We are currently experiencing a few problems with our phone lines. If you need to contact us urgently please send an email to info@dolphinpromotions.co.uk.

We hope to get them working soon. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

With 1 billion users, and 23% of these users checking Facebook 5 times a day or more, it is an excellent platform to advertise on. Facebook have released an infographic showing some interesting facts about their platform.

Sites developed with WordPress have been under attack from a botnet of tens of thousands of computers for the past week.

The botnet is using a brute force attack on the admin users to try and gain access to the sites administration. Once within the administration the hackers will be able to insert malicious code that will help grow the botnet.

According to survey website W3Techs, around 17% of the world’s websites are powered by WordPress which is around 64 million sites, with a readership of over 371 million people each month.

WordPress.com have implemented optional two-step authentication but this has not been officially rolled out to sites hosted on their own server.

WordPress are currently advising that anyone using admin as a user should make sure they use a secure password (we recommend at least 10 characters using uppercase, lowercase, numbers and special characters).

Due to the increased threat to wordpress sites we have manually audited all our clients, updated installations and plugins, made sure no client is using admin, updated insecure passwords, and installed captchas.

Source: BBC

Following Google’s Shopping move from free to paid there has been a huge drop in the number of shopping results that are shown up in the organic/universal listings within Google.com

Example of universal search

Searchmetrics produced a report showing that in January 2012 shopping results appeared in 20% of universal search integrations, however by December this number had fallen to just 5%.

The steepest decline occurred in October, which is also the month that Google made the switch to a paid-for model.

In comparison images that show in universal search remained constant at around 30%, though video results also declined from 76% to 62%

Google consistently accounted for more than 50% of the shopping integrations during 2012, with Amazon its closest competitor with around 10% market share.

As part of our work with the ProBuild Contractor Network we have just launched a website for Briden Insurance and Building Contractors.

Developed in WordPress allowing the client to manage everything themselves including updating the gallery with all their latest work

Sir Tim Berners-Lee the British computer scientist and four others have been awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize which comes with a £1 Million prize fund. The award has been given in acknowledgment for creating the foundations for the internet.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which oversees the Web’s continued development which outline the foundations which Dolphin Promotions adhere to when developing our sites. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.  

In 2004, Sir Tim Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work and was honoured as the “Inventor of the World Wide Web” during the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, in which he appeared in person.

Last Saturday the world’s largest broadcast news organization, BBC News, received an unnatural link notification from Google.

A BBC News representative posted in the Google Help Forums about the notification seeking advice on how to find and remove them:

I am a representative of the BBC site and on Saturday we got a ‘notice of detected unnatural links’.

Given the BBC site is so huge, with so many independently run sub sections, with literally thousands or agents and authors, can you give us a little clue as to where we might look for these ‘unnatural links’.

It is believed that the cause of the notification is due to websites scraping the data using RSS feeds provided by the BBC and therefore the BBC is not at fault, however the concern is that a news site as authoritative as the BBC would receive such a notification.

This is not the first large penalty of recent weeks, Google recently penalised dozens of UK news sites such as Worcester Standard  and This Is Total Essex as well as the flower delivery company Interflora.

*Update*

It turns out Google penalised one article on the BBC website, and the penalty had no effect on the rest of the site.

John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland, said in a Google Help thread:

Looking into the details here, what happened was that we found unnatural links to an individual article, and took a granular action based on that. This is not negatively affecting the rest of your website on a whole.

The number of people who made purchases on-line in February grew by 13% according to IMRG although the average amount each customer spent dropped across all categories except gifts (up by 36%), health and beauty (up by 8%) and lingerie (up by 9%) which is probably attributed to Valentine’s Day.

Tina Spooner the chief information officer at IMRG said:

“Online retail held its own in February, following a strong start to the year in January when the market was up 16%. Valentine’s Day clearly had a positive impact for e-retail with gift sales up 26% on February last year, and the average online gift spend reaching its highest level in over two years.

“The mobile growth rate has slowed by around a third over the last three months or so compared with 2012, which is perhaps inevitable after the boom in tablet sales last year that has no doubt driven it. As the use of mobile devices as internet portals has also become widespread, it has turned mobile into a viable sales channel as evidenced by the rise in conversion rate.”

Google Shopping or Google Base as it used to be called has been one of our favourite tools for getting traffic and sales for our e-commerce clients for several years now.

Unfortunately last year Google decided that it would be changing this service from being free for merchants to list their products into a commercial model built on the Product Listing Ads program. The new paid program will simply be called Google Shopping. This change has not affected our UK customers for the past few months however Google began rolling out the change to the UK in February with completion estimated for the end of Q2 2013

What this means is that the free traffic merchants have been getting for nearly a decade through what was called Froogle/Google Base will no longer be free, and essentially turn into a paid comparison shopping engine.

Google claims this is building a better shopping experience though we can’t personally see how paid inclusion is better than free, unless you own Google stock. In fact when Google started out it classed paid inclusion as a bad thing and listed it as part of its “Don’t Be Evil” creed however the potential for extra income seems to have made them forget about this.

If you require help converting your existing Merchant Feed into the new pay per click model then please contact us today and we will provide you a quote.

Google wants to protect searchers from bad merchants and could potentially drop rankings for websites that have a history of bad customer service later this year.

The news came during the “How to Rank Better in Google & Bing” session at the SXSW conference in Austin. Google’s chief web spam fighter Matt Cutts responded to concerns one merchant had about bad competitors outranking him.

Cutts said:

We have a potential launch later this year, maybe a little bit sooner, looking at the quality of merchants and whether we can do a better job on that, because we don’t want low quality experience merchants to be ranking in the search results.

One concern is the growth of fake reviews and how they may affect the rank of a merchant, but Cutts addressed this issue saying:

We are trying to ask ourselves, are there other signals that we can use to spot whether someone is not a great merchant, and if we can find those, and we think that they are not all that spammable, then we’re more than happy to use those.