Don’t ask us why we were looking for an Aston Martin. But something rather critical about the Aston Martin PPC campaign caught our attention, in-fact we have witnessed the campaign error for the best part of a week.

A search for “Aston Martin” in Google brings us the following ad:

When we click on this ad this is the landing page

No site configured at this address ‘gclid=CNTD1o29ipUCFQ5tMAodOR58rg’. An additional configuration error occurred.

The Google tracking ID is causing the error and it seems the PPC guys haven’t spotted this. The ad is supposed to just go to the Aston homepage.

Well I know for a fact that if the guys in our PPC Management team had set this up Dave would now be grilling them. We can all appreciate that it takes time to learn effective PPC Management but such lack of attention to detail is inexcuseable, especially when the brand is so well known. I wouldn’t like to be in the shoes of the PPC Management team for Aston Martin at the moment.

Searching is not always done through the net. Yes, there is a physical world out there too. Many have spent their lives searching for Bigfoot. Perhaps once thought a mythical beast it seems Georgia may have indeed found the mighty Bigfoot. Is this yet another example of link bait ? Well, Google trends think the story is hot. This time though the story may well be backed up with evidence as the DNA details of the Bigfoot Body are to be presented at the press confernce on Friday August 15th.

There must be some SEOs that read this blog in the region of Georgia, USA. What’s the story guys ?

This totally freaked me out today, I was signed into my Gmail account and was going to check the adsense test we had been running, which isn’t connected to my Gmail account so I normally have to logout and sign in has Becky my wife ( it’s her account lol ), but to my surprise and of course total excitement my Google account entered straight into adsense.. even more excitement when it WAS NOT MY Account !!!

Not sure what to do really, they have only made $8, haha but I can edit he payee details lol

DaveN

Gmail is one of my favourite mail systems. Why ? Well, I guess it true I never really delete anything and the storage capacity is huge. However, the outage I experienced yesterday was also huge: “We’re sorry, but your [Gmail]* account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to use your account while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.”

Temporary error 502

Google have had engineers working on the system to pinpoint the 502 errors. Was everyone affected or was it simply a subset of users ? I love the capacity and indeed functionality that Gmail offers but I guess the level of dependence I have put on the mail system is too high, I expect it there when I need it 24/7

Come on Google why was Gmail Down ?

August 11,

Lil Wayne has issued a statement, calling the rumors “false” and “unfounded.” and denying that his daughter had been killed,The rapper said the child was “alive, healthy and surrounded by family who care and love her dearly.”

I had an email through this morning asking me if I knew that “Lil Wayne’s daughter Reginae” had died in a car accident on Sunday night. Well, please forgive my ignorance but I didn’t actually know who ” Lil Wayne” is. I had to ask Dave. Dave as usual knew the answer “An American Rapper !”, he replied, did I not know?

Well looking into this through search, it’s quite difficult to decide if this story is again true or not. Is this story just an example of finely tuned link bait…?

Looking in Google for ” Lil Wayne daughter dies” returns a high volume of results and the term is currently heading up Google Trends too, no 6 for “Lil Wayne Daughter”

Recent posts have indicated that the story is not true, with unverified statements from family members saying that the story is totally false. It’s always difficult to confirm if news stories hold any truth.

Is it down to Google to stop such rumours if the truth cannot be confirmed ? How would this be possible ?

The net is overwhelmed with the 2008 Olympic coverage and search trends indicate the Olympics is indeed on most peoples minds. You would think then that the search engines would get this right. So, if I make a search for “Olympic Medal” chances are I am looking for the medal winners results. Let’s check out what the major search engines think..

Google brings back some rather uninspiring results, pictures of a few medals and some factual information about the origins of the medal itself. Hardly current and not really what I was looking for.

Yahoo with the same search term ” Olympic Medal” brings back a surprisingly accurate, current and informative search result: (Big cheer here)

Microsoft Live Search isn’t far behind Yahoo at all and brings back country results, if not quite as extensive:

In conclusion, we have to say that Yahoo is the clear winner for the search term ” Olympic Medal” with second place going to Live Search and a disappointing third place going to Google.

A great many in the SEO community use Facebook. Personally,  I like to see what people within that community are doing. Many of us are constantly on the move meaning Facebook Mobile could well be an option. Many say that the future of search is mobile, given the option though, do many of us use such as Facebook on the small screen of a mobile?

Customisations are of course availaible within facebook mobile to make sure you get the most out of your display  depending on what internet browser phone you are using.

What do we think, is facebook mobile an option ?

Do you worry about search engines not being able to crawl your site properly ? Does your site have a penalty ? Who’s linking to your site and are there any patterns in linkage occurring to the competitors website?

Well, the answer could be here:

Webmaster Tools

Much excitement has come from the Live Search Webmaster team in the last week as it prepared for the first major update to its webmaster tools since last November. The update includes many new features that will allow webmasters to glean more information about how Live Search is crawling and indexing sites. Available data on crawls and indexing will be much increased via the “crawl issues” feature set.

Microsoft is keen on securing its relationship with web publishers, so keen in fact the information webmaster live provides is bound to point you in the right direction in improving your website traffic.

Major factors that could seriously effect Live seeing your website are covered: 404 - not found errors, Blocked by Rep where URLS are listed that Live search has found but are being blocked from indexing. (robots.txt) Webmaster Center will report on URLS which are too long and should be shortened to avoid infinite loops in crawling. Content types can be monitored too, making sure that website pages are valid and in-turn can be indexed appropriately.

My personal favourite of the webmaster center update is how extensive the Back-link Data information is . Information about back-links is always welcome to the SEO. Reports are now easily generated on links to a website with the addition of filtering functionality where back-links can easily be seen from specific domains or sub-domains. Ideal for checking out competitors links too!

TLD back-link listing is equally extensive enabling checks on linkage received which is particularly useful with website localisation now very much in focus. The data set that webmaster center delivers is more than manageable with advanced export functions to excel and filtering that will avoid getting lost in the data itself when your doing offline analysis. This will make analysis of a website much easier with the added bonus of functionality to quickly filter results from two sub-domains or two sub folders. Such custom data can then easily be shared.

It’s fair to say Google have been blighted by issues of privacy over the last few month’s. What could be a better time then to release even more information about its users search requests ? Meet “insights for search” a free service aimed at marketers which will be an extension of Google Trends. We will now be able to see not only what individuals are searching for but get detailed information about specific groups too.

The main difference from trends is that a much greater level of detail will be presented for those tracking both word and phrase popularity within search. Categorisation of search results information is now possible with the ability to separate out specific areas of data meaning distinguishing what people are searching for will be a lot easier.

Google Insights will display geographic information on search results allowing for more specifically targeted ad campaigns. Imagine the capabilities of this tool combined  with the demographic search information that Microsoft has too…

Hat tip to Andy Beal

On reporting about how the NLPC used Google street view to show how a Google executives Privacy could be invade well he is the Google Maps address that they are talking about, OMG… how did Dave find that..

well open the pdf and press control-c and paste it back into word

if you can’t be bothered to do that i have the images :

edited in pdf :

Copy and pasted version

This imo is like me sitting on a panel at SES taking Photos with a Kaya Optics PF filter on ;)

DaveN