Martin Dinham

Director of Channel Digital. We specialise in, amongst other services;

Channel team members have worked on websites and search engine marketing projects for some of the UK’s leading brands, including the likes of the Post Office, Argos, GlaxoSmithKline, Direct Line, KPMG and JP Morgan amongst others. We now deliver these skills through Channel, a smaller agency (we're 12 strong) that is cost effective, agile, client focussed and able to continuously adapt to the changing demands of the online landscape, things that we believe larger agencies find increasingly difficult.

The great firewall of China

I can’t take too much credit for this latest blog post. It’s actually mainly down to my Channel Digital colleague Peter Graves and relates to his experiences with the internet during a recent trip to China.

I think it’s an interesting topic given the growth of the internet in China and the controversy that exists around the great firewall, the level of collaboration between Google and the general online landscape in that part of the world.

In particular, Pete was able to gain a hands on view of the actual internet browsing experience within China and how this compares with what we’ve become used to in the UK and indeed the majority of the “west”.

I’ll let Pete take up the story from here.

The rise of (not provided). Is Google making it impossible to measure natural search ?

It's reasonable that the average organic search engine marketer is feeling fairly embattled in recent times.

Not only are they under assault from the increasingly rapid pace of change within its algorithm, but it seems that Google is also making it ever more difficult to measure the real effect of SEO related changes.

The most obvious issue is the rise of the (not provided) keyphrase referrer in analytics. This was launched in a blaze of publicity in late 2011 for users signed into Google services, but the amount of traffic referred by (not provided) has been stealthily increasing ever since.