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The new growth of spring came considerably early for NoMow this year, with a fantastic boost to their PPC results on the back of a fresh new website courtesy of Soup.  
 
Even in its earliest days the new site has accrued a 95% increase in conversion from the PPC activity.
 
Phil Reay, Head of Media at Soup, commented: “NoMow's new digital presence illustrates exactly the benefits we can deliver to our clients when we use this full service approach. All our skills have been successfully coordinated to grow NoMow's business. We are working to constantly optimise the campaign ensuring that NoMow continues to get the very best from its site.”

Michael Tittershill, Managing Director of NoMow said: ''I am delighted with the look and feel of our new web site. I was informed throughout the process at regular intervals and the site came in on budget. Most importantly we have seen a marked increase in web activity and telephone inquiries.''

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Adam Lee, Head of Natural Search at Soup, has been considering the Whys and Wherefores of Google's SeachWiki.

The launch of Google’s Searchwiki has caused a huge buzz within the online community but I feel many have jumped on the bandwagon too soon. My immediate thought is why would anyone use it?

The Google Searchwiki product potentially allows users to customise their own results. It can also be used to manipulate and improve either your own, or your clients’ rankings and, therefore, create a huge bias in the search results. But, the concept of the search engine is to find the relevant results. If you are prescribing the results you want to see, why use the search engine? Google states that the Searchwiki interface will have no impact on its traditional results, but the data they will collect through Searchwiki will help Google to develop their algorithms. Due to the amount of bias that will exist within this data it can’t fail to have a potentially problematic impact on Google’s search results.

An interesting SERoundtable poll recently asked if the public is ready for Searchwiki. And 83% said no. From an SEO point of view, I think the old algorithms are still far more important than Searchwiki and will continue to be for a considerable time yet.

It’s not all bad though, one thing Searchwiki can do is help Google to identify spam sites. So, if a lot of users remove a result or give it negative comments Google will recognise this and prioritise its search results accordingly. Spam has been a big problem for Google lately and any ways to address and combat this will be of great benefit to them.

However, Google already develops algorithms to make spamming the engine more difficult. If Searchwiki becomes part of the ranking algorithm then it is only a matter of time before companies pop up offering services to vote up and comment on your sites and vote down and negatively comment on your competitors’ sites. All it takes is a few hundred Google accounts and let’s face it, a proxy server and a bit of time can get anyone 10-20 accounts!