Bluepost Digital

Bluepost Digital’s tech guru Ken De Pauw takes you through this week’s good, bad and the geeky from the digital world.

Experian Hitwise has conducted some data analysis for the month of November and have come up with some interesting results.

It shows that Bing’s share of the market has significantly increased. Bing-powered search received 25.7% of all searches, while Google only managed 70% of all searches (4.3% making up everything else). This is a large jump from the last set of figures I read about.

Also it states that out of Bing and Yahoo searches about 81% successfully led to a visit to a website, compared to Google’s success rate of 61%.

Is Bing becoming increasingly popular and becoming a credible challenger to Google? Will we have to start focusing a bit more on Bing as it now seems to be representing 25% of the world’s search population?
http://bit.ly/g75fRC

We all at some point take screenshots and may need to make quick notes it can be a bit annoying and time consuming to do it all in paint.

http://markup.io is a chrome extension you can easily install and lets you draw and right on the webpage you are on, then gives you a link to the image you can then share. People you shared it with can then “respond” and make additional notes and send the link back to you so you can see their changes.

This went down well at the Bluepost office and will definitely speed things up.

Seems Bing are busy this week with announcements. Stating Facebook “likes” will play a more prominent role on Bing’s SERPs. Your friends’ likes will now count as a recommendation and be a large step towards a more personalised search on Microsoft’s search engine.
http://selnd.com/haVMAv

According to a study of how often the average twitter users use twitter about half of them will never see your content.
http://bit.ly/fmt51x

This is a nice little tool if you want to create a keyword cloud – possibly for a presentation or something? Just enter in a block of text or a URL of a website and it generates a word cloud which you can then customise visually.
http://bit.ly/WXjW

Unrelated to SEO, however another leap in Augmented Reality was made recently with the new iPhone app World Lens. Point your camera at anything and it will translate any text for you instantly. I foresee a sea of tourists all with their iPhones out pointing it at everything because of this quite soon… pretty nifty though!
http://on.mash.to/gZpiO8

Bluepost Digital’s tech guru Ken De Pauw takes you through this week’s good, bad and the geeky in the digital world.

The UK Police are seeking the power to be able to shut down domains that feel might be engaged in criminal activity without a warrant, sparking fear in the world of online retailing.
http://bit.ly/gzuivH

SEOMoz CEO Rank Fishkin takes a closer look at Danny Sullivan’s interview about what social signals the two major search engines, Google and Bing take into account for in their ranking algorithms.
http://bit.ly/f8oTbb

Another post by Rand Fishkin about how tired he is of over-manipulated top search results on Google and the gaming methods of gaining links that aren’t naturally produced.

He has put together his recommendations to the Webspam team of Google to make the results be more “organic”.

Of course this won’t happen but it’s an interesting read anyway as a “what if” scenario in case Rand ever replaced Matt Cutts at Google!
http://bit.ly/i8W2NJ

Google has taken their motto “Don’t be evil” and inserted it into their ranking algorithm.

Some of you may remember the article about the business man who was actively being aggressive and unhelpful to his customers in order to gain bad reviews and complaints as a way of getting links and hence going up in the rankings.

Google have answered and added in extra metric to their ranking algorithm that now looks at merchant sites and reviews. As always, no hard details have been provided but interesting nonetheless that user reviews and how you respond to them can affect your rank.

Official Google statement – http://bit.ly/hsoRaX
Some further research by Danny Sullivan – http://selnd.com/g3k5lX

Seems the EU wants to push a law through that users must now consent to a cookie being placed on their computers. A bit silly as a vast majority of websites are dropping cookies on your computer all the time. If this comes into effect it could mean disaster for online advertisers, social media and general tracking purposes.

Either a new way of tracking needs to be invented or we all click countless windows saying yes/no to accepting cookies.
http://bit.ly/39WJf5

The good old Belgians (well the European Commission – yes I’m Belgian…) are launching an investigation into Google’s business practices after it is being accused of abusing its monopoly position, and could face a fine of up to 10% of revenue, which could mean a £1.54bn fine.

Reminds me of Microsoft and its old age battles with the likes of Netscape and the monopoly lawsuits over its Explorer browser (which ironically seems to now be a browser that is seeing a steady decline in users). Is Google becoming the new Microsoft pushing around the little guys?
http://bit.ly/gmtCcZ

And just for fun, if our browsers were celebrities, who would they be?
http://bit.ly/g7eo7z

Bluepost Digital’s tech guru Ken De Pauw takes you through this week’s good, bad and the geeky in the digital world.

The best ways of measuring ROI in social media have always been hotly debated, especially recently due to its ever growing popularity and demand. Here are two methods of measuring the effect of your social media campaign. First is an informative video from Digital Royalty on what metrics they measure and how they use that to calculate their ROI.
http://bit.ly/eRlR9n

The other is a study run by Social EQ sought to rank the Fortune’s top admired companies based on how successful their social media strategies are. The results ask the question if this kind of study is a new way of calculating your social media strategy’s effectiveness.
http://bit.ly/hY7eoY

SEOMoz CEO and SEO guru Rand Fishkin has provided us with another Whiteboard Friday, offering us his insights into building monthly SEO action plans to stay on top of your campaigns and always know what is going on without it overwhelming you.
http://bit.ly/eQJVdF

You may or may not have figured this out yet, but those new to Twitter may find this video interesting. You’ll never miss the latest buzz if you watch this video telling you about the power of Twitter lists, how to create them and how to use them.
http://bit.ly/hWngNx

Over the week, Search engine giant extraordinaire Google sparked some frustration when their new Instant Preview feature had a nasty bug that had a significant effect on Google Analytics data. It seems the previews shown on the SERPs were triggering the analytics Javascript code on web page causing it show up as a page view and visit on Analytics data causing some inflated data. Many companies were probably quite happy to see this increase only to find out it was caused by the bug.

Google have acknowledged it as a known issue on their forums and it seems they have now implemented a fix. Though the fix affects Google’s own analytics it’s not yet confirmed whether the bug has been squashed for other companies’ packages.

Oops…
http://selnd.com/ePFySk

Interesting rumour/speculation that Facebook and Myspace are talking some kind of merger of sorts. Myspace is said to be rolling out Facebook Connect throughout the site hoping to benefit from of Facebooks 26 million UK audience.
http://bit.ly/fuTkY4