As with any new Google innovation there’s a lot of criticism and head scratching as to why the need. Although there is a huge global sign up (yes you do have to sign up) we decided to ask our resident experts for their joint opinions on the matter. MD Adam Lee: Google +1 now there is a sign of desperation if I ever saw one!… Read more…

First new post in a while – sorry i’ve been a bit slack lately!

I am planning on a complete site overhaul in the near future so watch this space.

I’ve just seen a message at the top of my iGoogle saying:

‘Students: Submit your photos for the Google Photography Prize’ with a link to this page – http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/photographyprize/

My first thought was with all the data Google collects about me I would have thought they could make this a bit more targeted – I haven’t been a student for some time.

After some consideration it was decided this probably wouldn’t be the best approach – I mean seeing an ad like this might scare the shit out of me!

Adam – we know you have bought a sony SLR camera and have been taking pictures on Brighton seafront. Submit your photos for the Google Photography Prize’

Interesting to see Google using iGoogle in this way, will be interesting to see if this is adapted into another advertising platform in future.

One of my clients has a number of pages with duplicate content throughout their site. I was in the process of setting up redirects and noindex tags on certain pages but Google has just announced a new method.

Rel=”canonical” is a new method that allows you to add the page you want Google to associate the duplicate page with, resulting in only one of the pages being indexed. This will be useful for pages with tracking parameters within the URL but my main concern is what happens with the links pointing to the page? If someone links to the duplicate page does Google pass that link equity onto the required landing page? If not then i think 301 redirects are going to be the better option. I’m going to run some tests on this and keep an eye on the blogs to see if this is answered but if anyone knows please add a comment.

— This also works with Yahoo and MSN—

I don’t write much on social media marketing even though i do a lot of it. I find social media marketing strategies vary heavily dependent on your objects so one channel can be hugely successful for one product and have no effect for another but i’ve really started to get into Twitter lately and have seen a huge benefit out of using it. Not only does it have a very large SEO community to bounce ideas between but it is also a great way to mass target specific articles or content i have written.

I wrote a story on Facebook SEO links quite a while back now and knew it would be a useful post to the SEO community so i have pushed it through blog comments and social bookmark sites and generated a decent amount of traffic out of it. However it is nothing compared to what i got out of it when it got picked up on Twitter. Someone on Twitter posted a link to the story and it then got retweeted by a couple of other people, resulting in a huge peak in traffic to the site.

By writing useful content and posting a link to it on Twitter, as well as referencing the relevant group can result in more traffic than from the major search engines. So for the people that are still wondering why there is a lot of discussion around why Twitter could be the next Google there is your answer!

The launch of Google’s Searchwiki caused a buzz within the online community but I feel many jumped on the bandwagon too quickly. My immediate thought was why would anyone use it?

Read more on Google’s SearchWiki…