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Former employee sued over Twitter followers

Twitter

A former employee of phonedog is being sued due to his reluctance to hand over Twitter account details to his ex-employer. Noah Kravitz was employed to tweet for phonedog, but later changed his username when he left.

This means that Kravitz regained the 17,000 followers that he acquired whilst being under contract of the mobile news providers. So, where do you sit in this argument? Who owns the follower count – the employee (who does all the work) or the employer (who funds the task)?

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SOPA, Google and piracy – what to do?

SOPA - Stop Online Piracy Act

SOPA has got everyone talking over the past two months, with many heated and emotional debates on piracy, censorship and ignorance. SOPA is a bill in the US that, if passed, would allow the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders against websites outside United States that have been accused of infringing on copyright. This bill would also restrict search engines from displaying links to illegal websites within the SERPs – something I think we should all welcome.

Having said that, could Google have done something earlier – which in turn would have made the need for the bill irrelevant?

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Google Circles included within Gmail filters

Google logo

Google have incorporated circles within the Gmail interface to help you filter your emails easier.

Circles are obviously a bit part of Google Plus and following on from the addition of the Google+1 button within adverts on YouTube, it is clear enough that Google are throwing all they can at making their social tool work.

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YouTube now incorporating Google+1 in adverts

Google logo

I’ve just noticed that YouTube adverts are now accompanied by the Google+1 button next to the ‘skip’ button. This comes the day after Google acquired RightsFlow, a US based company that provides songwriters and bands with music licensing protection and a royalty payment solution, to help tackle music piracy.

Also, there was a very interesting interview with Eric Schmidt regarding anti-competition late last week, where YouTube’s prominence with Google’s search results is discussed in great detail.

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New Twitter design is now live

Twitter

Twitter has just launched its brand new interface with a new ‘discover’ option in the top menu bar. The transition from the old layout to this new one looks to be a lot smoother than the last time Twitter attempted to jazz up their style. There is far more page equity given to tweets; a welcomed move by Twitter if you ask me.

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Are links to your website setup using 301s?

301 redirect and 404 error page icon

We all work with some very interesting websites, so its always satisfying when you know that the work you have done results in a partnership or merger with a large organisation.

I’ve been waiting a few months to obtain a link from a major retailer to my client’s homepage and they’ve finally implemented it! However, they’ve setup the link to point to a query string, which then 302 redirects back to the homepage!

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Brand new Gmail interface

Google logo

Its been bugging me for a few weeks with that annoying little yellow box, but Google has finally launched their new Gmail interface for all users.

I’ve not really had much of a chance to play around with it but the aesthetic changes are quite subtle. Having said that, I think the new design looks slick and is definitely an improvement on the previous version.

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rel=alternate setup for multilingual websites

Google logo

Coincidence would have it that on the day of the first post on SEO Trench, which highlights some future blog entries – Google announce a new markup for the rel=alternate tag.

The tag allows the webmaster (you) to serve up very similar content to searchers in different countries without worrying about duplication.

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SEO Trench is born

Hi. I’m Andy Francos and I have decided to start my own SEO blog to summarise my experiences, thoughts and opinions on all things related to Search Engine Optimisation. You can read a bit more about me and my history in the about section if you like.

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