Creative SEO News UK, Search Engine Optimisation & Search Marketing News » technology

Google Launches New Display Advertising as part of Double Click Network.

Creative SEO — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:27:52 +0000

Google has launched a new online network which is set to simplify and speed up both online display ad publishing and advertising. Google has now officially acknowledged the launch and the new network which is set to shake up the existing display advertising community while promising to improving usability and accessibility.

“today we’re excited to announce the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a step towards creating a more open display advertising ecosystem for everyone. The Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace that helps large online publishers on one side; and ad networks and agency networks on the other, buy and sell display advertising space.” Taken from the official Google Blog.

Google has set up three primary objectives for the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

1) Make the buying and selling of display advertising easier and simpler to use.
2) Delivering improved performance which can be directly measured by advertising agencies
3) Open up the ecosystem.

“These publishers and ad networks manage and represent large volumes of ads and ad space from lots of advertisers and websites. By bringing them together in an open marketplace in which prices are set in a real-time auction, the Ad Exchange enables display ads and ad space to be allocated much more efficiently. This improves returns for advertisers and enables publishers to get the most value out of their online content.” Taken from the Official Google Blog.

This is not a new idea, there are many existing and established ad exchange networks but what will be different is Google’s approach. The Double Click Ad Exchange will be simple to use and accessible to all levels of advertiser and publisher. Integration into the existing Adwords community is sure to set the foundations for the success of this product. We will have to wait and see how the network is received but it does look set to offer users a valuable alternative to the existing ad exchange networks.

Article by Creative SEO UK

New Free Online Game, Monopoly City Streets, Google & Hasbro Partnership

Creative SEO — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:39:51 +0000

A massive new multiplayer version of Monopoly has been launched in association with Google, the world is now your play ground, buy property on any street anywhere in the world!

On the 9th of September, Hasbro will launch Monopoly City Streets. This massive online version of the famous board game will only be available for a 4 month period but the good news is its completely free. The Free game uses Google maps or the open source Open Street Maps as the playing field. Hasbro claims it will be “the biggest game of Monopoly of all time” and players will be able to purchase almost “any street in the world”.

As with the traditional board game, the idea behind the game is to make as much money as possible through purchasing property from different location. The more property you have, the more rent you can earn, the larger your income.

Each new player will start the game with 3 million monopoly dollars. Once a player owns a street they can purchase, sell and rent properties. Streets can also be traded or sold to other players.

The Hasbro have also introduced a chance card, which allow players to sabotage rivals by building rubbish dumps, prisons or wind farms on their property to reduce the value of properties and rent on a specific street. Players can only remove a hazard by bulldozing a lot clean, but this again requires the appropriate chance card.

Article by Creative SEO UK

Google in UFO abduction Mystery! “O” is abducted from Google’s Logo.

Creative SEO — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 11:53:09 +0000

Google’s world famous logo has come under threat from a strange “Unexplained Phenomenon”. On Saturday 5th September a weird flying saucer appeared on the Google logo and appeared to abduct the letter “O” from the logo itself. A keyword search in Google.com for “Unexplained Phenomenon” revealed the UFO.

At this very same time Google Tweeted the following message.

“1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19”

Translated the message reads “All Your O are belong to us.”

Danny Sullivan, famous SEO and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land received the following statement directly from Google about the incident.

“We consider the second ‘o’ critical to user recognition of our brand and pronunciation of our name. We are actively looking into the mysterious tweet that has appeared on the Google twitter stream and the disappearance of the “o” on the Google homepage. We hope to have an update in the coming weeks.”

At this moment in time we are unsure of what exactly Google has up its sleeve or weather this a real encounter with an internet entity.

Danny Sullivan is reported as believing he might have the answer.

“I twittered that I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of the letters disappear each day in some type of running logo changes, as Google’s done from time to time. That didn’t happen today, but Google Operating System notes that this type of series of change my occur related to H. G. Wells.
This is due to a Google Korea blog post that says to watch for the next in the series on Sept. 15 with things of “mystery,” “invisible” and “novel,” Google Operating System translates. The assumption is that this relates to the HG Wells work “The Invisible Man” and may celebrate his birthday. If so, then expect a further doodle on Sept. 21 — when Wells was actually born.”

We will just have to wait and see what happens next?

Article by Creative SEO UK

YouTube Rumoured to be in Talks with Sony & Lions Gate to Offer Film & Movie Rentals

Creative SEO — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 11:26:48 +0000

YouTube, the social networking video sharing community, is said to be in discussions with Sony & Lions Gate Films to offer a Film & Movie Rental service through the YouTube portal.

YouTube, one of the internet’s visited websites, recently announced that it would be offering premium, professionally produced content onto its network in order to attract more users and increase advertising revenue. Last month, as part of an agreement, Time Warner, CNN, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim added older content to the YouTube Network. At present the majority of YouTube content is user generated or uploaded. The addition of paid content will see a dramatic change to the existing site, offering new sources of revenue and advertising opportunities.

“Google’s trying to find ways to better monetize this very good asset,” said Andy Miedler, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co. “As long as the economics make sense, I certainly applaud them for trying to increase the revenue stream.”

Chris Dale, a YouTube spokesman, declined to comment on “rumors or speculation.”

“We hope to expand on both our great relationships with movie studios and on the selection and types of videos we offer our community,” Dale said, without being more specific. The Wall Street Journal reported the story yesterday.

YouTube has also reported that it has come to a final settlement with PRS for Music and Music Videos will shortly be available to view in the UK once again. PRS requested a large royalty fee from YouTube for playing and distributing Music Videos and related content. YouTube announced that the Fee structure was too high and that advertising revenue would not fund such high charges.
After lengthy discussions with PRS, YouTube announced back in March that it would be blocking music content until a settlement could be made in regards to license fees. Nearly 6 months on and the service will finally be renewed.

Article by Creative SEO UK

Digg adds NoFollow tags to reduce Spam

Creative SEO — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 11:14:52 +0000

Social Media bookmarking site Digg is said to be adding NoFollow tags to site links in order to reduce to volume of spam listings in its network. The links which will be directly affected are within user profiles, comments and unpopular posts. The addition of NoFollow tags will mean that Digg will not pass on link juice and page rank to any link which qualifies for the NoFollow tag.

Many Digg users create and submit content to Digg just for the links back to their sites. Quality content will drive high volumes of direct traffic to a website, through the Digg network, but many users are more interested in creating poor quality content in order to generate as many links as possible.

Digg have not explained how popular a link needs to be in order to qualify to have the NoFollow tag removed, the Digg blog announced the change but did not detail the criteria.

Digg have said that they have been working with leading members of the SEO community to come up with an effective and fair rule. No names have been given but you have to hope that this is not a result of pressure from Google.

Article by Creative SEO UK

Google Says Sorry for Gmail Down Time & Outage

Creative SEO — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 11:18:12 +0000

The Google email service, Gmail, went down on Tuesday for over 2 hours. Google has admitted that the Gmail downtime was a “Big Deal” for millions of domestic and business users.

Google have admitted that the outage was a result of routine server maintenance. A few of its servers were taken offline which resulted in the remaining servers being overloaded with traffic. Google has apologised and has said it will make every effort to stop the issue from happening again in the future. The Gadgetwise blog has reported that the issue was intensified as Google use Gmail internally and were unable to communicate.

Gmail is normally a very reliable and trusted service although there have been three outages this year, Google has rectified the issues extremely quickly maintaining the service. In June ComScore reported that Gmail had over 149 million worldwide users.
Gmail is also an important and integral part of many large and international businesses. More and more companies are switching to Gmail, delivering email over the internet and scrapping in-house email solutions. Outsourcing email online is extremely cost effective and can potentially save companies a lot of money and offer a larger amount of storage and functionality.

Despite yesterday’s issue Gmail is held in high regard, we have yet to see if yesterday’s outage will damage the image of Gmail as a reliable business tool.

Article by Creative SEO UK

Google News Adds Suggested Search to News Search box.

Creative SEO — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 11:11:00 +0000

Google Suggest is a simple yet powerful service which suggests a list of popular keywords, when inputting characters for a keyword search, within a search input box. As more characters are added the suggested search terms are refined to offer more relevant list of keywords based on the additional characters. This is not new technology and is currently being used as part of the Google Toolbar. What is new is the introduction of the service within the Google News website.

Google have adjusted the algorithm to feature only news related keywords and terms. The new feature is available in multiple Google News Languages including; English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.

Article By Creative SEO UK

Google Docs Launch Translation Tool: Multi Language Document Sharing.

Creative SEO — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 11:49:59 +0000

Google Docs has today launched an amazing new translation tool, now you can share Google Docs between 42 different languages and automatically translate the content.

Google Documents has fast become the world’s leading online document sharing solution, the simple and familiar to use service offers a whole suite of tools for the consumer and business user.

Google have integrated there Google Translates technology into the Google Docs. In the Tools Menu you can now select “translate document”, you will then be asked to choose a language. Not only will this service translate your existing document it will also create a new translated version which will be saved as a new document. This gives you the versatility to create multiple saved versions of the same document in different languages.

Google has acknowledged that the format and layout of translated documents will remain the same, only the text will change. Google is also rumoured to be in the process of updating the user interface of Google Docs to compete with Microsoft Office’s new web based productivity suite.

Article by Creative SEO

Lock Ness Monster Spotted on Google Earth by Security Guard.

Creative SEO — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 11:24:51 +0000

A British security guard has found an image on Google Earth which resembles the legendary Lock Ness Monster, but has the illusive creature finally been caught on camera?

The image shows a large unidentified object, which resembles a sea creature, on the surface or beneath the water. The image can be found by searching Google Earth and entering coordinates Latitude 57°12’52.13″N, Longitude 4°34’14.16″W.

Adrian Shine, a Loch Ness researcher has called the image “Really Intriguing” and is said to be investigating the story further.
Google have been so intrigued by the findings that on Thursday, they sent the new Google Street Maps Bike to circle the lake and record further imagery for the Street Maps project, hoping to capture more evidence.

It has been suggested that the image is of the Lock Ness Express, a boat which regularly tours the lake. Another image of the boat can be seen on Google Earth by entering the coordinates Latitude 57°10’8.21″N, Longitude 4°37’53.37″W.

It’s unknown at this time exactly what the image is but internet users are eagerly awaiting the launch of the new Lock Ness Google Street Map imagery, just in case they spot something else.

Article by Creative SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

Commercial Twitter Accounts with Premium services and Business Tools to be launched.

Creative SEO — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:29:46 +0000

Twitter is preparing to launch commercial accounts designed specifically for business users, could this be the long awaited introduction of Twitters new Revenue generation model and what services will be available on premium business accounts?

Twitter, the Micro-Blogging phenomenon, has grown to massive proportions over the last 12 months. Real Time search has become a key new player in online marketing and Twitter continues to pioneer the technology. It seems that Twitter was looking to establish the micro-blogging service with high user levels and popularity before considering the introduction of an advertising model to start generating revenue. The introduction of Business Tools and Premium accounts is the first sign of Commercial Monetization of the business.

During an interview with VentureBeat, Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone is reported to have discussed the first phase of rolling out commercial accounts and the introduction of business-orientated applications, API’s, which would add a “commercial layer” to the social network. Biz Stone said:

“Twitter will still be free for everybody and we’ll still tell them to go crazy with it.”
“But we’ve identified a selection of things that businesses say are helping to make them more profit.”

Last month some important Twitter documents were leaked to the public, they included detailed information and concepts about the monetization of Twitter which included; search ads, integrated Adsense, sponsored tweets and an analytics suite of tools. Twitter also announced the launch last week of a new Twitter Geo-tagging feature which will allow users to configure their Twitter account to display their exact Tweeting location. It’s evident that the new Twitter premium accounts will be extremely feature rich, it’s still unclear when the new service will be launched as no formal launch date has been released.

Article by Creative SEO