We received an email from Google today regarding a security issue in Google Website Optimizer, see below:

“Dear Website Optimiser user,
We are writing to inform you of a potential security issue with Website Optimiser. By exploiting a vulnerability in the Website Optimiser Control Script, an attacker might be able to execute malicious code on your site using a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attack. This attack can only take place if a website or browser has already been compromised by a separate attack. While the immediate probability of this attack is low, we urge you to take action to protect your site.”

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Google seem to have moved further into the B2C markets today with Google eBookstore and the Google Nexus S being released.

Google has launched its ebook offering, Google eBookstore, similar to Amazon’s Kindle Store in that you can purchase ebooks. The main difference is that Google has been scanning in books for years and already has around 15 million books in over 400 languages. More importantly, last year they claimed to have 1 million public domain books available, for free. I think you’ll agree, this is an astounding achievement, and it means that a massive amount of free information is available – this can only be a good thing.

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Just saw this on Google (see screenshot below), it’s basically a search results page with very accurate location information (my poscode has been erased out) and it only shows 4 listings. DaveN says he has seen this on some searches for brands and James, one of our developers, has also been seeing it.

If Google is considering rolling this out, god knows what the impact will be – perhaps we’ll see more click throughs to page 2? There will certainly be more pressure to get keywords ranking #4 minimum.

It’s something of a truism that porn drove the development of much of what we take for granted on the web today. Streaming video, social networking and online payments were all pioneered by porn sites well before most of today’s etailing giants were diagrams on a white board. Of course, porn is also at the centre of long-running debates about freedom of information, censorship and personal morality that still occupy the political classes and media when they talk about the internet. And yet Google gets a surprisingly free ticket out of this mess despite being arguably the world’s largest provider of top-shelf materials.

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I often get asked, normally by other SEO’s or journalists that are writing about search, what is SEO? What is Search Engine Optimisation? I often struggle to give a one line answer other than “we are the strange breed of people that makes websites like yours appeal to websites like Google and Bing”

So why the Internet needs SEO specialists like me in the words of John MU (Googler)

(did you know that serving a 503 HTTP result code for the robots.txt will block crawling of your site completely?).

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Google Remarketing has been released for some time now and it surprises me out how little it is being used – I think the reason behind this fact is that Google haven’t done a great job at explaining how it works and their help section is less than comprehensive.  Hopefully this post will help…

What Is Google Remarketing?
Google Remarketing allows you to define an audience using a piece of javascript placed on a page, you can then target this audience with Google AdSense ads. It’s important to note that the audience includes all visitors to a tagged page, not just those that come through Google AdWords.

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I’ve been off work ill (with terrible things) for a couple of days so I might be horrifically late in seeing this and basically be adding to my long list of personal embarrassments, but I’ve just happened on Google site previews in the SERPs – a nifty little feature available from a new magnifying glass icon next to each result.

I’m normally quite sceptical of interface gimmicks like this, but for some reason I feel warm and squishy about this. So sue me. While there’s going to be no direct SEO knock-on, it could focus attention on design as a factor in clickthrough rates.

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Yesterday while looking in to my Google Crystal Ball. I checked out “London Hotels” and was surprised to see the check in box and prices,  look at the London Hilton Park Lane, the prices lead to ad’s (I also noticed when I changed the dates at the top the hotel listings changed)

Personally I’m in two minds I like the fact that I can use Expedia and booking.com etc to book that hotel on-line, But I did get sent to the US versions of their sites so all the prices where in  dollars I also feel sorry for the Hotels that used to have a Good Google maps listing and now they have to pay commission to expedia and the like …

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