SEO, Website Content Optimization
& Software Development

We were surprised yesterday to receive a letter entitled “Notice of class Action Settlement.  It appears that some time in the past 10 years, (and it will now be nearly 10 years ago) we may have purchased text pay per click advertising on go to.com which then became overture.com and later Yahoo!. A settlement has been entered into by parties in action called “In re Yahoo litigation”.  We are informed that a class has been certified in the action and also of the terms of settlement.

We were very puzzled to receive this a class action - taking place against a company we have rarely had any dealings with directly, also in a different country to us, and relating to a time long ago.  Nevertheless, there are former Yahoo! (overture etc) pay per click search advertising customers who brought this class action back in 2006, alleging that the “Sponsored Search” and “Content Match” products provided by Yahoo! (overture etc) were in breach of contract because adverts were also displayed in spyware, domain name parking sites, sites are available under common misspellings known as “typo squatting” sites amongst other things. This was seen as unfair business practice. Read the rest of this entry »

Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt recently gave an interview at Gartner’s Expo in Orlando, USA. In front of thousands of IT Directors Schmidt outlined his vision of exactly how he thinks the internet will look in 5 years time.

To most people, 5 years may not seem like a very long time but in technology terms it is an eon. In 5 years time computers (and other technology devices) will likely be much more powerful with more than quadruple the power of today, according to Moore’s Law.

Moore’s Law describes long-term trends in computer power and (so far accurately) predicts that the number of transistors  that can be placed on an intergrated circuit board will double every 2 years. This means that processor power, memory and even digital camera capability doubles every 2 years. Read the rest of this entry »

Currently, there is a lot of consternation amongst local IT businesses here in Lancaster.  In fact, they are extremely angry.  They have realised that the local university is actually in direct competition with them. The programme is called ISIS and it offers help to businesses for software development, websites and web-based applications, amongst other things. http://www.infolab21.lancs.ac.uk/business/isis/

Clearly, as businesses, we have competitors and competition from many places.  So one more competitor, why worry?

Well, in this case, the anger of the local digital and IT business community has been awoken due to two key factors.  Firstly, the university has a high profile in the local business community, has worked in conjunction with local IT businesses as a facilitator for many years and has benefited from funding with a clear remit to involve local businesses in its IT strategy.  For companies previously involved with the University they see this as a betrayal. Read the rest of this entry »

In a landmark move, internet regulator ICANN has approved the use of non-Latin characters in top-level domains, with the first expected to appear some time next year.

Genuine Arabic, Chinese and Cyrillic domains will now become possible rather than the imperfect system of internationalized domains (IDNA) relying on character conversion which has already been in limited use.

Given the global nature of the internet, the real question is What took them so long?

Read the rest of this entry »

A piece of internet history will be consigned to the Recycle Bin in the sky today as Yahoo delete the GeoCities web hosting network. Although long-since defunct, GeoCities was outrageously popular in the late 90s and was synonymous with amateur websites, playing a significant part in the democratisation of the internet.

Established in 1995, GeoCities allowed users to set up free websites within its online communities or “neighborhoods”. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a lot of talk at the moment about a new music service Google will be launching soon, but little is actually known at this stage about the finer details of what they have been developing.

The original belief that Google would be serving and retailing music themselves has been forgotten, and the general idea now is that they will be providing an enhanced music search incorporating streamed recordings into the search results.

Google have reportedly teamed up with Lala and iLike who will be providing the streaming, and will also be retailing the songs. Read the rest of this entry »

Google PageRank (or at least the visible Toolbar representation we see in our browsers) has long been on borrowed time. Although Toolbar PageRank (PR) is still with us, a report by Search Engine Roundtable late last week confirmed that PageRank values have indeed been removed from Webmaster Tools.

Google has been threatening to take away the already crippled link-based importance indicator (Toolbar PR scores are purposefully outdated and often unavailable) since at least 2007, arguing that they are a distraction for webmasters and fuel the link buying industry.

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” explained Google’s Susan Moskwa, adding “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.” Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t already noticed for yourself, Google UK’s results have been pretty poor of late. Since June 2009, around the time of Vince update, the UK results have featured significant numbers of non-UK websites.

In amongst the regular co.uk and UK .com sites, those from other English-language websites like Australia, South Africa, Canada and (most frequently) the United States have been appearing. Even the odd Italian one has crept in.

Although websites from outside the UK can be relevant to local users, more often than not these sites are worse than useless. Not only are they usually completely irrelevant to UK users, their presence prevents the sites that are relevant from being found. Read the rest of this entry »

The BBC today reported positive news as Chinese official export figures for the previous month (Sep 2009) are said to indicate that the economies in the rest of the world are recovering. This appears to be good news for global economies, but there is also another trend which in the longer term could well have benefits for those in the West who get in a position to take advantage.

One of our senior managers from our China office is in the UK at the moment. One of her immediate observations to us, on this first visit in three years, is that things now seem comparatively “cheap” in comparison to how she remembers last time. The comment was made after a shopping trip to Asda. It’s likely indicative of how prices in China have increased as well as current exchange rates working in her favour.

As a company with a long established Chinese office branch, we have experienced wage inflation, certainly amongst the white collar educated staff which our business tends to employ. Recent valuations of the pound has also made purchasing in China seem more expensive for UK companies, as the Renminbi (pegged to the U.S. dollar) has risen in value. It is nevertheless a surprise to hear such a comment, especially as we have considered China a cheap place to do business for so long. Read the rest of this entry »

China is the single largest new Internet market we’re likely to see emerge in our lifetime, so why are so many companies so slow to gain an early advantage?  The answer seems to be the perennial, “…we’re aware that there are questions we should be asking, but we don’t know what they are….”  So, let’s start on just a few of the basics….

“Will the Chinese user feel comfortable using my site?”

Not only do you need to make a great job of translation, but are you adapting your Chinese website to fit the culture too?

Ensure that a Chinese person finding your site shouldn’t have to think about credibility, usability, language, and most important of all, trust – it needs to speak their language in every way. Read the rest of this entry »