At Ad:Tech Sydney, I went to an interesting presentation about rebranding interesting.  The presenter, Ray Bull,  has a background in design, spoke about the brand design of one his clients, (the Church) and the results.  When talking about a brand, it is important to be on the same page.  Everyone has a different interpretation of what a brand is .  Ray confirmed the definition of the brand as the below:.

Brand – all the feelings, thoughts and perceptions people have about products, services and people.

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At AdTech Sydney, I attended this session where Telstra shared their experience of integrating their search strategy to deliver better results. Kevin Tunney, the Search Account Director from Resolution and Robin Stafford, the Search Manager from Telstra presented.

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This past month, there was a lot content written about link analysis, link removals and link building.  In this post I wanted to share with you “Link Earning”, in 2014, companies want to earn links.  This was always the case but in the past as you know, people have been naughty and bought links.

Before you can earn links, it is important to analyse your old links.  In a post last July, I wrote about How to Recover From an Unnatural Link Penalty. Jon Ball wrote a very interesting post earlier this month on Search Engine Land about back link clean up.  As Jon mentioned, only clean up your links if:

1. You have received a manual penalty or an unnatural links warning in Google Webmaster Tools

2. Your site is not ranking high as it used to which may be due to an algorithmic penalty

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I am excited to announce the next Search London event in 2014 “How to Create Award Winning Content”

The UK search market is very competitive and it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd. Therefore I wanted to ask two people who had won awards for their campaigns and blog how they were successful.

I have invited Mike Essex and Richard Kirk to speak at the next Search London meetup which takes place:

Location: The Warwick pub – 1 – 3 Warwick Street, London W1B 5LR
Date: Tuesday 1st of April
Time: From 6:30pm

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There were many positives from 2013.  A few were the result of the first State of Digital Roadshow which I took part in 2012 and met over 16 SEOs all over Europe. I was able to interviews these SEOs and they shared their Search predictions for 2013.

Elena Farinelli predicted the biggest change in 2013 would be how to get valuable links. She was correct as we have found and this will continue into 2014. Elena said people will have to find new ways to earn links.

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Webcertain organised a great International Search Summit 22^nd of October in London.  There were some key speakers from the search industry  sharing their tips on how best to approach SEO in multiple markets

I have recapped some of the highlights from the day on this site and a few more on SEO Jo Blogs and written a full day write up on State of Digital.

International Content Outreach

Lisa Myers, CEO of Verve Search

Lisa as always, gave a very insightful and detailed presentation about International SEO.  She also referenced a case study for a piece of work her company Verve Search completed for Hotel Club, it was a video about “Brighton on a Skateboard” and was called Sk88ssing. The point of any campaign that is made is that it has to be beneficial for social media which in turn will generate links back to the site.

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The Link Removals and Avoiding the Wrath of Google presentation took place on the 30th of October, 2013. This was a very topical subject to speak about at Search London , considering many sites have been penalised by Google.  We had two great speakers at the event; Kirsty Hulse, SEO Strategist at Digitas LBi and Jose Truchado, Head of SEO for Expedia Europe.

Digtias LBi were the sponsors for the event and let us have their amazing venue for Search London – thank you Digitas LBi.

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I went to the 11th Digital Industry Females run by Tara Dee West and Sam Noble while I was in London last month. Harriet Minter, the Head of Community Engagement at The Guardian  gave an inspirational speech about how women can get to the top.

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Paul Madden, one of the founders of LinkRisk gave a great presentation at Search Love about Removing Spammy links.  This was particularly useful to those who have had a Google penalty.

Paul started the presentation by taking the audience through his history and how started his career in link building, from building scraper sites, to working in affiliates and now helping companies remove links.

Pre 2012 – links either counted or they didn’t. So people used to throw as many  links as they could to see their rankings improve.

Post 2012 – Google changed their stance. This was a major change and increased the pressure on link builders.

Google adopts very quickly and link builders have to as well.  Google introduced Penguin last year which was directly aimed at those who do SEO.  They introduced link penalties. So Paul and his team needed to change. As a result, Paul helps companies who have been affected by the Google updates and now have a penalty.

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September was a very busy month, which is why I have been delayed in posting this month’s round up.  Google celebrated their 15th birthday with two major changes, it introduced in the last week of September:

1- 100% not provided

2- Hummingbird

What a birthday present it shared with all of us – encrypting search query data, which means rolling out 100% not provided over the next couple of months.  The change comes as no surprise as the monopoly of Google has grown from strength to strength.  As they see the power of GA  as a great free analytics tool take shape, Google want to change the boundaries.  This encryption of all searches has come earlier than anticipated but is not really a surprise to the SEO industry who seem to always be severely impacted by the Google updates.

What does this 100% not provided mean for those in SEO? I wrote a detailed explanation on the iProspect blog, here is a summary:

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