SEO and Digital Marketing blog | Digital Marketing Strategist Sydney | digital marketing & technologies // social media strategy

Online Car Reviews

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Boris Jacquin

Once in a while you stumble upon an unusual site and might think, “wow, this is genius”, or “how original, I didn’t know someone did that!”. That’s what recently happened to me when my wife, The Makeup Mole, showed me cute videos about caretakers of baby sloths.

But this short post is not about bathing sloths at all. This post is about Finn, who started Finnweasel at the age of 7 – which probably made him one of the youngest bloggers in the world – and who has now started another blog in which he will be reviewing cars from the point of view of a kid. His car reviews are carefully written and he takes the time to sit in each car that is lent to him and take many precious notes on his iPad about what it is like to be in a car from the point of view of the ones who travel with you at the back. Did you know that the fabric of the seats of a Ford Focus CL is actually quite itchy on the calves of those whose legs don’t reach the floor? Had you thought about the many compartments that make it handy to stash lollies on long car journeys? And how about boot space to fit a kid’s bike?

If he carries on with his task of reviewing as many cars as he possibly can, who knows, maybe his site will become a point of reference and market research for car manufacturers. In the meantime, I recommend that you check his site for some informed, witty and entertaining reading from a 9 year old backseat traveler. www.kidscarreviews.com.

Posted in Blogs | Leave a comment

Adsense ban, or Google playing God. Again

Posted on June 11, 2011 by Boris Jacquin

I manage on a daily basis The Makeup Mole, my wife’s beauty makeup blog, which currently gets about 13,000 visits a month. Not a huge deal in itself but becoming quite authoritative in its niche since Christabel has worked with the best people in fashion and beauty around the world (side note, I am very proud of her, she’s worked with Karl Lagerfeld, Bruce Weber, Claudia Schiffer, Ellen Von Unwerth, Kay Montano – just to name drop a few – she’s way too skilled to be working in Sydney, but that’s another subject) . On makeupmole.com we had ads run by Adsense, nothing new here, there are tens of thousands of blogs running Adsense. Except that yesterday we received an email from Google advising us that The Makeup Mole had been banned from Adsense. That’s right, banned, gone, account suspended, hasta la vista baby. With no clear explanation, Google kicked the blog out of its network but strongly hinted that it was our fault and that we had undoubtedly been clicking on our own ads in order to make money from them. As if we a) were stupid enough to do this and b) didn’t have better things to do.

So we’re still trying to understand. All we can think about is a sudden increase in traffic from Australia as it increased significantly recently thanks to its popularity now that we live here. Vogue Australia mentioned it on its home page recently, but Google probably didn’t notice that since the Adsense department is different from Search.

The very reason for this ban remains a mystery and I don’t think we’ll ever know why. I attribute it to Google playing God again, deepening my strong antipathy for what it’s become: worldwide digital evil represented by pretentious geeks whose ultimate goal is to control your online habits and profit from them, and who will not hesitate to obliterate your site from the worldwide web if their mathematically-driven algorithms tell them it’s the right thing to do, no questions asked.

Posted in SEO | Tagged Adsense, Evil, Google | Leave a comment

Google Places is a sloppy student

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Boris Jacquin

So here I am trying to make Google Places understand that Wellington Point, Queensland, is in Australia while Google Search plays God again and releases a fancy algorithm improvement, cross-referencing listings with user’s blocked sites.
The thing is, Google sometimes gets it wrong, and there is no way to tell Google except through prayers. So I’ve been uploading all the Nandos stores in Oz into Google Places, and actually went back to an existing listing to correct a postcode that was wrong (error that Google didn’t spot at the time the listing was initially reviewed and accepted). And now that I did the right thing and corrected my postcode, some stubborn and uneducated idiot with very possibly no passport has been consistently rejecting it because it or he or she cannot comprehend that Wellington Point is in Queensland, Australia. Even Google Maps knows that, but Google Places doesn’t seem to be aware of the existence of Google Maps, and keeps on rejecting my now correct listing citing “Invalid country” for a reason .

So, Google, how about some geography lessons?

Google Places

Posted in SEO | Tagged Google Places | 1 Comment

Aggregators = spammers

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Boris Jacquin

Content aggregation – who, in their right mind, would bother building such site? Take this email we received today from beautynewsfeed.com. I can tell you that this website receives very, very little traffic from Google, despite all its apparent content. The SEO plot is blatant, and still it saddens me to see that such sites manage to convince many, many, many bloggers to add them to their website. The SEO plot is very simple: making bloggers believe that having excepts of their sites added to a site aggregator will drive traffic to theirs, thinking that, “after all, there is a lot of content there, so it must be a great source of traffic for my site.”.

Dear beauty bloggers and bloggers of all kinds, it is my duty to tell you not to link out to these sites. Blog aggregators are asking for what we call in our SEO jargon “link juice”. Once they have enough links, their PageRank will rise, and so will their relevance to the eyes of Google. As a result, there is a risk in the long term that Google finds their site before it finds yours when users look for things – i.e. they want to grab what we call long tail search traffic – your search traffic. Why are they doing that? To sell ads and make money.

So don’t be fooled, these blog aggregators will never bring any significant traffic to your site. Because their primary aim is to sell ads, not to bring traffic to your site. On top of this, Google is increasingly identifying their content as duplicate, therefore making them irrelevant and invisible – which is why they need hundreds of blogs linking to them, in the hope to be able to beat Google. However their plot is becoming too obvious to search engines.

My word of advice? Don’t bother with them, they are time wasters, and they WILL decrease the power of your blog if you link out to them.

Posted in SEO | Tagged Spam | 1 Comment

Papa

Posted on December 17, 2010 by Boris Jacquin

Au revoir Papa, that was way too early. I hope you rest in peace.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Search is going local

Posted on October 28, 2010 by Boris Jacquin

In my last post I stated that search was growing in the following directions: local, mobile, social and semantic.

Today, when checking the ranking of my friends at Après Restaurant, a French restaurant in Sydney for which I did some SEO, I noticed that Google had changed a few things around when displaying results for a commercially-related searches when the name of a place is part of the search term.

The map showing the results is now located on the right sidebar, above Adwords, and stays visible as you scroll down the page. Google is evidently trying to emphasise its Maps, of high relevance when the name of a place is part of the search term.

I also noted a revision of their algorithm. First, Google now displays links to customer reviews from more than its own Google Places. Second, preference is given to businesses that have registered their presence through Google Places and it seems that businesses that have pictures as part of their Google Places profile are also given a priority.

Finally, there are some major differences between Chrome and Safari. The former currently shows Adwords links and the latter doesn’t. There are also some differences in the SERPs when comparing both browsers. Overall it seems that Chrome showcases what to expect across all browsers when the whole process is deployed across the board.

A major improvement from Google that highlights the ever-increasing importance of local results.

Local Search using Chrome

Local Search using Safari

Posted in SEO | Tagged Google, Google Maps | 1 Comment

The Social Engine

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Boris Jacquin

The latest Bing-Facebook announcement by which your search results on Bing will take into account your Facebook friends’ likes and related favourite pages, and display socially-tailored results could be the light that will finally shine on Bing. The future of SEO is social, mobile, local and semantic. The integration of Facebook within Bing results could make a reality of the first three.

Google somehow missed the boat by poorly integrating Twitter into its search results. They are kept at the bottom of the results page and only available to Gmail users. Once again Google have been egocentric in their social search offering. Their integration of Twitter is more a display of technological prowess than social vision in the field of search.

It is not in Google’s interest to integrate search. Their business model is based on one-click-and-you’re-out – Google wants you to use the site as often as possible and as quickly as possible. With this in mind, Google also needs to make as much money from you as possible, which is exactly what happened with Google Instant, making Adword results prevail more than natural results.

Bing’s move to integrate Facebook and enable users to sign in by using their Facebook account is a bold and very smart one. Bing has always been about usability, as shown by their search applications for hotels and flights, for example. This move marks a natural evolution of search and a full integration of everyone’s social network – half a billion of us so far, and still growing.

What’s in it for Facebook?

Only 4% of worldwide searches are performed using Bing, and quite frankly, Facebook doesn’t need Bing to pursue its growth or cement its position as the world’s prevailing social network. Facebook doesn’t need Bing, full stop, so what’s really behind this partnership? It can’t just be for users or as favour from Mark Zuckerberg to Bing. This is big business after all, not philanthropy.

My take is that the next logical step to this partnership will be the integration of search within Facebook, proudly brought to you by Bing. This win-win situation would keep Facebook users on the site and would boost Bing’s popularity and ad revenue share. Once on Facebook you would be able to perform a search with social, sponsored and natural results displayed within Facebook.

More than a social network, Facebook could then become the world’s first and largest Social Engine.

What does it mean for SEOs?

Pure SEO will not survive unless it integrates comprehensive social media strategies and SEO agencies will have to become integrated Digital Media Agencies. A domain currently left to techies, SEO will pursue its natural move towards being an integral part of Digital Marketing, a sphere in which it’s always belonged but so far hasn’t been given a real place.

Posted in SEO, Social Networking | Tagged Facebook | Leave a comment

Sometimes all one needs is a pizza

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Boris Jacquin

Here I am sitting by the pool, looking at Dunk Island and enjoying a warm breeze after a morning downpour. It’s beautiful. The rooms are large, the beds comfortable although the aircon is noisy at night, which disturbed my sleep and prevented me from enjoying the comfort of the fluffy pillows.

Days by the pool are spent mostly on large day beds, the view’s amazing and the staff is the friendliest staff I’ve had in any hotels.

The only major drawback this resort has is the overpriced food. There isn’t anything simple that can be ordered and spending a whole day here means spending as much on food as you do on rooms. Unique dining experience is great, but every day, 3 times a day is pushing it. In the morning I want muesli, not fancy 5-star muesli with coulis and decorated plate with it. This place lacks simple, affordable food, which would probably boost its occupancy rate. We had to go to the local supermarket to stack on snacks and breakfast things because we don’t fancy spending $60 every day just for breakfast for us 2 and our 8 year old.

Would I come back? I don’t think so. Because sometimes one just needs a pizza for dinner and that’s not possible here at The Elandra Resort in Far North Tropical Queensland.

Posted in Australia - The good | Leave a comment

The future us talking to you

Posted on September 25, 2010 by Boris Jacquin

OK – this 11 yr old boy is home-schooled, which somehow makes me think that he didn’t come up with his environmental theories completely on his own. But having myself a child whose maturity and abilities to reflect, analyse situations and solve problems are way beyond average for his age, I can totally believe that he came up with his speech on his own. His stage skills already demonstrate a high level of maturity and confidence that are quite rare for an 11 year-old.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Ecology, Environment | Leave a comment

digital marketing & technologies // social media strategy