Matt Cutts, Head of Web Spam for Google, announced this news on the “This Week in Google” podcast and Matt stated that about “2.3% of English queries” will be affected by this update. Compared to the three other updates of Penguin this is going to be the second biggest update.

Penguin was first released in April 2012 and affected around 3.1% of all search queries. After that there was an update which affected less the 0.1% of all queries which was released in May 2012. Then the last update since then was in October 2012 which affected 0.3% of all queries.

This news has resulted in people searching for Penguin 2.0 through Google and Twitter. With the term Penguin 2.0 being searched doubling in popularity from 7 days ago. Penguin 2.0 was also trending in the UK and in the US on the 23^rd of May 2013.

Matt Cutts later also tweeted out that you can submit spammy sites which Google missed with this update via a submit form. This is showing that Google have really only just started in their fight against spam in their search engine and is an ominous sign for those who are involved in link building techniques which go against the webmaster guidelines.

SEO, Social and PPC were the main themes of the two day advanced conference. With a wide range of topics & speakers from around the globe, the conference certainly didn’t disappoint.

The takeouts from the conference highlight just how much the industry has moved in the last year, luckily for us we’re on top of this already and are constantly working with clients to align strategies with these changes but there was still some key takeouts from some industry experts:

1.      Create great content to gain links, links should be earned

Gone are the days where all links were created equal, links now need to be earned through good content. How do you know if a link you create is a good link?! Ask yourselves these questions:

• Are you proud of the link?
• Does it give you traffic?
• Would it add value outside the search engines?
• Would people want to share it?

2.       Social and search strategies should be aligned

The impact of number one means that creating good content is no longer just a job for SEO’s. Content creation needs a strategy, which is fit for purpose for both your social media strategy and SEO approach. Every piece of content to different channels and users should serve a different purpose. Content marketing should follow these rules:

1. Know your customer
2. Be active on mobile
3. Be above the fold
4. Include social CTA’s
5. Produce content in the right time, place and to the right people
6. Don’t link to home page – use variety of landing pages
7. Use the right colours
8. Don’t over sell
9. No tiny / hidden messages
10. Stand out

3.       Segmentation and targeting is more important than ever

Okay, so the segmenting and targeting has always been important but in an ever changing industry (and world), it’s even more important to segment & target the right people with the right message. Not all users or customers behave in the same way, so your marketing activity should segment these different types so that you can target them in a different way. The data gathered from different sources (Google Analytics, Google Adwords, CRM etc.) should be used in the correct way to show user behavior and really shape your segmenting and targeting strategies. For example, do users on a mobile or tablet behave in the same way as people on a desktop? Use all the data you have to establish this and create strategies in line.

4.       Measure -> Learn -> Evolve -> Repeat

That’s what should be done in all marketing activities, whether that’s setting a new PPC campaign, building links or posting on Facebook. Lessons can be learnt from everything we do; from campaigns that don’t turn out as well as you hoped to even the most successful ones.

Measure – Analyse all the data available to you to draw conclusions

Learn – What does your analysis show? This will shape all your future activity

Evolve – Put into practice the lessons you have learnt

Repeat – Doing the above 3 things is great, but it should be a one-off so repeat, repeat and then repeat some more!

5.       Connect the offline world to the online in social media strategies

When creating a social media strategy it is sometimes easy to think about the individual channels (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinteret etc) and forget about the wider world. Even if that’s just by placing your companies Twitter handle in-store or creating blogger outreach details, the offline world should be linked to your social media strategy. Take Paddy Power for example, they’ve built there TV campaigns purely around customer interactions within social media channels.

Thanks for having us Ion Search, see you next year… when no doubt things will have changed even more!

According to Google the revamp is designed improve the user experience and to help marketers reach consumers with relevant ads that reflect search intent as well as contextual factors such as device, location and time of day, all from a simplified campaign structure.  The official line is that advertisers will no longer need to spend time creating duplicate campaigns targeting the same keywords across desktop, tablet, mobile, and various locations. Instead the new system will enable advertisers to run unified campaigns with multiple dimensions, setting bid multipliers at campaign level, for example to increase the focus on mobile, or to bid higher when a consumer is searching from close to a store location. Alongside this, enhanced reporting capabilities should enable more intelligent attribution across devices, helping to demonstrate the value of paid search across multiple touch points.

Many of the new features are welcome and perhaps inevitable additions to the AdWords system, especially considering the growing complexity of the search landscape over recent years following the rapid increase in smartphone and tablet penetration.  At Fusion Unlimited, our paid search teams have become adept at creating highly segmented campaigns, splitting out target audiences by device type, location, time of day and so on. The new features can potentially offer a smarter way to manage this. However there will inevitably be a lot of work involved in the transition and it will be crucial to monitor the effects of the changes closely and make full use of the new targeting options to maintain an acceptable return on investment.

From a more cautious perspective, it is well known that Google has been constantly under pressure from investors to increase revenues from mobile. Despite the rapid growth of searches on mobile devices, the paid search market has lagged behind and average cost-per-click is still lower on mobile than on desktop. The slow take up of mobile advertising has often been for understandable business reasons – there is little benefit to ramping up paid search budgets and driving traffic to sites that are not optimised for mobile and therefore much less likely to convert. This trend has benefited the early adopters who have a developed a forward thinking mobile strategy, but it hasn’t helped Google’s revenue targets. It can be argued that the AdWords changes are a central part of Google’s strategy to ‘nudge’ reluctant advertisers onto mobile. The immediate result will be increased competition on mobile and higher CPC’s for advertisers.

Another concern is the removal of the ability to target tablet devices separately. Smart advertisers understand that consumer behaviour varies across devices, for example the generally accepted view in the past has been that tablet users, particularly iOS users, are more affluent and more likely to convert with higher average order values. As a result some advertisers have benefited from creating separate campaigns to maximise traffic from tablet users. This will no longer be an option under the new system.

The full implications of AdWords Enhanced Campaigns will take time to become clear and we’ll continue to explore the details on the Fusion Unlimited blog over the coming weeks. But one thing is certain, with the pending overhaul of targeting and reporting options on AdWords alongside the imminent changes to Google Shopping, 2013 is set to be another rollercoaster year for paid search.

Facebook this month have started deleting thousands of fake user accounts and “fake likes” on the social network. Pagedata found that some of the biggest changes were for Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker page losing more than 96,000 likes whilst Lady Gaga and Rihanna also lost a massive amount of likes.

This has come after Facebook announcing the plans to attack fake account in a bid to guarantee authenticity across the site. Facebook stated ”These newly improved automated efforts will remove those Likes gained by malware, compromised accounts, deceived users, or purchased bulk Likes” and they are backing up there words with the latest findings.

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iOS 6 – Maps and Yelp integration

The iPhone 5 was released this month. There was the normal fanfare with the people queuing all over the world in order to be the first to get their hands on the newest must have device. However it wasn’t all brilliant for Apple this time around as the new maps system was found by many users to be filled with flaws you wouldn’t expect from an Apple product. This even was stated by Tim Cook who took the unusual step of writing an apology for the maps software.

However with iOS 6, released this month, Yelp’s business reviews are now built in to the Apple Maps experience and these are now instantly accessible to iOS users. This will be a big boost for the company with now more companies paying attention to their rating score on Yelp. The Yelp integration, like most of the Maps, isn’t flawless with some businesses reporting that the business information is years out of date.

(Source)

Exact Match Domains Update

Matt Cutts, head of search spam at Google, took to twitter to announce officially that Google are looking to penalise low quality exact match domains. Matt explained in two tweets where he said

This is another move by Google to try to remove spam from the top of the search rankings and will not affect companies who partake in white hat ethical link building. This was updated with another refresh by Google simultaneously with the details of this other Google update being unknown at this time.

(Source)

Google Panda 3.9.2 + 20

Google confirmed that on September the 18^th they updated their Panda algorithm once again. This latest update of the Panda Algorithm has been branded Panda 3.9.2 and was described as a moderate change but not on par with other larger scale updates.

Then on the 28^th of September, Google announced that they released another Panda algorithm update. This was a fairly major update that impacted 2.4% of all English search queries. Matt Cutts released a statement saying that the roll out will last for 3-4 days and after that the update should impact enough on English queries that “a regular user may notice”.

(Source)

Google merges Insights with Trends

Google Insights and Google Trends have combined to become one tool in September. The merge does make sense as both essentially looked at the popularity of keywords and searches. Google Trends is the more mainstream of the two tools and therefore that is the name Google have chosen to keep which does make sense.

(Source)

iOS 6 change brings fault in Analytics

A change made by Apple has resulted mobile traffic where users using Google on Safari on iOS 6 devices is coming through as direct traffic rather than organic traffic in Google Analytics. Any user who is searching for anything through the safari search bar on an iOS 6 mobile device is now being sent through a Google SSL(secure sockets layer) search and this isn’t being seen through analytics and is therefore not being tracked. Which means when a user searches for a website and goes on they are seen as direct traffic instead of organic traffic.

(Source)

Twitter opens itself up to search engines

A change in the Twitter robots.txt file has made it that search engines are now able to crawl through the millions of twitter pages. Twitter is now making it searchable for its trends but is not making the users, photos or videos on the website crawlable. Twitter have released a statement saying it has made this decision to make finding popular topics much more easier, such as the Olympics.

It is interesting to see the next move by the search engines as it is not guaranteed that search engines will crawl the data available to them from twitter as Google before has stated that they do not want search results to be ranking in Google and that is what Twitter is giving them albeit maybe relevant user created search pages. Google and Twitter have had a rocky past with an agreement which ended in July 2011 which killed the real-time search from the Google SERP page.

(Source)

Google turned 14

Last, but certainly not least, Google.com celebrated its 14^th birthday this month.  We at Fusion Unlimited would like to congratulate Google on reaching this impressive feat and wish it all the best in its future endeavours.

(Source)

The key benefits of this feature are that it stays at the top regardless of if you click onto one of those links. This is so you can search for different but linked topics quickly and easily without the need to re-amend the search. It’s also very clever in the way it links things to create the links, if you search for a lower league footballer you will get players who are at the same level or with some legitimate link to the person originally linked to. The knowledge graph is quickly becoming very powerful in providing the user with useful information in an easy to view, visually appealing way.

Facebook newsfeed space is valuable, but it is also highly limited. Every minute there are around 500,000 comments, 300,000 status updates and 150,000 photos uploaded to the social media site. With all this content flying around, Facebook needs to filter out the less interesting bits and give users relevant content they will enjoy seeing and ultimately share!

This is where the EdgeRank algorithm comes in…

EdgeRank at its simplest is a quality score given to Facebook pages based on 3 things:

Affinity – How frequent is the relationship between a user and a page

Weight – How strong is the interaction (comments are better than likes)

Time Decay – How relevant is the post, over time it becomes less relevant as it becomes old

In essence, if your posts gain a low EdgeRank, future ones are less likely to be seen.

What is a Promoted Post

Promoted Posts is a feature designed to increase visibility of posts to your audience. It is not to say that without promoting, nobody can see your message but more people will see it if it is promoted.

 Reach – On average, a page’s updates will only be seen by around 15% of the audience; slightly higher if the group is well managed, but still a limited proportion.  Sadly this doesn’t mean that by posting 7 times a day 100% of your audience is reached, it is likely to be the same users reached, and so this spam will only annoy them and result in lost fans.

Cost – promoted posts are relatively cheap. We have seen some of our clients achieving a CPC (cost per click) of just 3 pence. From these clicks and actions we also see a lot of social impressions and engagement which is brilliant for any campaign. However, the cost really depends on how strong your message is, where you target it and why you are doing it.

Best Practice

There are multiple uses for this feature but here are a few to get your creative juices flowing:

Offers and sales – If you have a big sale on, why not ensure all your fans can see it, these people already like your brand so they will want to know!

Events – What better way to spread word of your events, especially when the social impressions kick in and friends of fans start talking about what’s happening.

Rejuvenating a page – Is your reach below what it should be for the effort you are putting in? Try promoting your best content, getting some engagement on it and future posts should see better returns.

Got any good ideas of how to use Promoted Posts? Then please tweet us @fusionunlimited let us know.

Or contact us directly to learn more about the new features by calling Mark Curtis on: 0113 226 2202

If you search for the Olympics on the right hand side of the page you can see an informative sidebar which displays information such as places to watch online, the medal table, official Google+ posts from London 2012 and the schedule for each day in the Olympics.Google has also embraced the Olympic spirit by adding some neat features to their search engine result page.

Also if you type in an event which is taking place in the Olympics with the words London 2012 the sidebar will appear in a similar style but with information all tailored to that sport. Feel free to try it out today!

We were able to advise the company on the reasons why and let them understand exactly how to rectify the problem. We therefore wanted to share our insights with you on the latest updates to Google algorithms.

If you’d like to find out more about how we can help with your site rankings and increase online orders, or reverse any drops in natural rankings and traffic, then get in touch so we can give you an audit of current online marketing activity.

Background on Google Panda

The Panda algorithm was first introduced by Google in February 2011, with the intention of penalising sites with low quality, thin content, and in their place, ranking sites with high quality useful content. Panda is a manual algorithm, so instead of updating continually, Google make tweaks to the algorithm and roll them out at intervals.

The nature of the Panda algorithm means that if even a portion of content is deemed low quality, it can pull rankings for all pages in your site down

Diagnosis

By checking our internal records of all Google algorithm updates and cross referencing with the site’s analytics, we identified that the site had fallen victim to the Panda 3.4 update on March 23rd.

We analysed “before and after” Google traffic levels around the penalty date to determine content that had gained and lost traffic.

We found that whilst some generic, boilerplate content had been impacted severely (such as category pages), unique content such as blogs and articles had benefitted.

Action

• We were able to rewrite unique, quality content for dozens of category pages.
• We blocked low quality content from being indexed in the short term, whilst consequentially having low impact on traffic levels.
• We carried out a site review and made recommendations to make the site and page templates more optimal.

Recovery

• Google’s Panda 3.8 update occurred on 25th June
• Upon the update, natural traffic increased 112% following the algorithm update
• The site regained over 70 first page rankings and improved visibility for 210 keywords

Have you been hit by a Google algorithm update and need assistance to turn your fortunes around? We can help, so please get in touch with Mark Curtis on (0113) 2262202.

Searchers will now be able to access the new pages from within search results, Google Maps or direct from their Google+ page via a newly added tab.

Google have done away with the old 5 star scoring system and added 2 separate scoring systems; an individual user score which is on a 0-3 scoring scale and an average user score which is an average of the individual scores multiplied by 10, meaning average score is on a 0-30 scale.

There are other expected changes such as people in your circles showing up next to their reviews and a new search filter to find reviews and recommendations from your circles. The biggest and most noteworthy change is the indexing of these new pages, unlike the Google Places pages these will be indexed meaning a greater SEO benefit.

Google Places users needn’t be alarmed just yet as nothing on the back end is changing, although I’m sure there are plans to change this soon. So far it appears the Google+ Local pages and the original Places pages are both showing but as the update rolls out you will find your Places pages will begin to disappear and be fully replaced by the new G+ versions.

Google+ Local should now get a lot more exposure and greater engagement but only time will tell, what we can expect is further integrations and I think it’s safe to say Google+ isn’t going anywhere and it’s time to take note!

You can watch a rundown on ways a user can interact with your new Google+ Local pages in the following short video

It’s very interesting that Google have ran with this update so aggressively; usually restricting updates to the US (.com) for testing before rolling out an update to the rest of the world. I guess the ghost town is getting desperate :)

The Insider’s Digital & Technology Awards celebrates the region’s most innovative of online businesses.

The judges chose Fusion Unlimited as the overall winner in the social media category because of our strategic approach across multiple platforms, using;

• Facebook commerce integration with an existing mobile app competition
• Twitter discount voucher rewards
• YouTube advertising

The Judges said “Fusion took full advantage of existing technology to help cut costs for the client, with social media at the very heart of the campaign.”

By adapting the campaign message and content management to suit different social channels, we’ve ensured the communication was inclusive and targeted to the most loyal and active online communities. Which ultimately has lead to an increase in brand awareness and driven a measurable increase in sales.

We also worked with our inhouse web development partner, MadeByPi, to design and build the social media applications to help us run competitions and track the results to improve performance. MadeByPi were also successful in the Yorkshire Digital Awards, picking up the award for ‘Best Web Design Team’.