As Google gets more powerful, various voices are being raised over its money power and dominance. In such a case, a French court has ruled that the company is abusing its dominant position by making Google Maps free resulting in huge loses to a French mapping company.

The court asked Google to pay a fine worth $660,000. As per reports the French commercial court “upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free web mapping services to some businesses.”

Bottin Cartographes provides mapping services for a fee and its clientele list includes Louis Vuitton, Airbus and several auto companies.
The French court ruling ordered Google to pay $660,000 in damages and interest to Bottin Cartographes, along with a 15,000 Euro fine. That means total damage from the ruling is about $680,000.

A Google France spokesperson says the company is still studying the court’s decision and reviewing its options, adding that Google is “convinced that a free high-quality mapping tool is beneficial for both Internet users and websites.”
This ruling can have far reaching implications as many critics and analysts have been saying that Google’s dominance over internet is squeezing out both customers and competitors.

The spike associated with Black Friday and Cyber Monday is ebbing down online. The positive news has been that year-on-year weekly traffic increased by approximately 12 million visits compared to same week in year 2010.

The W-O-W dip in 2011 has been more drastic which maybe due to traffic spike owing Black Friday, Cyber Monday before the holiday season officially kicks off.

Google doodle Tribute on Microchip Co-creator Robert Noyce's 84th birthday

To celebrate what would have been the 84th birthday of Robert Noyce, one of the founders of Intel Corporation, the doodle design shows a electronic chip with the Google logo as the circuit layout

Born on December 12, 1927, in Burlington, Iowa, Robert Noyce grew up in Grinnell, Iowa and attended the local schools. Even in his early days, he exhibited a talent for mathematics and science while in high school and took the Grinnell College freshman physics course in his senior year. He graduated from Grinnell High School in 1945.

Noyce, nicknamed “the Mayor of Silicon Valley” co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel in 1968. He is credited along with Jack Kilby with the invention of the integrated circuit or as popularly known microchip, which ushered in the age of personal computers.

He died in 1990 in Austin, Texas, at the age of 60.

I started off with Sonia Gandhi and here are the screenshots

Google search reveals curiosity about Sonia Gandhi's health

Obviously people are concerned & curious about Sonia’s mysterious surgery which was conducted away from the media glare in USA.  There was quite a buzz about it in political circles too.

I will also conduct similar unscientific research on other politicians & events to find what Indian public searches

According to Compete’s research, Google-powered search (which includes both Google and AOL) had 68.3% of the US market in August, down from 69% in July. Bing-powered search — Bing and Yahoo combined — held 31.7% of the market in August, up from 31% in July.

Web Browser Market Share: September, 2011 Update

Chasing Google?

Almost every online business nowadays has a SEO campaign with various rates of success. The success of any SEO campaign is largely determined by the targeted traffic it is able to deliver to the website. Traffic is increased by researching for the most relevant and popular keywords. Once the keywords have been selected, a website is optimized and a link building campaign is initiated. Hopefully, if dome correctly and consistently, all these activities result in a website rankings for all or many of its selected keywords.

But over the last few years, SEO has evolved. It is no longer about delivering traffic to a website but also encompasses analytics.

Usually, a SEO company will do the needful and deliver the traffic. If and when a search engine updates its algorithm, the campaign is tweaked accordingly. This becomes a never ending cycle where the bulk of efforts are spent on chasing algorithms. Rather than building a website according to your initial goals, the focus of an algorithm chasing SEO consultant is now what a site should be as dictated by the latest algorithm update.

With every algorithm, SEO consultant will be frantically making changes to the site’s SEO campaign but by the time SEO consultant is done with them next update m ay be around the corner.

Also, algorithm chasing means overwhelming attention on just one search engine at the cost of other search engines. This means putting all your eggs in one basket which is not a wise decision when you business depends overwhelmingly on your online presence.

Chasing algorithm means creating a one size fits all solution which takes in to account various signals which can affect the SEO of a site. But as we know such solutions don’t work across industries and niche. Such an approach can be a perfect recipe for disaster if followed to a T.

Chasing analytics is a better technique than chasing algorithms because it forces you to concentrate on much better and tangible statistics which make more sense.

Analytics involves focusing on your audience and serving them with best way possible. This is how search engines actually want the sites to perform in the first place. This also saves SEO consultant from always figuring how to game search engines or how to get off the penalty imposed during last update.

But analytics is only successful if you have considerable traffic. Without any traffic even the best designed and most UX friendly site may fail.

To get the best of any SEO campaign, a SEO consult should marry analytics with their SEO campaigns if possible. A traffic may not necessarily be converted in to sales and it’s here the power of analytics can be unleashed. Analytics can unearth user behavior and trend which can help a site convert visitors in to customers.

This will mean a much more successful website which doesn’t need to be tweaked with every algorithm update.

The other significant findings were:

1) About 83% of American adults have a cell phone.

2) 73% of these cell phone owners send or receive text messages.

3) 31% users said they preferred texts over talking on the phone

4) A majority – 53% – preferred a voice call to a text message

5) Text messaging users send or receive an average of 41.5 text messages on a typical day.

These results come from a nationally representative phone survey of 2,277 adults ages 18 and older conducted from April 26-May 22, 2011, including 755 cell phone interviews. The margin of error for the whole survey is +/-2.3 percentage points, while the margin of error for cell phone users is +/-2.7 percentage points.

Top 5 Reasons Why Your SEO Campaign Failed

SEO is thought of as a panacea which can cure low business and make site suddenly popular and successful. What is often ignored is the fact that a good SEO campaign will get your traffic. What a site is able to do with that traffic is outside the scope of SEO. If the SEO is getting you inbound traffic but you still fail to see any increase in your sales then your problems may lie somewhere else.

1) Website design: The first thing a site visitor encounters is the website design. There are numerous ways, one can scare away the potential customer. A site with old design signals that the company is out of sync with modern innovations. Old fashion sites score very poorly on credibility.

Slow loading sites also turn off visitors. No one has the time to wait for your site to load when there are hundreds of sites which are prompt to load on screen and eager to serve their clients.

A website with poor navigation and structure may also witness low sales activity. A client will not be able to find the information, services or products easily which may force the potential client to seek it on some other site.

2) Page content: A website’s page is the sales letter which convinces the buyer to buy your services or products. If the content is ridden with grammatical mistakes, inconsistencies and fails to attract the site visitors then traffic will not get converted to sales.

3) Errors: A website with broken links, blank pages, non-working contact forms and broken images send out very poor signals. A website has few seconds to establish trust and rapport. A website with such errors will stop visitor on his track and leave your site immediately.

4) Social Media: Social media is the most effective way to build trust. A company with no social media presence may look like fly by night operator. Social networking enables customers to send you feedback and establish your reputation.

5) Call for action: Many times websites do not have a strong call of action buttons or options to call. This leads to lost sales opportunities.

A SEO company should be able to analyze and determine which  factors are hampering the effectiveness of their SEO campaign and  suggest appropriate measures.