Without much ado or fanfare, Rdio was rolled out to UK and France early this morning- almost a year after Spotify rolled onto their turf and launched in the US.

So what’s different? Well not much actually. It seems that Rdio has added a few local touches as regards their catalogue, but they haven’t gone as far as localising the entire service- you will, for example, sign up with the American style mm/dd/yy date format. Their pricing structure is also on a par with Spotify at £4.99 or £9.99 a month.

If you’re active in search engine optimisation the last couple of months have been interesting, to say the least. Google has ramped up its fight against web spam, and one update after another is being unleashed on Google’s search results in their ongoing efforts to demote low quality websites and promote high quality sites to the top of their search results.

From changes in anchor text interpretation to over-optimisation penalties and ‘bad links’ warnings, Google seems to be firing off SERP updates at a machine gun pace. Their latest update is specifically targeted at web spam, and it seems to have wreaked a considerable amount of havoc in many sites’ rankings on Google.

When the news broke that Facebook had just acquired Instagram for $1billion, it left many people shocked. But is the news really that surprising?

Instagram has risen to astronomical heights since it’s launch two years ago- so much so that it’s recent entry into the Android market saw the app hit 1 million downloads on the Google platform in just 24 hours. The truth is that Instagram has become the default app for taking photos, and the most popular way to take photos on a smartphone that we have ever seen.

Now that you’ve had a few days to get used to the changes to the brand pages, what do you think? From what we can see, some brands have been remarkably creative and used their cover photo to really capture their brand. Hilton Hotels have done this particularly well, getting across the global nature of their business in a way that is also very appealing to the eye. Similarly, Sony have used their cover photo to show the diverse nature of what they do by including music, animation and film in a photo that is oh so hip and funky.

Yesterday Google published the fifth instalment of its ongoing Search Quality Highlights – a monthly blog post in which they summarise the changes they’ve made to their various algorithms.

And as before, the SEO blogosphere has erupted with speculation of what these changes might mean exactly. Especially as in this latest post Google indicates changes made to how it approaches links’ anchor text. Historically keyword-rich anchor texts have been a strong ranking signal for Google, and many SEO strategies hinge on attaining significant volumes of these types of links. So I imagine there are many SEOs worried about the possible impact of these anchor text changes.

But when you actually read these search quality highlights, you quickly understand that they don’t actually mean anything. It’s all so vaguely worded, so politically phrased, that they’re superb exercises in saying much without actually conveying any meaningful message.

Ok everyone, you’ve heard about it, you’ve read about it, you’ve thought “oh, I must do something about that”…but now, two days before Facebook roll out Timeline for business, are you ready for it?

For you last minute crammers out there, here is Pierce Communication’s Facebook Timeline check list:

On Saturday March 3rd the seventh Think Visibility conference was held in Leeds. Along with many great speakers our very own Barry was there to deliver a talk about SEO for E-commerce websites.

Other speakers included Anna Lewis from Koozai who delivered a solid talk on effective web analytics, Dan Harrison from WP Doctors spoke about WordPress tips & tricks, and Google’s Pierre Far educated the audience about Google’s crawling & indexing process.

Image Credit: michperu

I can’t remember exactly when I started using Google as my default search engine, but I’m pretty sure it was some time in 1999. Fed up with the spammy and irrelevant results provided by the established search engines of the late nineties, I tried this new search engine I’d heard so much about and never looked back. Love at first search.

A lot has changed in the nearly thirteen years since then, but one thing remained the same for most of that time: Google’s search engine delivered the best and most relevant results.

However, a few weeks ago I did something I haven’t done in over a decade: I changed my default search engine to Bing. And I think you should too. Here are two reasons why:

Our SEO guru Barry (who hates being called a guru, which is why we keep calling him that) has been interviewed by Sean from the geekily titled 01100111011001010110010101101011.co.uk blog, together with eight other top class SEOs such as Julie Joyce, Ted Ives, Branko Rihtman, and AJ Kohn.

The questions ranged from how they got in to SEO to what they consider to be the best linkbuilding method in terms of ROI. You can read all their collected answers on the 01100111011001010110010101101011.co.uk blog here.

Barry has also been invited to present at the upcoming Think Visibility conference in Leeds on March 3^rd, where he will be speaking on advanced SEO for ecommerce websites. Other speakers include Google’s Pierre Far, Dan Harrison from WordPress Doctors, Anna Lewis from Koozai, and many more. Tickets are still available to book online here.

Google seems to have started 2012 in the worst possible way. First there was a scandal about how Google, through a video advertising promotions agency, was apparently buying links to promote its Chrome browser.

Personally I felt this was much ado about nothing, and that Google penalised itself only so it would be seen to be doing something. In essence Google never paid for any links, but merely paid for video ads to be distributed among bloggers – the link was an editorial decision by one of the bloggers who posted the video.

This sort of thing is not against Google’s own guidelines, but Google still penalised itself under the guise of being “held to a higher standard“. If such a thing were genuinely worthy of a penalty in Google’s search results they might as well shut down the entire internet, as you could probably find a similar link in almost every established website’s backlink profile.

But that was just the start of it,

Search Engine Optimisation is a discipline within internet marketing that is, unfortunately, widely misunderstood. Often seen as a dark art bordering on the illegal, SEO as an industry has managed to gather a rather poor reputation.

This is entirely unwarranted, as SEO is a very powerful instrument in a website’s online marketing arsenal – if done properly. However, some of the negative connotations of SEO are due to inexperienced practicioners working off of incomplete or outdated knowledge, and thus not managing to gather any resulst for their clients.

Because search engines continually improve and update their algorithms, SEO is never static and always evolves towards new ranking signals. Thus SEOs need to change their tactics continuously.

However, not all SEOs do. Some still continue to work on old principles that no longer apply. Below are a few of such outdated practices that, if a ‘SEO expert’ recommends them to you, you should turn around and run: