Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great and productive week. There has been a lot of things going on in the SEO sphere lately and right about now (or maybe even before), I think that we can all agree that SEO has indeed a new face. Although there are many changes in SEO best practices, links (inbound and outbound) are still a major game changer (done properly of course).
As you all know, the Penguin updates focuses primarily to weed out sites with poor or bad link profiles, and for those of you who have received “warnings” from Google’s webmaster tools about “unnatural links” (or similar), you may be happy to know that finally, they will start to provide you with “real and actionable” examples of the bad links they are talking about. Here’s Matt’s recent video…
Don’t know about you, but I really welcome this new coming addition. Do you think that this information that Google will provide, helpful at all?
On a different front, Facebook announced this week that they will be finally supporting the use of hashtags. Coincidentally, not so long ago, I posted an article about “How To Use #Hashtags To Extend Your Reach“, and on that post, Facebook was not included. Seems, that needs to be fixed, lol. Anyway, here’s an excerpt of the official announcement:
“Starting today, hashtags will be clickable on Facebook. Similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest, hashtags on Facebook allow you to add context to a post or indicate that it is part of a larger discussion. When you click on a hashtag in Facebook, you’ll see a feed of what other people and Pages are saying about that event or topic.”
Btw, what do you think about making use of #hashtags? Do you find them helpful at all? I do know that some think that it is just another form of increasing SPAM.
Finally, I believe that we all need a break every once in a while. Who say’s SEO can’t be fun? Koozai.com posted an article about “The Best SEO & PPC Jokes“. Some are quite funny while others, well, so so.. Anyway check it out, then come back here and add more jokes in the comment section if you can think of a funny one.
As usual, in no particular order:
Inbound Marketing (SEO & related)
- The Advanced Guide To Content Marketing (mind blowing)
- Google’s Cutts Talks Structured Data Beta, Mobile Site Speed Need, Penalty Notices To Get Example Links & More
- 7 Content Writing Secrets Every Blogger Should Know
- Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Changes in rankings of smartphone search results
- Tips On How To Provide Remarkable Content (shameless – me on COC)
Social/Blogging/Small Business Bites
- “Content” Isn’t a Buzzword, It’s the Future of Your Business
- Pinterest Success: Creative Ways to Use Pinterest for Your Business
- Who Really Won The Commenting System War
- How To Increase Blog Traffic In 5 Easy Steps
More Cool Stuff and Other Roundups
- Weekly Marketing Skinny: June 8, 2013
- Marketing Day: June 14, 2013
That’s it! Enjoy and have a great weekend!
image credit: mashable.com
Adrienne
Hey Francisco,
I’m so tired of all these updates but I know they’re necessary because there are so many unethical people still around who are looking for the easy way out and that hurts the rest of us. I understand Google is always doing their best to stay on top of things although some of us innocent people get caught in the crossfires from time to time.
I don’t really use the hashtags myself because I’m normally not searching for what I want on the social sites. I know that I should and am trying to include them more in my tweets. I do feel though that when I have done some searches I have still never found what I was looking for because it’s like the search engines, how can you find relevant information unless you’re digging down much deeper.
Thank you for including my post on the commenting wars. I know from the response I received from my commenters who won but I never really heard a lot from others who use something other then WordPress on why they chose to go that route. I’m still curious.
Thank you for a great share here. Love these types of post because I get to go and read even more good stuff that I missed.
Enjoy your weekend and thanks again.
~Adrienne
Hi Adrienne. I totally relate on you with all these “updates”. They are overwhelming, but like you said, it is a necessary “evil”.
As for the hashtags, I actually was not a fan before, mainly using the #followfriday or #FF. But now, I am using it a bit (with moderation) and as for G+, can’t really do anything about it, because they automate it ๐
BTW, loved your post, but I guess that is already obvious ๐ Keep them coming
Adrienne
You can turn the automation off for the hashtags Francisco. Saul wrote a post taking us through how to do just that. Just FYI!
~Adrienne
That’s good to know. Thanks for the heads up..
Ana Hoffman
Yep, like Traffic Generation Café… What does a girl have to do to keep her rankings?!! ๐
I don’t mind hashtags as long as they are used in moderation. On Twitter you get 140 characters and a lot of people use 4 to 6 hashtags or more. That seems like a little too much to me. On Facebook since you can use more than 140 characters maybe it won’t be so noticeable or annoying.
It’s definitely about time that Google did something for the people instead of just sending them out a letter with no information and then penalizing them for not fixing things. I’ve been lucky so far but you never know right? Should be interesting to see what the first few people who receive the new letters thinks about them.
I totally agree with you Mitch. Like you I am very curious to see what kind of info they will be sending over. Just hoping I won’t have to see any for myself, lol
Martin
I’m old fashioned and consider the # sign to be the symbol for a number. I don’t Tweet or anything remotely like it. You mean to tell me that every post where I’ve ever used this symbol as a number sign will be visible? That’s outrageous.
LOL Martin. If you posted on Twitter the # symbol followed by “anything”, yep that’s pretty much visible ๐ And soon, it will also be like that on FB