A ruling in a dispute between Interflora and Marks & Spencer by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) could now mean that the practice of using competitor’s trademarks as search engine keywords could breach trademark law.

The ECJ ruled that companies buying trademarked keywords to be used on search engines to advertise rival services could be in breach of European Law. In relation to the case brought against Marks and Spencer by Interflora, Marks and Spencer were found to be using the word ‘Interflora’ as a Google AdWord, which meant that anyone searching for Interflora on Google were served with ads for the Marks and Spencer flower delivery service.

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I’m not sure how much this has been circulated yet, but there is news that london is going to get its very own TLD: .london.

I find this pretty interesting – although, surely .lon would be easier, wouldn’t it? Anyways, it seems like a reasonably good move – I’m hoping Ripon can get one so I can buy davidwhitehouse.rip (hmmm perhaps not).

There are other capital cities around the World that are also adopting this, according to this article on the register, these include: Rome, Madrid & Paris aswell as a number of others.

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Well this is my first post on the blog since joining Bronco a couple of weeks ago so I guess I’d better introduce myself quickly before my rant. Hi, I’m Steve. Introduction done. Now…

I got an email newsletter type thingy yesterday titled: “Google+ Proclaimed Dead. Is This a Fair Assessment?”

I have no idea on usage and maybe it’ll just take longer for Google+ to become accepted and grow, I don’t know. But it wouldn’t surprise me if it was dead, and that’s just down to my own experience with it.

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Over a year ago I did a post titled SEO is Dead: Check Out KP Baby it was mainly about the lack of on site SEO.

Dave always says that there’s 3 types of SEO

Technical SEO : This is where, for example, you make sure that your non www. properly redirects to the www. version or vice versa, and that your server and domain is set up well.
On-Site SEO : Making sure you are using your meta tags, <H> tags etc correctly and that all the coding is the best it can be.
Off-Site SEO : Everything to do with link profiles and that theres no negativity to reputation.

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There was an article on the BBC News website today about Brian Souter, owner of Stagecoach, it turns out his site just disappeared from Google last month with no apparent reason. He’s lobbying government to get them to sort Google out, apparently he’s talked to Google and they said it was something to do with algorithm changes.

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I’ve been studying a load of material on my course this week run by the Institute of Digital and Direct Marketing, and one thing that cropped up in a chapter of the main text book was that 12 million phone numbers had been registered with the Telephone Preference Service, at the time this accounted for 75% of UK households. On top of this 573 thousand businesses have registered with the Corporate TPS service.

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Dave pointed out this article to me yesterday from Search Engine Watch, Google are acquiring a digital coupon platform called Zave Networks – it’s interesting that Google are moving in this direction. There are a number of things that Google are doing that can all combine very nicely:

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• Google Offers
• Google Wallet
• Google Plus – Identity Verification
• Google Product Feed is tightening its specification
• Google Places (including checkins and coupons)
• The new version of Google Analytics has plenty of space and scope for improvement
• Google Shopper
• Google Checkout

The other day Google announced they are scrapping a number of their products including:

Aardvark – Aard-what?
Desktop – quite interesting as they used to really push this
Fast Flip – Pointless addition to Google Reader, total flop.
Google Maps API for Flash
Google Pack
Google Web Security
Image Labeler
Notebook – I really liked this, I used it to write a book. Fortunately if you do use this your notes will be imported into Google Docs.
Sidewiki – Again this was a bit of a flop.
Subscribed Links

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