Digital News 24th June

This week in the search space Google put their Panda 2.2 update live which targets low quality sites looking to ‘farm’ in traffic. This is designed to refine the sigifnicant movement that has occured particularly in ecommerce websites as many tense webmasters across the world endeavour to get their traffic back. It also will delve further into the issue of content scraping, as the Google search quality and anti-spam teams look to build on the Panda algorithm. Last small bit of Google things to note – the Google +1 button endorsements sporadically (e.g. 10,000 people have +1’ed this site) show against users search results for logged out users. This will have an impact on clickthrough rate, not as much as the logged in version but this is all relevant for both for natural and paid search.

Facebook temporarily deleted content written by Roger Ebert about the late Ryan Dunn’s death. There was a placeholder disclaimer saying that Facebook.com ‘doesn’t allow pages with hateful, threatening or obscene content.’

Twitter.com have been in testing for 9 months with a new Hootsuite sponsored tweets product but the rumour mentioned on Tech Crunch is that a new in-timeline Promoted Tweets product will be on the way.

J K Rowling opened Pottermore.com with a hidden link to youtube.com which counted down to the final trailer which for many Harry Potter fans would have been a dissapointment as it confirmed that there will be no more Potter books. This digital activity created a huge surge of Youtube, Twitter, email and website activity.

A new free application called JS-Kit created some noise this week which allows comment creation for any site, page or object. A nice, simple line of code that powerfully transforms your site for real time UGC.