Archive by Author
A Search Engine’s View of Eric Ward’s “Key Problems With Current Social Link Graph Signals”
Posted on 24. Jun, 2011 by Michael Thomson.
Filtering the mass of Google Reader subscriptions by magic for my daily consumption of digital, I was presented with a post from Eric Ward on Search Engine Land entitled “Key Problems with Social Link Graph Signals“. For those who do not know Eric Ward personally, like me, he has been in the link building and [...]
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Your Web History in Google Social Search Results
Posted on 16. Jun, 2011 by Michael Thomson.
While scouring the web for new content to consume, I noticed my pretty little face appear in the search results under a website I had just visited with a “You visited this page on…” message. I opt-in to Google Social Search, so I initially thought little of it. There are tons of Google experiments going [...]
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Stay at Home Son, The Hangover 2 Influence Online
Posted on 02. Jun, 2011 by Michael Thomson.
I love comedy movies, and when I went to see Hangover 2, I cried with laughter when Alan (Zach Galifianakis) described himself as a “stay at home son”. Intrigued by how much movies influence digital, I took my quest to Google looking to reveal who’s picked up on this memorable quote… Works as stay at [...]
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Demographic Based Personalised Search
Posted on 12. May, 2011 by Michael Thomson.
When I talk about rankings, I talk about personalised search. I mainly suggest location and search histroy as the two main demographics that influence personalised search, but yestarday when I stumbled across Danny Sullivan’s post about Google +1 on Search Engine Land, it reminded of how Google, amongst others, could use further demographic insight to [...]
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Combating Digital Shoplifting & Protecting IP from Digital(vandal)ism
Posted on 03. May, 2011 by Michael Thomson.
I’m a big fan of mobile barcode price comparison, and I followed with great interest Jeffrey Sharkey’s Compare Everywhere app (formally Andriod Scan) when it featured in the top 50 of Google’s Android Developer challenge. Mobile barcode price comparison is big, especially in Japan where BBC’s Quentin Sommerville reports a ‘digital shoplifting’ plague. People find [...]
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Use HTML5 to Enhance Your Mobile Apps Longevity
Posted on 25. Apr, 2011 by Michael Thomson.
You’are an investor, you love a new project, and you understand digital can being a real money maker. You have the oppertunity to invest in a new mobile app. You ask all the usual Dragon’s Den questions, you like the app – it’s clearly got potential. But wait, did you ask about HTML5? Roll VT… [...]
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Canonical Binds Google +1 for Paid, Organic and Social
Posted on 13. Apr, 2011 by Michael Thomson.
Google’s +1 ecosystem will shortly be available for users to +1 ads, organic results and webpages. However in many circumstancies, neither the ad, organic result or web page will share the same URL… Ads – example.com/hello?campaign=12345 Organic Result – example.com/hello?facet=red Web Pages – example.com/Hello/ Canonicalisation in the form of tracking, filters, facets, upper/lowercase mix, trailing [...]
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Mobile affiliate tracking; the ‘new’ telephone number?
Posted on 05. Apr, 2011 by Michael Thomson.
Affiliates tend not to like telephone numbers on merchant websites. Why? Well, because the user can convert without the affiliate getting any commission. There are ways around this, but in general, I’ll speak on behalf of affiliates and say they don’t really like them. Merchants have, or likely are, developing mobile, tablet and television specific [...]
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Riding the digital death traffic train
Posted on 31. Mar, 2011 by Michael Thomson.
With Jackie Chan unfortunately passing away recently, I thought I would brighten everyone’s spirits (no pun intended) and touch on the subject of the dead, and how it influences our digital lives. Being a fan of Jackie Chan, I took my quest to Google to reminisce his death by watching some of his classic martial [...]
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Structured data opens a ‘can of opportunity’ for paid search
Posted on 15. Mar, 2011 by Michael Thomson.
Structured data is great! It takes information you and I (humanoids) understand, and makes it machine (Matrix style) readable. “Machines” for the topic of this post, search engines, do a good job understanding content. Take Bing and Google for example, they crawl and web and are able to rank documents in an order based on [...]
