WebmasterWorld Weekly Roundup February 14

The news that Apple had lost its iPhone trademark in Brazil this week has taken many by surprise, and not least by Apple. It seems that a consumer electronics firm, Gradiente Eletronica SA, had filed its request to use iPhone as a brand way back in 2000, but, it will have to prove it has used it after the trademark was granted, which, surprisingly, was as late as 2008.

Of course, Apple has lodged an appeal over the trademark row, and there are now 60-days for the company to prove the iPhone trademark was used within the allotted period.

It seems rather odd that it took the regulator eight years to approve the trademark, and also odd that in 2008 the first Apple iPhone had already been released. Surely, somebody somewhere in Brazil must have noticed the huge publicity surrounding Apple's launch of the iPhone.

All very strange, eh!

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This week, WebmasterWorld members were debating the idea of a potential new revenue stream for site owners. The question of whether it is SEO blackmail was also raised.

Worldwide search engine stats can often throw out some interesting facts, or not. According to a comScore report, Russia's Yandex became the World's fourth largest Global search engine in November and December 2012, pushing Bing down to fifth. On closer inspection, the total number of users, worldwide, for Yandex is way below that of Microsoft. It seems that the smaller number of Yandex users are searching more. No doubt they are preferring to use Yandex for the language compatibility. That'll be the same with Baidu, i'm sure.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are at saturation in their own markets, so it's only a question of exchanging users between one search service or another. It's a little like the competition between the wet shave businesses: They can only steal share from each other.

I'd expect to see both baidu and Yandex search continue to grow as their market's users come online.

Both Microsoft and Google need to grow traffic from each other, or grow in the fast emerging markets of China and Russia. What do you see in your stats?

WebmasterWorld members were reporting significant drops in link counts in Google Webmaster Tools. The drops were causing some concern, and subsequently, we heard it was a known bug and it had been fixed. It seems the link counts are returning to normal.

Those of you that like to keep a close eye on the Google SERPs and the status of updates going on will like to review our update thread, "Google Updates and SERP Changes - February 2013"
Please do give us feedback if you notice any changes in your site's positioning in the SERPs.

Twitter announced that it is going to roll out older tweets in its search results. This is something that we all would like to see, i'm sure. Read about the announcement in our thread.

Google said it had started to use it's own WebP image format over JPEG and PNG graphics files. It said that significant bandwidth saving and faster loading times were achieved. What's your view on the need for speed and the WebP image format?

In what appears to be a strange lawsuit filing, Facebook is to be sued over it's "like" button. It is being sued by a patent-holding company, Rembrandt Social Media, acting on behalf of a dead Dutch programmer called Joannes Jozef Everardus van Der Meer.

WebmasterWorld eCommerce Members this week were discussing whether Google's Merchant Center switch to CPC has made it tougher for small eCommerce businesses to compete. How has it affected your eCommerce business?

In more eCommerce news, twitter and Amex announced a partnership where users will be able to buy directly from twitter's messaging. Read more about the experiment in our thread on the topic.

Opera Software announced a milestone of 300 million users, and more importantly, said, "To provide a leading browser on Android and iOS, this year Opera will make a gradual transition to the WebKit engine, as well as Chromium, for most of its upcoming versions of browsers for smartphones and computers."

Snippets from Eric Schmidt's yet-to-be-published book were revealed by the WSJ, and one particular piece caught my eye. "Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results." These would be your G+ authorship profile. The quote went on to say, "The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance."

Yahoo's CEO, Marissa Mayer, said that its search partnership with Microsoft was not delivering the market share gains or the revenue boost that it should. "One of the points of the alliance is that we collectively want to grow share rather than just trading share with each other," Mayer said. Microsoft must have read that and wondered where next!

A report published this week suggested that Google will pay Apple $1 billion in 2014 to remain the default search on Apple. That's quite a reasonable sum of money.

WebmasterWorld members were discussing responsive design, and the need for a dedicated discussion area. What do you think?

News came in over a ransom-ware scam that had been shut down. It seems the scammers were installing software that indicated a user has browsed inappropriate content. The scamware then prompted the user to pay to avoid reports going to the authorities.

In WebmasterWorld Supporters (Subscription Required) there a healthy discussion going on over webmasters sabotaging their competition. Have your say in our Supporters thread.

In another WebmasterWorld Supporters thread (Subscription Required) there was news of a bug in Google's mathematical formula results produced adult SERPs. As I understand it, the bug is being addressed so I expect the problem to eventually go away.

We hadn't run a video for a while, so here's something which might be of interest. A WebmasterWorld Member, suzukik, asks Matt Cutts, How many types of messages does the webspam team send to Webmaster Tools?

I hope this week's round-up helped your productivity. If you've spotted some news that we haven't covered or discussed, drop me a stickymail.
Have a wonderful week!

Cheers
Neil
@engine

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WebmasterWorld Weekly Roundup February 21

Spam email: it?s a challenge for many to cope with the massive volumes of rubbish delivered to inboxes. It needn?t be that way, of course. There are many tools and systems for defeating the spam, and if you?re not using them, you?re probably wasting your time scanning through the huge volumes of spam manually to find the legitimate email you do want.

Aside from the 419 spams and scams, supposedly legitimate businesses are offering their B2B email lists and services around for very little money. Now, everyone can be a spammer.

These days i?m seeing so many B2B emails with a tenuous message embedded along the lines of, ?you?re receiving this message because you have either bought from us, expressed an interest, or subscribed to our services.? I can be 100% certain; I have expressed no such interest, nor subscribed or bought from them.

These kinds of messages just cheapen the company profile, imho. Worse still, some of them send the same messages regularly; as if the first ten week?s worth didn?t get through, they just keep at it. Those are so easy to block.

The only reason I know these, and others, are there is because I set aside a few minutes each day to make sure my filters are working and to adapt accordingly. Job done. I can move on to productive work.

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How do you manage sudden drops in Google rankings? Join our discussion and find out how others are coping.

Facebook stated this week that it had no evidence of user data being hacked, subsequent to major attacks on its site and data.

As a result of Google's unnatural link warnings in GWT, webmasters are now getting emails asking for link modifications. Is this a potential revenue stream?

The Java security issue rumbles on, and this week, less than 24 hours after admitting some of its employees computers had been hacked, Apple has pushed out a security update to users of its Mac computers.

Yahoo's CEO, Marissa Mayer, announced changes to Yahoo, and said, "Over the next few days, our U.S. users will begin to see the new Yahoo! experience and we're excited to see the response." Read and comment on the story in our thread.

Twitter said this week that it had officially launched its advertising API. Twitter stated, "What this means is that as marketers, you'll soon have the ability to work with our initial set of Ads API partners to manage Twitter Ad campaigns..."

Pinterest said it had won a round of funding to the tune of $200 Million at a valuation of $2.5 billion. For many WebmasterWorld Members Pinterest continues to cause angst over copyright.

Has a JavaScript framebuster exploit resulted in an AdSense publisher getting an "Account Disabled" message from Google? Find out more in our discussion.

I heard this week that hackers have hijacked another hacker's twitter feed. Oh dear.

Google said it is launching Pixel, a Chromebook laptop in the next few days.

Google this week was talking up its defenses on Google accounts against 100 hacks per second. Quite an onslaught!

I hope this week's round-up helped keep you up-to-date. If you've spotted some news that we haven't covered or discussed, drop me a stickymail.
Have a wonderful week!

Cheers
Neil
@engine

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WebmasterWorld Weekly Roundup February 28

I?ve been following developments at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week as I like ?gadgets.? Well, don?t we all!

Now that most smartphones are looking pretty much the same,
from a physical point of view, the manufacturers are going to be fighting harder for market share amongst each other. If companies such as Apple can?t block another manufacturer from selling in their markets through litigation, it?s going to be open warfare for market share, and to be more about what you can do with your smartphone.

At the MWC I noticed another push for remote control of household equipment, which seems to come around each year. Another technology lauded as adding value is NFC (Near Field Communications). Many smartphones already have NFC built in, and it?s been in use in several countries for some time. I?m concerned about some of the uses demonstrated at MWC. Security is a major issue for me, and if someone gets hold of your phone and uses the NFC they could charge goods and services to your account, or use the phone for identity theft. I didn?t see a demonstration of the security, so i?d like to know more, but as it stands, I like the concept, but I?m not keen on the execution. If NFC is built in to new smartphones I do hope it can be turned off.

In the meantime, i?ll keep watching the developments and the latest gadgets.

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This week we reported that Google's Offer Extensions, which pair ads in search result pages with Groupon-like deals and special discounts, is set to roll out to all advertisers by the end of February.

Twitter has stepped up its email authentication of twitter emails by employing Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance, or DMARC. This will help fight against email spoofing and spam at providers such as AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! and any other email receiver implementing DMARC. Find out more in our thread on the topic.

I heard that a Zendesk security breach affected Twitter, Tubmblr and Pinterest this week. Find out more in our thread.

It seems that Facebook critical bugs resulted in many months of page reach report errors. If these reports were important to you, find out how it's being resolved.

Google has hit out with a penalty at some UK newspapers and flower seller Interflora for failing to comply with its guidelines. Find out what they did wrong in our thread.

This week, major U.S. net providers launched a Copyright Alert System (CAS). It's the culmination of many months of work on this "groundbreaking and collaborative effort" to curb online piracy and promote the lawful use of digital music, movies and TV shows.

What's all this white space on Google AdSense 300 x 600 units? WebmasterWorld Members discuss a bug in Google AdSense's new 300x600 ad unit that causes an unattractive white space to dominate a web page.

There was a great question about converting and publishing old magazines and turning it into an online digital format. WebmasterWorld Members were discussing solutions on how best to convert a resource of printed magazines and turn them into a protected digital archive. Read about the solutions in our thread.

Google announced Google+ application sign-in which is claims is simpler, more secure, and excludes social spam. Find out more about this announcement in our post.

Microsoft said it was making IE10 for Windows 7 available in the coming week. If you've already got IE10 release preview you'll be the first to get notification.

Baidu is to reach out to English speaking developers with the announcement it'll be launching an English language site. If you aren't fluent in Chinese this new site can help you make your apps discoverable on Baidu's Mobile App Center.

There may be a serious Chrome prerender bug when using rel=next which may affect Google AdSense accounts. If you study how the prerender works you'll see where the problem may exist. Either way, prerending is a useful tool to speed browsing, but it causes all kinds of issues for webmasters and, apparently, may affect AdSense publishers. Read about it in our thread on the topic.

Is Twitter worth its $10 billion valuation? Take a look at the assessment and join the discussion.

Yahoo's Marissa Mayer caused a bit of a stir this week by suggesting all it's staff should work at their desks and not from home. Can you be more productive from home, or do you believe you achieve more by working at the office.

Now that Instagram is publishing stats, it said this week it had more than 100 Million active users.

Google said this week it was extending it's Gmail search field trial, and anyone wanting to participate should submit a request. Find out more here.

An Italian court ruled this week that Google could not be expected to check every single upload. The court said, "The possibility must be ruled out that a service provider, which offers active hosting can carry out effective, pre-emptive checks of the entire content uploaded by its users,"

In another case in the EU, Google said the public should have access to "valid, legal content." Google's Head of Free Expression for Europe, the Middle East and Africa William Echikson, said, "There are clear societal reasons why this kind of information should be publicly available," continues Echikson. "People shouldn't be prevented from learning that a politician was convicted of taking a bribe, or that a doctor was convicted of malpractice. The substantive question before the Court today is whether search engines should be obliged to remove links to valid legal material that still exists online. We believe the answer to that question is no."

June last year, a security company alerted Google of a flaw in its two-stage login system. It seems Google finally plugged the hole.

Daily offers site, Groupon, has hit stormy waters when it reported a net loss of $81.1 million for Q4, with revenue up 30pc. It appears it's share price took a tumble by 26%.

There was a cPanel hack recently and the alerts are out that users should change root and account passwords immediately.

One other patch came through from Adobe releasing an emergency patch for Adobe Flash zero day exploit. Don't forget to update your system.

Google launched AdWords Editor 10.0 with enhanced campaign support, so if you use the editor, you'll be prompted to download the latest version.

Time for a video on a topical point. How much PageRank is lost through a 301? We have a discussion on the topic, and here's the supporting video by Matt Cutts.

Once again, I hope this week's round-up helped keep you up-to-date. If you've spotted some news that we haven't covered or discussed, drop me a message, or post it yourself and let me know.
Until next time, have a productive week!

Cheers
Neil
@engine

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WebmasterWorld Weekly Roundup February 7

The announcement this week that Yahoo is to take on AdSense inventory came as a surprise to some. As an AdWords advertiser I believe it brings greater opportunities, and raises the quality and reach. As an advertiser, I welcome it.

Once again, Google's position is strengthened and, the apparent weakening of Microsoft's.

What do you think? Have your say in our thread on the topic.

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The FTC released new privacy guidelines for App developers to include do-not-track for mobile. Find out more about the guidelines in our thread.

Investments and interest in Twitter indicates it is nearing $10 billion valuation.

Path has settled with the FTC over charges it deceived consumers and improperly collected personal information. "This settlement with Path shows that no matter what new technologies emerge, the agency will continue to safeguard the privacy of Americans."

Do you run AdSense? Learn how to make Google AdSense work on mobile devices using responsive design. Responsive designed sites are a great way to present content across mobile to desktop.

Twitter said that hackers may have stolen details of 250,000 accounts usernames and passwords. The most serious aspect is what they are going to do with the stolen data.

We've had a number of discussions over Google's disavow tool since it was announced at Pubcon in Las Vegas by Matt Cutts. Much of the discussion has been about confusion over the use of the tool. This week, our thread titled, "Best Practices For Using The Google Disavow Tool Disclosed" is the way for webmasters to gain valuable knowledge.

More Twitter news when we heard that it had acquired Bluefin Labs, a social TV analytics company that was founded in 2008. There's sense in that as Twitter seems to be used more and more on TV shows to gauage opinion and to analyse reach and users' interests.

Those of you interested in Google's PageRank will be interested to hear reports of a toolbar PageRank update rolling out.

I heard that Channel Intelligence, Inc., has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google Inc. for $125 million in cash.

In Australia, Google has won a landmark AdWords appeal in over competitor names. The ACCC in 2007 accused Google of engaging in "misleading and deceptive" behavior when it displayed ads for a company called CarSales in search results related to Honda Australia. The five judges of Australia's High Court unanimously ruled Wednesday that Google did not violate trade laws by allowing companies to purchase AdWords related to competitors' names.

It's yet another piece of Twitter news this week when it launched new and updated Android, iOS and mobile Twitter search. Twitter says, "This is a major shift from how we have previously partitioned results by type (for instance, Tweet search vs. people search)."

Google made a major announcement about AdWords upgrades aimed at improving performance on mobile. Google said, "...we're upgrading AdWords, by rolling out enhanced campaigns. This is a first step to help you more simply and smartly manage your ad campaigns in today's multi-device world."

As I mentioned earlier, Yahoo has confirmed it will run Google AdSense. Yahoo says, "...we're excited to announce that we recently signed a global, non-exclusive agreement with Google to display ads on various Yahoo! properties and certain co-branded sites using Google's AdSense for Content and Google's AdMob services."

Microsoft took another swing at Google's practices of adverts in Gmail with it's latest scroogled campaign. For me, I dislike the attack and would rather see Microsoft spending their $$ on innovating to compete with Google.

I heard that AOL is to close photosharing App, Hipster. It's announcements such as this which highlight the importance of having control over your own content.

Google this week added reporting notes to AdSense for ease of account tracking changes. I guess you could use it as a changelog.

There was a report that YouTube was in talks to invest $50 million in Vevo. As I understand it, we don't have any confirmation of this.

The E.U. is proposing that businesses should report hacking and net crimes. There's some sense in this, but I worry it'll be more legislation and bureaucracy.

On a lighter note, a German iTunes user was presented with the equivalent of a $13,000 gift card for downloading Apple's 25 billionth song. What a wonderful surprise that must have been.

I hope you valued this week's roundup. If you've spotted some news that we haven't covered or discussed, drop me a stickymail.
Enjoy your week!

Cheers
Neil
@engine

Follow WebmasterWorld on twitter. #webmasterworld or @webmasterworld

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