The agreement will see Twitter results appear in Yandex’s blog search results, as well as through a dedicated URL, twitter.yandex.ru.

The Russian search giant has described the partnership as a ‘licensing deal’ and although the terms of the agreement have not yet been disclosed, Microsoft reportedly paid Twitter $30 million dollars in a similar agreement.

Twitter’s deal with Yandex share similarities with the real-time Twitter search  that used to be used by Google. Google ended the partnership last year when they launched their Google+ service.

It’s the social media platform’s first deal with a Russian portal and Yandex says that it has licenced the full feed of all public tweets, especially those tweets that cover languages such as Russian, Ukranian and Belarusian.

The deal marks one of Twitter’s first major forays into non-English speaking markets and it could spark the start of a spate of localised deals which will help to widen their coverage across the globe.

Yandex currently controls roughly 60% of the search market in Russia and the joint venture with Twitter is likely to give the search engine’s social media strategy a huge shot in the arm.

Should Google be worried, or is its strangehold over search still as strong as ever?

Creative Minds Agency is a Kent SEO agency, specialising in professional SEO services through the use of ethical SEO practice.

Google, owner of the Android operating system for mobile phones, said in August that it planned to purchase Motorola for its 17,000 patents and 7,500 patent applications. The deal, the largest in the company’s history, will represent the internet giant’s most signficant foray into the hardware business and will ensure that it can compete with rivals such as Apple, as well as provide further defence for litigation charges aimed at itself and Android phone manufacturers.

Google is currently being sued for patent infringement on several patents related to Java by Oracle, which is seeking up to $6 billion in damages.

The Google-Motorola deal wasn’t the only major deal given the go ahead by the US Justice Department this week. They also approved an Apple-led consortium’s purchase of a patents from bankrupt Canadian company Nortel Networks and signed off on Apple’s purchase of patents formerly owned Novell. Google had previously failed to purchase Nortal’s patents before it launched its move to buy Motorola.

What’s your view on the acquisition and what it means for mobile technologies?

Creative Minds Agency is a Kent SEO agency, specialising in professional SEO services through the use of ethical SEO practices.

Universal Search arrived in 2007 when Google made one of the biggest updates in its history to its search engine. Soon after, rivals such as Ask and Yahoo started to launch their own versions and Universal Search became deeply embedded in how a search engine operates.

Traditionally a normal search would return solely text results. However, a Universal Search is designed to provide a richer experience to searchers and can return a lot more, including: images, news, local listings, shopping, video, blog posts, etc.

For example, type in a popular search term such as “Amazon Kindle” and on the first page of SERPs you’ll not only get text results, but also shopping results, images and news relating to the product.

Universal Search completely changed the ball game for professional SEO services as it meant that, along with optimising for text based results, you also had to consider video, images, Google Places and news results as well. To get the most out of Universal Search, you do have to be optimising for all these aspects, otherwise it becomes much more difficult to improve your page rank.

The best way to optimise for Universal Search is to be ensuring that you are providing content for all these appropriate channels. If you launch a product, don’t just turn out an image and text about the product. Instead, add a press release promoting your product and post it to PR sites. You could also add a blog post, release a video about the product and then push the content you’ve produced through social media channels.

If you follow these simple steps, they’ll ensure that your business gets the most out of Universal Search.

Creative Minds Agency is a Kent SEO agency which provides a transparent, measurable online marketing approach.

An update to Google+’s pseudonym policy is being rolled out, which adds the ability to use a nickname or maiden name and have it appear alongside your real name.

The issue, also known also as Nymwars, first started when Google+ went live. Numerous people who attempted to use nicknames had their accounts suspended because they did not meet Google’s strict name policy. According to Google, this policy was enforced to reduce spam and fake accounts, however, following user feedback, they have now decided to be a bit more lenient when enforcing the issue.

Although the rules have been loosened slightly, the naming policy still poses a problem for many users as they must prove that their pseudonym has already attracted an audience from elsewhere.

Google Executive Bradley Horowitz said users might also need to provide “scanned official documentation, such as a drivers’ licence” and that the review process would take a “few days”.

The change may make things easier for the Madonnas or 50 Cents of this world, but for regular Google+ account holders  the update does very little to give them flexibility in how they want to appear to their friends and people online.

Should the update to the Google+ ‘common names’ policy go further? Let us know in the comments.

Creative Minds Agency, an ethical SEO business which specialises in Kent SEO and UK SEO agency work, provides a transparent, measurable online marketing service to all customers.

Here’s an easy to understand run down of the significant changes Panda has made to professional SEO services.

- Panda penalises ‘low-quality’ websites, as well as spam and scraper sites. Even linking to these low quality websites degrades your ranking.

- It prioritises new, original content. The update caused a surge in the rankings for news websites and social networking sites.

- Panda’s penalising sites with a lot of ads, especially those with ads at the top of the page.

- Exact match anchor links aren’t as important anymore.

- Greater impact on one really high quality link, rather than a ton of low quality ones.

- If you’re submitting articles to a network, it’s best to steer clear of sites that instantly approve your article as they’re likely to be approving low quality content as well, which will have an adverse affect on your ranking.

- Successful marketing campaigns should focus around high quality content like blogs, whitepapers, webinars, infographics etc.

- Google have publicly said that even if you have a great site, if you have low quality content on your site it’ll drag down your rankings of the rest of the site, so you either have to update it or get rid of it entirely.

Following these steps will not only give you a better understanding of how Panda works, but also demonstrates what a UK SEO agency needs to be doing to most effectively perform SEO in a post-Panda world.

Creative Minds Agency, established in 2009, is a Kent SEO company that provides a transparent, measurable approach to Online Marketing.