BRAND INFECTION » Web

Google Now Analyzes Ad Placements – Improves Search Ranking Algorithm

Nader — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 05:07:02 +0000

Yesterday Google announced a major(!) upgrade to its search ranking algorithm which will drastically change the way designers and more importantly online marketeers will think about their website layouts. In Google’s ongoing effort to help users find more high-quality websites in search results, the company will introduce an improved algorithm. From then on Google will not only analyse content and keywords but also the page layout, more importantly the placements and usage of ads.

This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page.

In one way or the other Google will penalise websites that place too many advertisements above the fold. While this is good for user experience and actually finding relevant information, other websites such as niche websites, that are heavily marketed (“Adsense Websites”), will probably lose quite an important stream of revenue.

So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

Matt Cutts from Google says that only 1% of global search queries will be affected by this change but I kind of feel that this will have major implications and leave a sustainable scent mark in the world of online marketing.

By the way, Google itself is not really a good example. The search company has a page full of ads above the fold, as you can see in the picture below.

Google itself is full of ads above the fold

Personally I would like to know about what “above the fold” exactly means since so many different screen resolutions exist. Are we talking about 1024×768, 1280xXXX…? Another question remaining is what Google’s definition of “normal degree” is: two ads, three, four…? We’ll see in the future!

Wunderkit Is Over-Hyped: Men Who Stare At Wooden Walls 2.0

Nader — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:00:09 +0000

I got an invitation today to try out wunderkit and after 15 minutes of clicking around I have to say it’s so f*cking sad I don’t even know. This is in no way innovative nor easy to use. It’s simply a mixed mess of twitter meets basecamp meets things meets evernote meets wooden walls 2.0. ~~Wow~~, you can follow people and can get followed back, you can file notes and you can create tasks…super innovative…not.

Wunderkit is the perfect example for creating an absolutely successful hype (they do this extremely well!) around a product early on and promising a new way to organize our lives. Now that it is finally online I am pretty sure lots of people will be disappointed. Personally I feel made fun of with this kind of hype and “all hat and no cattle”. What do you think?

I’m in no way affiliated with them but if you really want to see an innovative, mind-blowing and flexible tool that adapts to your workflow check out podio.

Early X-Mas Gift From Me To You

Let It Snow, Google

Nader — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 20:27:36 +0000

Google’s got a creative and tricky search result once again. After “tilt” or “do a barrel roll” it’s now “let it snow”. People who aren’t celebrating christmas can type in “hannukah”. Google started with those tricks some time ago but since new web technologies emerged and still continue to do so they not only pimp their doodles but also create better and better search results.

Google Let It Snow

20 Creative 404 Error “Not Found” Page Examples

Nader — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 21:00:04 +0000

After countless hours of development everybody is happy when pushing a website or application live. What people usually forget is to a create meaning-, helpful or at least creative “404 Error Not Found” page. This is not something developers often pay attention to but should.

Most sites have a banal message like “Not found” and essentially that’s what it is, but you can make users more happy visiting your page and weren’t successful finding the content they wanted. A 404 Page should at least contain site-wide links to be able to quickly jump to another page, or, be as popular and viral like twitter’s fail whale. Here are a couple of great examples ranging from creative to helpful to extravaganza.

Check out more 404 pages at fab404

Twitter’s Redesign Looks Nice

Nader — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:26:14 +0000

Twitter on Thursday introduced a new look for Twitter.com and TweetDeck that it hopes will simplify the user experience. One major difference on the homepage is that tweets appear on the right side and take up less real estate than they used to.

What you can see from the video the redesign looks really nice, especially the media integration and instant interaction with tweets. You can read up more and see some screenshots here. It doesn’t seem to be active for my account yet, for yours?

[via Mashable]

E-Mail Newsletter HTML Boilerplate Makes Development Easier

Nader — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:07:49 +0000

Once in a while everybody working for clients on the web needs to create an e-mail newsletter and we all know how cumbersome, terrifying and time-consuming this task is. Not anymore!…well, at least you get a head start with this free e-mail html boilerplate. It’s a good basis and a template of sorts that will help you avoid rendering problems with the most common email clients out there. Thanks guys!

Twitter Spam Is Rarely Targeted, Sometimes Just Absurd

Nader — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 19:13:42 +0000

I just tweeted this with my private twitter account @nadr:

I’m shocked about a helicopter from liberty tours crashing into a plane, then falling into Hudson river.

First of all it is always a tragedy when people get killed, secondly it’s completely absurd I got this twitter reply one minute later.

What will twitter do in order to fight this spam? Will it have an anti-spam filter in the future, like your e-mail program does?

Tropicana: We’re not red, we’re not blue. We’re 100% orange

Nader — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 08:13:48 +0000

Simon Owens told me about a non-traditional branding project he’s been working on for Tropicana: an abstract visualization of the aggregate conversation on Twitter showing frequency and context of election-related words.

The site pulls a continuous stream of tweets mentioning Obama and McCain, representing the most-used terms as a series of bubbles. The bigger the “bubble” the more frequently the term is being used. You can hover over each word to see a graphical breakdown of each word’s use in relation to the candidates.

To brand it for Tropicana they included the tagline: “We’re not red, we’re not blue. We’re 100% orange” and placed one of their ads on the right-hand side.

Visit the website at http://anorangeamerica.com

Electric Face Disco

Nader — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:31:15 +0000

Ok, this has nothing to do with brands, marketing or advertising but it would still be a great viral if it were from an agency promoting a music product.

A little bit of masochism is needed to actually do this: Daito Manabe uses electricity to power his face make his face vibrate synchronously to electronic music.

There is not much movement going on during the first minute of the video but make sure you watch it until the end. This is a crazy experiment for people bored of the usual music visualisation.

WordPress Plugin “Most Comments” + Widget

Nader — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:17:51 +0000

This post is for the bloggers out there using WordPress.

I was searching for a wordpress plugin that shows posts with the most comments but couldn’t find any that has enough options, so I developed one myself. Now that it’s ready I decided to publish it for free.

Download WordPress Plugin Most Comments

More information on WordPress.org

Features

Limit the amount of posts to be shown
Exlude posts without comments
Select a time range (last XX days) of posts to be taken into account
Customize the design template via the settings page
Place a widget in your sidebar

Relaunch: New & Enhanced Version