Google’s previous efforts, such as Google Buzz, have largely failed. But Google+ is different, in that many people are taking it seriously and suggesting that Google may actually have a new, easy to use tool that could rival existing social networks.

At present, Google+ has a few different aspects to it. When you first sign up, it collects everything you’ve done on previous Google services together at once. For heavy Google users, this makes things a bit easier to start, although slightly creepy, as the system pulls every person you’ve ever emailed for years and presents them to you in a list. You can then categorise these people into your ‘circles’.

Circles

By nature, Google declares that you share things with different people and group them together in your mind. So you can create different “circles” for different sharing levels. You might find something cool that you want to share with your work colleagues, while your personal information can go only to your closest friends. At first glance, this seems like a good way to organise things; like many people, I know I personally have those groups of people from different times in my life, and I’m sure you do too; different jobs, different schools, different levels of friendship.

Photos

Google uses its purchased Picasa technology to store your photos. If you’re already using Picasa, you’ll find all of your photos right there, though you’ll still need to choose who you reveal them to. Future photos can be uploaded both in Google+ and through Facebook apps for mobiles. Called ‘Instant Upload’, Google+ will send your photos online as soon as you take them, but won’t share them until you’ve set your privacy settings.

Hangouts

This functionality is basically Skype built in to Google. You can start a ‘Huddle’ conversation, adjust your webcam and microphone, and invite friends to chat with you. Up to 10 people can enter a ‘Hangout’. This is actually a good idea, integrating a different service into Google so users don’t have to rely on apps installed on their computer, but we’ll have to see about adoption when the site launches more widely. It wants to be a replacement for the unplanned meetup in person, like happens for many of us at uni, but in the real world. It could also be a great feature for families if migration does occur from Facebook to Google+.

Huddle

This works like a chat room, turning your text messages into a single conversation with one of your ‘circles’. So if you’re all trying to go to a movie, you can coordinate in a single conversation instead of trying to get multiple people together.

Sparks

This, another very clever idea, leverages Google technology to bring you stories that you might be interested in. If you’ve listed one of your interests as ‘books’, Google will present you with all the recent stories about books and invite you to share them with your friends.

I quite like this one, as it could help me do a quick round-up of recent news in favourite sectors. I would still want to use Google for actual, impartial search, though those are apparently few and far between these days.

Privacy

This also seems a good move towards more privacy. You don’t have to share your personal news with your boss if you don’t want to, and you can screen out those people you’ve added just to stay in touch with but aren’t particularly close to. You can share whatever you like with whoever you like. Those people can also +1 your news or leave a comment, just like on Facebook.

Google, however, are open with the fact that they’re using the underlying happenings of Google+ in search results. So, if something gets shared on Google+, it’s highly likely that it will go on to influence search results. Of course, we know that some things we share will probably influence search results anyway, like on Facebook and Twitter, so in that sense this isn’t really new. It just means that Google+ isn’t breaking any boundaries on the privacy front, even if it does look easier to use.

Stay tuned for more information as we get it, including a hands on experience!

Google+: First Impressions is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

The document revealed that ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers had announced a decision to explode its restrictions on generic top level domain (gTLDs) registrations; meaning that from January 12 2012 any word in any language or in fact script can be registered as a domain suffix.

22 recognised domain extensions are currently in use, from .com and .co.uk to .biz and .info but the announcement by ICANN yesterday will undoubtedly lead to a great increase. From countries and cities to institutions, hotels and brands; in what has been labelled the ‘right of the dot’ movement organisations, CEOs and representatives will have the opportunity to buy into completely new domains that will professedly increase brand awareness and identity.

According to the article Australian domain registration firm Melbourne IT whose clients include Volvo, LEGO and GlaxoSmithKline have already experienced a surge of interest from brands looking to apply for their own unique extensions, chief executive Theo Hnarakis stating that, “It will allow corporations to better take control of their brands…For example, .apple or .ipad would take customers right to those products.”

It is thought that around 500 to 1000 new domains will be registered which ICANN hope will also alleviate the rather congested .com market with many companies and groups falling over themselves to find relevant domain names producing inevitable overlaps. To lay claim to a particular domain though, a prospective applicant must demonstrate a viable authority and relevance toward that extension; if two or more parties contend over the same name it is thought ICANN will auction the license off to the highest bidder. One of the first firms to back the change has been Canon, the Japanese imaging company, who have openly expressed their intention to purchase .canon.

Budgetary clout will no doubt play a large role in this new system with an application fee set at £114,000 and a further substantial yearly subscription charge this is undoubtedly a privilege reserved for the most successful or well funded enterprises and out of the reach of most SMEs. ICANN have however stated that around $2million has been set aside to aid applicants from developing countries where the, “evaluation fee or access to technical expertise might be somewhat of a bar”, according to senior vice president Kurt Pritz.

So what do reckon to all this domain denomination? Well there have certainly been mixed reviews in the office; a lot of people are somewhat skeptical about this innovation suggesting that it will just cause confusion for internet users trying to find their desired domain when the suffix could now be almost anything. The overall implementation of this process will no doubt take several months not to mention time for the domains themselves to start competing against existing TLDs and for users to grasp the concept. How this will affect the strength of .com and other extensions in terms of SEO domain url strength only time will truly tell. In the meantime though, I wonder if we are gifting even more influence to search engines that we may soon not only rely upon to uncover content but to actually find the domains themselves; www.wmps.digitalagency hmmm.

ICANN open floodgate to domain extensions is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

On Tuesday people discovered whether or not they had been successful in purchasing tickets in what seems to be more of a lottery than a sales process. This did not happen in the traditional manner of the lucky hopefuls receiving their tickets or even anything as simple as a confirmation letter or email. Oh no those lucky few have had funds withdrawn from their bank accounts with no indication of how many tickets they have secured, or which event they were for.

Despite this scenario being one of the worst examples of online customer service probably in the history of e-commerce, you probably won’t be too surprised to discover that the IMRG-Hitwise Hot 100 Shops List, May 2011 showed that LOCOG’s London 2012 ticket site was the most popular new e-commerce site so far this year. It is perhaps fortunate for LOCOG that this really is a once in a lifetime opportunity for us Brits and we didn’t have a lot of choice. It just goes to show that if you have the right product people will put up with an awful lot to get it.

However, defying every rule in the ‘Ladybird book of E-Commerce’ the tickets site rocketed into 35^th position on the Hot 100 – not bad for a newcomer. The Olympics is still over a year away, but sports fans were seemingly desperate to get their hands on these tickets with an eight fold increase in traffic to the website in the last week of April as the registration deadline approached.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the IMRG-Experian Hitwise Hot Shops List of the top 100 UK e-retailers, it is the key indicator of online merchant performance in the UK. Published annually the Hot 100 List tracks popularity of websites according to the number of visits sites within the  IMRG Capgemini Index receive. This List below is based on April 2011 data and shows the top 50 listings.

On the Winner’s Podium…

Although the Olympics took the newcomers Gold there were some other significant winners. The quickest off the blocks year-on-year were National Express (up 23 places), Republic (+22), Bhs (+22), House of Fraser (+20), Boots (+18) and Sainsbury’s (+17). These retailers are the new champions of department stores, fashion, food and health and beauty and these sectors are representative of the last 12 months fastest growing online industries.

There were however, 3 clear top performers.

In first place, Department stores are this year’s true online retail race leaders. These multi-channel retailers now account for 18% of all UK Internet visits. That’s pretty impressive! This has largely been attributed to the growth of House of Fraser, but steady bets John Lewis and Debenhams are up there in the top 20. The triumph of the department store also indicates that a multi-channel approach is really punching its weight in the online arena – converting customers in store to online and vice versa.

In second place are those retailers of Olympic proportions – the good old supermarkets – who had an excellent year. The popularity of online grocery shopping pushed the industry up to amongst the best performing sectors overall, with three of the Big Four in the top 25 and Morrisons looking set to join them if they enter the transactional online market. Tesco secured third place overall, overtaking Play.com and Sainsbury’s moved up 17 places to number 22.

Taking the bronze are DIY stores. B&Q and Homebase saw strong season gains this quarter thanks to the fantastic weather we had in April. The sun had people getting out in their gardens and prompted a rise in sales of BBQs, lawnmowers and garden furniture as they took advantage of the fabulous and unexpected conditions.

Training for 2012

All in all its been a pretty amazing year and looking at the variety of websites in the HOT 100 list you can see how competitive online retail has become. There has been some significant movement within the Top 10 itself – Tesco shooting up to third place and B&Q breaking into the top 10 for the first time ever.  Getting yourself up there in the Top 100 is no mean feat. Robin Goad, Director of Research at Experian summarised it concisely: ‘Some companies are choosing to increase their online presence in order to increase the reach of their brand, whilst others are using online as a customer service tool, but ultimately more visits to a website means more sales and it is this reason that is driving the thriving competition between our HOT 100 retailers.’

Whatever, your approach to online one thing’s for sure you need to be ready on the line for when the gun goes off to get Gold in the online race. The competition is only going to get tougher and it will take an Olympian performance to get onto the podium.

Sources:

www.imrg.org

www.hitwise.com/uk

Olympians of Online Retail Announced is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

The problem: Duplicate content is a massive problem. If your site’s content is also elsewhere, Google may consider you the copy and downgrade you in favour of another site.

The solution: While you may wish to include manufacturer’s copy in something like a product description, you should always have some content entirely your own on every page. A large ecommerce retailer might opt for customer-generated reviews in this scenario; writing a description for each and every product is time consuming and with reviews, your customers will not only do the work for you but will help encourage others to buy if your products are well received and generate good reviews. Sites with fewer pages should invest enough time to have some unique copy on each page.

The problem: Thin content is short with nothing to add to the end user. It may be spun or exist solely for SEO purposes, so it may exist in a slightly modified form somewhere else.

The solution: Thicken up that content with extra copy and adhere to stricter guidelines. While a search engine probably can’t tell that your content has become massively more persuasive, a variety of external factors such as click-through rate, bounce rate, and time on page may be considered either now or in the future.

If you can’t add much copy onto a transactional site, consider introducing a blog to help out with more in depth and long tail content to get your rankings up across the site. It’s also easier to encourage authority links to a blog page, which will help increase the overall authority of your site.

The problem: Too many ads. Even though Google makes money from AdWords and AdSense, a high proportion of ads above the fold on your site often indicates a spammy site, leading to lower rankings for legitimate sites as well as low quality ones.

The solution: Remove some of your ads at the top. In many cases, they won’t all be making money for you anyway. Find out which ads are more successful – banner ads or text ads, for example – and keep those while getting rid of others. Look for other ways to monetise your site, such as ebook publication or affiliate partnerships, that don’t require spammy-looking ads at the top of every site.

While rankings are generally slow to recover on sites that suffer from the Panda update, these best practices will help you set a good standard for the future.

Correcting Thin Content on Your Site is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

In the early hours of May 2^nd a team of US Navy special forces raided a mansion in the small Pakistani city of Abbottabad, located in the north east of the country around 100km from the Afghan border. During a fire fight with insurgent forces it is reported that Osama Bin Laden was shot and killed and after recovering his body the corpse was buried at sea by US naval officials from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson.

Although controversy and conspiracy continue to cloud the exact details of the operation, code named ‘Neptune Spear’, one of the most intriguing insights to arise from the event was however not the incident itself, but the medium through which the news was broken to an unsuspecting world.

Hours before President Barak Obama’s now famous address, the raid on Bin Laden’s $250,000 mansion had been unwittingly ‘liveblogged’ by an Abbottabad resident. Sohaib Athar (Twitter username @ReallyVirtual) roused by the unusual noise of a helicopter flying over head at 1am Pakistani Standard Time originally issued one seemingly commonplace tweet, observing that, ‘Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).’

The tweets which continued on for several hours catalogued a series of explosions and supposition that a helicopter had been shot down. After reporting that apparently one person had been killed in a helicopter crash Mr Athar who studied for an MBA at the University of Central Lancashire further in a tweet that, ‘I think the helicopter crash in Abbottabad, Pakistan and the President Obama breaking news address are connected.’

By now of course this was only one of a fury of microblogs being sent all across the globe in what was later revealed to be the highest sustained rate of tweeting in the service’s history which over a three and a half hour period preceding and following President Obama’s address averaged at over 3,000 tweets per second. The news itself was actually revealed by former chief of staff to Donald Rumsfeld, Keith Urbahn who a further hour before the President’s official statement tweeted that, ‘So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.’

Although many questions still remain over the validity of Twitter as a journalistic or even commercial resource the power of live-feed news it seems is undeniable and the impact of having access to an exclusive insight can be tremendous, just ask Sohaib Athar whose Twitter followers jumped from a respectable 751 on April 30^th to 101,526 two days later! Although this was of course a unique scenario it does demonstrate the growing influence of live-feed news and in an age where presidential candidates are announced over Facebook and Royal engagements revealed in a Tweet the growing impact of social media even, or perhaps especially, upon the most official and governmentally sensitive aspects of our culture is undeniable.

Social media and the fall of Osama Bin Laden is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Are retailers missing a trick with M-Commerce? is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Herein is one of the problems with relying on so many other people for our data and actual methods of working. Already, our websites are hosted in places we can’t control, our marketing activities take place on Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and Foursquare, and work simply cannot happen without access to the internet. How many of our readers out there would struggle to get any work done without email? Even jobs that have nothing to do with the internet are often reliant on it for basic communication – you can just pick up the phone, of course, but it’s simply not as easy. It’s the same in your house, though, if you think about it; we’re all crippled if the power goes out or if the water stops running. We don’t generate these things ourselves, we pay others to ensure that we receive them.

The cloud is simply not any different from the services we rely on. As the saying goes, you should never put all of your eggs in one basket, and neither should you rely on any one service for your online marketing. I would never advocate that you abandon your website for a Facebook page, for example, no matter who says the trend is going in that direction. Have multiple methods of marketing and try new things; that way, if one ever does fail, you’ll have plenty in other areas to keep you busy while it gets back up and running.

For the general cloud industry, however, Amazon’s downtime is very worrying. If it can happen to them, it can happen to anyone, and in an industry that asks small to medium size businesses to rely on them for everything, Amazon’s failure is a catastrophe. This failure has certainly damaged their credibility in the cloud field and undoubtedly caused doubt in the minds of many who had previously relied on the cloud with no worries. Amazon, however, have their eggs in many different baskets, and can afford to take the hit. If all of your systems go down, can you?

What Do Cloud Failures Mean for Your Online Marketing? is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Kate Garraway came up with the idea and name Goodypass.com after she set out to find ways of developing a long term business that offered something real and of value to her fans.  Her idea was that celebrities get freebies so why shouldn’t the general public and these values also suit the sites aims to push products in a socially authentic way. Kate has also signed up twelve other celebrities to help her promote deals on the site and each will have their own portal which will include videos, photos and a blog, from where they can recommend deals. These celebrities include Alison Hammond, Lynda Bellingham, Aldo Zilli, Lisa Faukner and Laura Hamilton to name just a few. The site also intends to donate 5% of all profits to the Make-A-Wish Foundation for kids.  

Goodypass joins a growing number of social commerce sites best illustrated by LivingSocial and Groupon which has been a massive success in America and has recently been valued at over $1 billion. It could perhaps be questioned that the online voucher market is becoming a crowded market place but having celebrities making recommendations does tend to give the site an exciting edge.

How does Goodypass work and what is on offer?

Goodypass.com works with a wide range of national and local businesses to source deals which offer members access to discounts on various goods and services including beauty treatments and designer clothing and accessories.  To buy a goodypass deal all you have to do is click, buy now, register, pay and you are sent an email with a link so that you can print your voucher. Your voucher will then detail exactly what you need to do to redeem it.  Once you’ve tried it out you might want to tell your friends all about the company and Goodypass are offering £5 credit to members who refer a new member providing your friend buys a deal within 72 hours of receiving your invitation.

So how does Goodpass.com make a profit? As well as negotiating discounts which are passed direct to consumers, commission is also negotiated for the company. This percentage helps to cover the cost of running the businesses and it is hoped this will eventually allow the business to make a profit. Until then celebrities involved will laso take a share of the commission in return for their involvement.

Potential influence of Celebrities on Social Commerce

Using celebrities to promote offers to a mainstream audience does seem like a smart move.  What makes Goodypass different is that it allows consumers to communicate directly with showbiz personalities. Most offer sites are set up with no pre existing brand or audience, however Goodypass is already an official discount partner of Ok magazine and Kate is very active on Twitter and blogs every week.  Kate only joined Twitter last year and already has over 38,000 twitter followers and Angela Griffin has 43,422 so Goodypass has an opportune audience base.  

The offers aren’t available for every city yet, but the company is growing very quickly. The website states that if you can help get any Goodypass.com deals in your city to get in touch.  The sector of celebrity and social commerce definitely seems like one to watch.  It is currently free to sign up to Goodypass.com so I’m definately tempted to give it a go!

Goodypass.com: A group buying site offering members a slice of a Celebrity Lifestyle Online is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Well that’s what John Gillen, Retail Industry Head from Google said last week at the BRC’s Multi-Channel Retailing Conference. Fear not, Gillen didn’t really mean that multi-channel was dead. He was actually referring to the fact that the way in which people shop is changing and very soon multi-channel will no longer be a buzz term but the norm.

It became evident from the speakers last week that any large-scale retailer worth his salt has to embrace multi-channel. Shoppers are no longer sticking to one particular channel in which to engage with a retailer. What seems to be happening is that customers are combining shopping channels in order to make an informed decision: get the right price, an item out of stock instore or the correct size. Shoppers want to be able to access products whenever and wherever they are. In fact according to Google 43% of people are using mobile in stores to do just that.

Click and Collect

The excellent speakers at the conference had some compelling evidence to back this up. Simon Russell , the Head of Multi-Channel at John Lewis Partnership  showed that 89% of JohnLewis.com customers also buy in the shops, 51% research online and then buy in shop and 24% of shoppers buy online and the collect in store. Overall John Lewis customers shopping via multi channels spend more on average than single channel customers and were the fastest growing group of consumers for the retailer during 2010.

Russell believes that ‘Click and Collect’ will be the big win of the future driving people from behind their computers and back into shops. Of course the advent of m-commerce will help the development of this concept tremendously as shoppers on the move can check something out online and then pop into the shop to purchase instantly and Gillen stated that he believed  mobile was at the centre of both on and offline commerce. Click and collect was John Lewis’s fastest growing fulfilment method during 2010 showing growth of +120%, representing 16% incremental sales.

Tony Stockil of ecommerce consultants Javelin Group agreed with Russell believing there is huge hidden value in the web to store process, as a great online presence can influence not only ecommerce sales but also in store revenues.  He predicts that more and more retailers will take the same road as Argos with their click and collect approach, as the concept allows retailers to have less floor space.

So what does this mean for Ecommerce?

Well in a nutshell it means that more than ever an effective and engaging online presence is essential as ecommerce has a huge part to play in multi-channel success, driving sales both online and offline. Last week Drapers published their Etail report which highlighted this issue even more.   Over 60% of the people who responded to the 2011 survey agreed that they were more likely to make a purchase online and offline when a website was brought to life with engaging content and stylish visual imagery; and over 70% also agreed that they preferred sites with interactive browsing and engaging content. Another research study by ecommerce solution supplier GSI Commerce has also found that 40% of customers would avoid purchasing if they saw no lifestyle images of products on a website and 48% would not purchase if there was only a single product image available to view.

Back to the Drapers Report 34.85% of online visitors used a brands website to see what products would be in store and 31.95% said they would get to the point of checkout and then decide to buy in shop. The Drapers report presents compelling evidence to suggest that ecommerce is having a much wider impact than merely driving online sales. However, from a different perspective, Tim Curtis, Chief Executive of catalogue retailer Lands’ End who spoke at the conference last week also pointed out that 58% of Lands’ End’s online sales were driven by their catalogues and that they could use the catalogue to predict their AOV. Their catalogue and website working hand in hand to convert sales.

This then suggests that online content is not only crucial to drive sales across all channels but it also needs be an effective mechanism to convert customers who are directed there via another channel.

Curtis believes that the e-catalogue will come into its own with the iPad as the functionality is ideally suited to turning pages and browsing. Increasingly websites are looking to magazine style content and in my last post I discussed an increasing use of editorial to engage online customers. However, good quality lifestyle imagery can be incredibly powerful and if used effectively supersede the necessity for additional content.

Retailers are quickly recognising that imagery is becoming increasingly important to communicate their brand values and sell the ‘lifestyle’ to customers and if Curtis is correct this will only increase as more and more consumers start to shop on mobiles and tablets.

In last week’s Drapers Danielle Pinnington Managing Director of shopper behaviour research agency Shoppercentric said “The trick of web merchandising is to ensure the products look fantastic online – good enough and easy to buy immediately, or at least eye-catching enough to inspire a store visit. Merchandisers will know which items are the best-sellers. So how can the limitations of a PC, tablet or mobile screen be overcome to present hot items, suggest outfits, and give enough visibility to engage customers? This is the challenge to retailers.”

So how can websites do this?

Online Merchandising

The evidence for rich and engaging content suggests that online merchandising will play a crucial part in a retailer’s multi-channel success. As Drapers pointed out last week retailers are beginning to understand that ecommerce sites are a powerful mechanism to drive traffic in stores and many are tackling this challenge through the presentation of their merchandise. Retailers are making concerted efforts to speed up the process of browsing looks to making a purchase through ‘Get the Look’ functionality and TV.

Pinnington told Drapers that retailers offering ‘flat’, thumbnail style product presentation, without rich media content, total outfit ideas, or new and ‘just in’ features were missing sales opportunities. “Thanks to sites like Asos and My-Wardrobe, shoppers have experienced the kind of content and functionality that is possible online, so expectations are high, some retailers don’t have the physical coverage of stores – John Lewis for example – so it’s even more important for these sites to seize the merchandising opportunities.”

H and M and River Island both have similar ‘shop the look’ features with great imagery that will take you directly to the styles shown. Net-a Porter has just launched a digital TV station on its site, which has taken a magazine format to a whole new level. Visitors can shop their favourite designers as they browse glam and informative video content and cleverly as you are viewing, a selection of relevant products pops up handily at the side for you to make purchases in only a few clicks. French Connection’s Youtique which Tony Stockil discussed at the conference uses elements of Net-a-Porter’s fashion TV and uses the social media channel YouTube to give fashion advice and styling tips alongside convenient links to purchase. Drapers predicts, that web-enabled TV is the future and retailers such as Marks and Spencer, Net-a-Porter and ASOS are already nudging in that direction.

Digital merchandising has a way to go but it is certainly taking strides forward. Next in particular have really got it sussed. The site has fantastic use of lifestyle imagery which is easily navigated and allows you to purchase the entire look in one click as opposed to jumping backwards and forwards from item to item. The dynamic and visually inspiring ‘catalogue’ style spreads make browsing the store incredibly easy.

So is Multi-Channel is dead?

Well given the evidence I would say definitely not and I think multi-channel will only continue to develop as shoppers expectations continue to rise and as devices that facilitate shopping on the move increase in popularity. I think Gillen could be right in one respect as I believe there could certainly come a time (and probably in the very near future) when the way in which people shop through a variety of channels will be the norm and it will be taken for granted that they could access products via so many methods. After all, the evidence suggests we’re already out there shopping in that way already.

Multi-Channel is dead…. is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

This update’s main focus appears to be on low quality content. Google is punishing sites that don’t provide real value to the people who visit them. These are sites such as article directories, how-to sites, and scraper sites that are piggybacking off others’ content. There is no word yet on whether the impacted sites’ links actually pass less ‘link juice’ than they did previously. Regardless, if you’re solely relying on low quality content farms for your SEO strategy, you’re going to need to come up with a new solution; they may not have implemented this yet but we can almost guarantee they will in the future.

What should you be doing to ensure the impact to your site is minimal?

1.      Write your own content, and write it well. This is something we have always recommended and will continue to do so. Even if you are selling products that are sold on many other websites and in offline catalogues, it is essential to keep the content on your site fresh, interesting, and unique. Not only will this help you rank better, effectively written selling copy will push more products and entice more users to click through and purchase.

2.      Monitor your backlinks. You should be conscious of any links coming from sites impacted by Panda and thus aware of the possible devaluation of those links. If you’re heavily affected by newly classified spam sites, you may wish to consider asking for the removal of those links and focus more time on high quality, genuine, natural links – even if the spammy links were natural. As we all know, not all links are created equal. This is especially important given Google’s recent crackdown on paid links and public exposure of sites known to be breaking the rules.

3.      Focus more of your energy on social media. While not every site is naturally aligned with social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook, there are a variety of niche sites and opportunities; this can make a difference not only to your rankings but to your image. If your company isn’t suited to social media, ask yourself whether any aspects of it can be incorporated and focus a campaign on those. For example, a company that makes engines isn’t going to be an instant win on Facebook, but can appeal to the average customer by creating a page on choosing an eco-friendly engine or even educating the general public about how an engine works. These signals are now officially used in rankings; while you’re waiting for the Panda / Farmer update to get sorted out, consider an increased investment in social.

Preparing for the Google Panda Update UK is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.