Find out the latest news from Google

Google’s change to the “nofollow” link attribute and what it means

This past week Google announced that after 15 years, they plan to make a change to the way they handle the nofollow attribute on links. If you publish sponsored content or host forums or comments on your site, consider implementing the new attributes when you are able to make a code change. If you can’t or just don’t want to, there’s no harm in that either.

Chris Grant (he/him) 19th September 2019 12:57 pm

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Digital Marketing

Mobile searches with the qualifier “for me” have grown over 60%

Savvy marketers and business owners now know that consumers want answers as well as ideas and inspiration. And they want these things fast. Those who can deliver answers to people’s personal needs will have an advantage.

Chris Grant (he/him) 16th September 2019 9:12 am

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Website Design

New website launched for SP1 Bookkeeping in Salisbury

We were approached by Tony at SP1 Bookkeeping to give his website a professional touch. Tony had put together a basic homepage for his website but wanted guidance on the best way to mix promoting his bookkeeping business with making sure that his website was easy to use and on the money (pun intended) from a technical perspective.

Chris Grant (he/him) 15th September 2019 9:25 pm

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Ecommerce latest news

Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) Update (13-Sept-2019)

You may have heard about Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), a new requirement under European payment law that, in part, aims to make online and mobile payments more secure. It does so by asking customers to provide additional information to complete their transactions.

While SCA will come into effect on 14 September 2019, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) recently announced it will take a phased approach to enforce SCA obligations over an 18-month period.

Chris Grant (he/him) 13th September 2019 12:52 pm

WordPress

WordPress plugins gone rogue – compromised plugins creating rogue administrator accounts

A recent malvertising campaign targeting vulnerable plugins is now trying to backdoor sites by creating rogue admin accounts.

Back in July when the campaign was first noticed it was attempting to hijack sites to push popup ads, tech support scams, and malicious Android apps.

Chris Grant (he/him) 5th September 2019 9:25 pm

WordPress

WordPress 5.3 will change how it blocks search engines from indexing content

WordPress announced an important change to how it will block search engines from indexing websites.

This change abandons the traditional Robots.txt solution in favor of the Robots Meta Tag approach. The change brings WordPress in line with the reason for blocking Google, which is to keep the blocked pages from showing in Google’s search results.

Chris Grant (he/him) 3rd September 2019 11:25 pm

SEO

Google is showing competitor ads on local business profiles (and you can’t do a thing about it)

Google has been slowly ramping local search monetisation over time. It introduced local search ads in early 2017, which put ads in local packs, and began putting ads in local Knowledge Panels roughly two years ago. Now, the company is starting to show competitor ads in local business profiles.

Chris Grant (he/him) 31st August 2019 9:53 pm

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Data and Analytics

1991 to 2019 – How many websites are there now?

Today we’ve got an infographic, showing the number of websites online since the very first one was created back in 1991. When Yahoo! came online in 1994, there were 3,000 websites while there were 2.4 million when Google was launched in 1998.

Tom Furmanski 20th August 2019 9:32 am