Pinterest Blocking Links, Google Warnings, Rebuilding Digg, Speedlink 29:2012

Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great week. Last week, it was announced that Digg was acquired by Betaworks for $500K. As expected, the “sphere” reacted saying that the amount was low, despite the network loosing its traction. This week, further clarification has been made and as it so seems, the $500K that Betaworks paid for Digg was only for the domain name and copyrights. Digg as you know it is actually being dismantled and the new owners are promising a completely new Digg come August 1. Don’t know about you, but I am very curious to see what’s coming. BTW, they are also asking you to help them “rethink Digg”, by completing a short survey form.

Other noteworthy news include Google buying the popular email app Sparrow, and some webmasters yet again receiving link warnings from GWT this week. This time though, it appears that you can safely ignore these warnings. Go figure!

On a side note, Pinterest, in its effort to fight spam is not making it easy for marketers to use the network for affiliate marketing. So if you are using Amazon links, URL shorteners, or some sort of URL builders, you may want to rethink your strategy. Better link to a landing page instead.

Finally, and as this whole “linking” stuff finds its sanity, you should know that asking for “link removals” can cost you money. Yeah, insane, but there appears to be some directories that are charging money to have links removed. If this pans out, maybe I’ll build my own “spammy” dierctory, include links from everyone and charge some few bucks to have links removed, just kidding, lol. Anyway, if for some reason, you face the need to go that route (request link removal), you can always try other measures first.

As usual, in no particular order:

Content Marketing/Online Business Bites

Search/Marketing

Social Web/Other Cool Stuff

Around the Web [more roundups]

Using Webmaster Tools like an SEO

Learn how to use Webmaster Tools as if you were the SEO for www.googlestore.com. Maile Ohye will show you how to utilize Search queries, reduce duplicate content, and maximize PageRank and other ranking signals to your important pages.

That’s it! Enjoy and have a great weekend.

DiTesco

DiTesco is a Business and Inbound Marketing Consultant, and founder of iBlogzone.com. iBlogzone's main objective is to help startups and small business owners achieve success in their online ventures. | More About Me and my Digital Marketing Services in SP Brazil.

11 thoughts on “Pinterest Blocking Links, Google Warnings, Rebuilding Digg, Speedlink 29:2012

  • Hi Tesco,
    Another great post that I need to bookmark for future reference. Awesome post..Here is some great information.

    Ya you are right on this that pinterest is the efforts of which marketers to use the network for affiliate marketing.Again with new and more infoful contents.

  • I used to love Digg (apart from the auto-bury feature) and would spend hours on it daily. There was no better place to discover and consume my endless thirst for news and entertainment. Then came the bans and all the changes and the exodus.

    Would I go back? I don’t know, they’re going to need to dazzle me.

  • Love your link removal biz idea; accept me as a biz partner for that matter lol. Seriously I guess anyone can do it 🙂

    Links turn out to be a problem recently. No matter how carefully we build them, there’s always something that could be caught. Wish the good ol’ times are back.

    • Hi Jane. Its a done deal. If I ever do move forward with the “biz”, you will definitely be my “partner” in arms 🙂 Seriously, It would be nice if we can come up with an idea together. That would be a blast 🙂 Thanks for stopping by..

  • Hey Francisco,

    Personally I think link removal is a huge waste of time. The web is full of low quality links. In fact, most links are low quality. The amount of time it would take to ask for the removal of thousands or even just hundreds of links is totally ridiculous. There are so many better alternatives if people feel like low quality links are influencing their ranking in Google.

    Not to mention that it’s virtually impossible to track down all the links pointing to your websites. None of the backlink programs out there show all of them.

    As for Pinterest, I figured it was only a matter of time before they started cracking down on affiliate marketers. I think the time will come when this happens on You Tube as well because I see a lot of people posting worthless 10 second videos that can’t be classified as anything but “video spam” in my opinion. That and posting the same video 100’s of times but just using different keywords for the descriptions.

    • Hi Derek. I agree with you. I actually had a client who wanted to know if I recommend him to request for link removals. I told him that it might just be a waste of effort and rather than worrying about those low quality links (which some times is inevitable), better focus on providing great content, guest post on authority blogs, and improve the link profile to “eliminate” the problem 😉

      As for YouTube, I hear you. I do hope they do some clean up there soon. Its not only full of SPAM and worthless video, but also quite a lot of “adult” related videos, That initially I thought was not even possible… My kids were the one who told me about it, and as you would imagine, I got concerned..

  • Hi DiTesco,
    IMHO prize of Digg was also very small, but you know – world is changing. The same thing was with one search engine before Google (I don’t remeber which one) – the prize was estimated ~500M$ ad it was sold some years later for some hundreds of thousands of dollars…
    Thanks for sharing,
    Chris

  • Hi DeTesco,

    Don’t know how I missed the headlines on Pinterest blocking certain links, but thanks for the recap. It’s important for any marketer and webmasters alike to stay up to date with the correct new and trends for one to make informed decisions.

  • I was surprised by the real market value of Digg. About several years ago Google offered a couple hundred millions dollar for the social network. The online environment it’s changing fast, therefore companies should act very quickly.

  • Hi Tesco,
    I love digg but after stumbleupon and your information is really interesting for me. Now, I am also waiting for 1st August to check that what we will find new in digg. Hope these changes give a lot of benefits and interests to its users.

  • That indeed is a bad news for Digg lovers, and they can only wait to be impressed by the all new Digg. However, sometimes I guess blocking links is necessary to stop endless irrelevant and poor quality back-linking that becomes annoying at times. On that note Pinterest would get a thumbs-up from me. Although, blocking amazon links might be a bad deal for some marketers for sure.

    Good information there.

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