Last Week in Search – Part 6
Early in the week, Google was ordered by a Brisbane court to hand over Adsense user data on jamiemcintyreexposed.com as a defamation case against the anonymous website heats up. With all other leads exhausted, Jamie McIntyre’s lawyers went after Google’s user data after it was found that Google had delivered ads via Adsense on the site. While the ruling is a landmark in user data protection, we’re not so sure about whether Google would even have all that much to go on after looking at what is needed to create an Adsense account. Contrary to what some news sites are reporting, this ruling won’t open a floodgate of court ordered Google user data as anonymous sites will simply avoid implementing Adsense on their sites. It’s a moral win for McIntyre but what he’ll get for his trouble won’t be much.
We finally took Facebook’s new iPad app for a spin on Tuesday after months of release delays and came away pleasantly surprised with Facebook’s first foray into the tablet space. While the app has been complete for months, the addition of Facebook to the iPad will no doubt bolster its appeal heading into the holiday season. We loved the touch-optimised interface, the integration of chat, photos, nearby and the overall sleek design, but couldn’t get past a few odd design bugs, messaging flaws and barebones news feed. Overall, Facebook’s new iPad app gets a solid B+.
Jim’s video blog this week was all about using Google’s Webmaster tools to increase you website’s traffic. We took a look at one of our own posts from a few weeks ago that received a high amount of organic search traffic and explored other options you could find in Google webmaster tools to take advantage of new keywords with better impressions and thus more potential for traffic. Taking a look at the tips and tricks you can use in Google’s webmaster tools to get the most out of your keywords and content, this week’s blog post is a must watch for anyone who admins their own site. Watch the video below:
SEOmoz ran a great experiment on anchor text that showed some surprising results about the types of anchor text you should be looking for in your backlinks. We won’t get into the methodology here, but the results showed that organic anchor text such as ‘click here’ or ‘this article’ shot straight to the top of Google very quickly before plummeting just as quickly as they rose. Anchor text that either was an exact keyword match or a partial keyword match tended to take longer to appear high in results, but didn’t drop in rankings the same way organic anchor text did. Not the most scientific of experiments, but a great insight into how Google views anchor text in your links over time.
We’ve been talking about Gasp and their online reputation issues quite a bit over the last few weeks and put together a quick recap on how the story’s been unfolding on our blog. We took a look back on Jim’s online reputation management video, the lessons businesses can learn from Gasp Fail and how despite the slow down in social media criticism, Gasp is still experiencing reputation stains in Google’s SERPs. Social forgets, search doesn’t.
Speaking of search, Google launched some new features to Google+ on Thursday, adding real-time search and hashtag support to the social network’s new search function. Google ceased real time search from its main search product after a partnership with Twitter to deliver results went awry and are now looking to build off their own social product for real-time search. The addition of hashtag support gives Google+ users an easy way to follow events or trends in much the same way hashtags are used on Twitter. More of a catch up than a new feature, Google+’s steady rate of new functions is slowly turning the project into a social product that could threaten Facebook and Twitter with some real user adoption. Here’s Google’s Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra introducing the new features:
Apple was in the headlines later in the week for the right and the wrong reasons as they launched iOS 5, iCloud and iPhone 4S within a 24 hour time period. iOS 5 was the first out of the gates and proved to be a headache for users looking for the early upgrade. With Apple’s firmware verification servers getting slammed by the influx of users looking to update, errors were being reported that ranged from download timeouts, verification failures and even full data loss. Our guide managed to help a lot of users get around most of the issues by downloading the update files directly from Apple rather than from within iTunes and getting around verification issues by restoring instead of updating, which seemed to ping a different Apple verification server. We’re still having a few teething issues with iCloud that should sort itself out as activations tail off. If you’re still having trouble, check out our guide to download iOS 5 here.
That’s all for Last Week in Search guys. See you next week!
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
