We are delighted to announce that we have recently acquired a large number of clients from Sabre Webdesign in Glasgow.

We are excited at the prospect of working on some great new web development and internet marketing projects with our new clients that include restaurants, photographers, florists, large ecommerce sites and public sector clients including the NHS, a few large national and international organisations.

We would like to welcome all our new clients and look forward to working with them.

Facebook launched its new business centre product this week following Google’s recent announcement this its now fast tracking its Google + for business service. The new service has been designed to help small businesses who wish to promote their business and engage with new and potential customers online set up a Facebook page, if they have not already done so. Many local businesses are still using profile pages as this is a much easier way to connect with Facebook users, however this is against Facebook’s T&C’s and it has been rumoured that Facebook will begin to shut these down shortly. “Facebook For Business” which was launched on Tuesday, gives users a step by step guide how to set up a custom business page, build a community online and create targeted adverts aimed at specific demographics. It also makes it much easier for you to find the various social plugins that can be used to promote you Facebook page on various other social platforms including blogs and your website.

If your business is looking for a custom Facebook page and would like to discuss further please feel free to contact our social media management team at 360innovate on 0844 414 0434

Matthew Marley

Looks like Google is rolling out a nice little update to its search bar. We have been testing this new feature this morning and it seems to be intermittent just now which could mean that it could still be under development. The new feature will now make the navigation bar at the top of the page sticky, this makes perfect sense as users want the ability to modify their search queries and click other links that are part of the navigation bar while they are scrolling on the page.

 
This could also be the reason that Google has decided to remove the search bar at the bottom of its page. Hopefully this update will also be rolled out to other Google products like G+, Gmail and Google Reader soon, which will give users a universal experience across all of Google properties.

Matthew Marley

What has Google done?

After the recent page rank update and the update to Google’s interface we have noticed that several shopping sites, including Amazon and Play have been badly affected by having really nasty looking meta descriptions.

I initially noticed this issue while doing weekly checks on a clients site and noticed that visits had dropped slighty for certain keywords.  So I ran a quick search and found something weird had happened to their listing on the search engine results page.  Google had placed ‘Product 1 – 7 of 7 – ‘followed by the sites defined meta description.  I immediately checked the meta descriptions on the page and had one of our developers look at the code, he could notice anything that immediately stood out.

So I then went on to search Google using the string ‘inurl:.cart.php?m=product_list’ and found 100s of pages that have been affected by the same issue!  This tells me that this is not an isolated incident.

My colleague John McCollum, a developer here at 360innovate, discovered that it was also happening to Amazon.  We then went on to find that it’s also affecting Play and Argos – there are examples at the bottom of this post.

Now, we understand why this would happen if you didn’t specify a meta description, or if your meta description was not relevant enough to the content of the page.  But most of the sites we have found have had proper meta descriptions in place, so there is no reason for Google to add in this information before the listing.

I am unsure if this update was intentional or not, some people might argue that it is to add value to the result and provide additional information to the searcher about the number of products on the page.  If this is Google’s intention the it should read a lot better and say something like ’10 products -’ followed by the meta description.  Not “Product 1 – 7 of 7 -” followed by the meta description.

Examples:

Gordon Campbell