Blog

How businesses should (or shouldn’t) react to Google’s latest update

May 20th, 2011

SEO has come a long way in the past decade, with companies focusing on search as a key component of their digital marketing strategy. And while you can probably guess I would be in the position to say such a thing, the truth is that SEO can indeed make or break a business on the web, leveling the playing field in this day and age between big names and local startups.

Companies around the world have started to use a good portion of their overall marketing resource based on how they perform in search. This is great, but it seems to me as still less of a “plan to action”, and more of a “knee jerk reaction”. The recent Google Panda / Farmer update was a major example of this – with companies “reacting” left and right wondering what they did wrong. While we love the fact that in today’s marketplace, many businesses are watching their search engine marketing performance much more closely – unfortunately, many are also believing everything they hear! So yes, SEO has indeed come a long way – and companies won’t fall for just anything, but there are certainly are still a fair bit of misconceptions going around the industry.

One recent example was the Overstock.com SEO Spam incident that you may have heard about on both the major news sites like CNN, or industry sites such as Search Engine Land where the major US retailer was penalised in the Google algorithm – supposedly (but this reason was never fully confirmed) for having a link building strategy that consisted of bulk .edu links. Weeks later, Overstock itself issued a statement saying that they had made the fixes Google required and sure enough they were back in the index – and all was well.

Some people simply assumed that Overstock had simply fixed things up, while some people complained that it was unfair that the big companies get such an advantage and got reinstated (not bothering to check why), while most companies only remembered the first part of the Overstock story, spending the time since chasing their SEO team, consultant or agency about some other new story that made the rounds in the industry or mainstream press. Perhaps direct competitors did look a bit closer at the overall situation, but we cannot confirm this, and thats not the issue here anyway.

Either way, it seemed like no one from any of the groups above double checked the story. If Google says no to bulk link acquisition and Overstock got banned from Google, does that mean Overstock’s bulk link acquisition got them in trouble? No. It was a poor misconception, an assumption that A+B=C. Clients should expect more from an agency, consultant or in house team, especially when monitoring competitor activity. We in this industry should be looking at the full answer and not taking other people’s word all the time. The EDU links by the way are still quite active in many places (example: http://www.alumni.ncsu.edu/s/1209/index.aspx?sid=1209&gid=1&pgid=632) – and so what changed then? Well, on the pages that got penalised for generic terms such as “living room furniture” – Overstock.com had pop-up/expandable text coded within the tags of their page. The pop-up text was filled with keywords and was in Google’s cache and visible to text browsers (screenshot of this example below).

The text strategy was reported by a competitor and got penalised shortly after. Yet, when Overstock was allowed back in, what changed? The links stayed, yet the hidden text is no longer there. Could this have been the “real” reason why the penalty was imposed in the first place?

No one will know for sure, but the point is that many companies will go by what they hear/read and that there are still many misconceptions about SEO as a whole. Here at Reform we make sure we try to not just throw some excuse about why sites perform the way that they do, but examine closer into it and find out what the real reason may be – instead of a “one size fits all” answer. With this extra insight and custom approach to your overall digital marketing strategy, SEO can become more of a natural approach, rather than a mystery. Not necessarily the wrong answer or right answer, but exploring multiple answers and possibilities and avoiding any potential misconceptions is key to any project we take on.

Microsoft and Skype – an odd pairing?

May 18th, 2011

Microsoft and Skype may seem at first like an odd pairing, but it might just prove that the corporate world of XP, Vista and Microsoft Lync et al, is a lot more creatively inclined than us iPad-istas could have imagined!

Why pay $8.5 billion for 170 million users (which by my reckoning is nearly $50 dollars a pop)? One possible answer is that Microsoft has decided that it needs to understand the world of freemium from the inside out. Culturally Microsoft has struggled to truly embrace the world of free products and alternative revenue models that venture beyond the shrink wrapped box and licence fee. For observers such as myself, this behaviour has seemed like a bad case of denial, and secretly I believed that Microsoft was kind of doomed because of it.

However, the acquisition of Skype all makes complete sense as Microsoft suddenly has:

1.    A truly digital native brand
2.    170 million users who are cloud friendly, and potential customers for a new generation of products and services
3.    Access to an audience who are used to the odd interruption from advertising – as they get that ‘if its free for me, some        corporate has to pay for it’
4.    Expertise in freemium, and face to face comms – which is surely the no brainer future of all global citizens conversations, and
5.    Africa

The last point there is in my view the most exciting opportunity. Like many developing and emergent economies Africa has leap frogged the traditional communications channels of landlines and broadband, and has gone straight to 3G and Skype for mobile. This in itself gives Microsoft unrivalled access to a mass audience of new consumers of enormous potential and makes it a player in mobile comms, as much as any telco on the continent.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype could be a true masterstroke, and provides our corporate friend with so many upside opportunities, new revenue streams and expertise as well as disruptive business modelling that $50 dollars a pop seems quite reasonable on reflection. Let’s hope that they don’t mess it up and get tied in the knotty world of internal red tape, or that the shrink wrapped culture doesn’t try and kill Skype off!

Blog post by Mary Keane-Dawson, Non-Executive Director at Reform

The ‘super-injunction phenomenon’ – is your digital reputation under attack?

May 11th, 2011

It can take years for a celebrity to build their reputation, but it can all be undone with one tweet.

Whether that tweet is written by the celebrity or not, the nature of the beast is that this tweet can spread so quickly that it very soon becomes common knowledge and, to all intents and purposes, fact.

So, how can celebrities manage their reputation online? Who is responsible for making sure that the image they are creating for themselves in the public eye is reflected online?

Who is responsible for reputation management?
There are two key people who need to be involved in both creating and managing a reputation – the celebrity themself and their management team. They both need to share a clear strategy on how they are going to build and maintain this reputation both on and offline.

Celebrities are brands and brands are alive 24/7. People don’t stop talking about you on Twitter or Facebook outside of office hours, which means that these kinds if channels need to be monitored 24 hours a day. Just like a celebrity can’t choose whether to be famous or not when they wake up in the morning, they also need to be in ‘celebrity mode’ online, constantly building their brand. If they don’t, they risk undoing all their hard work.

The other party who needs to be involved is the celebrity’s management team. I am constantly terrified at the lack of time and investment that agents, PRs and publicists put into their celebrities’ digital presence. I understand that this is a whole new world with different rules, but online reputation management is not a choice anymore, it is an essential part of their job.

So, to all celebrities and their management teams, my advice is this.

1. Take it seriously
If your brand comes under a cyber attack – a wave of negative publicity – it is very often too late to limit the damage. Tweets are in the public domain forever and it is impossible to ask everyone to remove their posts.

Reputations can evaporate in seconds. The speed in which this gossip spreads is astonishing. It is human nature to gossip and all Twitter does is give people an opportunity to listen and participate in it on a massive scale.

2. Have a plan – the best form of defense is continued preparation
Most of us invest in software and technology to protect the things we love the most – smoke detectors, burglar alarms and virus protection. If you have a brand or reputation that is worth saving then you need to invest in someone to develop a plan on how you might manage an attack on your reputation and to be able to respond intelligently 24/7. They need to live and breathe social media and have a true understanding of what the celebrity is trying to achieve.

3. Start NOW

Blog post by Rosie Sayers, Strategy Director at Reform

Google testing a redesigned search results page for US search users

May 7th, 2011

In the U.S. Google users are seeing a different look and feel to their search results page. This is the latest of several “tests” on Google.com – such as some users seeing “Google Voice Search” earlier this week.

New Google Search Result Test - May 2011

As seen above (click the image to see a full size version) – the search results page has more white space, a sort of muted colour tone, and PPC ads are not as obvious as before, since the colour of the PPC ads shaded much lighter.

Several users will notice the “cache” option has been removed from Google, much to the chagrin of SEO’s and users who want to check out a page before it loads in its entirety. However, they have replaced this from a visual standpoint, with “Google preview” – though this shows a page that one can hardly delve much information from.

Each result is also split by a dotted line, so that one can see where result one ends and two begins. And there is space between the result link and the snippet below. Overall, many people are guessing that this spacing below and above the title / link text may be a space for Google to later put their “+1″ button and various other social networking based aspects.

Last but not least, the results are not underlined anymore, which also has received mixed reactions. Unlike the recent layout changes on Google, this seems a bit more drastic. Several sites covered the story immediately with many users reacting to the change so shocked, that they thought it was a virus!

Let us know what you think.

Google updates: Panda/Farmer

April 21st, 2011

Over recent weeks the internet has been alive with commentary on Google’s recent changes to its search algorithms, labelled by some as “farmer” and others as “panda”. The changes that were initiated in the USA are now permeating Google sites worldwide with changes now evident on google.co.uk. Some of these changes are perceived to be having a devastating effect on websites who are seeing traffic levels fall by up to 90%.

The SEO implications

For a bit of background, “farmer” and “panda” are the same thing, explained in detail here – http://searchengineland.com/google-forecloses-on-content-farms-with-farmer-algorithm-update-66071 and http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-farms/ (Summary: “content farms” were the initial target, hence the name “farmer” while “panda” was Google’s code name for the very same update).  However, in the UK, it is often referred to as the latter.

The principal impact of the changes appears to be a downgrading of many of the most used article repositories, such as Ezine articles and Suite101, which has in turn had a knock-on effect on businesses that interact with these sites as part of their SEO strategy. For years, the SEO mantra has been ‘content is king’, which lead many sites to add as much templated content as possible to their site (and towards their site), often overlooking the quality of the source. This artificial inflation of a site’s amount of content now leaves them vulnerable to plummeting rankings and the associated ramifications.

Our take on the Panda update (Reform UK)

With the advent of the Panda update, we’ve seen a considerable shift in the type of sites being affected. Even those sites with significant brand authority have seen a large drop in visibility, resulting in a drop in traffic. For information sites this is problematic, but for e-commerce sites, this can be catastrophic.

The primary targeting has been towards uniform content on sites, such as articles that have been syndicated on sites which have no other content. However, it’s not just the sites that syndicate, it’s also their primary sources of content, the articles sites which have taken significant hits. Even for those sites that do not syndicate content, sites that rely solely on strategies like this for link building and that use templates for elements like product pages seem to be suffering as well.

Well known sites like Play.com have lost around 10% of their visibility and the associated level of traffic. This is possibly a very low level indicator that the real world weight of brands could be having less of an impact on their search rankings. There have also been a large number of well-regarded tech sites seeing significantly decreased rankings, such as Techworld & Techradar.

Our take on the Farmer / Panda update (Reform USA)

Names aside, all of these updates (Farmer, Panda, Caffeine, even Google Florida) are similar in many ways but from an SEO perspective it is important to understand that the changes will impact on a number of strategies.

Many websites rely on “tried and true” strategies and continue with them because they have brought positive results in the past.  In particular site owners have a had a penchant for allowing users to add content at will, which in turn helps make the site larger / more content rich and therefore more favourable to Google.

Other sites will automate content and templates to bulk up the site and catch keywords.  Another possibility is that they will see that a certain link strategy (whether ethical or not is not the question here for once) brings them good returns and stick with it.

However the recent changes to at Google suggest that while content may still be king, they are taking a much more qualitative view on the value of content and so webmasters and their SEO advises need to wise up to the changes.

How to counter the losses – 5 key points:

  1. Think long term strategy, not short term fixes
  2. Don’t keep using out-dated strategies
  3. Do your research thoroughly
  4. Constantly innovate in your optimization
  5. Audit your content

Reform has worked with a number of clients around the world developing long term and flexible strategies that maximise the benefit of existing content and infrastructure while providing an ability to move with the times.

Reform can also help you to move forwards with a balanced and ethical SEO approach that is in tune with your strategic goals in other marketing channels including profile building and social media.

Has Facebook killed the birthday card?

April 15th, 2011

Here’s a scenario…

It’s the morning of your birthday. You hear the post arrive through the door and rush out to gather up all the pretty pink, red, blue, green envelopes that are waiting for you on the door mat. Lovely cards picked out by friends and family who have been thoughtful enough to know your birthday is coming up, picked out a card with you in mind, and even found a stamp so it gets to you on the day of your birthday. The birthday card; a little indulgent treat to open while you enjoy your first cup of tea of the day (tea that presumably someone else has made for you, since it’s your birthday!).

But wait. This birthday morning there is but one card – from your mother of course – a utility bill and a bank statement. ‘Where are all my pretty envelopes?’ you cry at the departing postman who doesn’t even flinch as he walks away. He’s seen it all before.

So you chin up, walk it off like a brave soldier and head to work, where surely someone in your team will have remembered and perhaps even bought a cake. You’ve been dropping hints for days, so the odds look good. Turn on your PC, you have 87 new emails. How can that be right? You checked them last night at 9pm and it’s only 9am now! Sort by sender. 80 from Facebook. Facebook? That’s odd, you average about one interaction a day? You log in and see that everyone from your best friend, to your dentist, and of course your mother have posted on your wall ‘Happy birthday’… ‘Have a cracking day’… ‘Hope you have a wonderful birthday’. Ahhh that’s nice. People haven’t forgotten after all. Warm fuzzy feeling. Like.

It was one member of our team’s birthday this week and the day after her big day she recounted her tale, albeit in a slightly less Bridget Jones fashion than the one above, of having received a woeful lack of birthday cards. ‘Facebook has killed the birthday card’ she declared.

This launched us in to a conversation about people no longer feeling the need to remember birthdays as The Book of Dreams does it for them. They no longer feel the need to post a card as they can make a much more public declaration of well wishing on your wall. Where will this end, we wondered, will soon a private message on Facebook count for the same as a phone call? Does liking someone else’s birthday wishes count as having wished someone well yourself?

In short, no. This may seem shallow, and perhaps it is, but our feeling was that it’s all just a little bit too easy to say happy birthday to someone on Facebook. That’s not to say you shouldn’t do it, just that it shouldn’t replace actually thinking about people and planning to do something nice for them. Now, those that remember to send a card gain more brownie points than ever before (well done, mum).

Interestingly, our debate on the death of the birthday card took an unexpected turn the following day. That morning, two days after her birthday, my colleague received a handful of birthday cards through the post, all with the post mark dated on the day of her birthday. Our hypothesis – people saw on Facebook that it was her birthday, and rushed to get a card in the post asap.

So perhaps Facebook is actually the saviour of the birthday card?

Blog post by Penny Anderson, Consultant at Reform

Apple or Android? Coca Cola or Fizzy Drink?

April 11th, 2011

I can’t work out if I find flexibility or certainty more comforting. With the fight for democratic freedom raging in North Africa it is easy to feel that freedom of choice aka flexibility is what we really really want. The idea of being straight jacketed in an autocratic regime where there is no choice and you consciously and sub-consciously follow a predetermined path sounds very unappealing to the typical western democrat.

Yet in the most liberal of western societies where consumerism is championed and celebrated we are often quick to disregard the flexibility that our society allows and we opt for ‘choices’ that provide the most certainty. Supermarkets stack their shelves high and wide with a multitude of different products yet when we head up the fizzy drink aisle it is all too easy to grab the slab of Coca-Cola. Do we appreciate the fact that we had the opportunity to choose from 100 alternatives or do we tend to fall back on the ‘certainty’ of the product that we will consume.

The same debate prevails on the supply side. As a manufacturer or service provider should you organise yourself in a ‘walled garden’ (where for example the apps or the plug for your phone chargers only fit your phones) or should you be ‘open source’ (where the U in USB stands for universal)? If you visit a potential supplier’s website to establish the credentials for the service they are offering are you impressed or put off by the number of additional services that they purport to deliver?

The Brand marketer will always go for the closed shop certainty claiming businesses and consumers will always revert to type and if they can make their brand the ‘type’ that people revert to then they have done their job. “Nobody got fired for buying IBM” as they used to say. Scientists and statisticians will recount theories of natural laws that suggest people are intuitively creatures of habit and generally crave some certainty.

But we don’t all drive Ford cars, surf on Dell computers and support Manchester United. Indeed if a farmer planted the same crops in the same field year in year out his yields would collapse. Fields like people can have too much of a good thing. So whether we are looking at human psychology, business models or agricultural best practice it appears that variety may just be the spice of life.

We live in an ever changing world which suggests that we need more than certainty to thrive, but where a good brand is a lazy man’s saviour. Probably no right or wrong answer but something to ponder upon in the shower in the morning.

Blog post by James Kilpatrick, non-executive director at Reform.

Is Social Media Affecting Our ‘Real’ Lives?

March 25th, 2011

Often people moan a lot about the lack of privacy in our social media communication, particularly since Facebook and Twitter both make regular changes to their privacy settings. However, isn’t there’s another aspect that should be taken into account more often? That is, how those different platforms impact the lives we live away from the internet. As social media platforms have become more and more prevalent, there is almost peer pressure to join each and every one of the social platforms.

That peer pressure feels exactly the same as the one that typically gets us into trouble as children and leads to our mothers to say “If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?”. It feels almost as if we’re really disconnected if we’re not connected to the internet and checking in on Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare. The problem with all this connectivity is how vulnerable it leaves us ‘in real life’. We now have to moderate our behaviours on- and off-line to fit in with the image that we’re trying to portray to the world. The problems that this causes centre around the fact that we didn’t previously run the risk of baring ourselves and our lives to so many people at the same level.

Until the advent of social media, we’d have our close group of friends. Those are the friends we can tell almost everything to, the ones who attend our birthdays and console us after a breakup. Then we’d have acquaintances, the people that we go out for drinks with, invite along to house parties and see occasionally. There’s also the ‘work’ group that we socialise with at the pub on Fridays or see at company functions. Since the advent of social media, all these groups become equally privy to what’s going on in your life. Putting up a Facebook status that you’re hung-over after a night with your best friend won’t impress your boss, even if you’re at work that day.

An example is an acquaintance mentioning that no matter how much she wanted to share the photos of recent party she’d held, she couldn’t do it. The reason she held back was that there were friends on Facebook that hadn’t been invited due to one of those crowd dynamic issues that so often strike while planning a party. So in order to share the photos people wanted to see, she had to go through an entire process to only share photos with certain people so that no-one would get upset or offended at not being invited.  The emotional turmoil and feeling of dishonesty was overwhelming for them, and yet it wouldn’t have been present before social media.

Pre-social media, we could simply invite the people we wanted to see, and when photos were available, we’d simply take them with us and show those people who were interested. Now we have to sit and sweat about what we show people because all these different people have access to all of our activities. Facebook has introduced groups into which you can place people, but there is a need for better separation of the different groups into which everyone fits.

The easiest way to separate different groups is to either use different accounts or allocate different platforms to different groups. Typically the following allocation could be recommended:

Twitter: Acquaintances & Friends
Facebook: Close friends only, and potentially family
Linkedin: Anyone work relate, clients and colleagues alike

Horses for courses – or different social media for different sets of people.

Blog post by Juliette van Rooyen, Search Consultant at Reform

Google Instant Suggestions Misleading Users And Businesses Alike

March 23rd, 2011

This isn’t exactly recent news, and maybe more along the lines of criticism. But so many clients and people in the industry have referred to it that we had to take a closer look.

It has been six months since Google Instant officially became part of the default search results in the US (and since then in some other countries too), and actually there is an interesting transcript of a presentation at SMX in New York that touches base on this.

But that’s more of a side note. What I want to talk about here is that when people type in a query and see keyword or brand variations suggested, they think that these are the top terms people are querying based on the main term. For example, if you look for “Reform Digital”, Google will suggest “Reform Digital Limited” or “Reform Digital SEO” or “Reform Digital London”. Fair enough. Google Instant will often suggest up to five terms as you conduct your search, and they are often some of the top variations of the query; however that is not always the case and they don’t appear in any particular order.

A recent test, based on data from different clients and companies that we work with, as well as Google data, showed that the suggested terms were actually a selection of five key terms found in what Google considered to be the top ten queries around a term. From as long ago as 2006 you could go to a URL on which Google was testing what was then known as “Google Suggest”, where they used estimates of Google impressions (perhaps query estimates?), which differ by market. Google then took the top ten variations that it sees in terms of impressions and lists them out. Have a look at the following URL which we generated using the term “mobile phone” as an example, to see what we’re talking about http://www.google.co.uk/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=mobile%20phone (or http://www.google.com/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=mobile%20phone if you want to see the US variations). This kind of query can be done with any term to see what terms Google Suggest would return (ie first four or five listed on the page) and to see what the other contenders are (based on query totals next to most terms).

So what we saw is that Google picks the five search terms that it’s going to show via various parameters, but to have a decent chance of being listed amongst those five, you need to at least be in its list of the top ten (or know how to automate queries etc). In terms of timings, we saw that Google Instant’s suggestions don’t respond immediately to changes in impression volumes, there is some delay. When checking for AT&T following the announcement that they were buying T-Mobile at the weekend, it wasn’t until late on Monday that a T-Mobile variation appeared in the list of top ten key terms, and even then there was no “impression total” next to it (it’s the only keyword suggestion with no data on that above URL).

Or, for another example, for the term “Reform” (including the space, as if you were going to add another word), Google’s top ten list includes the term “Reform Digital”, and it actually now gets the most queries of the group. But as a newer addition to the list, it’s not one of the five being suggested when you search in Google proper.

So Google Suggest is definitely sensitive to a combination of historic data and trends, and, like everything else on Google, it’s subject to manipulation. Website owners have looked at getting users to query variations to make their business look cleaner, for example “Business Name scam” is a common suggestion. Tools such as Amazon Mechanical Turk – where users are paid very small amounts to do basic tasks such as “like” or tweet something – have also been used by sites in the past to try and manipulate the results, as have several other methods of pushing query data.

This issue comes into play when looking at brand reputation. What if one of the ten terms was some other negative comment about your company? How can we get a more positive variation up there in its place? Of course, if all five of Google’s suggestions were negative, you probably have other problems!

Blog post by Niall Madden, Search Director of Reform

Update: “Scam” variations of a keyword are now blacklisted in Google Instant – so… “Business Name scam” won’t reveal a drop down. Nor does it appear in the URL that lists the 10 keyword variations. However, some brand names still have the “scams” variation, for now.

The Oscar Prediction: Why We Were Wrong

March 9th, 2011

A couple weeks ago we did a short Oscar blog wondering if the new Oscar watch created by Google could accurately predict the Oscars. We took the data given by Google and localized it, limiting it to Los Angeles county. Our assumption was that voters who were preparing to vote during this time would go online and look at the film’s website or they would do some research on the film they were planning on voting for. We predicted, based on this data, that The Social Network would win. We were wrong.

Why were we wrong? Was it because The King’s Speech was a better movie? Is it because of Harvey Weinstein’s power and influence or is it because the Academy Awards are just political? The fault probably lied in our assumption. Most likely since Academy Awards voters get a free dvd of the films they didn’t need to search for the movie to watch them in the theatres and possibly they didn’t go to their computers at all for research.

But what does this prove? That while the data compiled for Google can show a trend in a specific area, it cannot determine a smaller base of voters on the assumption that they may go online. Was it a longshot that we could pick the winner? Yes, but it was fun and we’re sometimes geeks for data and we were intrigued. Although it didn’t go as well as our previous prediction, it was still an interesting experiment that had us on the edge of our seats for an otherwise drab awards show.

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »