Marketing

This week saw Google release Google Shopping and Product Listing Ads for us here in Australia and the search engine arguing that they have the same rights regarding freedom as speech as a newspaper. We also checked out Google's Mobile Playbook, a site optimised for tablets and other mobile devices. Mobile phone optimisation is an important part of the website design process. Here at Aspedia we are excited to see how implementing a mobile site has helped our clients, and are looking forward to producing more websites for mobile and smart phones in the future.

This week saw Samsung finally pass their rivals in terms of mobile phones shipped in one quarter, Bing differentiating themselves further from Google's search and Demand Media changing it's game plan.

Demand Media's Quality Content Play

Google has announced another major update to how they seek to rank websites, and this one is targeting Webspam. This is another in a lenghtening list of algorithm changes that Google has rolled out this year to maintain the quality of their search results. In addition to their changes to search, Google has released their storage product, Google Drive, and opening up video advertising to all businesses through AdWords.

This week saw Member Evolution, a project years in the making go live here at Aspedia. It also saw Larry Page, Google's CEO, publish a letter and a mobile phone app called Instagram get bought by Facebook for $1 billion.

Member Evolution is Live!

This week has seen Google release Account Activity reports for users, and completely de-indexed a number of blog networks for bad behaviour. Rumours have also begun that Google intends to release a Google+ based commenting platform for websites similar to Facebook's own commenting system.

Risking Linking Business

This week saw another Aspedia client go live with a great new site. Sci Qual is an accredited third party Certification Body offering ISO 9001, ISO 14001:2004, AS/NZS 4801:2001 and more. In the last few days we also saw Google list a number of SEO dos and do nots on the Webmaster Tools blog, announce Social reports in Google Analytics and see Twitter turn six.

There has been a lot happening with social media recently, one of the largest stories featuring a video with over 79 million views on YouTube as a part of the "Make Kony Famous" campaign. LinkedIn also hit another mile stone by passing 3 million users in Australia, covering over 60 per cent of the Australian professional population.

Google's SSL search and local search on mobile changes, and a new iPad have made this week anything but dull. The new figures about browser market share also make good reading, and certainly highlight by cross browser compatibility is important for web design. SSL search does promise to have the greatest impact of the stories mentioned below, as dealing with '(Not Provided)' becomes an important challenge for Australian site owners.

It had to happen eventually. Yesterday Google announced that SSL search will soon be available on more than just Google.com. This means that SSL search will begin to affect Google.com.au users who search while signed in very soon.

This week's big news was Facebook releasing Timelines For Brands. Business pages on Facebook can now create a timeline just like a normal user. If it was not for this, Google's new privacy policies coming into effect on the first of March would have been this week's big story. Even if it has not gotten the same coverage as Facebook's new changes, Google's new privacy policy will probably have a greater effect over time, as it effectively allows Google to use user data from each service across their entire range of products.