Digital Marketing Forum

Google's seemingly always changing indexing algorithm continues to hit site rankings as the search giant continues to drive a new generation of SEO relying upon original and relevant content generation and sharing above all else. Now a panel of SEO experts in the UK has warned that companies need to avoid putting all their SEO eggs into the one Google basket and instead embrace SEO strategic evolution in order to maintain and grow traffic.  At a round-table discussion, hosted by cloud provider UKFast, Sam Allcock, CEO of Custard Media, stated that the key to successful audience growth was …

According to the [Australian Federal Police](http://www.afp.gov.au/), it would appear that at least half a million credit cards 'down under' have been compromised and funds in excess of AUS $25 million (US $26 million) stolen. Although precise details are still coming in, it would seem likely that nothing more complicated than a bit of simple scanning for point of sale terminals which looked vulnerable was used to locate potential victims in the small retailer market rather than run the greater risk of detection by targeting banks or bigger business. Lessons learned from the Subway caper in the US last year no …

As many of you know, DaniWeb was hit by a Google algorithm update back in November 2012 and we lost about 50% of our search traffic. In investigating the issue, I discovered that DaniWeb, in addition to most other programming forums out there, all lost their google traffic to [StackOverflow](http://www.stackoverflow.com). For those who don't know, StackOverflow is a Q&A-based wiki-forum hybrid that was born a few years ago and subsequently received a lot of venture capital. Hands down, it deserves really high listings in Google results: it is fast-loading, lots of people link to it, it has almost exclusively high …

Radiohead are a band which does not need to prove anything to anyone. Their seminal album 'OK Computer' is consistently voted one of the greatest recordings of all time, be it the critics or mere mortal music fans putting the crosses in the boxes. Which is perhaps why the latest Radiohead album '[URL="http://www.inrainbows.com"]In Rainbows[/URL]' has not been made available through the usual channels, but rather the group have bucked the trend and challenged the music industry by making it available for free download instead. It was not meant to be quite that simple, of course. The distribution and sales model …

One of the great things about social media is the way that it utilises the wisdom of crowds. This concept is perhaps best known through Wikipedia, where user editing can often create some wildly inaccurate entries in the short term but over time these get corrected by the larger volume of editors who truly care about the product they are using. Somewhere else that the wisdom of crowds has made an impact is the consumer review market. Most of my family, friends and work colleagues pretty much turn to the Internet for a quick and unbiased opinion before splashing the …

Advert blocking software is thought to be used by something in the region of just five per cent of online users, or 150 million people of you prefer. It is, however, on the up; research conducted by Adobe and anti-adblocking campaigners PageFair suggests that ad blocking use rose by 70 per cent last year. Of the various options out there, Adblock Plus is one of the best known and most used. Which is why the company behind it, Eyeo GmbH, recently found itself on the sharp end of a court case in Germany seeking an injunction to prevent it from …

The recently revised Facebook community standards page states that the social network is on a mission "to give people the power to share and make the world more open" however it appears that it may have been giving the wrong people the power to share stuff you thought was private. According to security researcher and bug bounty hunter [Laxman Muthiyah](http://www.7xter.com/2015/03/how-i-exposed-your-private-photos.html) Facebook's photo sync feature came with a critical flaw which "allows any malicious Facebook application to read your mobile photos." The vulnerability concerns Facebook's Photo Sync feature for mobile users, which was introduced back in 2012 but because it was …

As with any online service that starts to get popular traction and experiences rapid growth, social network come micro-blog platform Tumblr has been the target of just about every kind of scam and attempted cyber-criminal subversion out there [inclduing some of its own making](http://www.daniweb.com/internet-marketing/social-media-and-communities/news/459258/tumblr-warns-users-to-change-password-after-security-mess). Most of the time it's not worth reporting on these as they fall into the 'same old, same old' category, and if we did then DaniWeb would be so awash with scam warnings that every other posting would be drowned into obscurity. However, this one is worthy of our attention. Not least as it seems to …

I don't usually write about acquisitions and all that financial stuff, but news that PayPal has acquired CyActive caught my eye as apparently this brings the promise of 'bio-inspired predictive security' into the online payments provider threat protection mix. Which made me think, just what the heck is bio-inspired predictive security when it's at home, and why has PayPal bought into it?  My first port of call in trying to get a line on this was the [official PayPal blog posting](https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/PayPal-Forward/PayPal-Establishes-New-Security-Center/ba-p/956298) on the thing. "While we have industry-leading fraud models and verification techniques, and a world-class security team" …

Cancer is a terrible disease which it has claimed the life of a well known technology journalist and a well known coder within the last couple of weeks. Now Facebook has been diagnosed as being in the final stages of that online cancer which is a disregard for user privacy, and I think it is probably terminal. The issues have not gone unnoticed by the media, including the DaniWeb news team, with [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story281329.html"]Ron Miller reporting[/URL] how some people are very unhappy with such things as the recent 'instant personalisation' feature that shares user activities as they move around the web, …

Teens just love using social networks for everything from [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story220006.html"]posting naked photos online[/URL] to [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story218938.html"]wasting time during class at school[/URL]. We also know that [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story219438.html"]parents have little idea what teens get up to online[/URL] but, it would appear, the teen online love affair has not gone unnoticed by young hackers who are actively targetting their fellow teenagers. Researchers at the Imperva Application Defense Center have uncovered a new hack attack which specifically targets teens using the popular Habbo Hotel virtual world come social networking site. Since it launched in 2000, Habbo Hotel has gone on to see around 75,000 new …

When 'Thefacebook' first launched in February 2004, access was initially restricted only to students of Harvard University where Mark Zuckerberg was a student. Facebook went on to become something of a success, with the social network [controversially being valued at more than $100 billion](http://www.daniweb.com/internet-marketing/social-media-and-web-communities/news/423739/is-the-facebook-bubble-ready-to-burst#post1810124).  Microsoft must have been watching from the sidelines, wondering when and if it could join the social networking revolution; conscious of how it was relatively late to embrace both the Internet and search bandwagons but still able to make more than a little impact when it did. Google limped into the social networking space …

The annual 'Black Friday' discounted shopping storm is no longer just an American event; it's hit the UK like a hurricane today. Last night police were called to four different supermarkets with heavily discounted televisions after large crowds started to gather for the midnight opening. At one Asda store (a Walmart owned UK supermarket chain) there was fighting as shoppers opted to get physical in order to secure that electrical bargain. Then, both the Tesco supermarket and Currys PC World electrical superstore websites buckled under the pressure of would-be shoppers keen to get an online bargain. Next it was clothing …

Research results just published by digital marketing agency Visibility IQ would appear to confirm what the savvy marketeer already knows: social video is an important driver for engagement and purchase behaviour amongst online consumers.  The research, conducted by Entertainment Media Research Ltd, was based upon interviews with more than 2,600 consumers between the ages of 15 and 64. Although the research was conducted within the UK, the results are likely to be mirrored in any markets where broadband provision is good and Internet access widespread. The key findings of the research are as follows: 78% of UK adults …

There's a truism that I like to share with as many people as possible: if you don't want other people to see something, then don't post it online. It is, you might think, a pretty simple concept to grasp. After all, you wouldn't stroll into a bar with a megaphone and yell "I'm not wearing underwear" if you wanted to keep that secret would you? But would you write that fact down on small pieces of paper and slip them unnoticed into the pockets of people in that bar if you wanted to reveal all (please excuse the unfortunate choice …

Goodwill Industries International, a network of 165 community-based agencies in North America, has been breached. This follows a previous announcement of a potential attack back in July. After an extensive forensic investigation lasting a month, Goodwill has now [confirmed](http://www.goodwill.org/press-releases/goodwill-provides-update-on-data-security-issue/) that "a third-party vendor’s systems" were indeed "attacked by malware, enabling criminals to access some payment card data of a number of the vendor’s customers." According to the statement, about 10% of stores (or 20 Goodwill members if you prefer) using the same third-party vendor were involved; Goodwill insists that there is no evidence of malware on internal systems. The breach …

An interesting [post](http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.in/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal_6.html) appeared yesterday in the official Google Online Security and Webmaster Central blogs which confirms that in an effort to "make the Internet safer" it has been testing a system which looks at "whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms." This follows calls for HTTPS everywhere at the recent Google I/O a few months back. Google says is has seen positive results, and is now actually using HTTPS as a ranking signal albeit a "very lightweight" one which only impacts <1% of queries. Nonetheless, the intention is now clear that this …

First there was Panda, and then there was Penguin, but is there now Ghost as well? Webmasters will immediately know what I'm talking about as far as Penguin and Panda are concerned: updates to the Google search results ranking algorithm designed to make the search experience more relevant for end users by lowering the rank of 'low quality' sites such as content farms and those who use black-hat SEO techniques. Ghost, however, is not only rather spooky but also remains unconfirmed by Google itself. While anything that makes search better for the user has to be a good thing …

It's an interesting question, and one that's being raised by Gartner which is predicting that [URL="http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1392716"]the number of wireless e-mail users will reach an incredible one billion[/URL], worldwide, by the end of 2014. A number that's not too hard to accept, given that earlier this year global business wireless e-mail accounts were being estimated in the region of 80 million, and that's equivalent to around 60 million individual users. [attach]15686[/attach]Monica Basso, research vice president at Gartner, points to how the productivity gains achieved with using wireless e-mail are driving adoption beyond the purely executive reach and reveals that "in 2010, …

The latest major online outfit to suffer from a breach is Bitly, the url shortening service beloved by users of Twitter and Facebook. According to a statement from Bitly CEO Mark Josephson, the company has "reason to believe that Bitly account credentials have been compromised."  Although Josephson insists that there is no indication at the current time that any Bitly accounts have actually been accessed by the hackers, he has quite wisely taken the proactive step of disconnecting all users' Facebook and Twitter accounts which means they will be required to reconnect these when they next login once …

The US military is apparently making good use of a secure Facebook-like system for networking which already has hundreds of user groups and thousands of members. Known as "milBook" the system has been embraced by the Department of Defense for the way it can open up safer avenues of communications amongst personnel. Previously, the department lacked a medium for employees to share official and sometimes sensitive information. MilBook provides several options for users who wish to share information with specific individuals. By creating discussion threads, they can exchange ideas among specific, self-created groups on topics such as Army policies. "The …

If a week is a long time in politics, then 24 hours is an absolute age in ecommerce security terms. Which make the findings of a Tripwire survey, published today, all the more worrying. The survey, conducted by Atomic Research, questioned 102 financial organizations and 151 retail organizations which process card payments in the United Kingdom. It has concluded that 35% of organisations takes two or three days to detect a breach, with 44% admitting they could protect customer data better. This gets more worrying when you realise that 24% had already been victims of a data breach which saw …

So this morning I get an email from Amazon which promises to inform me of some important information about my Amazon Prime membership. This is the subscription service which, in return for an annual charge of £49 here in the UK, provides free next day delivery on any item which is flagged as eligible for Prime members. That may sound like a lot, but actually if you do the math properly it's a pretty good money-saving deal for anyone who falls into the 'regular shopper' category and likes the tracked next day delivery option which usually costs an arm and …

It was once the biggest Bitcoin exchange in the world, accounting for as much as 80% of the global trading market in the virtual currency, but Mt. Gox suddenly stopped trading yesterday and reports suggest that some $375m worth of Bitcoins, or 6% of all Bitcoins in circulation, have gone missing. In an official statement, the Mt. Gox management team state that: "In light of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on Mt. Gox's operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. …

The photo messaging application Snapchat, which allows users to post images, video and text on a time limited basis to a group of recipient users, has been hacked. The attraction of Snapchat, apart from not being Facebook and therefore somewhere teenagers can meet online without their parents having a clue about it, is in the 'Mission Impossible' nature of the service: your photo will self-destruct in 10 seconds. Well sort of, as users set the time limit up to 10 seconds that the snap will be viewable to the receiving group, after which they can no longer see it and …

Back in 1992 a national newspaper interview referred to me as being the first virtual celebrity, which wasn't really true. Sure, I had managed to build something of a high profile in the emerging world of the Internet courtesy of my Wavey Davey persona and a disregard for the traditional convention. However, that profile was helped along by my also writing some of the first books about the Internet to be published in the UK, helping launch such well respected (even at the time) magazines as .Net and PC Pro, and perhaps more than anything plentiful appearances on TV and …

Until not very long ago, the More dropdown menu on the Google search results pages offered the ability to filter the results by type: News, Discussions, Blogs, etc. There were quite a handful of choices and they've all existed for years and years. It used to work great for me, but for the better part of 2013, I actually found it quite frustrating because whenever I was filtering `site:daniweb.com` results by Discussions, *only* news stories and code snippets would come up, and meanwhile all of the forum threads would show up when filtering by Blogs. In fact, I posted something …

If you have never stopped to think about language in terms of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) then the results of a survey by digital marketing agency Greenlight might make you do just that. According to the global Search and Social Survey, some 76% of people do their online searching in at least two different languages. This should come as no real surprise when you consider how many countries have more than one official language, and explains why Belgium with three official languages was towards the top of the survey for countries topping the multilingual searching stats. However, this explanation does …

That's the surprising consensus reached at a meeting of 30 CSOs representing some of the UK's leading enterprises held in London during the past week. This despite a poll at the bi-annual [URL="http://www.csointerchange.org"]CSO Interchange[/URL] event revealing that those same CSOs view social networking as the most over-hyped threat. When it came to the round table discussions on the subject of social networking, however, the gathered CSOs expressed what has been called a "strong preference" for companies to consider banning them all. Well, almost all, as LinkedIn gets an exception as most of the CSOs considered that acceptable. Could that possibly …

[ATTACH=RIGHT]22094[/ATTACH]Facebook Vice-President Chris Cox has [announced](https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150251867797131) the latest in a seemingly never ending run of privacy updates for the worlds' biggest social network. The improvements can be summed up as tightening up the question most often asked by those users worried about their privacy, namely "who can see this?" Unless the users asking that question happen to be using an iPhone it would seem. According to Cox the privacy updates, which will be rolled out to all users during the next few days, will make it "easier to share posts, photos, tags and other content with exactly the people you …