Google appears to be finally flexing its muscles in China. The search engine giant announced, through a prepared statement this week, that it plans to stop censoring the Chinese version of its search engine and may pull out of China altogether. As well as criticising the Government’s stance on censorship, the statement also mentioned that the company had uncovered cyber attacks on itself and other foreign companies emanating from China on a huge scale. Read the rest of this entry »

Here at Top Click Media we recently took on a brand new contract to help TrackCompare to improve their internet presence and increase the traffic to their vehicle tracking website www.trackcompare.co.uk. Read the rest of this entry »

Even the most casual followers of this year’s CES, will have noticed one particular trend emerging amongst the exhibitors, mobile internet. The unstoppable rise of the iPhone in 2009 has finally moved mobile internet from the province of nerds and show offs to actual everyday use. Vastly improved speed and performance of 3G and WiFi connections combined with Innovations like the app store have finally made it actually practical and useful to search the internet on the go. Read the rest of this entry »

For a while now, Google has made no secret of the fact that it believes that mobile is going to be a key growth area for the internet and internet advertising in particular. So confident were they of this that in 2008, with some assistance from the OHA, they built the first mobile only operating system and then, last year, took the bold step of actually releasing their own handset, the HTC. Read the rest of this entry »

Google have made some much needed changes to the ad filtering system within adsense. For a long time the system has allowed you to filter out ads that you do not want appearing on your site, however, the number you could designate was strictly limited. Also, the filtering process used to take hours upon hours to work allowing inappropriate, or competitors ads to take up space on your site. Read the rest of this entry »

A group of computer hackers led by German encryption expert, Karsten Nohl claimed this week to have cracked the secret code that keeps around eighty per cent of the world’s mobile phone conversations secret. The team then published the code online leaving upwards of three billion mobile phone users vulnerable to having their calls intercepted. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite claims from some that it’s not as versatile as competitors like Firefox, the Google Chrome web browser has been gaining supporters steadily since its launch earlier this year, thanks to its speedy performance and reliability. However, it seems the slow steady groundswell of support is about to turn into a deluge in the next few weeks and months. Read the rest of this entry »

The subject we’re tackling today is one of the hot topics in the world of SEO currently – the importance (or otherwise) of ‘.edu’ links and whether or not they’re necessary or desirable part of the optimisation process. If you’re an SEO or webmaster, you may have already been approached by someone attempting to sell you ‘.edu’ backlinks for a not insubstantial monthly fee, claiming that they’re a shortcut to better rankings and pass substantially more authority than normal co.uk or .com URLs. Read the rest of this entry »

For a while now I’ve been talking about the dangers of assuming that one search marketing approach will work across a number of platforms, with mixed results. Unfortunately, some people just don’t want to believe that the approach required to make a success of a PPC campaign on Google is that much different to the approach required to do well on Yahoo, Bing, etc. Some people unfortunately will not be swayed from the notion that search is search and what’s good for the good is good for the gander. Read the rest of this entry »

Debate surrounding this one has been raging over at the Top Click Media offices for quite some time now. Some of us think it’s one of the most exciting developments to the ranking algorithm for quite some time, whilst others of us question the relevance of seeing things posted to the internet in order of how recently they were posted rather than relevance. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been following this blog over the last few weeks you’ll know that Google have been looking into including a twitter style real time element in their search engine results for quite some time now. I personally thought it would be included as part of the caffeine update and said so on the blog a couple of weeks ago. Just shows what I know, this week the search engine giant began to release the real time element across the world. Read the rest of this entry »

According to Matt Cutts, Google’s de facto mouthpiece to the SEO community, Google’s latest search update, caffeine, will launch early next year. What do I mean when I say launch? Don’t worry, the rankings aren’t going to turn upside down overnight. As is Google’s recent form, the roll out will be gradual and in stages over approximately the first quarter of next year. Read the rest of this entry »

A very interesting adwords development that’s been trialled across the US recently has finally made it to these shores. Essentially what’s happening is that Google are allowing some accounts, initially just ones with particularly high quality scores, to show more than just text in their ads, this can take some surprisingly diverse forms with everything from links and maps, to pictures of products and even videos. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi all,

We wanted to say a big thanks to all those of you who’ve been reading the Top Click Media blogs over the last couple of years, and what better way than with a free Google Wave account.

Wave is currently in Beta and only available via invitation. Luckily, we just happen to have fifteen invites to give out. If you want one, simply post a comment on this blog with your email address and name – the first fifteen will get invites sent to their inboxes within a couple of days.

Just our way of saying thanks,

Keep on reading.

For those of you who still are living in the dark and do not know about Wave, have a look at this video: