On the very same day that Google refused to hand over to the US government data containing keywords and website addresses contained within its indices, a parental advice internet site, KinderStart.com filed civil lawsuit proceedings against the search engine. The basis of the lawsuit was that Google, without warning in March 2005, downgraded KinderStart’s rankings resulting in a 70% drop in traffic with a resulting 80% decline in revenue.

You can read more here:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-03-19-google-kinderstart_x.htm?POE=TECISVA

This case is definitely worth following though it is difficult to see how Google can be held responsible for the revenue of a company that seems overly dependent upon its positioning in their ‘free’ listings. It will also be interesting to discover whether the ever secretive Google has to reveal why they appear to have actually penalised the site though on my cursory glance over their site there does seem to be some evidence of some dubious coding.

Just imagine! In the future, we may all be able to sue Google when either our clients’, or our own, websites, take a dive in the rankings;-) Somehow, I don’t think so! In which case, why not join us at our next Search Engine Marketing and SEO Training Workshop in sunny Southampton on Wednesday, 5th and Thursday, 6th April? There’s barely a week to go and we still have some very limited space. You will learn how to gain and retain high relevant rankings by using ‘best practice’ SEO and SEM strategies so that you can avoid the pain that KinderStart has clearly suffered.

Visit http://www.searchengineworkshops.co.uk/registration.htm

Or call Sally on 01425 476547 to discuss further.

One of the topics that frequently arises on both our search engine marketing workshops as well as web analytics training is click fraud. Click fraud is a form of abuse by third parties which could be an individual but is more likely to be some form of automated software repeatedly clicking on advertising links; at the cost of the advertiser, of course. It has been mooted that if you’re an online retailer this is something that you just have to accept much in the way that an offline retailer accepts that they have to account for shoplifting within their costs. Further, if you are conducting effective web analytics and monitoring your paid campaigns you will know which keywords/bids are delivering a return on your investment so that, in the grander scheme of things, click fraud is not worth getting over obsessed about it. Or is it?

Some experts have speculated that as much as 30% of Google’s advertising income could be emanating from fraudulent clicks and, given that Google’s advertising revenue amounted to some $6.1 billion last year, that’s rather a lot of money to have allegedly earned improperly. It seems that the ongoing debate has prompted Google to offer to pay up to $90 million (£52 million), before legal fees, to any US advertiser proving it has suffered from click fraud since 2002.

$90 billion! 52 million quid? In cash? Well, not quite. Rather, Google is willing to provide free advertising to any company that believes it has suffered at the hands of click fraud. However, the bad news is that it’s not clear whether these credits are being offered to UK advertisers as Google ascertains that it has not been sued by anybody outside the UK with respect to click fraud. So why is that? Well, we might be able to throw some light on this: our partners, SafeBuy, the online retail watchdog (who we congratulate on achieving the Office of Fair Trading approval of their Web Code of Practice, by the way) recently discovered that as many as 66% of their members were using Google AdWords and other online pay per click campaigns with an average spend of some £4000 plus per month. However, only 60% were monitoring the results!

Conclusion? No wonder UK advertisers aren’t suing Google – it seems that the majority of UK businesses are willing to hand a blank cheque book to Google and haven’t a clue what is working/not working as long as the visitors appear to be hitting their websites. Hmmm! It’s not exactly the way most businesses monitor their offline spending and budgets, is it?

Consequently, SafeBuy - http://www.safebuy.org.uk - has been promoting our search engine marketing and web analytics programmes to their members for some months. Now, in response to demand, we are putting together new training events on pay per click advertising and web analytics using the free Google web analytics tool.

Shouldn’t you, or your clients, be attending?

Watch this space! http://www.searchengineworkshops.co.uk/registration.htm

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.

You just cannot keep Google out of the newspapers these days! The Times this morning reports on how comments by Google's chief Financial Officer, George Reyes to investors yesterday managed to wipe more than $8 billion (£4.5 billion) off its market value by admitting that the 'internet company's search for revenue was running out of steam'. I guess George's comments weren't quite on the scale of Gerald Ratner's a few years back but it did mean that Google had to circulate a somewhat modified version of his comments so that the shares only ended down 7.2% on the day on Wall Street.

You can read the complete article here:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-2063696,00.html

You may also have read articles surrounding the demise of the butler in Ask Jeeves over the past week or so. The decision to dismiss Jeeves and become plain old ask.com was influenced by the feeling that teenage boys (one of their key target audiences) don't really see butlers as role models these days. Well, that's not quite how The Times reported it on 27th February but I think that's the gist of it!

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-2060961,00.html

In order to accommodate the wishes of people attending our workshops over the next couple of months, we swapped round the dates so you need to make a note in your diaries that the April Workshop will now take place in Southampton and the May one in Richmond upon Thames rather than the other way round! We find it helps if we get students to the correct venue on the right day;-) See our up-to-date search engine
marketing workshop, Google Analytics and pay per click training dates.

In fact, you don't just need to make a note, you need to register right now as Southampton is proving to be a popular venue!