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Weekly round up of the Australian business news.

Recently Google’s released a major algorithm update for the local search function (AKA Pigeon Update) and whilst there isn’t much press around it yet; webmasters all over the US are reporting changes to their local rankings.

As a digital marketing specialist I deal with a lot of web sites from a lot of different industries each and every week. The great thing about my job is that it is so varied and no two websites or campaigns I run are the same. There is however one common thread that runs between every client I deal with, and some place more emphasis on it than others. Bounce Rate. In this article I want to shine the spotlight on the humble bounce rate and try to get people thinking about it a little bit differently.

There were heartbreaking scenes in The Netherlands, Thursday night as a cargo plane arrived carrying the bodies of MH17 victims, which were then loaded into a convoy of hearses and driven to a forensics facility for identification.

Imagine Google sending you an AdWords bill that is three times what you were planning on spending for the month on your pay-per-click advertising campaign? Unfortunately this is a terrifying reality for some small businesses due to click fraud. Click fraud is a deceptive and dirty technique that can end up costing companies and entrepreneurs thousands of dollars and their online reputations.

As of September 30th, Google will shut down its first social-networking service, Orkut, which was launched in 2004 the same year that Facebook, which is the most popular social media platform in the world was founded by Mark Zuckerberg.

I hear this every so often from some of my clients, a sense of desperation when attempting to deal with the Google Adwords system. And while I don’t think Google set out to make navigation of the system difficult, on the contrary, I believe they attempted to make it as accessible to everyone as possible, I understand why it would seem this way to many clients.

Google is an ever-changing landscape of innovations and methods for businesses to promote their goods and services – but how do you keep up? What happens when your competitors start utilising these avenues before you? The key is to look before you leap. Just because it’s new, doesn’t mean it’s for you. Here are a few things to consider when doing market analysis for your online advertising strategy.

An unfortunately common misconception amongst those who engage in SEO is that it is not an ongoing concern. Too many people think that once you rank, you rank. This is simply not the case.

Fiction #1: The more rankings the better. Fiction #2: Rankings = Business. Perhaps I should clarify here a little. The above points don’t have to be fiction. But whether or not they are depends entirely on you.