Category Archives: Online Marketing News

New Rules for Domain WHOIS Contact Verification

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stop-domain-suspension

New rules from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) have come into place regarding verification of WHOIS data on some domain extensions.

These rules covered under the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) mean that registrars take reasonable steps to investigate and correct inaccurate Whois data.

How does the RAA affect my domain?

If you hold a domain with one of the extensions listed below you will need to verify your WHOIS contact details or risk having your domain suspended until you verify your details. This would cause your website, email and any other services associated with this domain to go down.

How can I prepare for this?

Ensuring your WHOIS contact email address is up to date, as this is how you’ll be contacted to verify your WHOIS data.

You should be able to view and change your WHOIS contact details by logging into your domain registrar control panel.

You can also see your current WHOIS contact details at http://who.is by searching for your domain name.
NOTE: If you have privacy protection enabled on your domain you won’t be able to see your contact details here.

Affected Domain Extensions:

  • .aero
  • .asia
  • .biz
  • .cat
  • .com
  • .coop
  • .info
  • .jobs
  • .mobi
  • .museum
  • .name
  • .net
  • .org
  • .pro
  • .tel
  • .travel

New Nav Bar Layout For Google SERP’s

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Too Long Google Sidbar Recieved Complains from Users earlier this year

Too Long To Cope With New Features - Google Side Bar Navigation

Earlier this month we spot Google again started testing new possible update to SERPs (Search Engines Result Pages) usability and structure. As previously this testing is not yet visible to everyone but we can perhaps expect it to be visible across all Googles within next few weeks (possibly with some modifications).
Switching Navigation from Left hand side bar to the top bar may suggest several things:
1) Google follows trends and decided to simplify some elements of navigation (current options for search criteria has been summarised in “Search Tools” button and they allow to tick options.
2) More products (search options) which popped up earlier this year created situation where side bar navigation become too long and not that useful. When you tried to open tab “More” and “Show Search Tools” you would need monitor with more then 1000px height res to see all options. “Applications” become for good part of the main navigation – obviously they create revenue for company and long awaited Flight Search looks like made its way from Beta to full release (maybe not yet as Error 500 is not what you expect from link on main Google Nav Bar :-( see more of this story here.

3) left hand side bar is now ready for new task – empty and wide enough to generate some revenue can be easily used for advertising or more push of google products like Chrom or G+ results also it is another space which could be used by AdWords let see.
G+ results make a lot of sense in this position as we have seen in the past them being on right hnd side where briefly they were replacing AdWords for some ad free but popular search terms.

The whole exercise with new layout testing suggests Google similar to other giants struggles with navigational expansion. These changes are made just few weeks after Amazon introduced their new sliding expandable navigation. All these companies need to deal with several layers of navigation from User specific/Account functions navigation through Products/Services Navigation and Functional/options navigation this creates a lot of navbars and buttons and the last thing they want to do is overcomplicated layouts. Perhaps we will see soon some ground braking propositions to keep all this functionality in place but at this same time to create some standardise systems to keep users happy.

One of these recent attempts to improve experience on multi level navigation we can see below:

 

In the past we also struggled with these type of navigations but we made good progress few years ago while we developed http://www.surrey-online.co.uk/ and Top-Content based websites .

 

New Functionality on Google Navigation Bar in SERPs – Flights Serch – Cool but with 500 Error!

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We just checked new Top Nav Bar setup from Google and we spot several times “Error 500″ on return of the flights page. Google Flights is a quite new product from Google which was available online as beta release from 2011 but it did not made to the main search options up to earlier this year. It was mostly due to commercial and technical problems. It looks like despite recent updates which introduced more travel products within Google Flights some technical glitches are still there.

Unfortunately we discovered Google servers respond to some browsers with http Error 500 which of course is not what you expect when you browse one of the most popular services on internet. We checked if this was temporary issue and we logged in from different IP addresses over few hours to assure what we have seen is not temporary situation. Unfortunately Error was repeated with no obvious rule behind its appearance.
I can imagine once this is completed and with minimal Errors it will become our favourite tool unless it will share its faith with couple of other abandoned Google projects. As we can remember this is  what happened last year to Property Search.
Google Flights still needs some work to do - Error 500 on some browsers

Which is better SMX London or SES London?

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Early Bird offers for two Search Engines London conference and training events are about to expire today.

SES London takes place later this month SMX London in mid May.

We ask simple question:

Which Search Engine Conference and Training event is better?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

Maybe these two are so different we should visit both even you have tight budget?

Any Comments?

New Google Privacy Policy 2012 (60 in 1)

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Google managed to update it’s Privacy Policy model today. This is what you can come across when you login to Google from today (if actioned this message will disappear)

New Google Privacy Policy

GoogleNet is almost here?

Over the years company took over a lot of businesses many with existing customers. Online services from YouTube, DoubleClick to Feedburner and many more had there own set of legal documents in place. During last 12 months we can see extra effort in bringing all these services in to one manageable system. This of course is not very smooth operation and Google managed to upset few people and institutions in the process. However difficult gradually whether we like it or not we are closer to Googlenet then ever before.
Google claims is managing currently over 60 privacy policies and is willing to replace them from 01/03/2012 with one which will serve everything from searching to sharing and browsing (You can read new policy here). Of course we can imagine all this is to do with cutting budget measures but we must mention recent advance of https in Google’s infrastructure as one of the elements which will show interesting results in the near future especially for online marketers.  From beta version and english based only service Google over ssl is now spreading to other languages

Encrypted search available on new regional domains. Google now offers encrypted search by default on google.com for signed-in users, but it’s not the default on our other regional domains (eg: google.fr for France). Now users in the UK, Germany and France can opt in to encrypted search by navigating directly to an SSL version of Google Search on their respective regional domains: https://www.google.co.uk, https://www.google.de andhttps://www.google.fr. [more about Jan 2012 Google update here]

We can soon expect many comments from legal and from technical gurus about one Privacy Policy changes from Google.

There are no shocking statements here but we must remember this page https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/ is perhaps now guarding Privacy of the biggest human database in the world!

 

Google Algorithm Changes 2012 – Results :-o

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It always makes me wonder how some companies perform and I’m jealous when I see all their operations are glossy and smooth. If I forgot to email customer or project schedule is off by few days I blame myself and feel low. I think how on Earth others are able to be always 100% on the highest level of performance – silly me – of course they not! I should learn this already after 14 years in business but somehow I fall in to this same trap over and over again. Recent well commented Google search improvement post get my extra attention today from end user point of view.

Days like today just give me this extra confidence schedules, implementation dates and always growing lists to do is not only my problem. Last week Google announced latest updates to their algorithm:

More relevant sitelinks. [launch codename “concepts”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We improved our algorithm for picking sitelinks. The result is more relevant sitelinks; for example, we may show sitelinks specific to your metropolitan region, which you can control with your location setting.

All great, smooth I love this open cards policy where they work hard on communication with users and developers to let you understand what they completed, worked on. On official search blog they say “We improved”. On Google UK I see:

of course as you can see I was so shocked I visited landing page. “Good” – I think viagra content is not there

a bit of hesitation and Ivisited cached version. Oh, Noooo! 08/01/2012

Is there, is official – black-hat trick works and on I assume improved sitelinks algorithm too!!!

From one site I’m frustrated to see legitimate very resourceful website with UNESCO logo on explored by spammers. This is charity based organisation – What is wrong with you people? – Disgusting on multiple levels.

On the other hand on the back of my mind I remind myself my today’s concern how all this glossy and 100% confident PR bit from Google Search Blog is far from reality- good remainder – even for huge company with lots of cash and human resources each day list to do gets longer and job is far from being completed!

Does Site Links update needs another update? How about scaning sitelinks content on Google servers before serving them to the end user?

Do you know black-hat technique used on ihcn.in? Comments always welcome.  Maybe Matt Cutts or someone from quality search will post here one day ;-)? Never mind I am going back to work my list to do get longer and longer!

 

New Webmaster Tools Layout

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Yesterday Google announced on their Webmaster Central Blog that a new Webmaster Tool Homepage layout was available for accounts that have less than 100 sites (verified or unverified).

New Google Webmaster Tools layout

The new layout shows users a brief health check for every site on their account as well as a small screenshot of the homepage.

There are currently only 3 issues reported:

  1. Malware detected on the site
  2. Whether any important pages have been removed by the URL removal tool.
  3. Whether any important pages have been blocked by the robots.txt file.
Right now, that’s not really much, but it leaves a lot of room to expand. Sowing any HTML or crawl errors could be helpful, or just have a small overview of no. of search queries, clicks and links if there are no errors to report.

Add Images to Tweets with Ease Using New Twitter Feature

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Twitter image upload share photos on Twitter camera icon

Last week Twitter released a new feature allowing ou to upload images to your tweets easily.

You can upload any image that’s up to 3MB in size. It will then appear as a link in your timeline and when the tweet is clicked it displays the image in the details pane.

The images themselves will be uploaded to twitter.com but they will be hosted on photobucket.

Don’t worry if you want to use services like Flickr, Twitpic or yFrog they’re still supported by Twitter.

For more information about this new feature check out Twitter’s Documentation on Image Uploads.

Firefox starts rapid releases! (Surprise Firefox 5.0 is Here!)

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Firefox 5.0 Android Do Not Track Feature Today I got Firefox 5.0! You may remember about 2 and a half months ago every one got excited about Firefox 4.0, well now Mozilla has decided instead of having small updates (Firefox 3 reached version 3.6.18) they’re going to have rapid releases of whole new versions.

This may seem like a strange move, but it is probably so their browser appears new and fresh, Chrome’s newest stable release is version 12 and it’s only been around for 3 years! Some users may be led to believe that the version number dictates the usability and level of functionality that a browser provides (that would mean IE6 is better than FF3, 4, and 5 *shudder*). So Firefox is just trying to look cool compared to all the big number browsers out there.

According to their blog Firefox 5 “ includes more than 1,000 improvements and performance enhancements”.One of the main new feature Mozilla is bragging about is built in “Do not Track” feature that is now available on their new Android release. They are now the only browser that offers a “Do not Track” feature across multiple platforms.

Simply FF5 is nothing more than another chapter in “BROWSER WARS” EPISODE 2011