Today BrandZ has published the Top 100 Most Valuable Brands. And the winner is Google who has become the first $100 billion brand. With a 16% increase on last years results, Google beat its rival Microsoft to the top spot by 25%.
 

BrandZ -Top 100 Brands

The top 5 brands are:

Google
Microsoft
Coca-cola
IBM
McDonald’s

This is the third time that Google has held the top position, and I am pretty sure that Google will retain this position in 2010.

Over the past few years Google has reached pretty much every area of the internet (Search engine, Map, News, Internet explorer, phone, social media, video…). Although Microsoft is planning many future online projects, it seems unlikely that they can become as popular as Google in a year. The fact that Microsoft is desperately trying for partnership with Yahoo shows that future prospects of Microsoft may not be too good…

Anyway, we are now living in a Google world after a few years of Microsoft world.

Welcome to the Googlelisation of the world.

How do you bring traffic to your website via a pay per click (PPC) campaign? It is actually pretty effortless and very easy to do.

The principle is simple, just select cheap and high volume keywords. Generally, if a keyword is highly searched the cost per acquisition is important. But the idea here is to look for new high volume keywords.

The best way to do that is to have a look at Google trends (Today’s Hot Trends) and select the most relevant keywords to your website. Another good website is YouTube (Top Video, Most popular etc…). Or you can just go to your news website (BBC, Yahoo, etc) for an update on the latest hot topics.

Britain Got Talent - PPC Keyword

After I recommend having a quick look at Google Keyword estimation in order to see the CPC and volume estimation (generally you should avoid using generic words inside your keyword).

It is easy to get a keyword like, for example, ‘Britains Got Talent’,or even ‘Susan Boyle’, for $5 cents per click.

Cheap Keywords PPC

If you are a news and/or video blog it is very useful way of developing your traffic at a low cost and to show to your audience that you are at the top of the trends!

It was surprising today that Time magazine announced that the Moot (Christopher Poole) is the most influential person on the planet.

Time - The world's influential personne poll

The Moot is the owner and creator of 4chan.org, an imageboard website. The site was launched in 2003, the website is very successful because there is minimal rule on posted comments. It is possible to post comments anonymously.

4Chan.org

4chan.org is a very successful website but not when compared to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other big social media websites.

Traffic 4Chan.org - Alexa 2009

If I believe the results of the poll from Time magazine, Moot is the most influential person on the planet…sounds pretty odd. To be honest with you before today I had never heard his name before and had only once visited 4chan.org!

So how could the Moot be more influent than Obama, Putin and even Oprah? A possible answer is through “cheating” or to be exact hacking. It is quite easy to find online scripts in order to hack the Time magazine pool, they may have used the failure on the URL protocol in order to increase the number of votes.

Script - Vote for Moot

The 4chan community would have the rest and sent the Moot to the top of the poll!

Vote for Moot

The biggest question is why Time magazine still believes that an almost total stranger can be the most influential person on the planet?

Everybody knows about the controversial statement by Carrie Prejean (Miss California) who answered a question about gay marriage during the election of Miss USA. A radical reaction in the USA was provoked by the un-politically correct answer.

The judge, Perez Hilton, who asked the question during the election has since started a campaign against Miss Prejean via his blog.

Since the election the number of searches has blown up and there are more people who are looking for Miss California or Carrie Prejean than for Miss USA.

Miss California - Google Trends

It is interesting to see what Carrie Prejean or the Miss California Organisation did or neglected to do in order to manage the crisis.

Miss California Organisation posted an official statement on its official website. It is of course a typical reaction, but many other companies forget to do so.

Miss California Official Statement

YouTube was the war ground between the two parties and it seems that Miss California has posted more content and has exposed more people to her point of view. The videos regarding this event have been the most watched videos of the week.

Youtube Miss California

On Facebook a number of support groups for Carrie Prejean have been created with a large number of followers. Less groups against her have been formed.

Carrie Prejean Facebook Group

On Wikipedia, the controversy section is more or less objective. I guess nobody tried to influence the result of Wikipedia.

Carrie Prejean Wikipedia

On Twitter there is not so much of the Carrie Prejean propaganda as her page (or maybe a fake one) doesn’t work anymore. The page of Perez Hilton has a few comments about the event.

Carrie Prejean Twitter

At the end of the day, I am not sure how much did Carrie Prejean, Miss California organisation, or her fanbase did to mitigate the crisis. However, the winner of the online battle seems to be Carrie Prejean who made herself available to more people than Perez Hilton and his supporters.

Once again, Gocompare, the UK comparison website, has been penalised by Google.

GoCompare Logo

This is the second time that Google has penalised Gocompare.com. This time for the main keywords (brand and generic) the penalty is going 50 positions down on the Google search result.

Gocompare Google result page

There is, for the moment, no official comment from Google UK regarding this subject.

The penalty is for an aggressive link building strategy from GoCompare. Rumour is that Gocompare was sending emails to an impressive number of blogs, websites, forums et.c… in order to increase the number of back links in exchange for services or money.

Nobody knows for sure what happened, but one thing is sure, Gocompare did not learn from past mistakes.

Gocompare was trying to beat the number of competitors online (e.g. comparethemarket.com, supermarket.com, confused.com). It is a very difficult SEO market with an important Search budget.

Lets see how long the penalty will last this time. But for sure, it is a good way to create some buzz

Every 22nd of April is Earth day.

The aim of Earth day is to promote awareness for the Earth’s environment. It was created by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1970.

Google and Yahoo have both decided to promote this event, but not at the same cost once again.

Both Yahoo and Google promote Earth Day on their home page.

Earth Day - Google

Google includes a new ‘Google’ logo and a links to a Google result page for the keyword ‘Earth Day’. Not too much work for Google !

Yahoo on the other hand has created a little flash animation on its logo and links to its own website Yahoo! Green where they have created new pages about this event. This site has some nice flash animations and information. Yahoo wants to finance this website by advertising on it.

Yahoo Earth Day Logo

Yahoo Green - Earth Day

Once again, Yahoo have made a lot more effort than Google, but the weird thing is people are talking a lot more about the Earth Day Google logo initiative than the micro site of Yahoo… …..must be difficult to be Yahoo!

Google launches News Timeline in this lab section. Google News Timeline organises your search results chronologically. This tool allows us to see news, video, magazines etc chronologically by year, month, week and day.

If you want to know what kind of books or movies are out on your birthday you just have to enter the date and Google do the rest (date in US format).

This Google tool is very fast and well presented. Google News Timeline allows the user to look for a specific category, date or topic (via keywords).

Google News Timeline

Generally this tool is great, but the further we go back in the past (e.g. :20 years), the less sources we find (mostly Wikipedia, Time magazine and some baseball news). Also, I am not sure what additional value this tool provides compared to BBC Archive or The Times Archive.

Time Archive

At the end of the day Google News Timeline uses these different sources (the Times, BBC etc…) and compiles them by date.

In conclusion, it is a good tool but not unique. I don’t see a big need for Google News Timeline.

Today Google brings us pictures from LIFE. Google gives us the possibility to see some historical pictures of ‘football’ or a specific event ‘Winter Olympic’ from LIFE via Google Image.

LIFE and Google Image

Google hosts the LIFE photo archive and via this initiative tries to have it own database of pictures. It means that you don’t leave Google website when you click on the picture, Google via LIFE becomes a publisher of content.

The principal is very simple, if you search for picture from LIFE you add ‘source:life’ to the topic that you were looking for on Google image search.

Google Image Result Page (LIFE)

Note that all the new functions (size, source, and colour) of Google image search don’t work with the ‘source:life’. It is not very smart of Google to neglect this.

Anyway, this search is more a gadget than a real new function from Google, but at the same time it shows Google’s aim: to own more and more content.

In order to promote the show Yellowstone, BBC Two uses its Youtube channel.

They have posted the extraordinary video of the incredible fox who dives in the snow!

Great success, the video is one of the top favourites on Youtube this week (Most Discussed This Month). Very good, when you know that Susan Boyle and other Britain have talent videos are taking possession of Youtube UK.

Fox Snow Dive - Youtube

It is not new for the BBC to post a video but it is one of the first times the have had such a successful video on Youtube.

But like most of the time with people who don’t know the fine details of SEO, the video is far from optimised. For example, the link on the video links to the BBC home page and not on the specific page about Yellowstone. A good video not so well exploited.

Yellowstone BBC 2

We also can note that the page for the Yellowstone is not optimised…at least the video is doing well on the Google results page.

Google result page - Yellowstone

Bo is the newest furriest member of the Obama family. The new pup is a black and white Portuguese Water Dog. He may be only 6 months old but already has a huge online presence!

The number of online searches over the last few days for ‘Bo Obama’ has exploded. Google Trends show that in a few days the number of searches and the number of pages relevant to the subject will continue to increase considerably.

Bo Google Trends

There is a Wikipedia entry where we can find all the information about him.

Wikipedia Bo

 The White House has also set up a doggy-blog for the best friend of Sasha,
 

Bo Blog White House

as well as a video page on Vimeo where we can watch the first family playing with dog in the White House.

It is the first time that the American government has started an online campaign for an animal. The weird part of it is that based on Google information and the ranking of the news (from Yahoo US) people really care about this little dog.

Strange times people…one day, dogs will have Facebook and Twitter