Google Buy Twitter – What Would This Achieve?

"Tweet this!" - Google buy Twitter?

The online rumour mill has been churning recently to the tune of tweets and news articles suggesting that the search giant Google are set to acquire social media phenomenon Twitter.

Reports suggest that talks are in the later stages and that the deal would be in the $1 billion range, with Google paying through a mix of cash and stocks.

But what purpose would acquiring Twitter serve for the big G? Well, firstly it has been proposed (by Computerworld’s Seth Weintraub) that Twitter could help Google by providing a better pool of real time data from which Google News stories can be pooled and their popularity guaged in order to determine what deserves to rank highly. The platform would also help Google tie together other social networking sites it owns, Blogger and Orkut, in order to truly rival, and potentially dominate the social bookmarking super-powers such as Facebook and MySpace by offerring both “immediate” communication through Twitter, tied with the typical profile and personal news sharing that Orkut and Blogger provide.

A deal between Google and Twitter creators Evan Williams and Biz Stone wouldn’t be the first deal struck between the parties either. The Twitter founders previously sold personal blog publishing website Blogger to Google in February 2003 for an undisclosed fee.

Despite the numerous recent claims that Google has no interest in purchasing the social media platform, the value of Twitter is rapidly increasing. Attracting nearly 2.7 million users in the U.S. in December alone, and having secured an additional $35 million from venture captialists in February this year, the acquisition rate for users of the platform has begun to snowball at a phenomenal rate making the advertising potential for Google very lucrative. Not to mention the value of mining the large database of information Twitter has already accumulated.

Effectively, the deal would work out well for both parties. Google would get another valuable platform to monetise and harvest data from, while Williams and Stone would get richer off of yet more Google stocks and cash. We wait with baited breath to find out the results of these talks.

Google in Court over Trademark Infrigement

The row over trademark infringement and Pay Per Click(PPC) continues as LVMH, the company behind the Luis Vuitton brand of hand bags and luggage, have taken Google to court in a row over trademark usage.

LVMH have accused Google of selling keyword terms such as “vuitton” to PPC campaign managers for rival brands and firms selling counterfeit copies of Luis Vuitton designs. LVMH argue that when users Google the brand name, they will now be directed to competitors or counterfeiters.

Originally disputed in a lower French court, which ruled against Google, the case has since been escalated to the European Court of Justice (EJC) in Luxembourg following an appeal.

LVMH have been actively defending their trademarks online or late, having sued eBay to the tune of 40million euros last June. The French court ruled that eBay had not done enough to stop the sale of counterfeit handbags, perfumes and luggage under LVMH brand names such as Luis Vuitton, Givenchy and Christian Dior.

The case, which is unlikely to be resolved for months, follows the recent case lodged by world-wide florists Interflora against Marks and Spencerover M&S bidding on the Interflora brand name as part of their PPC campaign for their own florist services.

The outcomes of both of these cases could set a precedent for online marketing, which has for years considered targeting rival brand names as accepted practice for PPC and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns.

No Love For Valentines SEO?

No love for SEO this "valentines day"

Officially recognised holiday’s and days of celebration, as we all know, are a major event for commercial marketers aiming to position their product/service/experience as THE ideal gift for the given holiday. However, as I noted in December, the big (largely currently struggling for enough sales) retail companies seem to shun undertaking any targeted online search promotion for these events. And at this time of year, it’s Valentine’s Day’s turn to be snubbed.

Keyword search results on Google for Valentines Day related terms

A quick look at Google’s AdWords keyword tool (keeping it Google since it’s the SE I’m looking at), suggests there were 40,500 searches in the UK for the term “valentines day” alone and that AdWords competition for the term is “full green bar”, so somewhat competitive then! However, a look at the top 10 results for “valentines day” in Google brings up a set of organic search results notably devoid of any major retailers.

With online sales having increased dramatically (in the UK) in the last 2 months, and online advertising spend now over £2billion (only 2-3% behind television and print advertising spend and growing), it is somewhat surprising that the big retailers would neglect to target holiday terms such as this in order to cash in on this growth.

As with my last post about “christmas presents”, it was clear that, while organic search was neglected, PPC for these terms was being conducted by a few of the big retailers (M&S, Apple, Earnest Jones),  and again, a few are in on it with “valentines day”. M&S (Mark’s and Spencer’s) have once again opted for PPC along with interflora, Aldi (supermarket) and easyjet. While some people mentioned in the comments for my last post that these retailers probably opted for PPC due to the fact that in order to achieve high rankings for a seasonal term such as “valentines day” or “christmas presents”, you would have to maintain a page on your site for these offerings, even outwith the seasonal timeframe.

This is a valid point, however, given the cost per click for these terms (highly competitive remember), Rand’s own analysis of the success of PPC vs SEO, and the relative frequency of “Special Offers” pages, wouldn’t it be more beneficial to simply maintain seasonal holiday pages under this main heading and reap the search rewards?

There are a number of companies in particular that would probably significantly benefit from this approach, in particular, businesses involved in the typical gift sectors such as flowers (interflora, flowers direct), chocolates (Thorntons, Green & Blacks), lingerie (Agent Provocature, Ann Summers), jewellery (Earnest Jones, H.S. Samuel) etc.

A number of these sites already have Valentines Day specific pages on them, yet none rank in the top 20 for the highly searched term “valentines day”, despite the fact that this is probably one of the biggest “celebration days” for these businesses in terms of sales.

Even with the average valentines day gift spend predicted to decline due to the current economic climate (reports I have seen suggest an average spend of £72, down from £92), there is still likely to be a large amount of money being left on the online table.

So is this a missed opportunity for retailers, particularly during difficult times?

Searching The Internet The Environmentally Friendly Way

The press recently reportedthat every two searches conducted on Google uses the same amount of energy required to boil a full kettle of water, the equivalent of 7g of CO2 per search. With an estimate of more than 200million internet searches conducted worldwide on a daily basis ,  the electrical consumption and greenhouse gas emissions produced by computers and the internet is a growing concern for environmentalists. Particularly with Global Warming a frequently recurring topic worldwide.

So how can you do your bit to save the world by cleaning up your internet emissions? Well, fortunately Scotland based web designersWeb Wise Business has a few ideas on how you can search the internet the environmentally friendly way. 

1. For searches try using Blackle. Blackle is being pitched as an energy saving version of Google. The premise is, the background of Google is white, which requires more energy to render on a computer screen than a black background. Therefore, Blackle is saving the world one search at a time by requiring less energy to produce the same results.  The only things Blackle lacks are local listings, YouTube videos in the results and skyscraper AdWords on the right hand side. Still, if the cost to the world of your internet usage weighs heavily on your mind, then doing your searching on Blackle could be a good way to help you sleep at night.

2. Bookmark links to content you access regularly. If you have a favourite website you check every day, why not bookmark it rather than adding to Google’s carbon footprint?

3. Schedule numerous blog postings in one session. If you are one of the web’s millions of bloggers, and like us, you research your posts by searching for relevant links and information, why not produce a week or two’s worth of blog posts in one sitting. You will likely limit the total amount of searches you conduct as you are less likely to perform repeat searches, while at the same time reducing the total amount of time your computer needs to be on and running in a week. In the time you save (because all bloggers know that once your in the blogging groove, posts form and finish much quicker) you could even get away from the computer and see some of that big old world out there. Perhaps you could even plant a tree?!

So the next time your searching on Google to while away your time, why not save some CO2 and give Blackle a try.

EDIT -

Actually, it seems that the good intentions of Blackle may not actually be helping the environment, but instead damaging it further! According to research conducted by Google and others, Blackle searches may actually use more energy when conducted on LCD screens (believed to be roughly 75% of the market).

Google Searchwiki, Digg and Why the Popularity of Humour Isn’t Always Helpful

Today I was going through some searches I conduct regularly in Google and organising the links I regularly click as a result of these searches using Google’s “Searchwiki”. While conducting this fairly monotonous task I began considering whether Searchwiki had been introduced as an early precursor to “voted” SERPs – search engine rankings positions determined by the popularity of the links for a given search.

Google Searchwiki - DNN Developers

However, rankings for search terms determined by voted popularity opens up a whole new can of worms as far as Search Engine Optimisation is concerned. A can where negative voting for competitors and “vote encouragement” techniques become the new black hat. It all sounds like a Presidential election but it would be the likely reality of such a system. The other downfall comes from the fact that “one man’s garbage is another man’s gold”, not everyone has the same tastes which means that while I like my Nike “sports equipment”, you might prefer Adidas. This predicament would mean that top SERP positions could potentially be changing more frequently than Britney Spears’ hair, therefore making anything like accurate ROI on websites and in particular, optimisation efforts, as difficult and unreliable to predict as voting polls.

Other difficulties arise when you consider relevancy of results too. 

Political "Promotion", who says Republicans don't listen to what they're saying!

Themes such as humour and sex are well known selling and marketing factors, though these are not always relevant, appropriate or applicable to a lot of websites or important and useful articles. Yet dig deep enough for most searches and you can usually find a link or two that, while not really useful in anyway, contains one of these themes. Sometimes it’s easy (search for “Rachel Riley“, Carol Vorderman’s replacement on UK daytime TV’s “Countdown” and the Google image results will provide a laugh! – note, you need to have unfiltered searches to get this), some on the other-hand, involve looking a little deeper (such as “Navy Carrier Squadron” version of “Pump it” for the term “air pump”). If the success of articles on Digg’s homepage is taken as an example, these are likely the types of results that could end up at the top of the SERP’s with such a ranking system.

"Randomly provided vowels and consonants on a board, what could possibly go wrong!"

Sure, a “voting” system wouldn’t be the sole determining factor for rankings but even then, the prevalence of humourous or sex related links already in the SERP’s for seemingly unrelated searches would suggest that this type of content already does quite well from the number of back-links it tends to generate, thereby indicating that any addition of a ”voting” system for determining rankings would be counter-productive in achieving the search engines’ aims of “relevant search results for a given term”.

Food for thought.

Google gives candy for Christmas – A missed SEO opportunity

A quick search for “christmas” in Google brings up something a little different from the big G. It seems that a special addition of candy canes is what the search engine are providing this year. I’d have preferred some extra boosted rankings for our search engine optimisation customers but what can you do!

Google's festive spirit

Interestingly, the term “christmas”, according to Google Adwords keyword tool, generated 13.6 million searches in November alone. Yet, a look at the top ranking results for the term shows a total lack of optimisation effort on the part of businesses, particularly those whose biggest trade period is the run up to christmas. Even the term “christmas present”, which generated 60,500 searches for the singular and 165,000 searches for the plural, “christmas presents” in November is poorly optimised for with the top ranking site only registering 33 google indexed backlinks and a pagerank of 3.

Christmas search statistics

Interestingly, both Ernest Jones – the jewellers, and Apple.com have PPC adverts for the term “christmas present”. Yet wouldn’t it have been just as easy for these two, pretty large companies I’m sure you’ll agree, to have SEO’d their websites? Afterall, statistics and tracking both show that organic search results generate more clicks than PPC.

Perhaps something for the retail industry to consider this credit crunching Christmas.

Have a good one!