General Motors, one of the biggest advertisers in the world, says it is no longer going to pay for advertising on Facebook – as the popular social network readies its initial public offering on the stock market.

Facebook is a free service with some 800million users worldwide: it makes its money from data-related, targeted advertising. The IPO valuation puts the company somewhere around the $100bn mark – based on potential revenue streams such as paid ads.

The timing of GM decision could prove to be the first dent in Facebook’s IPO plans.

According to Reuters, the company is yet to confirm the reason behind its decision. GM was thought to spend around $40m a year on Facebook – with around $10m of that paying for advertising.

GM has been one of the biggest proponents of social media ads – even using an entirely digital strategy to launch the Chevrolet Sonic last October.

The move to withdraw from Facebook’s advertising appears to be down to a lack of return on investment.

GM is quoted by Reuters as saying it will continue to maintain its free Facebook brand and car pages, as these continue to be “a very effective tool for engaging with our customers.”

GM said: “It’s not unusual for us to move our spending around various media outlets. In terms of Facebook specifically, while we currently do not plan to continue with advertising, we remain committed to an aggressive content strategy through all of our products and brands.”

Conversely, Ford Motor Co – another leading company in the world of Internet marketing, and an early embracer of social media – says it plans to boost its spending on Facebook, including paying for more adverts.

Around 20% of their marketing budget goes on social media marketing initiatives – including a huge push for the Fiesta, a car absent from the US market for almost 30 years. As a result of that campaign, costing $5m, Ford claims 60% of Americans were aware of the brand – something which may have cost $100m to achieve with traditional ads and marketing.

Whether GM’s decision does eventually impact on Facebook’s IPO, raises questions about the longevity of its financial strategy, or causes a cascade of advertising pull-outs from big brands remains to be seen.

News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.

Paid search advertising can be a bit of a minefield – tactics which work on one PPC campaign aren’t always transferrable to another.

Managing profitable pay per click services involves a lot of foresight, analysis, and just a touch of guess-work. This experimentalism is absolutely imperative to ensure your paid ads are displaying to the right people at the right times, and getting the right results. Without experimenting, most PPC strategies will fail. Or, at least, fail to meet their potential.

Google’s always been acutely aware that the more tools it can give to search marketers, the more people are likely to spend on search marketing.

If you can analyse properly – to see where money is best spent and best avoided – you can afford to invest more in paid ads as you know you’re more likely to get the conversions you want.

As such, Google’s AdWords tool has, for some time, given search advertisers ways to project and forecast how a PPC ad may work at both the keyword and ad group level. Now Google’s improved its projection tools, allowing advertisers to forecast simulations at campaign level, too.

The change is designed to give advertisers a way to create reports on potential future campaigns even without the requisite level of data to do so at keyword or ad group level.

The tool allows advertisers to swap variables to check effects – such as lowering all bids by a certain percentage.

The system feeds back on how an advertiser can then use the data on a real campaign – with projections on potential necessary campaign budget and a downloadable summary. An AdWords Editor file is also available showing simulated bid amounts and applicable groups.

The changes have already gone live – check the Opportunities section of AdWords.

News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.

Search engine Yahoo! has parted company with CEO Scott Thompson, amid claims he embellished his CV.

It is the second high-profile departure from Yahoo! in recent months. The firm is now looking for its third CEO in three years.

Former CEO Carol Bartz, hired in January 2009, was fired in September 2011.

Her replacement, Scott Thompson, a former president of PayPal, was appointed in January this year. Just four months later, Thompson is gone.

Yahoo! is now hoping to find some stability. A veteran online entity, it still has popular portal sites focussing on entertainment, horoscopes, sport and health.

But Yahoo! has lost major ground in the search industry, thanks to Google. Despite being one of the first major search engines, Yahoo! has failed to capture the same user volume of Google – which now controls the lion’s share of the search market.

Thompson was already under pressure, as some Yahoo! shareholders felt the company wasn’t doing enough to catch up – whether that was improving its Internet marketing options, increasing paid ad revenues or capitalising on traffic to its other sites.

Thompson had started to make changes – with planned job losses and rationalisation to cut costs.

He won’t get to see through what he started though.

The problems arose after tough questions from board members about Thompson’s academic history seemed to show an anomaly.

Thompson’s online biography, on Yahoo!’s website, stated that he has a computer science degree. As did information submitted as part of regulatory filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

He has since admitted that he does not have such a qualification.

Reuters is now reporting that Thompson maintains he didn’t actually submit the erroneous info to the Yahoo! board. The error was included in his PayPal bio – with claims now that the info was simply lifted, but not checked, by either Yahoo! or their executive recruitment agency. Reuters reports these claims are still being verified.

The revelation that Thomspon’s academic history may have been skewed was first unveiled by ‘shareholder activists’ on Yahoo!’s board, who had been waging a proxy battle to get more of its members into board seats.

Thompson finally stepped down on Sunday, May 13 – just ten days after shareholder Daniel Loeb first claimed he’d ‘touched up’ his qualifications.

Yahoo! has since moved to appoint Ross Levinsohn as interim CEO. Levinsohn has a chance of getting the role permanently.

Daniel Loeb’s hedge fund group, Third Point, was also given new seats on the board in what one analyst called a “big victory”, according to Fox News. BGC analyst Colin Gillis told Fox: “It’s going to increase Third Point’s ability to shape the direction of the company.”

Loeb is said to have been frustrated with what he saw as an inability by the board to maximise Yahoo!’s potential revenues. A Yahoo! statement quoted him as saying: “We are confident this board will beneift from shareholder representations and we are commited to working with new leadership to unlock Yahoo!’s significant potential and value.”

News brought to you by ClickThrough – specialists in Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing.

ClickThrough Marketing SEO account executive Lily Bowron is used to challenges – her day job involves scaling the heights of Google’s results pages for clients. This month, Lily is setting her sights a little higher than Google page one: she is set to take on an entirely different challenge, involving three mountains and a yacht!

One week and counting til we drive up to Scotland to start the SIPR – Scottish Island Peaks Race.

It is May 11 already and suddenly the SIPR seems painfully close.

I am a member of a team of five sport enthusiasts – Team Satisfaction – due to the name of the boat we will sail. We are taking part in the yacht race starting on May 17, which involves running the odd marathon and racing day and night in-between.

There are four stages:

1. Oban – Six miles – to spread the teams out
2. Mull – Climbing 3,300 feet! More than 23 miles.
3. Jura – Climbing 2,500 feet, three times! More than 14 miles.
4. Arran – 3,000 feet! More than 18 miles.

The route Lily Bowron, SEO Executive at ClickThrough Will Take During The Scottish Island Peaks Race

We’ll be starting on Friday, and hopefully finishing on Sunday or Monday – fingers crossed.

These mountain runs are events in themselves. But the challenge doesn’t start and end there: add some sailing in between, navigating at night and trying not to fall asleep at the helm, and it’s a serious endurance challenge.

What really makes this challenge different to other runs, is that you start the running leg at whatever time you arrive on shore, be it 2am or 9pm. It all depends on the time and speed you can get over the water navigating the quickest routes along the coast, often through rocks.

These runs are also not fully marked; you have to orienteer between check points, in the dark, after battling sea sickness, to finish at quickly as you can.

The team will have to climb straight up each mountain and straight back down, and then clamber on to the boat and into wet weather gear before setting off again. The whole event can be described as rather soggy and smelly – five people living on a boat after a day of running, with no showers (except for the salt water and driving rain).

There are 50 teams taking part this year. Team Satisfaction consists of Bill Tipper, Joe Tipper, Richard Mortiboys, Simon Heppell and myself.

We are doing the race to raise money for the Samantha Dickson Brain Tumour Trust, a charity that is very close to the heart of the team and their families.

It’s going to be a huge challenge, but I think Team Satisfaction is more than ready. I’m prepared and staying calm – as long as no one says to me in the next week that “worse things happen at sea.”

Obviously, we’re hoping our team will be ranking well on the winners’ podium, that we will have smooth links between the sailing and running legs so we can optimise our team and resources, and keep our target in site!

No more SEO jokes!

We’d like to say a huge thank you to ClickThrough for its support and sponsorship.

If you want to support the Samantha Dickson Brain Tumour Trust, then please sponsor me on our Just Giving page.

Team Satisfaction, over and out!

Mozilla, creators of popular internet browser Firefox, claim Microsoft is restricting user choice in Windows 8, by only supporting Internet Explorer.

In a potential online PR disaster for Microsoft, both Mozilla and Google have raised public concerns about the future of Windows operating systems.

Harvey Anderson, from Mozilla’s general counsel, claims Microsoft will return Windows 8 users to the “digital dark ages”, when only Internet Explorer was available to navigate the web.

Anderson says Microsoft is refusing to allow Firefox, Chrome, or indeed any other browser to work on its new operating system, which will be loaded on ARM processor chips.

Mozilla claims Microsoft is planning for its new Windows RT (Windows running on ARM) to run in two environments – a ‘Classic’ mode, and a ‘Metro’ mode which will run apps.

“However, Windows on ARM prohibits any browser except for Internet Explorer from running in the privileged ‘Windows Classic’ environment,” Anderson said. “In practice, this means that only Internet Explorer will be able to perform many of the advanced computing functions vital to modern browsers in terms of speed, stability, and security, to which users have grown accustomed.

“Given that IE can run in Windows on ARM, there is no technical reason to conclude other browsers can’t do the same.”

Anderson said the decision would restrict user choice whilst also killing competition and innovation.

“We encourage Microsoft to remain firm on its user choice principles. Excluding third-party browsers contradicts Microsoft’s own published Principles, that users and developers have relied upon for years,” he said.

Anderson’s comments may hit home hard with Microsoft, which has already faced antitrust action in the past. Back in 2001, DOJ vs Microsoft saw the firm forced to allow PC sellers to include non-Microsoft software on new computers. The European Commission was also involved, leading to Windows users being given a choice of browsers in Europe.

Google has backed Mozilla’s concerns. A spokesman told V3: “We share the concerns Mozilla has raised… we’ve always welcomed innovation in the browser space across all platforms, and strongly believe that having great competitors makes us all work harder.”

News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.

Microsoft’s search offering, Bing, has undergone another revamp. And with a huge focus on social, Bing may have found a way to begin to oust Google from search dominance.

After joining a ‘search alliance’ with Yahoo!, the “New Bing” will try to usurp Google by offering things it currently can’t.

Of course, Bing will still return normal organic search results and paid ads, just like it used to.

But now its social annotations, scraped from public information across a variety of social networks, are being lumped into a special sidebar, giving you the chance to interact with social friends.

The sidebar will pull information from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare and even Google+.

Google has already fallen out with Twitter, and, to a lesser extent, with Facebook. It can’t return Twitter profiles in its search results, because the microblogging site has blocked their spiders.

Not so with Bing.

Whereas Google has faced accusations of throttling social results – leading Facebook and Twitter to publicly demand “Don’t be Evil” (a cheeky nod to Google’s original ethos) whilst falling out with the search giant – Bing isn’t discriminating.

Google isn’t going to be able to pull info from Twitter or public posts from Facebook until relations are mended. In the meantime, Bing has a big open deal which could allow it to steal a march on Google.

The ramifications of this social focus, on both search engine optimisation and pay per click campaigns, could be huge. It would see an integrated Internet marketing approach, where search marketing and advertising is combined with social media.

Friend recommendations could become key selling tools, for instance. Group discounts for social groups with similar interests could be offered. It’s still early days, but the potential to create more joined-up marketing campaigns certainly exists.

Bing has been quick to point out that in a blindfolded taste test – much like those undertaken during the 1980s cola wars between Coke and Pepsi – search users preferred Bing’s search results to Google’s.

“We regularly test unbranded results, removing any trace of Google and Bing branding,” they said. “When we did this study in January of last year, 34% preferred Bing, whilst 38% preferred Google.

“The same unbranded study now shows that Bing search results have a much wider lead over Google’s. When shown unbranded search results, 43% prefer Bing, whilst only 28% prefer Google results.”

Of course, internal market research is hard to qualify. And Bing still needs to convince people to leave the relative comfort zone of Google and try something new.

If that works, though, then Google could face a real fight to maintain its position.

News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.

By Ali Harris, content manager, ClickThrough Marketing

I just did a search for “Internet marketing”, out of interest, mainly, and I was bit surprised by Google’s first page of results.

The Internet marketing industry is currently feeling the harsh end of Google’s brickbat – with the Penguin update playing havoc with rankings as the engine looks to end webspam and keyword stuffing.

Examples of bad results have come up on various forums – we wrote yesterday about searching “Paypal France”. That term returns a whole load of spammy results.

That, suffice to say, wasn’t Google’s intention with Penguin.

We wrote earlier about another mistaken side effect of the algorithm update: the potential for successful negative SEO campaigns.

But until there are proven examples of negative SEO bombing an otherwise entirely reputable website, it’s the organic results that matter.

And the organic results remain skewed. I just searched “Internet marketing” on organic Google, without logging in, but with local UK search on (not by region, just country).

Two of the top five organic results are spam. That’s almost 50% spam. A few weeks ago, the top results for Internet marketing were all SEO companies.

So in this case, Penguin has made Google 40% more rubbish than it was.

Try it yourself: you’ll find returns for a telecoms company which offers phone numbers and telephonic systems – but has absolutely no apparent content, services, or information about “internet marketing”, as well as a site pertaining to offer the ‘new rules’ of Internet marketing, but actually only featuring two measly pages of absolutely terribly written content, and a seeming focus on Forex.

I’ve had a look at the sites themselves and can’t really see why Google thinks they should return in the top five results for an “internet marketing” search.

Maybe the search engine is having a laugh at the SEO industry – who are making money off Google’s free product (search) when Google would far rather they used its paid-for products (paid search or pay per click).

Or maybe this is another example of the recent Penguin update getting things very wrong indeed.

News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.

The Google Penguin update, launched last month, punishes sites participating in dodgy paid link schemes by removing them from the search results.

Now, post-Penguin, the Internet marketing industry is debating whether the algorithm change has become a charter for negative SEO.

Negative SEO is essentially search sabotage: giving competitors a Google Minus, if you will.

The idea is to use underhand, blackhat SEO techniques on a competitor’s website – as though the competitor had done it themselves. Google sees dodgy SEO activity on the competitor site, and downranks it as a result. Your site then sails up the rankings as your sabotaged competitors disappear.

It’s a horrible strategy.

Penguin’s introduction was supposed to bolster honest, white hat SEO: not destroy it.

But some commentators claim that by arbitrarily downranking sites with unnatural link profiles, Penguin has made negative SEO strategies a very stark reality.

One of the main problems is that most small websites can’t actually control their own inbound links. Bigger companies can afford lawyers to run round getting dodgy sites to remove links. Smaller sites cannot.

If you run a small e-commerce site, which currently ranks on the first page for your core products, will your business survive on Google’s first page if a nefarious competitor aims 50,000 bad links in your direction?

Some experts say it would be too hard to make negative SEO foolproof, and it would essentially be impossible to downrank well-established sites because of Google’s other ranking factors.

Negative SEO has always been in existence and it’s not something Google would want to promote.

Yes, Penguin has made backlinks a dangerous factor for all sites, but in reality, it shouldn’t really increase the prevalence of negative SEO campaigns.

That’s partly because backlinks are just one metric Google uses to analyse the quality of a website. The basic idea is the more backlinks a site has, the more trustworthy it must be, the more useful its content must be, and the more valuable it is to a searcher.

Sites like the BBC, Daily Mail or Wikipedia have massively strong link profiles, and they rank very well for a huge number of search terms as a result. Their SEO work, compared to smaller, less-known sites, is pretty much an effortless process.

Smaller sites are judged on the same metrics as massive global brands, and that includes backlinks.

Some experts have cited examples of negative SEO campaigns actually working on smaller sites – especially as SMEs don’t have the international recognition or consumer loyalty of bigger brands.

The advice for vigilant SEOs is to stay vigilant. You should be checking sites for evidence of negative SEO campaigns anyway – and there are some steps you can perform to help protect you against this kind of underhand campaign.

If you notice a spike in unnatural-looking backlinks, work quickly to try to get them removed. Contact sites who have given you positive links and establish a line of communication. If those links are suddenly removed by a fraud, you have more chance of getting the link back.

Other negative SEO tactics to look out for include crawlers sent to your site to scrape it and  slow down load times – this can cause visitors to bounce very quickly, so you should always be checking the IPs visiting your site, and blocking potential crawlers.

Stealing content from competitor websites before Google has indexed it is another means of sabotage. If Google sees your content on a competitor site first, it will discount yours as duplicate or plagiarism (even though you wrote the piece). Using rel=canonical tags can help prevent this.

Other tactics can be harder to deal with: this includes spamming review sites with bad reviews, or even with good reviews, as a huge swathe of positive reviews (especially from the same IP address) would immediately appear dodgy to Google.

The first iteration of Penguin was always going to have a few creases to be ironed out.

It’s unlikely Penguin can be refreshed to recognise whether a site owner or webmaster has paid for backlinks, or whether a competitor has attempted to sabotage them.

But it’s also highly unlikely that Google will allow negative SEO success stories to become the norm.

Something’s got to give.

News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.

Google’s Penguin update has sent the SEO industry into something of an ironic flap.

Almost a fortnight after Penguin went live, webmasters are still moaning and complaining that Google got it wrong.

And in some cases, the detractors have a point.

Penguin was designed to destroy the dark arts of SEO. Black hat tactics – such as keyword stuffing, or paying for spammy inbound links – have been utilised by cheeky webmasters attempting to manipulate the rankings. And Google’s had enough.

Penguin aimed to torpedo sites which used keyword stuffing to trick spiders into thinking their content was relevant, whilst also blacklisting sites which had paid for dodgy incoming links in an attempt to falsify credibility.

But Penguin clearly hasn’t worked exactly as Google planned.

Search industry forums are reporting examples of apparently ‘white hat’, honest websites being downranked, with examples of horrific, spammy ‘black hat’  sites suddenly displaying on the front page of Google for completely unrelated search terms (see below).

The thing is, though, is that Penguin hasn’t altered much in reality. It’s certainly not a game changer.

Google has always had good practice guidelines. But it hasn’t always had a way to police whether sites are adhering to those guidelines.

Penguin, therefore, is essentially a Google search copper, plodding the everlasting beat that is the results pages, looking for traces of the notorious Internet crimelords Webspam and Spammy Links, and attempting to bring the perpetrators of online offences to justice.

Now, the problem. It’s bit like a search version of RoboCop – Penguin appears to have been appointed judge, jury and executioner by Google.

And that, it seems, is where the problem lies. Penguin is programmed – it has been coded to look for telltale signs of black hat SEO. It’s not a human, and it’s not capable of rational thought (unless Google’s keeping something from us).

As such, Penguin was always going to be prone to mistakes – especially after first launching. That in itself should account for the ‘funny behaviour’ reported by webmasters immediately after Penguin went live. Some went as far as to claim Penguin “broke Google” – others petitioned for the update to be reversed.

Google realises that placing arbitrary decision-making into the hands of a dumb robot isn’t going to reap foolproof results and is prepared to reinstate accidentally downranked websites.

Webmasters who feel unfairly punished by Google can flag up their complaint. Those meeting Google’s good practice guidelines should be reinstated as a result. Conversely, you can also report instances where spammy, rotten sites are returning high in the results when they really shouldn’t be.

This level of teething problems and fall-0ut clearly wasn’t part of Google’s intention with the Penguin update.

Google wanted Penguin to go some way towards levelling the playing field for search engine optimisation. Some feel it’s an attempt to push people towards paid ad-based Internet marketing.

It’s clear Google still has some work to do, either way.

And until then, those genuine sites which have lost rankings – and business as a result – are going to have to weather the storm.

• Have the Rules for White Hat SEO Changed After Penguin?
  A Sideways View On The News, by Ali Harris, content manager for ClickThrough Marketing

Penguin wasn’t a game-changer – it was simply a means to enforce the ‘rules’ already laid out by Google.

Those who had got away with breaking, or just bending, the rules for some time have now been penalised. That may’ve meant some previously top-ranking sites suddenly plummeting.

Anyone adhering to Google’s best practice guidelines, on the whole, will have avoided a hammering from Penguin.

The cases where legitimate sites got downranked are few and far between, and Google has set up the right channels to rectify this. If Google refuses to reinstate a site, chances are, there’s some spam, links or some other ‘black hat’ problems somewhere.

That said, respondents on a handful of search forums have provided examples of spammy, rubbish websites which are now appearing on page one of Google.

One great example is to search “Paypal France”. The first page of results for this search returns no fewer than three websites selling viagra.

Not only are these sites totally unrelated to the search term “Paypal France” – they’re also stuffed with keywords.

In terms of content, it’s nasty. Really nasty.

In fact, these search returns are exactly what Google engineer Matt Cutts said Penguin would whitewash.

Yet, it hasn’t.

Even the page description, displayed directly under the website URL, shows how badly stuffed some of these pages are.

One reads: “During relative of pele’s observing sugar in brazil there was no rheumatoid film viagra paypal france.”

It’d be hard for anyone to argue that this search result:
i) makes any sense
ii) is of any use to anyone, ever
iii) is not blatant, keyword-stuffed spam
iv) should be on page one of Google for any search term other than “examples of ridiculous spammy content”

It’ll be interesting to see how these anomalies iron out in the coming weeks, and whether Google refreshes Penguin so it looks a lot more closely at the factors which might separate a genuine site from a fraud.

If they do, may I suggest this level of closer inspection should henceforth be known as ‘observing sugar in Brazil’?

• Why call the Google algorithm update Penguin?

The last big algorithm change from Google was called Panda. This one was Penguin.

Speculation is rife that Google is following a pattern with its search engine updates.

The obvious bits are: animals (cute ones at that), which begin with a ‘p’, and are black and white.

Guesses for next update name include Panther, and Pigeon (derived from vowel use: pAnda, pEnguin, pIgeon etc…).

On the black and white theme, some have posited that Google is separating ‘white hat’ tactics from ‘black hat’ tactics via the use of bestial metaphor.

I have my own theory behind the name, which takes us back to the ironic flapping of the SEO industry.

Take Google’s ‘average user’ – someone with little knowledge of anything. Google plays to the lowest common denominator.

If you don’t know anything about quantum theory, and you Google it, you’d want something reputable, trustworthy and reliable to return on the front page of the results. The same goes for any search term.

With webspam sites, you might get a top search result which says “Quantum Theory” on the page name, and includes the phrase in the description too. But on closer inspection, a bunch of other, unrelated words are in the description. This is known as keyword stuffing.

Click the link, and you won’t find a repository of sparkling information about relativity, worm holes, or physics. No. You’ll probably get a bunch of bad links, nonsense sentences, and the odd advert for a miracle diet instead.

In search terms, that result is useless.

Now imagine you’re looking for a bird. You’d expect a bird to fly, right?

Only, Penguins can’t fly.

So perhaps, Penguin was designed to root out sites which seem genuine, which look like they are fit for purpose, but, on closer inspection, are actually technically useless. Like a Penguin’s wings.

Or maybe I’ve overcomplicated it.

News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.

Business networking site LinkedIn has acquired the team behind popular content sharing platform SlideShare.

SlideShare – which allows professional users to create and host presentations, videos and PDFs online – was launched in 2006 and now has 29 million unique users a month.

LinkedIn paid $119m (£74m) to acquire SlideShare, saying it aligns “perfectly” with LinkedIn’s mission.

A SlideShare app on LinkedIn was already proving popular with professionals. It is thought LinkedIn will now integrate SlideShare into its core site as it looks to improve its ‘product’.

LinkedIn’s current success – it has amassed 161 million global users – is based on the popularity of social networking sites like Facebook. However, unlike Facebook – where users connect with ‘friends’ (random and real-life) -LinkedIn’s niche has been to focus entirely on professional networking.

As a result, the site has become a mainstay for professionals looking to move up the career ladder, make business connections or find new staff.

In fact, LinkedIn has become something of a playground for recruiters and service providers: it has made one-step transglobal headhunting a reality, whilst Internet marketing content can be sent directly to the inboxes of some of the world’s most prestigious and connected CEOs.

The acquisition, confirmed by LinkedIn on May 3, cost $119m in cash and stocks (a split of around 45%55%).

LinkedIn said it was now looking to integrate SlideShare into its core site – giving professionals simple access to tools allowing them to create and share work online, whilst signficantly boosting the site’s attractiveness to new users.

LinkedIn’s CEO, Jeff Weiner, explained: “Presentations are one of the main ways in which professionals capture and share their experiences and knowledge, which in turn helps shape their professional identity.

“These presentations also enable professionals to discover new connections and gain the insights they need to become more productive and successful in their careers, aligning perfectly with LinkedIn’s mission, and helping us deliver even more value for our members.”

SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha, added: “We built SlideShare to help professionals share presentations and connect people through content.

“What we can build with LinkedIn, the largest professional network on the Internet, is the most natural extension of this vision.”

Shortly after announcing the acquisition, LinkedIn revealed its first-quarter revenue for 2012 – showing a 101% rise year on year.

LinkedIn’s revenue for the first quarter was $188.5m (£116.5m), with income from the same period rising from $2.1m to $5m. More than half the total revenue comes from LinkedIn’s “hiring solutions” unit, whilst display advertising revenue rose by around 73%.

LinkedIn floated on the stock market last year, with stocks worth around $45 at the start. They have risen by around 70% since.

News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.