Polemic Digital is an expert SEO consultancy based in Belfast, Northern Ireland
Hype or Substance – can you tell the difference
Google, by way of John Mueller, said yesterday it’ll be killing off the rich author snippet in search results. The author snippet, enabled by implementing rel=author tags on your content, gave you a rich search result showing your Google+ profile photo and circle count: This snippet will now disappear, apparently because Google wants to “clean…
Earlier this month the highest EU court ruled that individuals have the ‘right to be forgotten’ in Google’s search results. This means that any member of the public can ask Google to remove specific webpages from its search results if those pages contain information that is ”inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”. Of course this immediately…
When Google was first launched as a search engine in 1998, it fulfilled a great purpose: it helped make the information stored on the world wide web accessible and easy to find. Google’s link-based ranking algorithm resulted in much more relevant and high quality search results than other search engines could produce at the time.…
…and we all know where that road is headed. If I were a genuine conspiracy nutcase I’d have no problem believing that Google is a fully controlled subsidiary of the American intelligence apparatus. I mean, the things Google are up to are just so perfectly suited for full scale surveillance of every individual on earth,…
I have a serious issue with the internet technology sector as it exists today. Specifically, I take issue with the way startup culture is venerated in digital circles. In pursuit of ‘innovation’, technology startups are seen as the biggest value creators of the digital economy. The technology media is almost exclusively focused on reporting what…
Inspired by continued sales success, I wrote a post for State of Search outlining what I believe is key to selling digital services: not trying to make a sale, but trying to solve the client’s problem. State of Search: Don’t be a Salesman, be a Problem-Solver “So when I start talking to a prospective client,…
In a new piece for State of Search I write about how there is an increasing trend towards brand-owned content channels, which seem to work well for bigger brands and carry less risk: State of Search: Are Brand-Owned Channels the Future of Content Marketing? A piece in the New York Observer, entitled “Journalists Take Refuge…
by Barry Adams
State of Search was given a press pass to the Dublin Web Summit – Europe’s largest technology conference – and as the Irish resident on the blogging team I got to attend. Here’s my write-up of the first day: State of Search: Dublin Web Summit The 2012 edition of the Dublin Web Summit is a…
by Barry Adams
A persistent theme that recurs every now and then in the online tech world is that ‘everyone should learn to code’. There are a slew of blog posts claiming that to be a great SEO you need to know how to code, and a recent Venturebeat article once again proclaimed programming the most vital skill…
by Barry Adams
For State of Search I explored a way to reclaim some of the keyword data that was lost when Google implemented SSL search. With some clever Google Analytics filters and custom reports it’s fairly easy to correlate (not provided) keywords with known keywords, and thus reclaim some of your lost metrics: State of Search: Yet…