If you have been living on a desert island for the past two years and know nothing about Penguin, you can read up on it here and here. The main takeaways:

1 – The new version of Penguin is more aggressive

2 – It targets lower level pages of a site and not just the top level.

You might want to watch this again as well:

What I really wanted to do was go over some of the trends we are seeing, and what you can do if you are being badly affected by the updates.

Link devaluation & website devaluation

If you have seen your rankings diminish over time, that does not necessarily mean that the Penguin algorithm is affecting you. Matt Cutts announced 3– 4 weeks ago that they had taken action against a large network of link sellers and devalued the outgoing links accordingly.

On-going link devaluation is very evident in the SERP’s as Patrick pointed out in his post on aggressive link devaluation.

If your rankings seem to be slipping on a weekly basis, it is likely your link profile is being devalued, there is nothing you can do about this other than to remove/disavow the low quality links and focus on building stronger links based on a natural strategy. The last 3 – 5 years of your SEO is likely wiped out, getting your rankings back will not be an easy task, you will have to start from scratch.

Authority sites win

No brainer really, this latest round of Penguin definitely favours what everyone in the real world would consider the authority sources on the web. Government websites, news sites and advice driven resources have all fared well from the recent update, as you would expect.

So, you may not have been penalised, or hit by the algorithm update, however you may have lost visibility to websites with more authority.

Penguin isn’t a penalty

Many sites were expecting to see link removal efforts when Penguin reran, however it is becoming clear that Penguin is not a penalty. There will be no magic recovery because you have removed links, this is an algorithm update, it isn’t Google saying ‘you’ve been naughty, we’re going to punish you’, this is Google saying ‘all that stuff you did to rank, we’ve just killed it, start again’.

So unless you have managed to replace all the authority your low quality links were giving you, don’t expect to see your rankings come back. Unfortunately, any investment in low quality links is lost, and the only way back is to invest at a higher level in developing a solid SEO strategy.

It could get worse

Matt Cutts has already stated that the impact can be adjusted, and I am pretty confident that he doesn’t mean ‘we can make this easier on link spam’.

This update is going nowhere, Google is not going to let you off, aggressive link devaluation and manual action against link sellers and networks will intensify. Building a ton of anchor text links is not going to help you, there is no secret formula for anchor text variation, and removing links will give you a clean sheet but won’t bring you back.

As I have said on my blog and plenty of times on Twitter, if your links are acquired for SEO value only, you are likely to be in trouble now and in the future if you persist. No more easy street.

If you have, you’ll know about the panic that ensues. Maybe you know you’ve done some link-building in the past that’s outside of Google’s guidelines, or perhaps you hired an SEO firm which wasn’t honest with their link-building tactics.

Either way, these links have to come down.

In the last six months we’ve helped over 40 clients recover from manual spam actions. In that time, I’ve read a lot of literature about the process. The amount of posts about this process might be overwhelming for someone doing it for the first time. Especially since there is a lot of false information out there.

Here is a list of the five most common myths of recovering from a manual penalty:

1) Remove all of the links that are obviously paid for

Some people in the past may have paid webmasters to host links to their own website; be it in a blog post, or in a sidebar.

Some of these links will have to be removed because they do not add value to anyone.

However, if you have a good link on a good blog that’s going to drive traffic, why remove it? Even if it says “paid” or “sponsored” yes, you can keep them.

This is why the rel=”nofollow” tag exist. Google’s guidelines for webmasters states that if you’re going to sell links, you should place a nofollow tag on them to prevent them from passing PageRank.

I run a blog myself, and know that fellow bloggers feel a degree of annoyance at being asked to remove a link. It’s like telling them “your site’s not good enough, this link is pointless”. It can sour a good relationship that had the potential to be valuable if it wasn’t already. Asking someone to no-follow a link can be much more favourable. No-following a link means they retain their link equity and is less likely to have an adverse effect of PageRank.

Myth Busted: No-following links can be more effective than removing links

2) Remove all low authority links

Nearly every article I’ve read on removing links says something along the lines of “prioritise your links by domain authority/PageRank/number of pages indexed/other random metric” and goes on to say “automatically remove anything with metric below a certain number”.

It makes my head spin.

Just because a link is on a low authority website, does not automatically mean it’s not a link worth having.

Every good website must start somewhere. A brand-new website is never going to have much authority in terms of metrics – however it might soon have a surge of readership or inbound links. How can you justify removing a link without ever even seeing the link? It’s beyond me.

Yes, a lot of harmful links could be from low authority websites; but the corollary of this statement is just as bad. Links from high authority websites are not automatically good. Many spammy websites whose links could harm you still have authority in terms of metrics, they could be a dropped domain and the webmaster is clever enough to know how to maintain that authority (I’ve seen it on many occasions).

Links don’t even have to be on spammy websites to be harmful. Links from high authority websites can be harmful too if they are seen to be manipulative. This once again iterates that links should be looked at manually before being thrown in a “remove” or “do not remove” pile.

Myth Busted: Metrics mean nothing in the world of removing links. New sites might yield good links, trusted sites might have manipulative links.

3) All brand anchor text links are fine

Another arbitrary metric to sort by is anchor text. The advice for these ones is “any link that exactly matches your brand name is fine”.

Once again, how can you assume that a link you’ve never seen is fine?

If a link is on a spam site, it has to be taken down, no matter the anchor text – it’s harmful.

However, if you know that the manual spam action is being taken out on a specific keyword, I could forgive you for prioritising those exact match keywords before anything else. However, it’s still important to look at your full link profile.

Myth Busted: The anchor text tells you nothing about the website a link is on.

4) Just run an automated tool to do it

Automated tools are good enough, up to a point. We’ve trialled a few in the past, and the best we’ve seen any of them do is identify some of the worst links from the worst websites. The lower tier of these kind of tools classifies anything from a trust-worthy website as “good”; that really doesn’t tell the full story as we’ve discussed above.

However, I have yet to see a tool that can classify your whole link profile for you. You still have to do a lot of work yourself.

Here’s a tweet that Alan Ng (a fellow Data Insights team member) sent out many moons ago that pretty much sums this up.

if you ran automated tools to get rankings and got penalised…would you then trust automated link cleanup tools to get you them back again?

— Alan Ng (@TypeAccord) November 20, 2012

Myth Busted: Link clean-up tools might be able help you start processing, but most links need manually looking at.

5) Don’t use the Disavow tool

Of all the advice, I find this one the most unbelievable.

Google created a tool which effectively lets you tell Google “I know these links are bad, but I can’t get them down” so Google can discount the links. Why wouldn’t you use this?

Many stubborn SEOs insist that using the disavow tool is “doing Google’s work for them”. The fact remains that the tool does work. Why make work harder for yourself? Branded3′s Head of Search Strategy, Matthew Jackson did an in depth review of why the disavow tool works and how you can use it.

That is not to say that the disavow tool holds all the answers. Simply throwing links into a disavow file and submitting a reconsideration request to Google probably isn’t going to yield results by itself. You have to show you’ve made an effort to actually remove bad links or change paid links to being no-followed, to keep within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Michael Auty, who also works in Branded3′s Data Insights team had this to say about Google’s disavow tool:

The Google disavow tool was never meant to be a first resort, it was meant to be a last.

— Michael Auty (@MichaelAuty) March 18, 2013

By all means, don’t be afraid to use it – just don’t expect it to do all your work for you. But by using it it can certainly make it easier to tell Google that you know you have bad links.

Myth Busted: Google’s Disavow tool works, why make a difficult job harder?

If you’re concerned about the Manual Spam message, please don’t hesitate to talk to us about it. I’m also on Twitter @ejbarnes89 if you want to chat about it.

One of the biggest devaluations Google has done was last week, shortly after Matt Cutts tweeted about taking action on a major link seller network.

In fact, we took action on several thousand linksellers in a paid-link-that-passes-PageRank network earlier today.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 15, 2013

Searchmetrics has not updated this week yet but when it does you will see lots of sites taking a big decline, we tend to monitor dozens of sites every week that we have noticed to have a spammy link profile but that were not hit by any penalties in the past year or so. Loads of these were wiped out at the end of last week by link devaluation.

Some people seem to think that link devaluation is somehow better than a manual link penalty – let me be very clear about this, it’s certainly not. We can recover anybody from a manual link penalty within 2-3 months and have done so for over 40 brands in the past six months. Rankings usually improve dramatically after the penalty is lifted and everybody is happy. If you are losing rankings week after week due to link devaluation the only solution is to place good quality natural links to counteract the losses. The problem is that it’s impossible to place enough natural links every month to rival the speed that Google is working to devalue the rest of your links.

Link devaluation is perhaps better than being hit by Penguin but it’s pretty likely that the people suffering most from link devaluation are at risk from Penguin too. We have a policy of doing a full manual link audit for all clients every few months (some are done once a week) to minimise the risk of any bad links causing problems and this should apply to every site in the world that wants to succeed in SEO. There are various tools that do an automated audit which is great for a health check but nothing beats a full manual audit to make sure you find every single bad link.

Standing still or growing?

A lot of sites have a goal of aggressively increasing SEO visits year on year but in reality if their link profile is poor then they really would do very well to just stand still this year. Look at the searchmetrics.com charts of people who were trying to grow aggressively a couple of years ago and think about whether they would have been happy to stand still.

Voucher sites are a prime example (although there is no suggestion their troubles are due to bad links or any other bad practices, or that their traffic has dropped in line with the visibility on searchmetrics) of how standing still would have been a great result. Two of the market leaders have lost a lot of visibility (according to searchmetrics) recently with myvouchercodes down from 266,000 to 13,700 since 2011 and vouchercodes.co.uk down 50% since mid-March this year.

These drops are probably due to lots of factors including how Google ranks voucher sites for brand queries (or not as the case may be) but I bet they would love to have the rankings they had two years ago.

Image http://www.digitaltrends.com

In case you hadn’t heard, multi-national internet corporation Yahoo! has acquired content creation platform Tumblr in a billion dollar deal yesterday that not only sent any other start-up owner into an envious dither over the 26-year-old billionaire’s new fortune, but left the rest of us pondering Yahoo!’s long-term strategy.

This is mainly a revenue generating exercise for Yahoo!, since being over taken by Google in terms of the online advertising go-to site, CEO Marissa Mayer has been searching for a sturdy foundation to strengthen Yahoo!’s otherwise crumbling content bastion in a constantly changing digital climate.

By tying down Tumblr’s giant audience; a collective monthly page view number of 17.5 billion; Yahoo! had this to say,

“The two companies will work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience.”

Although Tumblr’s growth has been steady for the past few years, the sudden buzz around the platform may spur a further initial interest. For those who have not used Tumblr before, the intrigue around the high-profile acquisition could lead to investigation while others may feel compelled to dust the cobwebs off their old blogs and start posting again.

Since yesterday, quite a few old but still relevant blog posts around the subject of Tumblr have been circulating such as this: SEO for Tumblr Blogs written by Distilled in 2009 and this infographic from ‘social scientist’, Dan Zarella.

My eye has also been drawn to the resurrection of Tumblr lists such as Ultimate List of all the Best Art + Photo Tumblrs to Follow and The 10 Funniest Tumblrs.

There are, of course, those who think that Yahoo!’s latest attempt at becoming cool is doomed to failure. The young, tech-hip Tumblr generation are a demographic Yahoo! deems lucrative yet endlessly unattainable and their latest move to some people is the digital version of your dad doing the robot at your 16th birthday party.

The worries are not unfounded as it has been reported that Marissa Mayer told analysts during a conference that Yahoo! is “making a sincere promise to not screw [Tumblr] up.” Not exactly a vote of confidence!

(image via Tumblr)

What Yahoo! does with Tumblr really remains to be seen but since it’s been the hot topic in the office we thought we would share Branded3′s favourite Tumblr blogs:

Luke Aylward – Meerkats That Look Like Nigel Farage - http://nigelorlov.tumblr.com/

Andrew Machin – Texts from Dog - http://textfromdog.tumblr.com/

Alan Ng – Reasons my Son is Crying  - http://reasonsmysoniscrying.tumblr.com/

Fiona Dunphy – Women Laughing Alone While Eating Salad - http://womenlaughingwithsalad.tumblr.com/

Joe Griffiths – Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things - http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/

Georgia Halston – This Advertising Life - http://thisadvertisinglife.tumblr.com/

Andy Curry – Agency Wank -http://agencywank.tumblr.com/

Felicity Crouch – Animal GIFs - http://animalygifs.tumblr.com/

Catherine Desrochers – GIF Movie - http://gifmovie.tumblr.com/

Emma Barnes – This SEO Life - http://www.thisseolife.com/

Jordan Appleson – Hey Girl, I Like the Library Too - http://librarianheygirl.tumblr.com/

Laura Crimmons – #iworkinpr -http://iworkinpr.tumblr.com/

Cue people from all ends of the colour spectrum (that’s black to white) throwing their hat into the ring and proclaiming that Google has no right to do this; they’re still getting results from that; they expect everything to be less valuable in future and you should be on Google+ just to be safe, like that little red +1 on your website’s door will make Penguin walk on by like some sort of SEO Passover.

The question that gets asked far too rarely is: “should this tactic still work?” and, in the case of press releases, I’m not sure that answer is in the affirmative.

Do press releases still work?

To answer all those questions above, many people are still getting reasonable returns from press releases, there are currently some relatively safe ways to do it and some of the big press release distribution sites such as PRWeb and PR Newswire haven’t been penalised yet.

Earlier this year, Branded3 received a response to a reconsideration request that highlighted a brand anchor text link in a press release as an unnatural link. We questioned Google about it and they decided the site was acceptable, but it seems that it’s sitting right on the borderline.

Google now regards brand anchor text as unnatural in press releases it seems. Yes, I did say brand anchor text.

— Patrick Altoft (@patrickaltoft) January 23, 2013

That should tell you pretty much everything you need to know about how Google considers press releases nowadays (either that, or everyone with an exact match domain should probably consider purchasing a new domain as you’ll never be able to build links again) – if not, this should.

Should press releases have ever been an SEO tactic?

Linkbuilding has changed fundamentally over the past year and the way outreach has performed has changed along with it. Regardless of whether online PR is replacing linkbuilding (it probably is), PR has completely replaced press releases and quite rightly, too.

If your client/company is doing something newsworthy, that’s a linkworthy asset…and the easiest way to waste that asset is to write 300-400 words that are blatantly self-promotional (don’t pretend you’ve NEVER put out a press release that reads “the leading X company in X…”) and squeeze in links to that service.

This doesn’t work for a couple of reasons:

1. News is coming from the company itself, so it becomes less trustworthy and fewer people care

2. Your news is now out there, published. What’s the incentive for a big site to break your story?

Fewer and fewer people are browsing press release sites, whereas plenty of people are reading The Verge/Guardian/*insert site you actually read here*. Where would you want your news to be published?

The sad fact is that a press release is all about your company and if you’re promoting your services in that news item, it flows so much better if the links are exact match anchor text to the correct pages on your site. Trying to batter brand terms into your sentences screams “I know about SEO and that’s why I’m doing this” and Google will hate you for it.

Matt Cutts breaking some news. Not in a press release.

Where SHOULD I be publishing my news?

When deciding where to publish your news story, think about who it’s most relevant to. If you’re a tech company, why not head over to The Verge and see if you can get featured there? If you do debt, or deal with money, try the FT. Put your news into a press release, put it into the public domain and you’re just hoping that someone finds it relevant to them.

Placing your products and/or services in front of the people that will convert is a no brainer, and you need to understand what medium your target audience operates in. The readership of press releases, for the most part, is the press itself – by putting out a press release you’re just giving the raw facts so that journalists can make it work for their readers. Not many people can get hundreds of links from raw facts, so why would you put your news out like this in a press release?

Build a relationship with someone who has a great, relevant blog, and you’ll land an awesome link with an article in front of an audience that will actually buy into what you’re selling. Try the scattergun approach with a press release and you’ll get thousands of terrible links you can’t remove AND a penalty you’ll have to explain to your client.

Publish on your own site if you have to

You can do so much more with a news story. Even if you only put it on your company’s blog, you’re at least sure that you’re not going to get penalised, you might get some long tail traffic and you can use that link in your outreach if you want to talk to bloggers about what your company is up to. Bloggers are part of the press now and it’s a fairly safe bet that whatever your niche, the bloggers who will help you to sell your products won’t be browsing PR Newswire.

This is the tactic that Matt Cutts seems to advocate – check out an interview on this topic published on Linkbuildr last month. Combine this with some awesome outreach and it could work. If you have something genuinely newsworthy, though, you might want to think about publishing it on a news site that your audience will read instead of wasting it on a press release site.

(Throughout this post, I’ve been referring to press releases as “news stories”. If these things aren’t synonymous for you, please don’t ever write a press release.)

New layout for Google+

• Details –  Google’s social platform now has a whole new look.
• What does this mean? – There are now 190 million active users on Google+ and it is evident, through examination of its API that the social platform is central to the overall Google strategy going forward. Everything Google does now seems to have Google+ at its heart and there is an apparent effort to unify users throughout the Google universe, whether it be android users, YouTube publishers, Gmailers or Google Play users. The new design is image-heavy and the UI makes it far easier to find things you are interested in. Hash-tags can now be found as a tab on the side of post that when clicked, flip the ‘card’ you have selected to reveal related posts of the same subject. The new UI also categorises, styles up and highlights your images in the new and improved gallery section. If you are using a Google+ business page, it may be worth considering how image-focused your content strategy is and perhaps make tweaks to best optimise your posts for the new layout. You should also make sure you are making the most of your banner image as only the bottom section is visible when you first land on a profile page.

Google Has Released a Hangout app

• Details –  Google’s live chat Hangouts can now be taken everywhere and they never end, they’re just paused.
• What does this mean? – Google has brought together every type of communication in one place and it’s available on desktop, tablet and now via their mobile app. You can amalgamate your text messages, video chats, emails and images in one place.  Using Google Hangouts is a great method of CRM and it looks like it’s something Google will not be giving up on anytime soon.

Google introduces Google Play All Access

• Details –  Google has released its own live streaming style music library, one big enough to challenge current market giant Spotify. Google’s All Access has one leg up on Spotify as well as its stablemates Rdio and Pandora since users are not only able to create their own radio stations, they are able to merge existing libraries on their own devices with that of the live stream. The suggested music function is also said to be smoother and more intelligent than its counterparts.
• What does this mean? – With this step into the world of music streaming, although a cost of $9.99 a month will apply, it looks like there really is no online arena the search giant will not try.

That’s enough about Google, let’s see what else has been happening in the world of social:

Exclamation points get more re-tweets, but fewer clicks

• Details – In response to a question tweeted by Rand Fishkin, (below) ‘Social Media Scientist’ Dan Zarrella has done some research into the nature of the exclamation mark and whether or not people are more likely to action a tweet using the punctuation of urgency.
• What does this mean? – Although the research put forward by Zarrella is undoubtedly interesting, do not take this for fact when it comes to your own social media content strategy, your following may not react in the same way. The only way to really improve your strategy is by continuous testing of copy and tone.

Is there any data on whether tweets with exclamation marks get higher vs lower CTR/RTs? cc @followerwonk

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) May 13, 2013

Twitter acquires Lucky Sort

• Details – Monday marked another important acquisition from Twitter following their procurement of TV analytics company Blufin Labs back in February and computing start-up Ubalo, only two weeks ago.
• What does this mean? – There is definitely something big brewing over at Twitter head-quarters. It would be advisable, if you are interested in progressing your social marketing efforts, to keep your ear to the ground on this one. Twitter has a vast amount of information that has until now, mainly remained untouched, probably due to the lack of skill and experience in the field of big data. But with the recent acquisitions, do not be surprised if, in the coming months we see something really special coming from Twitter.

Welcome aboard, @luckysort! luckysort.com

— Twitter (@twitter) May 13, 2013

Welcome to the flock. “@ubalo: We’ve got some exciting news: The Ubalo team is joining Twitter. Read more: ubalo.com.”

— Twitter Engineering (@TwitterEng) May 9, 2013

Buffer allows scheduled re-tweets for the first time

• Details – Twitter scheduling tool, Buffer, has announced the scheduled re-tweet functionality for the first time.
• What does this mean? – Smart users of Buffer will do some research into their Twitter followers and optimise the best time for sharing across social based on the most potential reach. Up until now though, it was impossible to schedule a re-tweet but all that is about to change since the company has apparently taken listened and actioned comments left on their Feedback Forum.

Twitter for Google Glass

• Details – On the 16^th of May, Twitter announced its own app for Google’s newest invention – Google Glass.
• What does this mean? – All of the big companies are jumping on the bandwagon and creating new apps for the mostly unobtainable device and Twitter is no exception.

Facebook rolls out its one column timeline for all personal users

• Details – The new one column timeline we have seen being tested over the last few weeks has been standardised for all personal Facebook users.
• What does this mean? – While the new layout does perhaps call for a change in your Facebook content strategy, it’s worth noting that business pages remain split in two, try, for the time being, to match a strategy that will fit into both layouts; keep it image heavy (remember to always use high-definition images so they look good when exposed in a larger area) but make sure your profile has a healthy mix of useful, engaging copy as well as varied media.

Facebook allows users to rate movies, books and TV shows

• Details – Since the creation of ‘sections’; the panes you can now see on the left side of your one column Facebook profile; Facebook is finding new ways of steering user’s engagement and curation of apps and likes in this section and the new rating system is indicative to that effort. The rating system has appeared in the US but we are yet to see it in the UK.
• What does this mean? – This move feeds into the ever growing Graph Search database and basically grows Facebook’s knowledge of users to a whole new level, not only do they know that you like Good Fellas, Of Mice and Men and Boardwalk Empire, they know exactly how much you like them. The new rating system allows Facebook to present you with more relevant results for content in your news feed and Graph Search (again, still not rolled out in the UK yet). From a marketer’s point of view the update will allow for increased definition of targeting and if you happen to be a producer of a TV show or an author of a book and a user has given it a five star rating, you’re laughing since you can link your business Facebook page to the movie or book and through the magic of Edgerank, your content will appear more often on their timeline!

Facebook releases a home for its research publications

• Details – If you were ever looking for information, case studies or research done by the big blue F it might previously have been an arduous task, fathoming the labyrinth that is the scholarly side of Facebook has always been somewhat daunting. But now all you need to do its visit the Research Publications Library and there you will find an Aladdin’s cave of whitepaper gems, with enough social research tit-bits to quite literally drown in.
• What does this mean? – Perusing through the Facebook library may seem like an activity more suited to the real social research boffins but if you really want to get to the bottom of how and why Facebook works for brands, from the flashy campaigns to the bare nuts and bolts, you might want to set aside an hour or two a week to soak in an article endless archive of social media wisdom.

Social Roulette gets the loaded chamber from Facebook

• Details – Social destruction app, Social Roulette, has been shut out of Facebook. The app which allows daring users play with their social media lives has, as of last week been blocked from the Facebook API. The app gives that lucky one in six the grim fate of automatic and complete social shut down, a functionality Facebook were eager to see the back of leaving only Twitter in the line of fire.
• What does this mean? – Any start up or indeed established company looking to use Facebook, whether for a business profile, use of Facebook apps or Facebook connect in any way, had better make sure they are sticking to Facebook’s rules to the letter.

Facebook update for iOS

• Details – There has been another Facebook update for Apple device users. The improvements are mainly to do with photo viewing, Places and Events.
• What does this mean? – Photo sharing has become even more streamlined since users can now share and save images instantly, feeding into Facebook’s new and apparent image heavy directive. In terms of using Facebook for brands, we must learn to change and adapt to everything Facebook throws at us. If the social hulk says its users like images, get more image content in your strategy.

One of the biggest Facebook meltdowns to date

• Details – Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro staged one of the most catastrophically tragic social breakdowns yet, following a walk out by none other than the furrowed faced, foul mouth chef Gordon Ramsey.
• What does this mean? – On the face of it, what we assume can be learned from this torrent of crazed, often unfounded, inconsistent babble, is exactly what not to do on social media. But from the stats, outlined by Social Bakers, they must have done something right!

The online event kicks off with a global YouTube livestream, The Big Live Comedy Show, at 1am on Monday morning (5pm Pacific Time) and will continue for entire week, right up until Sat 25 May. You can also catch a pre-show an hour before the official launch.

Here’s a little word about the event from The Governor himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger!:

The aim of comedy week is to showcase the best of comedy and offer viewers a unique experience by hosting live stand-up, sketches and musical performances, video premieres and creative collaborations from “the world’s funniest people”. YouTube even pokes fun at itself with the tagline, ‘This better be funny’:

The comedy week will consist of live performances, new episodes from popular YouTube comedy channels, curated top ten lists from comedy stars and more.

As well as a comeback appearance from Blighty’s very own David Brent and David Mitchell, we’ll see videos from the likes of Sarah Silverman, Michael Cera, Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim and Reggie Watts (collectively known as JASH), Vince Vaughn, Seth Rogen, Rainn Wilson, The Lonely Island, and even websites The Onion, Funny or Die and Smosh.

Here’s a little taster of our beloved Brent’s comeback – Office fans might recognise a bit of Free Love Freeway in there too:

You can tune in to the event from 1am this coming Monday (if you think you’ll be able to wake up for work on Monday morning!) at youtube.com/comedyweek.

B3 Towers is abuzz with excitement today as it has been announced that Branded3 has been acquired by the St Ives Group; the UK’s leading publishing and marketing solutions group; in what will prove to be a momentous step for our agency.

Adding to what has already been a fantastic year for us with the launch of our first London office and appointment of a new MD, David Crawford; this strategic move further boosts our agency towards achieving our ambitious growth plans.

So what does this mean for Branded3? Well, not much on the face of it, we’ll still operate independently as a standalone business led by the existing senior management team of CEO Vin Chinnaraja, Director of Search Patrick Altoft and Managing Director David Crawford.

This means that our insight-focused and innovative culture built up over the last decade will still remain. There’ll be no changes to the team structure, day-to-day running of the company or the office locations.

Put simply, this exciting move gives us an extra push towards our vision; to be the ‘go-to’ agency for Fortune 500 companies.

Plus, we’re in great company; St Ives Group owns an impressive portfolio of marketing companies, and so the acquisition generates a lot of opportunities for Branded3 to collaborate with some truly forward-thinking businesses.

One man whose excitement resonates through the entire team is Branded3 CEO Vin Chinnaraja, who had this to say:

“I am really proud of my team and what they have helped Patrick and me to achieve.  The success of Branded3 is really a credit to them. 

“We are focused on being the best and doing the best for our clients and the support of St Ives will strengthen our mission here for both existing and new clients.”

Patrick Altoft shares Vin’s delight and commented:

“This exciting move means that we can continue to grow and expand both in the UK and internationally, whilst still retaining our known and well-respected reputation in the industry.

“Reaching this major milestone is testament to what our team has achieved, and we can’t wait to see what the future brings for our agency.”

So today is a significant day for Branded3 and all those working for it, as we move another step closer to world domination reaching our vision. We hope you’ll join us in celebrating this day and continue to support Branded3 as we approach an exciting future.

Two squads of 22 players – the armed forces Tri Services team and Scotty’s team – will be taking to the home ground of Premiership rugby team, Leicester Tigers, on Friday 31^st May to battle it out on the pitch until the next day; and Branded3 will be right behind them!

The event is being held to raise money for the charity Scotty’s Little Soldiers, which was set up by armed forces widow Nikki Scott, who tragically lost her husband and father to her two children, Cpl Lee Scott as he toured Afghanistan.

The charity is dedicated to supporting the spouses and children of men and women killed in action whilst serving in the British Armed Forces. At just £5 a ticket, the money raised from this event will go towards growing the charity and providing on-going support for families of the fallen.

In an event which will amount to 19 back-to-back full rugby union games, the stadium on Welford Road will play host to a whole variety of activities for adults and children, including face-painting, magicians, and a spectacular display from The British Army’s Red Devil skydiving team before the rugby marathon kicks off.

Branded3 is sponsoring the event and members of the team will be in attendance to live blog throughout the day and provide updates on the 25-hour game via Twitter and Facebook.

Always up for a challenge, we too will be staying up the full 25 hours to live blog and tweet throughout the game.

Not only will we need a few cups of coffee to keep us going (ok, make that 50) but we’d love everyone at the game to get involved in the tweeting by using the hashtag #ScottysRugby, and showing your support for the teams and the charity.

If you live in the area, you can also catch coverage of the day on ITV Central News.

If you can’t make the game, why not try going the whole hog and staying up 25 hours with us? You can follow all the action live on the blog here, and you can donate to the charity here. Wish us luck!

The tweet was subsequently deleted but some clever social brain over at the main Sky News account followed it up with this retort:

Panic over. We’ve found #Colin. All is well. Normal service has resumed over on @skynewsbreak — Sky News (@SkyNews) May 14, 2013

  Since then, Twitter has been a flutter with Colin related banter, this being reflected in the trending topics section:

In a shrewd social move Sky News has created a Colin related account  which plays along with the sudden, and sure to be fleeting, fame of the infamous ‘Colin’ yet simultaneously distances them from the antics.

The account already has 175 followers at the time of writing but has only two tweets. The first is the original ‘Colin was here’ and the second quoted simply ‘Ed Balls’ in reference to the on-going Twitter joke and has been subsequently retweeted by the politician:

RT @skynewscolin: Ed Balls — Ed Balls (@edballsmp) May 14, 2013

There have also been other parody accounts created as a result of the sensation. Keen marketers including M&S, Xbox UK, Ladbrokes, B&Q the charity Unicef have jumped on the hashjack bandwagon with their own messages:

We’ve found him! #Colin (the Caterpillar) is here. twitter.com/marksandspence… — M&S (@marksandspencer) May 14, 2013

See you later #Colin. twitter.com/xboxuk/status/… — Xbox UK (@xboxuk) May 14, 2013

Rumour has it Colin has been approached by BT Sport to present a range of programming after his meteoric rise. #Colin — Ladbrokes (@Ladbrokes) May 14, 2013

Colin’s not here. But he may be hiding in one of our fantastic range of sheds! bq.co.uk/10UUxHr #colin — B&Q (@BandQ) May 14, 2013

#Colin definitely was here… bit.ly/16wJIDP #ColinWasHere @colinjackson — UNICEF UK (@UNICEF_uk) May 14, 2013

And then the usual celebrity suspects joined in too:

You beat me there by ten minutes, Colin twitter.com/tomscott/statu… #colinwashere — Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) May 14, 2013

Although the true identity of today’s Twitter hero is still a mystery, Sky News Press Office have released two statements:

The second (below) is their final word so far. The term ‘disaster recovery test’ is fairly ambiguous though, does this mean they have tests in place for social media recovery? And if so, is the Sky News disaster code word Colin? Or is it more likely that they have no idea what happened and are eager to keep their board member’s and client’s minds at ease?