April 8th, 2009 Posted by: phil Comments (0)
There has been a change to the Google Trademark Complaint process that means you can now “blacklist” sites as well as “whitelist”.
Whitelisting means everyone is blocked from using your trademark unless you specifically include their domain or Google CID in the trademark complaint.
Blacklisting means everyone can use your trademark, except the specific sites you wish to block.
For most advertisers, Whitelisting is the way to go – there is probably a much smaller list of sites that are authorised to use brand terms. However, for some advertisers, blacklisting makes more sense, particularly if there are large (and ever increasing) numbers of affiliates, franchisees etc.
Google Trademark form
March 16th, 2009 Posted by: kristy Comments (0)
Recent numbers from emarketer.com shows huge growth in online coupon redemption in the US last year. 13% of online coupons were redeemed in 2008, versus only a 1% redemption rate for print coupons.
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Online coupons still have a long way to go versus their more traditional counterpart, they currently represent only 1% of the 2.6 billion coupons offered annually in the US.
With a recession knocking on our door, retailers will be looking for new ways to drive consumers in store. How long until Australia retailers improve their infrastructure to allow online couponing to flourish here? How will mobile coupons change things? Stay tuned in 2009.
February 13th, 2009 Posted by: phil Comments (0)
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have coming together in rare agreement on a standard for identifying canonical links to reduce the impact of duplicate links through the introduction of a new HTML tag: <link>. This new <link> tag helps reduce duplicates by documenting the preferred URL form to access each page. Duplicates can come about for multiple reasons; common ones include sorting the page by parameters (eg price), or tracking codes for identifying the referring source of traffic in web analytics sofware.
As an example for one our clients, the following 3 URLs are all valid for the same page. Using the new tag, we can specify the official/canonical version that we want to be indexed and displayed in the search results.
http://www.goldenglow.com.au/product.asp?pID=57&cID=11
http://www.goldenglow.com.au/product.asp?pID=57
http://www.goldenglow.com.au/product.asp?cID=11&pID=57
For more gory details, check out:
Google’s announcement and explanation
Yahoo’s announcement and explanation
December 4th, 2008 Posted by: Dave Comments (0)
Everyone’s looking for new ways to help people find places of interest. Well, a mob in London has come up with this nifty little website that allows users to search (and post) things based on their mood. I Feel London is not the most amazing experience (the website is currently in beta) but it does put a new spin on mapping, and should make us think about new ways to help people find new experiences!
Websites: http://www.ifeellondon.com
November 3rd, 2008 Posted by: phil Comments (0)
After (very) recently meeting with Sensis reps to explain why it really didn’t make sense to use Sensis BidSmart for our clients, I am very pleased to see that Sensis will start showing Google AdWords from Q1 2009.
Read more
October 31st, 2008 Posted by: phil Comments (0)
Socialmention
Socialmention is a new service based on the Yahoo Boss search API that tracks activity across blogs, micro blogs (twitter), social bookmarks (delicious), news, video, images etc.
Looks like a pretty cool way to keep track of what people are saying about brands. You can search by recency – in the past hour, 12 hours, day or week.
A great example of where Yahoo is going with opening up its platform. Not so great as a search engine, per se, but with tuned and pimped to do other cool stuff with a solid search underpinning, it’s got great potential.
Socialmention is pretty terrible from a monetisation point of view – there are sponsored links on the pages, but as the site uses AJAX the ads are displayed related to the overall frame (relating to social networking/blogging) rather than the content of what you are actually searching for. The ads always seem to relate to blogging or working from home.
