Andrew Girdwood

Andrew is Media Innovations at bigmouthmedia. He has been in digital marketing for over nine/ten/many! years. In his time at bigmouthmedia he has been responsible for Search strategy, the coordination of Paid and Organic Search, the coordination of Search and Affiliate Marketing and Social. He comes from a technical background and has an honours degree in Computing Engineering.

In his spare time he likes to dabble in even more search, social, affiliate and even a bit of display testing. In fact, it's a challenge to get him stop talking about digital marketing.

Challenges from next-generation URL Shorteners

Digg recently released a URL shortener that doesn't take customers to your website. It wraps your website in a Digg frame instead. This presents a number of challenges.

by Andrew Girdwood 09 April 2009 11:45am 3 comments

Those websites Google does not like

While discussing the type of sites Google does not like some people may think of the (allegedly) leaked quality rating guidelines that (allegedly) came from the search engine. However, Google does publicly discuss the type of site it dislikes.

There is a document in circulation in the search industry which people claim to be a copy of Google’s 2007 guidelines to their quality testers. Google does use humans to rate the quality of the search results. Google argue they do not use humans to change the search results.

by Andrew Girdwood 03 April 2009 09:59am 3 comments

Taking your US search campaign to Europe

There are a number of common pit traps that American companies risk falling into as they start to push their search marketing campaigns out into Europe.

by Andrew Girdwood 18 March 2009 12:30pm 3 comments

Is Google's First Click Free a blow to Facebook and Twitter?

Google News publishers know all about the wonders and horrors of First Click Free.

Google News wants to include prestigious newspapers and let users click through to the stories which matched keyword searches.

Some newspapers still want to operate on a subscription model.

by Andrew Girdwood 11 November 2008 09:30am 3 comments

Jargon I'd like to ban: Seeding

It seems like a hundred years ago when a client first asked me: "What's Usenet and should we be seeding it?"

I don't know who they had been speaking to but whoever it was should be locked away in a room with angry toddlers.

by Andrew Girdwood 28 July 2008 09:00am 1 comment

Is your search marketing campaign legal any more?

On the 26th of May there was an update to The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations Act.

There's certainly been coverage of the Act on the likes of the BBC but the focus has been on buzz marketing. Search marketing campaigns could be affected as well.

by Andrew Girdwood 10 June 2008 08:30am 4 comments

SEO Wars: Alt Battles

There is no such thing as the 'alt tag' in HTML. There is, however, the alt attribute which is applied to the image tag.

The alt attribute is designed to provide alternative text for an image. I've seen it create wars within marketing departments.

by Andrew Girdwood 05 June 2008 12:09pm 0 comments

Are you coping with Universal Search?

Google has evolved its search results to include images, news, recent blog posts, videos and related links.

Let's build a quick to-do list to spruce up your site for Universal Search.

by Andrew Girdwood 08 April 2008 09:00am 0 comments

A brief history of Poking

If you waited until Facebook launched and opened their doors wide before you started poking your pals and professional colleagues online then you may have waited longer than you needed to.

by Andrew Girdwood 07 January 2008 08:10am 0 comments