Welcome to this week’s ‘What Happened in Search’, where we are absolutely not talking about Black Friday… OK, we have a small mention at the start, but then it’s back to business as usual bringing you the latest news and insights from the world of search marketing. Find out who the winners and losers were in natural search in our SEO Battleground feature, check out this week’s top tip and find out who had a wonderful week and who’s week was a little bit of a disappointment.
ONLINE CHRISTMAS SHOPPING TRENDS
On the day the UK is set to blow over £1bn on shopping, this Black Friday we bring you a little insight from Marketing Week on shopping trends during the Christmas period. The online retail specialist Summit has gathered data in a study to show demand and purchasing peaks specific to product categories/sectors. Some trends won’t come as much of a surprise, but there are definitely some interesting findings, such as demand for Children’s toys starts early, around October 17th, whereas for items such as dining chairs, mountain bikes and airbeds, they don’t peak until between 28th – 29th November. A very interesting point from the study is that January sales last year seemed to have a weaker effect on purchasing than pre-Christmas promotions. Read more.
GOOGLE MOBILE WARNING
Google is making serious efforts to detect and take action on mobile affiliate traffic networks that bounce users from one site to the next, as they believe that this is harming UX for the mobile user.
BING IMAGE SEARCH
The new feature has been introduced in timely fashion, ready for the biggest online shopping weekend of the year. Users simply click on the ‘shopping cart’ image on a Bing image to find places where they can buy the product. There’s also a feature introducing recommended products based on images that users have favourited. Is Bing the next one stop shop for product comparison shopping?
WHO CARES ABOUT SHARING?
Share counts have stopped being displayed on tweet buttons on websites, making it very difficult for publishers to determine the popularity of their content. Twitter’s team claims it’s because they need to simplify their platform and that the share count wasn’t overly accurate. Many publishers seem quite distressed by this, though it also seems there are other tools around that can show total shares of a page, which should still give a good indication about its popularity.
SEO BATTLEGROUND
Right let’s not dilly dally then, you want to know who has come out shining this week in natural search and who should be feeling a bit down in the dumps. Lucky for you we have everything you need. Enjoy.
GOOD WEEK FOR…
Li-Fi has just been tested in the real world, and it’s 100 times faster than Wi-Fi . Read more.
BAD WEEK FOR…
Some Dell laptops which appear to have been shipped with a self-signed root certificate eDellRoot and private key that attackers can exploit. Read more.
TOP TIP
In Google Chrome and Firefox right click (ctrl click on mac) to pin a tab open. This will prevent a tab from being accidentally closed.
