True Facts About The Chameleon

/in /by

Ok, so this is somewhat unprofessional but it made us lot laugh a lot in the office.

The video explains how the Chameleon manages to amaze us in a comedy manner and the voice is funny.

Maek sure you have your sound on:-

True Facts About The Chameleon

We also found these so if you liked the above:-

True Facts About The Mantis

True Facts About The Land Snail

True Facts About The Tarsier

True Facts About Baby Echidnas

True Facts About Sloths

And this is funny about Morgan Freeman:-

True Facts About Morgan Freeman

Apple Launches iBookstore in Japan

/in /by

TOKYO―March 6, 2013―Apple today announced the launch of the iBookstore in Japan featuring titles from major and independent publishers, including a great selection of books from Kodansha, KADOKAWA, Bungeishunju, Gakken and Gentosha. The iBookstore has a wide selection of emerging and established authors including Shyotaro Ikenami, Jiro Akagawa, Atsuko Asano and Ryu Murakami. The iBookstore in Japan is the best way for book lovers to browse, buy and read books on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

“We’re excited to launch the iBookstore in Japan with a wide selection of Japanese publishers and authors,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “We think customers are going to love how engaging and interactive the books are to read, and how beautiful they look on iPad.”

“We’re thrilled to have our books on the iBookstore,” said Tsuguhiko Kadokawa, Chairman of KADOKAWA Group Holdings. “More than anything, I think it’s great the iBookstore lets us offer our readers a wide variety of reading experiences that they can’t have anywhere else and that they can only have on their iOS device.”

iBookstore customers can choose from a wide selection of enhanced books that look incredible on iPad, as well as digitally exclusive titles including Ryu Murakami’s fiction novels “At the Airport,” “Exodus of Middle-School Students” and “I’ll Always Be With You, Always,” which has interactive emails in each chapter to bring you even deeper into the story.

“I’m excited to offer three of my works exclusively on the iBookstore, and hope that readers love them as much as I do,” said author, novelist and filmmaker Ryu Murakami. “As an author and Apple user for 20 years, the arrival of the iBookstore allows me to tell stories in a way you simply can’t in a physical book.”

Beloved children’s books including “Piyo-chan: A Letter for Piyo” come to life with interactivity, transitions and audio, while new favorites including “Toy Story 3: So Long Partner” let readers easily read aloud at their own pace.

“We couldn’t be more excited about how incredible ‘Piyo-chan: A Letter for Piyo’ looks on the iBookstore,” said Hiroaki Miyahara, President and Representative Director of Gakken Holdings. “We’ve taken this beloved Japanese children’s book and made it more engaging with gorgeous animations and interactivity that makes learning more fun.”

Cookbooks are even more useful on the iBookstore with titles such as “I Love Cheesecakes!” from culinary specialist Kiyomi Ishizawa that allows cooks to easily search recipes and ingredients. Additionally, the iBookstore offers best-selling fiction novels including “Sora-Tobu Kouhoushitsu” by Hiro Arikawa, “Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu” by Nagaru Tanigawa, and “Tenchi Meisatsu” by Tow Ubukata. Also available for purchase and download on the iBookstore are world-renowned Manga titles including Eiichiro Oda’s “ONE PIECE,” Mari Yamazaki’s “THERMAE ROMAE” and Hirohiko Araki’s full color version of “JOJO’S BIZARRE ADVENTURE” Part 4, which is digitally exclusive on the iBookstore.

The iBookstore is available in 51 countries and offers hundreds of categories including cookbooks, history books, biographies, picture books and children’s books with free books available in 155 countries. The iBooks app for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch has been downloaded 130 million times worldwide.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

Press Contact:
Adam Howorth
Apple
adamh@apple.com
020 7184 1202

This information was take from here

Interflora and Advertorial Paid Links

/in , , /by

Advertorial Penalties

The removal of the flower delivery giant Interflora’s website from Google organic search results has shocked many online businesses, making everyone realise once again that Google guidelines must be adhered to otherwise you will be penalised, regardless of the size of your company.

But what did Interflora do wrong and what were they penalised for exactly? The short answer to this is paying for advertorials.

What is an advertorial?

Advertorials are stories or editorials that are published on press websites and contain links to related businesses. The businesses pay the press sites to create the story and embed links to them in it, passing the power to their sites.

Interflora did this with an array of different newspaper sites, including The Independent as they had a high page rank and so the links brought lots of power with them.

Google do not disapprove of advertorials as an advertising platform in general, it is the fact that the links are paid for that does not meet their guideline criteria. Google states that such links such have a ‘no follow’ tag attached and so are not included in their robot crawl.

It is not just Interflora that suffered a Google penalty however, the newspaper websites involved were also penalised. The Independent, which had a high page rank of 8, was down-graded to a page rank of 4. This is because they were selling the paid advertorial links, a practice which is condemned by Google.

Why do Google not approve of Paid Links?

Google strives to be the best search engine online, and they can only achieve this goal by ensuring that their search results are the most accurately matched to the needs and wants of the user in terms of matching sites to keywords searched.

If these results relied on the number of backlinks that a site had gained only, then the company with the most money to purchase them would always be top for their desired keywords, even if they are not necessarily the best for the user in terms of relevance. Therefore, Google considers this to be a ‘black hat’ method of SEO and penalise heavily for it.

iTunes U Content Tops One Billion Downloads

/in /by

CUPERTINO, California―February 28, 2013―Apple today announced that iTunes U content downloads have topped one billion. iTunes U features the world’s largest online catalogue of free educational content from top schools and prominent libraries, museums and organisations helping educators create courses including lectures, assignments, books, quizzes and more for iOS users around the world.

“It’s inspiring to see what educators and students of all types are doing with iTunes U,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “With the incredible content offered on iTunes U, students can learn like never before―there are now iTunes U courses with more than 250,000 students enrolled in them, which is a phenomenal shift in the way we teach and learn.”

More than 1,200 universities and colleges, and 1,200 K-12 schools and districts host over 2,500 public and thousands of private courses encompassing the arts, sciences, health and medicine, education, business and more. Leading universities including Duke, Yale, Cambridge, MIT and Oxford continue to extend their reach by enrolling more than 100,000 students in single iTunes U courses, with Stanford University and The Open University each surpassing 60 million content downloads. The Ohio State University’s Matthew “Dr. Fus” Stoltzfus’ General Chemistry course enrolled over 100,000 iTunes U students in the first year it was offered.

“The interest my iTunes U course receives from non-college students is overwhelming,” said Professor Stoltzfus. “I’ve been working with high school teachers who use my iTunes U material to prepare to teach their own classes, high school students all over the world who are leveraging the course to tutor their fellow classmates, even retirees who download my iTunes U course to stay intellectually active.”

Over 60 percent of iTunes U app downloads originate from outside the US, giving schools of any size the ability to share their content with a worldwide audience. The unmatched global reach of iTunes U gives educators, like University of California, Irvine Professor Dan Stokols, international recognition and acclaim in their fields.

“Because of iTunes U, I have been able to introduce students and colleagues in China to research on the links between chronic multi-tasking, information overload and stress; discuss research publications and degree programs with students in Europe; and exchange information about the influence of neighbourhood design on community levels of physical activity and obesity with students in Australia,” said Professor Stokols, whose Environmental Psychology course enrolls over 170,000 students on iTunes U. “The opportunity to impact so many students who are gaining interest in environmental psychology by taking my free course on iTunes U has been highly rewarding and gratifying for me as an educator and learner.”

“I see success unfolding before me on a daily basis,” says Chrissy Boydstun, a teacher from Mansfield Independent School District in Texas which provides each of their over 10,000 high school students and faculty with an iPad. “Students are engaged and working hard as they use the incredible amount of information at their fingertips in a way that is meaningful and impactful. I love the way iTunes U provides a roadmap to take students beyond what a typical lesson or lecture could achieve.”

Educators can create iTunes U courses in 30 countries including recent additions: Brazil, South Korea, Turkey and United Arab Emirates. These courses, and other education content, can be accessed via the iTunes U app in 155 countries. In addition to thousands of individual iTunes U learning materials, over 75,000 educational apps are now available for iOS devices on the App Store. Additionally, with the free iBooks Author app on the Mac App Store, writers and publishers continue to bring ideas and stories to life sharing more than 10,000 original Multi-Touch books with the world.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

Press Contact:
Mandy Hershon
Apple
mhershon@apple.com
020 7184 6194

This article was taken from here

Interflora SEO Google Penalty Analysis

/in , /by

News hit the SEO world that Interflora has been given a Google penalty and been removed from organic search results.

Interflora SEO Google Penalty Analysis

When you Google the keywords “Interflora” they do not appear for their own brand name organically which can be seen above. This term was approximately 20% of the overall traffic for the florist sector and the fact that it was a brand name shows how well-known and influencial Interflora is within the industry.

Interflora’s brand name is known world wide and this effect will have a huge impact on the business.

Interflora has had a huge market share in the Flower industry. This stretched through to the online domain as if you searched in Google the keywords “Flowers”, “Florist” and “Flower Delivery” you would find Interflora in top spots.

We did some investigation work and found that they also ranked very well for terms like “valentines day flowers”, valentines day”,  “valentines gifts”, “flower delivery UK”, “flower delivery”, “wedding flowers”, etc.

Google Search Flowers

So what went wrong for Interflora?

Well, Google work hard to ensure that companies follow guidelines to ensure that the results consumers are presented with in their searches are the most relevant and therefore shows Google to be providing a good service. It doesn’t matter how big you might be, the rules and penalties are the same for all companies, as highlighted by the Interflora predicament. When something like this happens it sends a signal to everyone doing similar things to stop.

In 2006 BMW got hit by Google and as a result the page rank for the BMW website went to zero. GoCompare also got a Google penalty in 2008.

In all cases, the websites were penalised due to an unnatural increase in the number of banklinks to their site. Google detected a similar increase in Interflora and given a penalty to them.

What is also worth noting is that the backlinks were from well-known UK Newspapers which has resulted in them being penalised also.  The Independent, which had a page rank of 8, and now has a page rank of 4. This has a knock-on effect for all other sites linked to The Independent as the links will now bring less power as they no longer have a high page authority.

Interflora Google Penalty Analysis

Now looking at Interflora to understand how they got the Google Penalty you need to look at the backlinking profile.

interflora-backlinks-historical

This graph shows the backlinks that have been built to Interflora over the years and the volumes involved.

You may notice that in 2008 they had approximately 175,000 backlinks built to them and wonder why they were not penalised for this, but have been in 2013 for 60,000. Well, in 2008 Google did not consider large numbers of backlinks to be a negative influence on the reliability of their search results. However, through the years they have realised that a site paying for unrelated backlinks to get volume rather than quality actually negatively affected the quality of their search results and therefore made changes to the algorithms used to rank sites. These changes were implemented in 2012 under the Penguin and Panda updates.

Even though everyone in the world of SEO was aware of these updates and the resulting influence on unnatural backlinks, Interflora continued to build large numbers of links in a very short space of time; this is shown below.

Interflora Backlinks Recently

If you look recently you can see that they have a huge volume generated daily and this gives us an overall amount of:-

Interflora Backlinks Problem

There is no ethical way that a company can generate nearly 60,000 backlinks in this time, or even over 12 months.

This profile was the effect of trying too hard for valentines related keywords which seems a little foolish as the company Interflora was already on page one of Google for the relevant terms and in most cases top.

We have been informed that in January 2013 the company Interflora purchased links from News Papers using stories in order to capture the Valentine market.

Matt Cutts has put an article on the Webmaster Central Blog titled “A reminder about selling links that pass PageRank” and this article explains that Google has said for years not to buy links in order to achieve Google Page Rank as this violates Googles terms and conditions. He also explains that if you buy links for traffic then ensure that they are “nofollow” links.

So what can Interflora do now?

The question now is what can Interflora do now? This is a question that will be asked over and over in their marketing meetings as the task ahead of them is huge.

Officially they should remove all the links and then submit a reconsideration request and then a manual webspam team will check and review the request at Google.

They could change the domain name to something else they have like www.interfloraflowers.com and redirect the domain to the new name. This is a huge step to take but in the short term it is the fastest recovery option.

The key here is to follow Google guidelines and this means that the marketing team need to understand what they did wrong and why, and then think how they can rebuild confidence. However, this is not going to happen over night.

Google Adwords

It was only back in 2011 when Interflora took Marks & Spencers to court for using the “Interflora” keywords in Google Adwords. The court ruled that Google had not broken any laws allowing a trademark word to be used in this way. But they did find Marks and Spencers guilty of trademark infringement.

Now in these events their is one company that has won and that is Google. They have sent a message to all website owners and web companies that their rules are not to be broken as there are consequences. Also, as Interflora are now no longer able to appear in organic search results, their only option to appear in Google is using Google Adwords. This means that they will be paying Google for each click and piece of traffic they receive, lining Google’s pockets and no doubt increasing their Adwords daily budget!