Google starts removing search results following EU 'right to be forgotten' ruling

GOOGLE ANNOUNCED on Thursday that it has started removing search results, following the European Court of Justice landmark "right to be forgotten" ruling in May.

A Google spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal, "This week we're starting to take action on the removals requests that we've received.

"This is a new process for us. Each request has to be assessed individually, and we're working as quickly as possible to get through the queue."

Google doesn't sound too pleased about this, and hasn't revealed any further details about the process, which means it's not clear how many requests the firm has received, nor how many it has removed so far. If recent reports are to be believed, takedown requests have topped the 50,000 level.

Bloomberg noted that the internet search engine has removed a link to a Spanish newspaper that was the target of a court case by Mario Costeja Gonzalez. A Search of Gonzalez's name now shows text at the bottom of the page, which reads, "Some results may have been removed under data-protection law in Europe."

"We're showing this notice in Europe when a user searches for most names, not just pages that have been affected by a removal," Google clarified on its website.

Towards the end of May, Google started offering EU citizens an online tool to fill out if they want a link removed from its search results.

When submitting a request, Google said that users will have to provide at least one kind of photo ID, and stated that links will only be removed if the information is erroneous, misleading or no longer relevant.

Jersey Boys Movie Review

Genre: Musical, Drama.

Director: Clint Eastwood.

Cast: Vincent Piazza, John Lloyd Young, Christopher Walken, Steve Schirripa, Kathrine Narducci etc.

Synopsis:Jersey Boys is a musical biography of the Four Seasons-the rise, the tough times and personal clashes, and the ultimate triumph of a group of friends whose music became symbolic of a generation. Far from a mere tribute concert (though it does include numbers from the popular Four Seasons songbook), Jersey Boys gets to the heart of the relationships at the center of the group-with a special focus on frontman Frankie Valli, the small kid with the big falsetto. In addition to following the quartet's coming of age as performers, the core of the show is how an allegiance to a code of honor learned in the streets of their native New Jersey got them through a multitude of challenges: gambling debts, Mafia threats and family disasters. Jersey Boys is a glimpse at the people behind a sound that has managed to endure for over four decades in the hearts of the public.

  Review: So here's the thing: Saw Jersey Boys tonight. Now I've never been interested in the stage version (I think musicals should have original music) and I didn't really trust in Clint Eastwood directing a musical; in short - I was ready to hate it (I've been called snob and pretentious more than a few times). But let me tell you, I was dead wrong.

It was AWESOME!!! The actors are stellar, the music is fantastic and the film completely engrossing. I had a big goofy smile plastered across my face from beginning to end. The audience clapped twice during the movie (it was that good). It would not be hyperbolic of me to say that this WILL get Oscar nominations. 

I will be seeing this movie again and again when it comes out June 20th. Do yourself a favour and do the same.

Affiliate Marketing – An Efficient Digital Media Channel

Affiliate marketing constitutes an effectual online communication practice which seeks to engage users on third-party sites and generate new leads into a company’s or organization’s website.  Affiliate marketing prompts users to click through referring sites (publishers) to a company’s website to ACT either this means purchase, submit information that allows an interactive relationship (newsletter subscription) or get benefit from special vouchers or offers which can be used in-store.

Part of Online business strategy

In the context of acquisition strategies and tactics, affiliate marketing plays a significant role, yet it should be considered as a part of a holistic strategy approach. The RACE planning framework illustrates key steps on organising effective online business:

REACH: acquisition strategies for brand building tactics (affiliate marketing – SEO – PPC techniques – Online PR – Social Media marketing etc.)

ACT & CONVERT: tactics that lead to measurable actions. (Lead generation techniques – e-commerce management – home page / landing page optimization etc.)

ENGAGE: retention and growth tactics to turn one time visitors into repeaters. (Content marketing actions – newsletters and promotional techniques – mobile marketing – ongoing customer support)

Payments policies

Its profit potential and measurable results has evolved affiliate marketing through the past years into a popular media channel. Affiliate marketing involves commission based payments such as pay per click(payment is related with clicks on the link and it is usually a low paying technique) or pay per action ( payment is related directly and only with actions performed (Cost per Acquisition (CPA) which can be very effective compared to PPC which is used more for traditional online ads.

Generally it is estimated that gradually CPA tends to replace CPM or CPC as the advertiser has increased intervention control over the percentages agreed. “For example, in 2005 manufacturing company Unilevernegotiated CPA deals with online publishers where it paid for every e-mail address captured by a campaign rather than a traditional CPM deal.”

The cost per acquisition can be calculated as follows:

CPA= 100 / conversion rate%  *  CPC

The affiliates or publishers can follow the performance progress by the earnings per click (EPC) which is a metric used to indicate average earning per 100 outbound clicks generated.

It is significant to note that apart commission percentages, there are also network and placement fees along with agency management fees. What matters is to achieve your revenue goals and still retain yourROAS target (return on ad spends). What is more, it is efficient to keep aside a part of your estimated budget for paid placements, further publicity actions and testing.

Models of affiliate marketing

There are several options and models of affiliate marketing such as:

• Aggregators sites (comparison sites)
• Shopping directories
• Review sites
• Loyalty sites: rewards sites
• Voucher or coupon sites
• E-commerce sites
• Personal or blog sites

Pros and Cons of Affiliate Marketing

Below we list the most important pros and cons of Affiliate Marketing:

Advantages	Disadvantages
Reach new targeted audiences Ease of constant updates Generate new leads Reduce Diversity risk Pay-per-action can be managed effectively	Incremental profit or sales may be limited (You may be cannibalising business you would have achieved anyway) Affiliates may exploit your reputation Not effective control may damage company reputation Program management fees Close and constant updates which requires a close co operation with agency and company

4 Tips in affiliate marketing management

1. Commission management

In affiliate marketing, it is vital that commission is calculated on a level that it motivates affiliates to preferentially support a merchant’s products, while at the same time being cost-effective.

2. Cookie expiry period

Affiliates’ EPC will be also affected by the cookie expiry period agreed on the time between a visitor clicks the affiliate link and the sale is certified to the affiliate.

3. Content

Managing the design and content which affiliates use to advertise a company constitutes a challenge since content needs to be current in line with different promotions. So this needs to be monitored by the affiliate manager on a constant base. Many merchants now provide live product feeds to affiliate networks in order to keep their promotions and product pricing up-to-date.

4. Select the right channels

It is vital to fulfill the most effective selection upon the affiliate’s partner network and constantly review its progress. A static allocation of your budget can be detrimental. Consumers shop via different channels and change their habits and preferences often.

Affiliate Marketing – An Efficient Digital Media Channel

Affiliate marketing constitutes an effectual online communication practice which seeks to engage users on third-party sites and generate new leads into a company’s or organization’s website.  Affiliate marketing prompts users to click through referring sites (publishers) to a company’s website to ACT either this means purchase, submit information that allows an interactive relationship (newsletter subscription) or get benefit from special vouchers or offers which can be used in-store.

Part of Online business strategy

In the context of acquisition strategies and tactics, affiliate marketing plays a significant role, yet it should be considered as a part of a holistic strategy approach. The RACE planning framework illustrates key steps on organising effective online business:

REACH: acquisition strategies for brand building tactics (affiliate marketing – SEO – PPC techniques – Online PR – Social Media marketing etc.)

ACT & CONVERT: tactics that lead to measurable actions. (Lead generation techniques – e-commerce management – home page / landing page optimization etc.)

ENGAGE: retention and growth tactics to turn one time visitors into repeaters. (Content marketing actions – newsletters and promotional techniques – mobile marketing – ongoing customer support)

Payments policies

Its profit potential and measurable results has evolved affiliate marketing through the past years into a popular media channel. Affiliate marketing involves commission based payments such as pay per click(payment is related with clicks on the link and it is usually a low paying technique) or pay per action ( payment is related directly and only with actions performed (Cost per Acquisition (CPA) which can be very effective compared to PPC which is used more for traditional online ads.

Generally it is estimated that gradually CPA tends to replace CPM or CPC as the advertiser has increased intervention control over the percentages agreed. “For example, in 2005 manufacturing company Unilevernegotiated CPA deals with online publishers where it paid for every e-mail address captured by a campaign rather than a traditional CPM deal.”

The cost per acquisition can be calculated as follows:

CPA= 100 / conversion rate%  *  CPC

The affiliates or publishers can follow the performance progress by the earnings per click (EPC) which is a metric used to indicate average earning per 100 outbound clicks generated.

It is significant to note that apart commission percentages, there are also network and placement fees along with agency management fees. What matters is to achieve your revenue goals and still retain yourROAS target (return on ad spends). What is more, it is efficient to keep aside a part of your estimated budget for paid placements, further publicity actions and testing.

Models of affiliate marketing

There are several options and models of affiliate marketing such as:

• Aggregators sites (comparison sites)
• Shopping directories
• Review sites
• Loyalty sites: rewards sites
• Voucher or coupon sites
• E-commerce sites
• Personal or blog sites

Pros and Cons of Affiliate Marketing

Below we list the most important pros and cons of Affiliate Marketing:

Advantages	Disadvantages
Reach new targeted audiences Ease of constant updates Generate new leads Reduce Diversity risk Pay-per-action can be managed effectively	Incremental profit or sales may be limited (You may be cannibalising business you would have achieved anyway) Affiliates may exploit your reputation Not effective control may damage company reputation Program management fees Close and constant updates which requires a close co operation with agency and company

4 Tips in affiliate marketing management

1. Commission management

In affiliate marketing, it is vital that commission is calculated on a level that it motivates affiliates to preferentially support a merchant’s products, while at the same time being cost-effective.

2. Cookie expiry period

Affiliates’ EPC will be also affected by the cookie expiry period agreed on the time between a visitor clicks the affiliate link and the sale is certified to the affiliate.

3. Content

Managing the design and content which affiliates use to advertise a company constitutes a challenge since content needs to be current in line with different promotions. So this needs to be monitored by the affiliate manager on a constant base. Many merchants now provide live product feeds to affiliate networksin order to keep their promotions and product pricing up-to-date.

4. Select the right channels

It is vital to fulfill the most effective selection upon the affiliate’s partner network and constantly review its progress. A static allocation of your budget can be detrimental. Consumers shop via different channels and change their habits and preferences often.

Grace Of Monaco Movie Review

Genre: Biography, Drama.

Director: Olivier Dahan

Cast: Nicole Kidman, Tim Roth, Paz Vega, Milo Ventimigilia, Frank Langella etc.

Synopsis:The story of former Hollywood star Grace Kelly's crisis of marriage and identity, during a political dispute between Monaco's Prince Rainier III and France's Charles De Gaulle, and a looming French invasion of Monaco in the early 1960s.

 Review:he 67th Festival de Cannes opened with a royal fiction. It's traditional for Cannes to start with something spectacular. This film displays an homage to Princess Grace, formerly Grace Kelly. Nicole Kidman is magnificent and breathtaking in the part of this iconic figure of American Cinematography. In fact she embodied a sort of elegance through Hitchcock movies. In this film she's introduced mostly as a wife and a mother who wants to keep her career still. The director, Olivier Dahan (La Môme), had created this whole couple interactions. On the other hand Prince Rainier, starring Tim Roth, is a two faces character. With a complicated identity as he's dealing with his political and public image as well as his private family life. Plus, Grace's Royal life hasn't really turn out the way she imagined. yet for all the movie's efforts to turn this long forgotten Côte d'Azur missile crisis, it never registers as more than a turf war - whose worst possible outcome is that a few thousand tax- dodging bourgeois might be forced to become French citizen. The script is agonisingly airless, especially when it tries to fill into a conspirational plot involving Rainier's sister. Dahan keeps things very busy on the visual front even making sure to have a real fireworks erupting in the background of one marital argument. As Langella said once "At some point, every fairy tale must end" - only in the case of Grace of Monaco, not really soon enough.
Overall the resulting film is like a 104 minutes long Chanel ad editing with Instagram filters.

3-Way On Page Optimization

The first step to maximize our website’s probabilities to rank as high as possible in the SERPs for a variety of terms that we have optimized our pages for is to follow some time tested best practises of on page optimization. So without further ado, let’s find below the 3 most important on page factors we must implement every time in order to maximize our websites effectiveness.

Title Tag

Over the years page title tag remains the most important on page factor in order to ensure top SERPS rankings. Study after study clearly shows that in order for our website’s pages to rank as high as possible we must place our most important keywords at the very beginning (or as close to the front as possible) to page’s title tag.

Optimal Format:

Most important Keyword – Second most important Keyword | Brand Name

Best Practices:

Make sure that your title tag length does not exceed 67 characters, as this is the character limit that search engines use to display their search results.

Meta description

While search engines don’t use Meta description as a ranking factor anymore, it’s crucial that we provide a meaningful Meta description for each page that will contain the page’s most important/targeted term-phrase for two very important reasons.

The first reason is that a well-crafted Meta description can increase listing’s CTR (a relevance signal for search engines). The way this will happen is that when a user performs a search using a page’s targeted search term as a query, your page will show in SERPs with your targeted terms bolded both at the title tag and at the Meta description section. As a consequence the bolding effect of part of the title tag and the Meta description text will increase significantly the chances of the user clicking your SERPs listing.

The second reason is that a meaningful Meta description will allow the user to recognize instantly if the page’s content has information relevant to his query (what he is searching for). In this way not only we increase our chances for a click and further engagement to our websites but also we decrease the possibility for a bounce back that will happen almost instantly if a user visits a page and can’t find information relevant to his query.

Optimal Format:

Try to include one-time in your Meta description your most important keyword as well as your second most important keyword.

Best Practises:

Your Meta description length should not exceed the 157 characters, as this is the character limit that search engines use to display their search results.

Content

Content is what the user will come to see to our websites, that’s why high quality (meaningful) content is one of the most important factors that search engines are utilizing when they try to decide in what position to rank each website’s page.

So, the next step in order is to create meaningful content by including in our pages specific elements that will boost each page’s effectiveness when it comes to user satisfaction and SERPs rankings.

The elements that you must take into account are the keyword density (how many times you will include your targeted keywords and variations into page’s content), Heading tags  where <h1> defines the most important heading and as a result <h1> must be the first heading that we must include to each page’s content and the third element is the alt tag attribution to be used to each page’s image that contributes both to boost our SEO performance and at the same time to serve users (if image can’t render successfully, then the alternative text will be shown to users).

The best way to automate the above process as much as possible is to use a professional SEO tool like Web SEO Analytics’ Keyword Analyzer Tool in order to analyze the title tag, Meta description and content for each page of a website.

Tips And Insights For Effective SEO Copywriting

The SEO copywriting is a technique used for websites’ texts, that produces high quality and persuasive content for the website visitors and, at the same time, targets specific search terms in order to be ranked highly by the search engines.

The search engine placement and traffic conversion starts with quality content. The text displayed in web pages is the main source of keywords for which the website will be referenced in search engines. The search engines take into account many factors to determine the relevance of a web page for a specific keyword. Below we list the most important tips for optimizing and improving the page ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (aka SERPs):

1. Conduct keyword research

Creating a list of strategic keywords and phrases before starting to write can help you structure your content, thus making writing easier and resulting into a copy easier to read. Search for terms that your customers might search when they look for products and services like yours. Use the Keyword research toolto identify good performing keywords. Check the popularity of each keyword by comparing the number of results in Google Search and in Adwords and find out how difficult it is to achieve high rankings for specific keywords using the Keyword Difficulty Tool.

Keywords can help your creative thinking!

2. Mind the KeywordRank, not Keyword density

Keyword density measures the number of times that a keyword appears on a page. It is a percentage which is calculated by dividing the number of occurrences of one keyword with the total number of words contained on the text. Several years ago this played a significant role in achieving higher rankings. This technique has been heavily used by webmasters & SEOs in order to improve their rankings, nevertheless due to the excessive use of this technique their content looked unattractive and spammy. Repeating the same word again and again will no longer help your rankings but on the contrary it can negatively affect them because search engines developed techniques to identify keyword stuffing & low quality content.

Nowadays other metrics play significant part on SEO.  A good indicator for Keyword Optimization is theKeywordRank which is a metric that measures how optimized a keyword is within a page. This special rank can be used to distinguish the important amongst the not important keywords. It takes into account not only the number of occurrences but also the weight of each word on the text, the position within the document, how optimized the word is, its relevance within the text and more. In addition to that, KeywordRank will tell you if a particular keyword is over optimized and whether it can raise spammy signals on the search engines. To calculate the KeywordRank of your keywords and improve your Onpage Optimization use the Keyword Analyzer tool.

3. Work on the structure of your Texts

The keywords should be included in the body text as naturally as possible. Make sure you use Titles, split your content in segments and organize it appropriately to make it easier to read. Moreover the page should be structured so that your main page keywords appear on the first paragraph. Remember that the text that appears above the fold is important both for the Search Engines and for the users. Repeating your main keywords naturally can help you achieve different keyword combinations. Avoid keyword stuffing, unnecessary repeating and ensure that your main terms are scattered throughout the rest of the text.

Don’t forget that the main goal is to create content that engages the visitors and communicates to them effectively the benefits of the products or services offered. Even the most powerful keywords can’t transform a poor copy; they just add extra flavour to a good one. Use them wisely or you’ll spoil the whole page.

4. Avoid duplicate content

Duplicate content is a piece of content that appears on 2 or more separate URLs (internal or external). It heavily affects SEO and it can create major problems on our strategy. Duplicate content messes up with your site architecture and it reduces the strength of your pages. In addition to that, large amount of duplicate content can create problems on the way that your site is analyzed, crawled and indexed by search engines. As a result writing unique texts and avoiding republishing content from other sources can keep you safe from duplicate content issues and search engine bans.

Use the Duplicate content tool  to find how similar two different URLs are.

5. Mind the On-page Optimization factors

The goal of on-page optimization is to help the search engines understand your content easier. A big part of the SEO consists in following some standard guidelines which allow search engines to index, analyze and rank your pages properly. Here are few on-page factors that you should always have in mind:

• Page titles: Incorporate the selected keywords in each page title. Titles are super important for SEO.
• Internal link structure: ensure that all your pages can be found by the search engines.
• Page structure, specifically Headings (h1 & h2 etc): the heading structure defines which parts of your content are important, and how they’re interconnected.
• Meta Description tags: The Meta description is a meta-data field appearing sometimes in the search results as snippets. Title & META description heavily affect the CTR on SERPs.
• Schema.org Markup: Schema.org is a collection of the HTML tags/attributes etc which help search engines understand better the content of a page. It allows you to define relationships, types of content etc and it is currently supported by most of the major Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex etc.

 

Get the recipe right! And don’t forget: The main goal of the SEO copywriting remains writing interestingcontent that people want to read and link to. Last but not least, don’t forget to evolve your copywriting: