This week Three mobile launched a new brand campaign. You can view the dancing pony  advert on their website. The telecom have rolled out an Ultrafast network meaning you can get near 4G speeds without the hefty price. Their TV campaign has gone viral, clocking up over 700,000 views in the first few days on Youtube alone. It comes off a back of research the company did that sought to find out what people like to share online and with who. Turns out people simply like to share ‘silly stuff’ and the brand has made a contribution to that!

I figured that I would post this to help out anyone that may have encountered a similar problem this evening. I was most glad to see that an update was available for the One X – finally 4.1 was becoming available to SIM free handsets like mine. However, after successfully updating, I realized I wasn’t getting any mobile data or 3G connection. Using search engines, I wasn’t able to find anyone else with this problem or reporting it at least.

I did however find a solution. If you go to settings, then select ‘mobile data’ (not the on/off slider) you’ll get an array of options. Then select ‘access points’, then select your network (in my case everything everywhere). Boom, 3G connection restored!

This new infographic from Three provides a visual representation of  what you can do with your phone when on a 1GB data plan versus all-you-can-eat. Many consumers do not fully understand data, for instance, relatively few consumers really have a grasp of how much data streaming video has versus social networking. Visit Three for their full range of mobile phones.

Super duper new infographic by Tesco Compare Car Insurance. The new infographic compares a myriad of cars in terms of top speed, performance, new price and cost per mile. The amount of data on this infographic is so much that you need to click on the image to open up the lightbox.

Anyone who has worked on a financial client will appreciate the frustration SEOs commonly face. Google primarily uses the link graph as a proxy for determining what are useful sources of information, however because many of the financial companies are FSA regulated, their hands are legally tied on what content they can produce. In the instance of Mortgages for example, providers can offer the product, but can not take an advisory role. This makes it extremely difficult for websites to make their site worthy of generating authentic link citations.

Taking any client on a journey of producing content can be a difficult one, but those with some financial experience will hopefully appreciate what we have achieved even more. Sure there are some limitations with the infographic; it’s faced several amendments, and sure there are some limitations imposed on the CMS which has restricted our ability to make as shareable as we wanted, but it’s a good step forward and I’d personally appreciate any sharing that is done.

Visit Tesco Compare now, to compare Home Insurance

Yesterday I generated four iGaming players from 15 clicks. That’s great, however with the data that was available to me, I had no idea which pages on my website was sending the clicks that were driving converting clicks.

I have event tracking labels on all of my outbound affiliate links, so in Google Analytics I can drill down to some level to understand what keywords and landing pages are driving those sales, but beyond that, on my affiliate portals, I cant tell which traffic my site gets actually converts.

So I thought, wouldn’t be great if I could see which pages on my affiliate website were the clicks that converted?

1. On affiliate portals, create a different campaign URL for each of your main landing pages
2. Cloak each URL using .htaccess
3. Replace all of your outgoing links with variables
4. In a PHP file, set a URL variable using the  $_SERVER function
5. Write conditional statements that set the outgoing link based on matching the URL function
6. BOOM!

At Arena we have regular meetings with Google about organic search (it’s not with engineers, so about as insightful as you would expect), and it was in this session we vented our frustration over the removal of the monthly volumes being exported from the keyword suggestion tool. They said that they would feed this back to the product team, and sure enough, today I can see that when you export data from the keyword suggestion tool, you get monthly volumes again. No more normalising Insights data

Martin here at Arena has just been looking into how Google go about blocking the keyword in the referrer. We did a search for the term “seo” at https://www.google.com whilst logged into a Google Account. With Google Instant turned on it created the following URL…

https://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=seo&btnK=Google+Search

Wikipedia was top of the results, so we had a look at the html element containing the result, which looked like this…

You’ll see a bit a of JavaScript there bound to the ‘onmousedown’ event, which calls a function called ‘rwt(…)’. Here is the function declaration…

 
There is a lot going on in there, but essentially it redirects the browser to a new URL with the ‘q=’ parameter wiped (as indicated by the wonderful red arrow above), which then redirects to the desired page you clicked on in the search result (which is passed via the ‘url=’ parameter). So, from the search result itself (Wikipedia in this case), the referrer becomes…

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CGoQFjAA&

url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSearch_engine_optimization&ei=GpqeTqSzJsuFhQettaBN&
usg=AFQjCNHfIpCo_Ap336oSDlmNqh1STSriIg

Meaning the ‘q=’ parameter exists, but is empty! This is very bad news for our natural search scripts (and analytics packages full-stop!), the only thing we’ll be able to tell from the referrer is that they came from Google, any brand/generic keyword logic goes out of the window. The only thing we could do is isolate this traffic and track it differently, as we know it’ll be coming from ‘www.google.com/url…’ instead of ‘www.google.com/search…’.

This is one of my favourite SEO mythbusters.

It is the notion that preventing Google crawling a page in your robots.txt will prevent it appearing in organic search results. It’s rare to come across examples, but today I have, triggering me to make this blog post. In case there is any confusion, Matt Cutts explains it clearly in this Webmaster video. He also runs over the use of the meta noindex tag.

Here is the example. ESPN shop are disallowing all UAs from crawling the domain ESPNshop.co.uk.

However if you do some very strict searches, Google still shows the URL in search results.

I love quick wins. Remember if there is a page you want removed from Google organic search results, either

- Add the meta noindex to the <head> tag

- Remove the URL in Google Webmaster Tools

It looks like Google are giving users a subtle hint as to how they can access Google Plus. The arrow is animated; when you load the page the arrow is drawn.