Firstly, we wish to announce that Search Engine Workshops is bringing its popular search engine marketing training courses to Southampton. Having noticed that many of our students come to us in Richmond from places such as Portsmouth, Soutampton, Poole and Bournemouth, we thought we would make it easier for them.

Secondly, here is our take on some topical information, interspersed with a little fun, surrounding a news story related to search in the UK.

Many of you may have already seen the already well documented news about the Arsenal and England defender, Ashley Cole, who is taking libel action against two national newspapers. (For those of you have who haven’t, Cole is taking issue against published stories surrounding some allegedly bisexual antics involving two Premiership players. Although Cole was not, in fact, named, it was assumed that he was one of the players involved by implication.) So what’s that got to do with search engine marketing?

Well, firstly it’s a Saturday so we thought a snippet that combined football with search would be appropriate (!) but, secondly, his lawyers have taken an almost unprecedented step of setting up an online survey inviting respondents to reply to not only whether they read the stories but as to whether they contributed towards articles on chat rooms,websites or forums as a consequence. Clearly, the lawyers are trying to identify possible witnesses to gather evidence but as to whether this
stands up in a court of law remains to be seen. More likely it will increase the speculation and PR surrounding the rumours. It is easy to see that rival fans are likely to have a field day (pun intended?)posting mischievous replies!

Thirdly, and more relevant to this snippet, Cole’s solicitors have asked Google to disclose why typing ‘ashley cole’ into their search engine generates See results for: ashley cole gay half way down the results page.

Graham Shear, solicitor for Mr Cole, said that he is interested in the origin of Google's decision to display the "gay" results alongside generalsearches for his client. He said: "I am keen to find out whether the decision to automatically include the term 'gay' to the keyword 'AshleyCole' was an editorial decision or one made by a computer based on thevolume of searches for 'Ashley Cole' linked to the word 'gay'.

While we can see the funny side of a firm of solicitors somewhat innocently suggesting that some Google ‘editor’ might be colluding in these rumours, Mr Shear has probably highlighted a phenonemen that has been observedwithin the Google results over several months, that is, ‘clustering’. In other words, Google is grouping together pages on what it considers to be a similar topic.

We tend to have a bit of fun on our workshops when discussing ‘Google bombing’ by demonstrating how linking can dramatically influence rankings (try keying ‘miserable failure’ and ‘liar’ into Google and observing the top rankings sites if you haven’t already!) and while this is significantly different to Google bombing, it is easy to see that there is potentially a lot of fun to be had with this as well as yet another way to manipulate Google’s results. I am sure we will be seeing examples of this in the future!

You can read more about this in Danny Sullivan’s excellent Search Engine Watch blog here:

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060306-101828

Meanwhile, for any of you based on, or near, the sunny south coast, we have a couple of places remaining on our Workshop scheduled for 5th and 6th April in Southampton prior to our next SEM Workshop in Richmond in May. Don’t delay though as we do limit the number of spaces on our workshops in order for them to remain interactive!

If you have any queries, regarding our workshops, or other training events, just drop us a line @ http://www.searchengineworkshops.co.uk/contact.htm
or call Marie direct on 01406-351556.