Reporting to the company Directors, the successful candidate will head the Online Marketing/SEO team working on a number of external projects for a growing list of prestigious clients as well as contribute to some very exciting internal projects. The Directors of Atelier Studios pride themselves on creating a friendly and professional work environment where the team work towards common goals and all opinions and creative input is valued.

To find out more details, view the full job description at http://www.atelier-seo.com/about-us/careers/head-online-marketing-seo/

For starters, the Like button has been declared illegal in Schleswig-Holstein. According to Afterdawn.com “Website operators in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein have until the end of September to get remove all Facebook “Like” buttons or face fines up to 50,000 euros.” The Data Protection Commissioner’s office explained; “By using the Facebook service traffic and content data are transferred into the USA and a qualified feedback is sent back to the website owner concerning the web page usage, the so called web Analytics. Whoever visits facebook.com or uses a plug-in must expect that he or she will be tracked by the company for two years. Facebook builds a broad individual and for members even a personalised profile. Such a profiling infringes German and European data protection law. There is no sufficient information of users and there is no choice; the wording in the conditions of use and privacy statements of Facebook does not nearly meet the legal requirements relevant for compliance of legal notice, privacy consent and general terms of use…To Internet users ULD offers the advice to keep their fingers from clicking on social plug-ins such as the “Like”button and not to set up a Facebook account if they wish to avoid a comprehensive profiling by this company.”

But this is not the first time Germany has taken issue with Facebook policy. The Friend Finder Facebook service came under fire in July 2010 from German officials concerned at the sharing of personal information and the sending of automatic invitation emails. In a rare move this January Facebook conceeded defeat and made drastic changes to the system in Germany.

Earlier this month Hamburg’s privacy commissioner questioned what he called “the collection of biometric data”, also known as the Facebook photo tag suggest feature. The tag suggestion feature came under heavy criticism from many angles at the time of it’s launch. Quietly rolled out as a default setting, no doubt in part due to the panic ensuing the launch and initial success of Google+, the ill-thought out launch met controversy from users and legislators alike from day one. Facebook has since apologised admitting they could have provided more information to users at the time of the launch. The Hamburg Privacy Commissioner has the power to impose a fine if it deems Facebook to have broken the law, which of course Facebook denies.

Facebook has over 20.7 million users in Germany, a 32% penetration of the online population, making them the 10^th biggest users of Facebook (source: Social Bakers). How will the rest of Europe view Facebook in light of these challenges?

What is the Panda Update?

Designed to hurt the ‘bad guys’, the 500 or so recent Panda updates are an effort to weed out scraper sites, while further increasing the quality of results returned to users. Panda Updates are rolled out about every 4-7 weeks, so SEOs and Webmasters need to keep updated regularly. Here’s Matt Cutts’ take on it: “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

What Does It Do?

Panda seeks out and penalises low quality, old and out of date, and scraper sites. Google want users to find what they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible, and by eliminating poor quality sites Google increase the probability of giving users the right answer, first time.

In an interview with Wired.com Matt Cutts & Amit Singhal give some indication of what Panda looks for. Most of it is pure good SEO practice, with Panda looking a levels of original content, duplicate content, and advertisements on page. It also seems to take into account ‘over optimisation’, low click through rates, high bounce rates, and social mentions.

Worst hit seems to be content farms, article sharing sites, auto-generated store fronts, and sites not updated often. A number of UK technology sites were also affected, as well as Microsoft’s shopping channel Ciao, and the European Commission. Unfortunately these well intentioned algorithm changes have had a negative impact on a number of sites who may not deserve such harsh punishment.

This table, courtesy of SEOmoz, shows some of the most badly hit sites.

After the first update many unduly victimised site owners were at a loss as to how they would recover and many suffered strong financial difficulties as a result of the reduced traffic their sites received. However, many of these sites are making a good recovery, and some have even improved on their original figures such as DaniWeb.

Remember that Panda is a site-wide penalty, individual pages which let you down bring down the quality of the whole site in Panda’s eyes.

The Panda Hit Me – What Can I Do?

Google’s official line is “If you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.”

If you know you have been indulging in grey-to-black hat practices, stop it. They can see you, and they’re coming to get you. If you really feel you have been unfairly hit by the Panda updates you can contact Google and get your site reviewed. However it’s more likely that Panda has a point even if they have been unduly harsh. So what can you do?

First things first:

• Increase original content
• Edit or delete duplicate content
• Lose any pages which serve purely to link to other pages
• Lower your ad ratio if it looks high
• Edit pages which may be ‘over-optimised’
• Get into social, spread the word about your product or service
• Use robots.txt and 301 redirects

By filling your site with up-to-date, original content, keeping it updated, disallowing duplicate content, and generally applying good SEO practice should help to keep the Panda locked in it’s cage and away from damaging your visibility.

But stay updated on the mighty Panda, in the next 4-7 weeks he’ll have picked the lock again and be back on the prowl.

When Google+ first launched as an invite only test, Mark Zuckerberg quickly got involved and soon became the most followed person in all of Google+dom. Initially he praised the shiny new competition, gushing “it’s a validation of Facebook’s vision”, and grinning gaily as his nearly 30,000 Google+ followers watched his every move with baited breath.

A few months later and things have changed. Zuckerberg’s happy face has been replaced with a grimacing man who looks like he would rather be anywhere else. Well, it did, until he closed the account citing ‘privacy concerns’. Ironic coming from the CEO of of a company who’s privacy policies have been heavily, and repeatedly criticised. An Inside Google+ post compares his move to Dracula sending back a steak for being too bloody, and I have to agree.

But now Facebook have taken a rather underhand step, censoring Google+ invites on their network and keeping this information all to themselves. To confirm authentication, Google’s own Vic Gundotra has posted a demonstration video and has asked about people’s experience of this on Google+. If a user posts Google+ invites to their profile, or that of their friends, it seems Facebook will remove it without sending a warning or notification to the sender or recipient.

Tech writer Mike Elgan who created and shared the video later added “Some commenters are reporting that sending invites on Facebook does work for them, or is censored only in the Top News view. Possibilities that explain this include: 1) the video is a fake; 2) Facebook censored, then stopped censoring; or 3) Facebook is censoring only some people, using Edgerank somehow to censor or not censor according to some unpublished rules.”

I’m currently testing this myself, and in the last hour not one of my usually eager-to-participate Facebook friends have confirmed they can see the invite, though I can. Though this may seem a little extreme, one post I came across said ‘No big surprise. You don’t see McDonald’s adverts in Burger King either’. Food for thought indeed (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Have you had your Google+ invites censored by the Big Brother division of Facebook? Are Facebook within their rights to choose what we can see and not see, or are they just protecting their business?

A post from Larry Page today explains “Motorola’s total commitment to Android in mobile devices is one of many reasons that there is a natural fit between our two companies. Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers everywhere.”

He goes on to mention the threat Android faces from anti-competitive brands standing in opposition to Google, I think we can all guess who they are…”We recently explained how companies including Microsoft and Apple are banding together in anti-competitive patent attacks on Android. The U.S. Department of Justice had to intervene in the results of one recent patent auction to “protect competition and innovation in the open source software community” and it is currently looking into the results of the Nortel auction. Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.” If you want more detail you can read the full Google press release.

It seems some users have tested the download and a substantial number of usually reliable antivirus engines were able to detect the threat initially. A few definition updates later the questionable file was identified as Rogue:Win32/FakeRean, though this kind of fake anti-virus software uses many names.

Windows Secrets reported on this form of attack back in 2009, claiming that ‘maladvertisements’ were being shown along side genuine ads for search queries such as ‘malwarebytes’. Sadly it seems the criminals are still ahead in 2011, at least in part.

Search engines work hard to prevent such ‘maladvertisements’ and malware from entering the mainstream, but in this day and age, and with such an open ad auction system, it can be very hard to detect. Those working within SEO and related fields for a period of time may be more likely to spot malicious sites and links, but how is the non-technical user to differentiate between the ads below, one of which is linking to malware, one which is not?

Recently Google confirmed the addition of games to the network. Vic Gundotra’s official post lovingly declared “With the Google+ project, we want to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the web. But sharing is about more than just conversations. The experiences we have together are just as important to our relationships. We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life”. Mindful to keep users interacting with Google+ in other areas they added “Games in Google+ are there when you want them and gone when you don’t…If you’re not interested in games, it’s easy to ignore them. Your stream will remain focused on conversations with the people you care about.”

Just hours after the Google released the news, Facebook hit back announcing a plethora of new features for their own games. Their developer blog announced “Today we’re excited to make some of the biggest updates to the apps experience on Facebook since we first launched Platform four years ago. We are launching a major redesign to the Canvas Page to give your app greater real-estate on the user’s browser, and including a live ticker of real-time game related updates to keep the users constantly engaged and updated with their friends’ activity on apps and games as they play.” “…In addition to the automatic stories, we are launching new Graph APIs for achievements and scores so you can publish stories for user’s achievements, passing friends’ scores, or leader board movement to make game play more competitive, social and exciting for your users.”

Personally I am grateful to Google+ for giving me the option not to see games. Frank Reed eloquently echoed my sentiments in his post, saying “…Google must know that there enough folks out there like myself who would rather get a sharp stick in the eye than have one of my friends requesting help getting a virtual animal out of a virtual mess or looking for me to help them fight some evil menace in fantasyland cyberspace.”

As the long fingers of Facebook and Google reach deeper into each other’s pockets we can only speculate on future figures. In a recent post I explained how Facebook may not be suffering from the onset of Google+ quite as badly as you might think. With Google+ gaining well over 20 million users already, could the bubble burst early on Google’s oh-so-successful social media platform?

Some went as far as to lay blame at the door of social media for the riots becoming so large and spreading so fast. The BBC have quotes the Conservative MP Nick Du Bois as saying ‘it was clear that many people came to the area “on an organised day using the social media, phoning their friends, in a concerted effort to just move trouble up and capitalise on those awful events at the weekend”.’ He is not alone, his sentiments have echoed across the press for the last two days.

Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry Messenger have taken much of the blame as a weapon to help fuel the fire and mob mentality of the individuals responsible. The Mail went as far as to describe events as a ‘Twitter frenzy’. Reports suggest the platforms were/are being used to mobilise users, plan future riot locations, communicating the location of law enforcement, and even posting photographic evidence of the hauls and London in flames.

However today we have seen the other side of the power of social media. Mashable’s post describes how locals are helping neighbours who have lost their homes and businesses but with power of Twitter and Facebook. Mass clean up operations have been put into effect by residents who do not want to see their community in tatters. According to Mashable RiotCleanup’s Twitter page gathered over 50,000 followers in under 10 hours. And it’s not just the locals who are helping out. The creator of riotcleanup.co.uk lives in Shropshire. Twitter also shows numerous community members offering their trade services for free to help those trying to repair their broken lives.

Another aspect of social media during these dark times comes from Catchalooter on Tumblr. While of course people are not to put themselves in any danger, anyone with photographic evidence of looters in action can post the photos to this page in the hope they can be identified, named and shamed. Visitors are encouraged to contact the police and Crime Stoppers should they recognise a suspect. I have seen Facebook profiles inciting violence being reported to police through Twitter today, and 99% condemnation and ridicule for those who chose to take part.

Once again, for good or bad, social media is simply a tool. It did not exist in 1985 when the Broadwater Riots took place in Tottenham. Some say the relationship between police and locals in the area has festered for sometime, just waiting for an excuse to flare up. Technology cannot be blamed for this kind of behaviour, it is in the hands of people who decide how it will best suit their needs. When it comes to social media, as some believe in all aspect of life, the responsibility remains with the user. Personal responsibility and moral values will decide who uses social media to incite violence and criminal behaviour, and who uses it to clean up the streets and help those who have lost their homes and businesses to this mindless behaviour.

To finish on a lighter note, if you really want to know how the British cope in times of crisis look no further than this image taken by Joel Goodman.

Randi is one of founder Mark Zuckerberg’s three sisters, and his Director of Market Development. She is also Facebook’s television spokesperson, and has been an integral part of Facebook’s overwhelming success to date. She announced her departure via Twitter, and her complete resignation letter was first shared in an exclusive by Kara Swisher at AllThingsD. Kara states there is no word from Mark Zuckerberg yet, but from the way she has treated him in the past some might say it’s no wonder she doesn’t have that exclusive.

Randi, who is leaving to run her own social business, RtoZ Media, explains her move in the letter: “I’m proud of what I’ve done here and the people I have had the chance to work with. But I know I’ll be able to do just as much or more for Facebook once I’m on the outside. My goal is to launch my own innovative programming and work with media companies to develop their programming in new, and more social ways. In attacking this challenge, Facebook will clearly be a central element in all of my projects. I plan to demonstrate that ANYONE can do groundbreaking media work on the platform. And to the extent it makes sense for you, I’d be happy to advise Facebook on media projects, “Facebook Live” or other initiatives if it is desired.”

But who else is leaving Facebook? The web is peppered with stories of individuals who have abandoned long term partner Facebook for the heady and exciting new relationship they have developed with Google+, and haven’t looked back. Computerworld reports that Facebook lost 6 million US users in May, and 100,000 in the UK.

Anson Alexander reports on an interesting PCMAG.com poll in which users were asked if they would abandon Facebook for Google+. Over 50% of the 6,237 respondents said they would. As he points out, most people reading PCMAG are likely to be in the computer business and are likely to be early adopters of Google+, and these figures can hardy be extrapolated to the entire Facebook population, but it still makes for interesting reading with only 7% saying they won’t be leaving Facebook.

Despite reported losses in the US, UK, Canada, Norway and Sweden, Facebook is growing in popularity in Mexico, India and Brazil. Google’s Orkut remains big business in India and Brazil despite most of the Western world having forgotten about it years ago. As of this month 58.1% of Orkut’s 66 million active users are from Brazil, and 32% from India. Recently it has been reported that Facebook uptake has increased by 50% in Russia and Brazil over the last 6 months, and 40% in India over the same period.

Could it be that as Google+ entices users away from Facebook, Facebook could claw numbers back from current Orkut users? What impact could this have?

If you liked this article take a look at our article on Google+ Adoption Rates: Can Popularity Be Sustained? Facts, Figures and Conjecture.