Google “doodles” have long been part of Google’s history and are the drawings that are often designed on, around and through Google’s logo on its home page. These doodles have attained cult status and are a combination of technology and art, created by a passionate in-house team. They illustrate the creative and innovative personality of Google and like the company, use advances in technology to demonstrate their capabilities.

The Google doodles are used to celebrate famous birthdays, anniversaries, worldwide events or holidays, specific to particular countries. There are competitions held for the best designs and some examples of these are imaginative ones designed for Albert Einstein’s birthday; and Valentine’s Day.

The idea for doodles originated in 1998, when the Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin played with the corporate logo to indicate they were “out of office”. A stick figure drawing was placed behind the 2nd “o” in the word ‘Google’ and the revised logo was intended as a comical message to Google users. While the first doodle was relatively simple, the idea of decorating the company logo to celebrate notable events was well received by its users.

More recently, interactive versions such as the highly popular and humorous global one created for Jim Henson’s 75th birthday, have been created with Sprite Image technology and javascripts. Examples of how this was created can be found here or here.

There have been over 300 doodles created by the doodle team for Google.com in the United States and over 700 have been designed internationally. It’s possible to see all the doodles that have been designedhere.

If you’d like more information about Google Doodles, please contact us now.

At the start of February there was extensive news coverage and online discussion following Google’s accusation that Microsoft had been “cheating”, by taking search results from Google to use on their Bing search engine. This debate is likely to run for some time as the two search giants exchange claims and counter-claims about each of their search engine practices.

The story was first broken on Search Engine Land, and stated that Google ran a “sting” operation against Microsoft, catching them using some unique search data that had been set up by Google to check their suspicion that Bing was taking people’s search activity from Google and using that data to improve their own search engine’s listings.

Bing doesn’t deny this and say that they use ‘multiple signals and approaches’, which seems to include tracking search activity through the Internet Explorer browser and the Bing toolbar. They counter that accusation by stating that this was just a stunt by Google to take focus away from the event that Microsoft was simultaneously holding to discuss the “Future of Search”.

The author of the article subsequently stated that both companies approached him to discuss the issue, but remains convinced that the timing of Google’s accusation was purely coincidental. He says that undoubtedly, “both Google and Bing play the PR game” and “what’s happening right now is that there’s a perfect storm of various developments all coming together at the same time”.

He concluded by saying that he sympathises with Google’s opinion that Bing is “doing something it shouldn’t” and that Bing should be truly independent and not use Google as “a tuning fork”. He also states that as a result of Bing’s alleged data mining of Google’s searches, its name now, jokingly, stands for “Bing Is Now Google”.

If you’d like to know more about this story and how it might affect your search engine rankings, please contact us for details.

The prominent US retailer, JC Penney received a large amount of unwelcome publicity last month following press coverage about how the store’s website came to dominate many searches for product items that they sell, even though they might not be the ‘best fit’ for the searcher. This led to the accusation of the store utilising “black hat” SEO techniques and a subsequent reduction in search rankings on Google.

“Black hat” optimisation is the term given to the range of techniques that could be described as ‘spamming’ or methods that contravene Google’s standards when targeting search engine rankings. These techniques were described as “the most ambitious attempt to game Google’s search results that I have ever seen” by an independent online marketing consultant who investigated the JC Penny issue.

JC Penney’s SEO agency were accused of using a “link farm” to give the company a benefit from thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com. A “link farm” is a website or combination of websites containing many hyperlinks, especially designed to increase the index ranking of other websites to search engines and contravene Google’s guidelines on ethical SEO practices.

Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed that the “link farm” techniques being used violated Google’s guidelines and that “corrective action” was being taken. He stated that even as recently as last November, Google had been aware of JC Penney’s violations of its guidelines but they hadn’t followed up to ensure this was no longer happening.

A JC Penney spokeswoman is quoted as saying: “JC Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links, as it is against our natural search policies. We are working to have the links taken down.” They have also fired their search engine consulting firm, SearchDex.

This is yet another high profile case of a major company falling foul of unscrupulous SEO techniques, which although might have gained them some advantage in the short-term, have proven to be a bad investment as a long-term search engine ranking solution.

If you’d like to know more about this story, or how your website can benefit from legitimate SEO practices, please contact us for details.

In a surprise announcement at Google’s 4th quarter earnings review, Larry Page is to take over as CEO at Google in place of Eric Schmidt. Co-founder Page will take over the role in April and Schmidt – who has been in the job for a decade – will become executive chairman with a focus on “deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships”. The news has led to much speculation about the reasons for the change and the intentions for Google’s future development.

Page is the co-founder of Google with Sergey Brin. When they first established the company in the late 1990′s they served as co-presidents until 2001, when Schmidt was brought in to bring some business experience and guidance to the growing company. As a veteran CEO, Schmidt created a ‘triumvirate’ with Page and Brin to lead the company and to drive the massive growth of the business that has been seen over the past decade.

This new change retains the triumvirate, as Schmidt remains as Executive Chairman with Google, but Page would appear to have a power shift towards him, which has surprised many who see him as the ‘quiet’ partner in the team. He will also lead product development and technology strategy, which will include Google’s aim to become more involved in social media. It’s not clear from the announcement whether any disagreements internally prompted the change, but Schmidt says Page is ready to run the company, while Brin will continue focusing on new product ideas, with the title of Co-Founder.

Schmidt said the management changes were part of a plan to “streamline” decision-making and create clearer lines of responsibility and accountability. Not surprisingly, the news has generated an enormous amount of comment and speculation on the change, with some commentators feeling that Google has become too corporate and the change is an attempt to regain the vibrancy and innovation that drove the business in the early years.

The news upstaged the earnings report, which showed that Google had a strong rise in net profits in the last three months of 2010, at US$2.54bn on revenues of US$8.44bn. The profit figure also compares well to the $1.97bn made in the same quarter the year before. Although there will be much speculation about the change in leadership, it appears that Google timed the potentially unstabling news to come out at the same time as the positive financial figures.

To find out more about these changes at Google, please contact us now.

At the start of January, Yahoo7 in Australia announced that it would now be displaying search results from Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The change happened soon after, so that the variety of search engines has been further diminished and the Australian market is now largely dependent on search listings from Google and Bing, with the former still being used by around 90% of the total search market.

This merger between Yahoo7 and Bing’s search results (which are used by NineMSN) was not unexpected following the long-running merger between the two US search giants. In the US the change had already taken place at the end of 2010 and the roll out is expected to be completed globally over the next few months, with the UK and other European search engines to follow soon. However, it was expected that the Australian merger may take longer to implement due to the unusual partnerships between the search services and the Seven and Nine TV networks, although this is more of an issue with the advertising channels.

Yahoo7 sent an email out to companies to prepare for the changes. It suggested they compare their organic search rankings on Yahoo!7 Search and Bing to help determine any potential impact to traffic and sales, although for most companies this is such a small share of their overall search referrals! What it does mean, however, is that businesses should review their listings on Bing’s webmaster tools and optimise their website for the Bing crawler, to ensure that their site is indexed and prominently listed in both Yahoo!7 and Bing’s organic search results.

Yahoo originally developed as a web directory in the 1990′s and became one of the leading resources for the slowly emerging list of websites that were starting up. However, as the size of the web grew rapidly in the 2000′s, Yahoo’s human-edited directory couldn’t keep pace with the growth and Yahoo purchased a number of established search engines to integrate with their search service. Pioneering search engines such as Inktomi, AltaVista and FAST were acquired by Yahoo but the experience and technology behind these tools didn’t help Yahoo grow as a search engine in the face of Google’s dominance.

Now Microsoft has taken another step in their challenge with Google for market share, through their Bing search engine. In the US the market share of Yahoo and MSN is larger than in Australia and many other countries, and so the merger or ‘alliance’ between Bing and Yahoo has given Microsoft a stronger position to develop their search service and to compete for users. For Yahoo, it’s another stage in an apparent downward spiral from the once dominant site, which is now essentially a partner for the Bing network of search results. For users in Australia, and worldwide, it’s another stage in the growing monopoly of available search results with a limited range of options now available to find information online.

As a footnote to the recent merger, the transition of the Yahoo paid search services (PPC) to Microsoft technology is scheduled to take place in the second half of 2011. Outwardly this will show little change, since Yahoo currently supplies the paid listings to Yahoo7 and NineMSN, but for the advertiser it is hoped that the new platform will be more user-friendly than the existing Yahoo! one, and that it will help to give advertisers a more effective alternative to just focusing on Google AdWords.

If you’d like to know more about the merger between Yahoo and Bing’s search results, and how it might impact your search engine marketing strategy, please contact us now.

The first decade of Web Marketing Workshop, 2000-2010

A lot of changes have happened in the online world since we first launched Web Marketing Workshop in the UK in 2000. Ten years ago, online business was just starting to develop as a significant marketing channel, despite the dot.com boom and bust!

These are some of things that were happening a decade ago:

• In the UK, 27% of households (19.5 million) had Internet access in September 2000, which meant that the country ranked 3rd in the world in terms of total Internet users, behind the US and Japan. Today, over 80% of households have access to the Internet but the country now ranks 8th in terms of total users.
• 30% of users in the UK had broadband access in 2000, compared to dial-up access.
• The culmination of the so-called ‘Dot com’ boom and bust period had affected many websites and investors earlier in 2000 and resulted in a reality check in the growth forecasts and development of commercial websites – notable ‘failures’ at the time included boo.com in the UK, pets.com in the US, as well as Go.com and Infospace.
• Some of the popular search engines at the time included Lycos, AltaVista, Excite, Direct Hit (purchased by Ask Jeeves).
• Google was a relatively new player in the search market, having launched in 1997, but it was beginning to gain market share and signed a deal to power Yahoo searches in 2000 as Yahoo had begun to realise that their human-edited directory was starting to fall behind the rapid growth in new website launches.
• GoTo was developing the original paid search service and gaining wide coverage on many search engines, except for Google. However, paid search was still seen as an unwelcome commercial intrusion into search engine services by many people. GoTo was eventually rebranded as Overture and then bought by Yahoo several years later.
• Some search engines, such as Ask Jeeves and Looksmart, also offered a paid inclusion service to get editorial listings appearing in search results, plus Yahoo introduced a paid submission fee to be considered for their directory listings in 2000.
• Google launched AdWords in 2000 and without the level of fanfare or comment that new launches from Google receive these days! AdWords was originally offered on a cost-per-impression basis, before it later changed to a cost-per-click model and started become more widely used around 2002.
• In the wider world, September 2000 saw the United Nations Millennium Summit being held in New York, marking the largest meeting of world leaders in history.
• In the UK, anger about fuel taxes led to blockades of many refineries and fuel depots, leading to petrol shortages.
• And, of course, in Sydney there was the small matter of the 2000 Olympic Games being held in September!

It’s difficult to visualise how the online world will be in another 10 years but there’s sure to be more significant changes in trends and market leading websites. You can keep up with the latest developments through our monthly newsletter, web marketing blog or Twitter account, and Web Marketing Workshop will be here for the next 10 years, supporting our customers to get the most from their online businesses.

Many of the trends likely to have an impact in 2009 have already started, but what are our predictions for some of the key developments this coming year?

1) The economic slowdown focuses attention online: there is little doubt that the economic impact of the ‘credit crunch’ in 2008 will have a significant impact on business in 2009, particularly in the US and Europe. Progressive companies will still need to maintain and grow their business in the face of any downturn and therefore even if marketing spend is cut back, the focus on online marketing will be greater, due to the measurability and proven cost-effectiveness of this form of advertising for many businesses. Search advertising will still see an overall growth in spend and market share of online advertising and despite some companies withdrawing from this sector, many others will put more spend into this targeted advertising to support their business.

2) Analytics becomes more mainstream: partly because of the widespread uptake of Google’s free Analytics tool and partly because of the greater need for advertising spend to be effective in 2009, the use of website statistics or analytics is expected to become more common, even for small companies. However, the interpretation of the data and the way that understanding can be used will still be the most important aspect of this trend, but companies can now access much better data on their online activities which in turn can help to improve their website and marketing strategy to get the most from their online spend.

3) Yahoo won’t survive in its current form: it seems inevitable that Yahoo’s ongoing saga that was the source of much news coverage in 2008 will come to some sort of conclusion in 2009. Whether this is with Microsoft eventually coming back on the scene and buying Yahoo’s search business, or some other form of takeover by another leading online brand, it’s likely that Yahoo won’t be able to survive the next 12 months in their current form, despite – or maybe because of – the change in their CEO. It would be a shame for Yahoo to lose more search market share, as Google needs a stronger competitor, but with the economic problems in the US, it’s hard to see Yahoo surviving much longer as a key player and we can expect more developments here sooner rather than later.

4) Video becomes the new marketing tool: as mentioned above, with the growth and impact of ‘universal’ search, video is now playing a more visible role within search and in 2009 this is likely to see a bigger impact in the business sector. Companies need to think about ways they can effectively use video to drive traffic and new business to their website, as it is becoming a more widespread medium and one that can play a bigger role within search and advertising channels. The ‘optimisation’ of video will be as important as the production if the effort of creating videos is to reap the rewards expected, particularly against the massive growth of user generated video content on sites like YouTube, but the creative use and marketing of videos will become more mainstream this year.

5) Reputation management becomes a core service: we’ve covered this issue before, but with the increasing growth and focus on user-generated content sites – such as review sites, blogs and comments on social networks – the need for companies to monitor what is being said about their business and brands, and to respond effectively to that content, will become a bigger requirement in 2009 as more businesses realise the potential dangers as well as the advantages of this trend. Online reputation management will therefore become a service in much demand from PR companies and search engine marketing firms, as web content is monitored and responded to in a more effective manner.

These were our 5 predictions for 2008 that were made in January last year, together with a review of what actually happened:

1) ‘Universal search’ becomes a significant optimisation issue: the inclusion of all forms of search results – such as images, videos, news or maps – within the main search engine listings has become more prevalent over the year, particularly on Google. This has created many opportunities for companies to achieve visibility within the search results in new and more creative ways. Local business listings have been the most effective method for many companies who target a localised area, so much so that Google has had to control some of the more extreme methods by companies trying to get listings within these results. Video sites like YouTube continue to attract huge traffic volumes and videos do appear within Google’s search results, when applicable. Google has also introduced new formats for PPC adverts although these remain limited to the content network and have yet to be offered within the main search listings.

2) Personalisation gains ground: the impact of personalisation has yet to be understood as no figures have been released by Google, or other websites that offer this option, to show what the levels of uptake have been. However, at the end of 2008 Google introduced the Search Wikia option for logged in users, so that search results could be adapted to suit user preferences and notes could also be added to listings. There were also hints from Google that this data may also be eventually used to determine search engine rankings which is likely to attract abuse of the system. We believe that personalization is still in the early stages of development with the vast majority of web searchers being aware of, or using, this option, although it is likely to gradually increase usage within the market and to become a more significant issue for search engine optimisation.

3) Behavioural advertising becomes the next ‘big thing’: this is still expected to become a key service for advertisers but has still to become a mainstream function, partly due to the technology still being developed and data being collected, as well as the privacy issues that are raised once individuals realise how their data is being used to target advertising. The huge mass of data that’s being collected by search engines and other major web properties should provide highly targeted advertising opportunities but the balance between this and privacy concerns is still to be determined.

4) Content targeted advertising becomes the new PPC battleground: Google has made further improvements to the content advertising network for PPC advertisers in 2008, most notably with the introduction of Placement advertising, and with the use of display and video advertising options. This sector has not become a battleground as other PPC services offer weak alternatives, but with better data and reporting on Google’s own service, the content network has become a more accountable resource to extend the reach of this targeted form of advertising.

5) Mobile search finally becomes serious: the launch of the Apple iPhone at the start of the year and the new Google-apps phone some months later has marked the start of the mobile Internet in earnest. The range of applications seems to be limited only by ideas at the moment and so as these type of phones gain market share and become ‘the norm’, then companies need to seriously think about focusing part of their online presence to the mobile market. This has yet to happen in any significant volume but the signs are there and examples can be demonstrated.

Last month saw the final clearance of Google’s year-long acquisition of DoubleClick when the European Commission ruled that the purchase could proceed in Europe. Google immediately finalized the deal and now begins the big task of making the acquisition work, by combining the companies and advertiser services into an integrated package and pushing new products into the market.

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The online industry news has been dominated over the past month by Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo!. The move came at the start of the month and although Yahoo! quickly rejected the move, Microsoft’s intentions have now been made clear and there has been plenty of speculation on what the likely implications will be for the market and, in particular, the search sector.

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