Archive for the 'Google' Category

Video hosting site Youtube has shown its support for the less fortunate this week by announcing a service that will automatically caption any video uploaded to the website in the English language.

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I am sure many of you, like me, have habitually typed in the web address of one of your most frequently visited sites only to realise that your usual flawless typing has failed you and in your haste you have misspelled the URL (Googgle instead of Google). You then realise that instead of getting the usual ‘unrecognized URL’ error you are actually whisked off to a rather basic but evidently intentional website.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

There’s been a small change to the adwords interface over the last few days that seems to have caught a couple of people on the hop. What’s happened is Google has decided to stop allowing exceptions to its 35 character display URL rule. It used to be that you would be allowed to file an exception request if your URL was longer than this but now that function has been removed.

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SEOs spend most of their working lives – and, let’s be honest, some of their private lives – trying to think like the Google Bot, in order to make their clients sites as welcoming and comfortable for it to visit and return to as possible. For the most part this is a pretty difficult thing to do, the Google Bot is, after all, a computer programme – not a living thing and, as such, is pretty hard to empathise with.

Until now, that is…

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Google Labs has struck again with yet another useful tool entering beta testing on Webmaster Tools. It’s called Malware Details and it’s basically a godsend for anyone worried about hacking/illicitly installed Malware on their site. It works by crawling the site and flagging anything that it feels is malicious.

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