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Google and Microsoft almost simultaneously announced deals with Twitter a few months back, that would give the companies access to tweets in real-time to fuel their respective search engines’ real-time results. Microsoft immediately launched their version, but it was separate from the regular Bing search engine. Google waited a while, but eventually started incorporating real-time results right into regular Google SERPs (including not only tweets, but various other sources).

After the Twitter deals were announced, Bing came out and said, “If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower.”

Amit Singhal Google was not as vocal about how it would rank tweets and other real-time results, but the company has now shed a bit of light on that via an interview with MIT’s Technology Review. David Talbot interviewed Google “Fellow” Amit Singhal, who has led development of real-time search at the company. According to him, Google also ranks tweets by followers to an extent, but it’s not just about how many followers you get. It’s about how reputable those followers are.

Singhal likens the system to the well-known Google system of link popularity. Getting good links from reputable sources helps your content in Google, so having followers with that some kind of authority theoretically helps your tweets rank in Google’s real-time search.

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

But that’s only one factor.

Do you commonly use hashtags in your tweets? If your goal is to rank in Google’s real-time search index, you may want to cut down on that practice, because according to Singhal, that is a big red flag for a lower quality tweet. This seems to be part of Google’s spam control strategy.

Another noteworthy excerpt from the interview:

Another problem: how, if someone is searching for “Obama,” to sift through White House press tweets and thousands of others to find the most timely and topical information. Google scans tweets to find the “signal in the noise,” he says. Such a “signal” might include a new onslaught of tweets and other blogs that mention “Cambridge police” or “Harry Reid” near mentions of “Obama.” By looking out for such signals, Google is able to furnish real-time hits that contain the freshest subject matter even for very common search terms.

Well, we certainly know more about Google’s strategy for tweet ranking now, but there are still plenty of questions about it. What is Google’s stance is on Ghost Tweeting? Are Google’s ranking factors a good reason to create and follow more Twitter lists in hopes for gaining more reputable industry followers?

The factors mentioned aren’t the only ones Google employs. It’s not like Google is going to tell us everything. It also helps to keep in mind that real-time search spans far beyond just tweets. Still, Twitter is clearly a big part of it, and even the significance of tweets themselves will evolve in time.

Google says it hopes to factor in geo-location data (with regards to tweets) into the real-time search results at some point. Google and Twitter engineers frequently collaborate on real-time search, which Google itself says is evolving.

By the way, it stands to reason that Google’s strategy for ranking tweets probably shares similarities for how it ranks content from other sources drawn from for real-time search.

admin london seo, seo twitter

The last eBay-centric article to appear on WebProNews concerned mobile transactions during the holiday season; the company was quite proud of its stats and had made some noise about them. Now, there’s essentially been outside confirmation of its impressive performance, as eBay was declared the 2009 Mobile Retailer of the Year.

eBay

Mobile Commerce Daily is the entity that awarded eBay this title, and Giselle Tsirulnik, its senior editor, supplied quite a number of reasons for the judgment in an article today. For starters, eBay’s sales were impressive, with about 1.5 million items changing hands thanks to mobile transactions during the holiday season.

Then there was a nifty promotion using a Mobile Boutique to consider, the success of the eBay iPhone application, and the introduction of the separate Deals application. Plus, as Tsirulnik wrote, “EBay-owned online ticket marketplace StubHub went mobile in 2009,” and PayPal took a lot of steps forward, too.

All of which appears to put eBay in an admirable position moving forward, since the growing popularity of iPhones and Android devices is sure to have people buying more stuff online in the future.

Of course, there are other factors to consider when thinking about a company’s success or failure, and eBay critics will be pleased to hear that it’s not having a good day on the stock market. Despite getting the Mobile Retailer of the Year award, eBay shares are down 2.43 percent right now.

admin ecommerce ebay, ecommerce, london web design

Google is set to make changes to its search ranking algorithm to combat the spate of links leading to malicious web pages appearing at the top of Google’s search results, according to an inside source.

Over the past few months, cybercriminals have been using blackhat SEO techniques to manipulate search rankings. When it first began, they were marginally successful at following Google Trends to find buzzy search queries and elevating a newly created targeted webpage.

But after a short period of time, these same gangs appear to have become disturbingly effective. Last week, when researching a news story, I found the top five results all led to fake scareware pages.

Obviously if Google fails to do something about this manipulation, users will lose trust and the good ole days of Google will be over fast.

A report from security company PandaLabs identified over a million links targeting malicious webpages ranking for auto part searches. Google noted that many of the phrases mentioned in the report were rare. A phrase like [1989 Nissan Pickup Truck Engine Check Light Troubleshooting], for example, only appears on attack sites set up by spammers, which explains why Google brought back so many attack sites in response to it and similar queries.

Google’s response seems also an admission of how difficult it is to provide fresh, timely search results while simultaneously combating spammers. Part of the appeal of Twitter to many people is the platform’s ability to provide real-time information; the live Web works remarkably well there so far because Twitter’s set up isn’t very conducive to spam (yet). At least Twitter has to some extent control over accounts.

Google, on the other hand, cannot control for content appearing on the Web at large, and historically its famous algorithm performed better than any other at weeding out spammy webpages and malicious results. Unfortunately, that was a version of the Web that was more static. The live Web presents entirely new challenges manifesting as the first major weakness the search engine has faced.

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paul london seo google, london web design

There are 33 districts in london, londonwebdesign1.com office is based in Kensington, London.

Here is a list of the other districts in london, if you are at all interested!

City of London
City of Westminster
Kensington and Chelsea
Hammersmith and Fulham
Wandsworth
Lambeth
Southwark
Tower Hamlets
Hackney
Islington
Camden
Brent
Ealing
Hounslow
Richmond
Kingston
Merton
Sutton
Croydon
Bromley
Lewisham
Greenwich
Bexley
Havering
Barking and Dagenham
Redbridge
Newham
Waltham Forest
Haringey
Enfield
Barnet
Harrow
Hillingdon

paul london london

London is the capital of the United Kingdom and the Constituent Country of England, and is the largest city in the European Union. An important settlement for two millennia, London’s history goes back to its founding by the Romans. Since its beginnings, London has been part of many movements and phenomena throughout history, such as the English Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and the Gothic Revival in architecture. The city’s core, the ancient City of London, still retains its limited mediaeval boundaries; but since at least the nineteenth century, the name “London” has also referred to the whole metropolis that has developed around it.[8] Today the bulk of this conurbation forms the London metropolitan region and the Greater London administrative area, with its own elected mayor and assembly.

London is one of the world’s most important business, financial, and cultural centres and its influence in politics, education, entertainment, media, fashion and the arts contributes to its status as a major global city. Central London is the headquarters of more than half of the UK’s top 100 listed companies (the FTSE 100) and more than 100 of Europe’s 500 largest companies. The city is a major tourist destination for both domestic and overseas visitors, with annual expenditure by tourists of around £15 billion. London hosted the 1908 and 1948 Summer Olympic Games and will host the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.

London contains four World Heritage Sites: the Tower of London; the historic settlement of Greenwich; the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; and the site comprising the Palace of Westminster, Westminster Abbey and St. Margaret’s Church.

London currently has a wide range of peoples, cultures, and religions, and more than 300 languages are spoken within the city. On July 2007, it had an official population of 7,556,900 within the boundaries of Greater London making it the most populous municipality in the European Union. Since 2001 the Greater London Urban Area has been the second largest in the EU after Paris with a population of 8,278,251, and the metropolitan area is estimated to have a total population of between 12 million and 14 million, the largest metropolitan area in the EU. The public transport network, administered by Transport for London, is one of the most extensive in the world, Heathrow Airport is the busiest airport in the world by international passenger traffic and the air space is the busiest of any city in the world.

paul london london, london web design

Social networking remains the number one area of interest to mobile Internet users with Facebook and My Space being the top two search terms on both Google and Yahoo OneSearch, according to a report from mobile software and infrastructure provider Openwave Systems.

In terms of average hits per session, MySpace leads Facebook by nearly 46 percent, indicating that MySpace could become the preferred choice for mobile communications for a segment of the operator base and displace some popular email offerings.

In the mobile advertising marketplace AdMob servers nearly seven times more ads than its closest competitor, but it also has lower click through rate than rivals BuzzCity and Microsoft. AdMob’s lower click through rate could be because of generic ads that are not relevant to the subscriber.

The report also found that Craigslist ranked number 7 within the top 10 search terms on Google, indicating a trend towards mobile classifieds for jobs, housing, bargain items and services during the economic downturn.

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paul seo

Google Checkout is now easier to install on the open-source platform osCommerce and supports subscription-based payments after the search company introduced new updates its online payment processing application.

“We’ve completely reworked the installation process by no longer requiring users to manually copy and paste large swaths of PHP code into their files. Instead, we’ve created an automated deployment app that does this for you by looking for the appropriate PHP insertion points and adding the code where it’s needed,” Ed Davisson, a Google software engineer, wrote on the Checkout blog.

The upgrade is designed to ease concerns about lines of PHP code getting copied in the wrong place. Additionally, configuration is now easier, Davisson said, because the most important fields are grouped together for easier access, with the rest having been moved to a detailed control panel.

“At Google Checkout, we’re constantly striving to improve our usability,” he said. “That’s why we’ve recently made Checkout’s installation and configuration much easier on the popular open-source commerce platform osCommerce.”

The upgrade will primarily help online merchants just starting out, said Kerry Watson, an e-commerce consultant and author of 14 books on osCommerce.
“Google’s announcement is good news for would-be online merchants who want to run an osCommerce online store with Google Checkout, and who have an unmodified fresh install of osCommerce,” Watson said. “These lucky few can set up Google Checkout by using a Wizard-like interface to enter long paths and strings of numbers called ‘transaction keys’ into form boxes instead of manual coding.”
Users who have modified will still have to hard-code Google Checkout by copying “about a dozen new PHP files and then hand-editing their store files in about nine places,” she added.
In other Checkout news, online sellers now have the ability to sell products and services that require recurring billing using Google’s API.

“One of our most requested features is a way to sell subscriptions through Google Checkout, and we’re pleased to announce that this functionality is now available on our Beta Features page,” Andrew Cunningham, a Google software engineer, said at the Checkout blog.

E-commerce site owners who are comfortable building their own carts using Checkout, can now implement subscriptions by following documentation provided by Google.

“Each billing recurrence is a new order, so everything you’ve learned about processing orders still applies. You can let us create these billing recurrences for you with Google-Handled Subscriptions, or if you’d like more control, you can create these recurrences yourself with Merchant-Handled Subscriptions,” Cunningham said.

Google’s Checkout announcements come on the heels of a recent price hike — effective May 5, Checkout is moving to a tiered fee structure and is eliminating its AdWords discounts for sellers – that’s good news for PayPal, which now offers more merchant services for about the same cost, and just mapped out an agenda to double its revenue by 2011.

The Checkout upgrade is a minor addition to the slew of recent developments beyond the search behemoth’s core business, including a new Internet phone service, Google Voice, the introduction of ads on its hosted news sites, behavioral advertising, and the funding of research grants aimed at maximizing online ad performance.

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The Kindle, Amazon’s e-book reader, has been sold out for months. Over 7,600 (mostly positive) reviews have been written on its official product page. And even though Amazon’s chosen not to share official figures, a Citigroup analyst has now estimated that around 500,000 Kindles were sold last year.
That number means quite a lot. First, it’s rather higher than the 380,000 Kindles Mark Mahaney initially thought Amazon would sell in 2008. Then, revenue strictly from the sales must be in the neighborhood of $200 million. Add in the prices of however many e-books Amazon’s moved to wind up with something even more impressive.

Mahaney next factored in a couple years’ worth of growth (along with the next version of the Kindle), and Reuters reports, “Online retailer Amazon.com could see revenue related to its ‘Kindle’ e-book reader reach beyond $1.2 billion by 2010 — over 4 percent of Amazon’s revenue for the same year, Citigroup said.”

The entire e-book and e-book reader industries would surely see some gains if this occurs, too.
Amazon’s stock is up 3.52 percent so far today on Mahaney’s rather exciting estimate. The company also nailed its Q4 financial report, of course.

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News Corp. chief executive Rupert Murdoch said on Thursday that newspapers must find a way to charge for online content to make up for declining ad revenue.

“People are used to reading everything on the net for free, and that’s going to have to change,” Murdoch told attendees at the annual Cable Show event in Washington, D.C.

Murdoch cited The New York Times as an example, saying it has a “very, very good Web site.” He said he did not believe the paper would make any money online unless it changes its current business model.

“They cannot give their advertising away itself because the inventory of display adverting on the web is doubling every year, so they’re never going to make money out of it on an advertising model,” he said.
“I think the classifieds, though, which was their river of gold, is probably draining away and will be gone forever.”

Murdoch owns The Wall Street Journal, which News Corp purchased in 2007 along with its parent Dow Jones & Co, is one of the few major U.S. newspapers that charges for access to its online content.
News Corp also owns the New York Post, the Times of London and other papers in Britain and Australia, which are available for free online.

Murdoch also said News Corp is investing with partners in a new mobile device that would allow people to read electronic versions of newspapers.

The portable device would be different than Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s E-Reader in that it would be designed more for the newspaper format.

“What we’re investing in and others are investing in – and it’s only software development at the moment – is a bigger panel to look a little bit like a small newspaper, but very readable, four colours, and you get the edition as of that moment,” he said.

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Online retail made positive gains in March compared to February, according to online marketing firm Coremetrics.

Online shoppers purchased nearly 12 percent more items in March compared to the previous month, while the average dollar value increased by more than 4 percent, indicating that consumers were not only buying more items online, but they were also spending more money on average than they had the month before.
Jewelry retailers saw the biggest gains in March, with the average order size and dollar value increasing 13.8 and 13.4 percent respectively.

Health and beauty retailers also saw positive gains, with the average order size up 6.9 percent and the average dollar value increasing 5.3 percent. Consumer engagement with these sites and the average time spent rose by 3.2 and 12 percent respectively from February.

Overall online retail was down compared to a year ago, with the average order size falling 8.3 percent and the average dollar value off 6.3 percent.

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