according to Jim Goldman from CNBC, a source is said to have been quoted as saying that Microsocft are”willing to throw much more money to Apple to ensure that they displace Google as the default engine. If that’s the case, it is an absolutely key point to getting a deal done.”

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