We’ve had a really good year so far at Branded3 and are looking for at least one/two experienced SEO consultants to join our Leeds office. I don’t want to make this post sound too much like a job advert because I’m sure most of you know the skills and qualities that an SEO consultant needs to have.

You will be working with some of the leading brands in the UK (our client list is missing some of the best accounts we have due to NDA’s) and get to work in one of the fastest growing natural search agencies in the UK.

We’re looking to move quite quickly once we find the right person so please send an email to patrick @ branded3.com and we can discuss the role further.

When you download the Google Toolbar and select the “enhanced features” option you are giving consent for Google to monitor and log all the web pages you visit. That’s always been fairly clear but apparently Google is being a bit more sneaky – the toolbar will continue to track your visitors even after you disable it.

Pretty clever way for Google to get data.

Another story this morning shows graphically how Google is reducing the share of money they give to AdSense publishers. Not a good day for Google.

This isn’t a post predicting what’s going on for the rest of the year, more a post talking about what’s been a bit of a whirlwind year already and we’re only 22 days into it.

I don’t normally talk too much on Blogstorm about the stuff going on at Branded3 because I hate self promotional blogs but today I wanted to make an exception just to explain why there are so few posts going up on Blogstorm at the moment, even though it has a shiny new design.

The initial reason for slow posting was my 3 week Christmas holiday but since then business is so busy the blog has taken somewhat of a back seat. We redeveloped our website in December and that combined with a lot of people wanting to revamp their marketing campaigns in the New Year has resulted in an influx of enquiries and a number of really great new clients coming on board.

Our team at Branded3 is up to 40 people now (across the 2 offices) and growing by the week which is great to see, we’d love to have another 10 people by the end of the year. With the number of search queries up a staggering 46% year on year (35% in the UK) we’re in the middle of what we’re hoping will be a big year for the industry.

Google Local Business Listings are either a fantastic opportunity or a really annoying barrier stopping a site in 4th place from getting any traffic.

For example when Google displays a map for the query mobile phones it’s annoying for the poor site in 4th place because they get a massive drop in traffic but it’s also not an opportunity really because most people are not looking for a local phone shop they want a national online retailer.

If you are lucky enough to be in an industry where local search matters then 2010 could be HUGE for you.
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For affiliates concerned that their hard work will be wasted by ‘leaky tracking’ of offline conversions, Jonathan Treiber’s offline tracking panel at Affiliate Summit East provided hope for a more accountable tomorrow. (I know, we’re already at Affiliate Summit West – the technology is still new and the tips Jon shared still valuable, so bite me .)
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Google is one of the most trusted services in the world and when it tells me that my spellings are wrong I normally blindly accept the correction like most of the UK population. The problem is that Google is a US company and they have a different way of spelling lots of words.

Try searching for marginalisation or search engine optimisation and you can see that Google isn’t just offering a correction they are displaying search results for the Americanised search term rather than the English one. Totally unacceptable.

If Google continues to correct our spellings how long before people start to become Americanised?

Depending on whether you believe Google or the fake click detection companies click fraud is big business. Detecting it is impossible for small advertisiers and it’s now being made even harder for even larger companies thanks to a new scam involving spyware.

Traditionally fake clicks were very costly to the merchant because the traffic wasn’t real and therefore didn’t convert. The new spyware scam infects a persons PC and when they are about to visit a popular ecommerce site the system triggers a fake click and sends the user though the tracking link to the site where they carry on and make a purchase. Clever stuff.

Below are the details via Ben Edelman who uncovered the system.

I’ve repeatedly reported improper placements of Google ads. In most of my write-ups, the impropriety occurs in ad placement — Google PPC ads shown in spyware popups), in typosquatting sites, or in improperly-installed and/or deceptive toolbars. This article is different: Here, the impropriety includes a fake click — click fraud — charging an advertiser for a PPC click, when in fact the user never actually clicked.

But this is no ordinary click fraud. Here, spyware on a user’s PC monitors the user’s browsing to determine the user’s likely purchase intent. Then the spyware fakes a click on a Google PPC ad promoting the exact merchant the user was already visiting. If the user proceeds to make a purchase — reasonably likely for a user already intentionally requesting the merchant’s site — the merchant will naturally credit Google for the sale. Furthermore, a standard ad optimization strategy will lead the merchant to increase its Google PPC bid for this keyword on the reasonable (albeit mistaken) view that Google is successfully finding new customers. But in fact Google and its partners are merely taking credit for customers the merchant had already reached by other methods.

Google is clearly going for some kind of record with product launches this quarter. Today we see them extending support for the rel=canonical tag across two different domains as well as adding sentiment analysis to reviews in Google Local.

I don’t see any situations where a cross domain rel=canonical tag would be the right thing to use but here is what Google has to say:
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The SEO industry has always been hard to follow but the last few months/years have seen unprecedented changes to the results being displayed. Ever since universal search catapulted videos and local business listings in front of searchers there has been too many different mediums for most people to understand.

During the last 70 days Google has launched no less than 38 new search products from social search to real time search and each one has a different algorithm and requires different optimisation techniques.

According to The Telegraph & Marissa Mayer the next big breakout area for Google is going to be language.

“Imagine what it would be like if there was a tool built into the search engine which translated my search query into every language and then searched the entire world’s websites,” she says. “And then invoked the translation software a second and third time – to not only then present the results in your native language, but then translated those sites in full when you clicked through.”

Right now if you type a search query into Google in English, the servers crawl only English-language sites and deliver only English-language results. But this will change and Google are working on it.

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