“Penguins are so sensitive/To My Needs”
If you’re a Lyle Lovett fan, you probably know what I’m talking about. If you’re not, this should explain my otherwise unusual outburst. It’s surprisingly appropriate to this week’s Penguin update – the fourth major update (arguably the 25th overall) of the major Google algorithm that’s targeting spammy links. This update has mainly affected Adult and gambling sites, or websites that have blatantly disregarded Matt Cutt’s advice over the years. Although it’s going to affect 2.5% of English sites (which seems like a lot), it actually shouldn’t cause your site any penalties if you’ve been paying attention to current Google Values.
Current Google Values can be explained very simply – the overall confusion often comes from the fact it is constantly evolving, and people sometimes work off antiquated information (ironically, one of the issues Google will no longer value).
| What Google Values Now | What Google does not value anymore |
|---|---|
| Quality Content (ie. Something a reader actually needs) | Links! Links everywhere! |
| Natural links placed organically | Keyword stuffing |
| New and relevant content | Canned or poorly developed content |
| Authorship |
Online vs. In-Person Training & Workshops
K’necht Delivers: Parenting & Social Media
I’ve been teaching people of all ages for over 30 years one subject or another. My early days as a technology instructor started by running software classes (Lotus, WordPrefect, desktop publishing) in the late 80s. Since then I’ve taught everything from web development, to SEO, web analytics and Social Media Marketing. My training background evolved to where I’m now an on-line instructor for the University of San Francisco’s Online Internet Marketing program and head up the USF Advanced Digital Analytics course.
With this experience I’ve had countless opportunities to teach and run workshops both online and in-person. When deciding if on-line workshops class are better for you or organization versus in-person training there are a few things to consider before making your decision.
Step 1: Which Types of Corporate Training are Right for Your Organization
Measuring the Success of a Well Posted Presentation
The evolution of the digital marketing sector has been propelled by free information.
Digital Always Media partner Alan K’necht uploaded his April Pubcon presentation, “Measuring Success: Up the Down Escalator” to SlideShare last Tuesday.
The DAM team started promoting the presentation through social media applications minutes after Alan’s slide-deck was posted. A bunch of our friends in the industry shared, retweeted, blogged about, or otherwise noted it in their blog posts. 
It quickly became a top SlideShare download. It was then featured on SlideShare’s Facebook page and LinkedIn feed. That’s a long way for a quickly posted and promoted presentation to go in a few days.
Here’s a copy of Alan’s presentation. He is always available to deliver it in person.
May 13
9
Gearing Up But Dumbing Down
On May 2, a patent was filed with the USPTO for a smart-watch that will potentially include touch-pads, a screen, processor, wireless transceiver and communication abilities. The way it’s wired would essentially allow it to serve as a secondary body computer to Google Glass, or possibly compliment other Google products. While not a guarantee that the smart-watch will come to market, it’s in line with staying competitive with Apple, who are apparently developing an iOS-based watch device of their own.
SEO Google Plus Hangout – Integrated SEO in 2013
Featuring: Dave Davies, David Harry, Jim Hedger, Michelle Stintson Ross, and Dan Theis
Next Thursday, May 16 at 3:30pm, we’re going to do our first open Google Plus Hangout session on the new roles played by search engine optimization specialists in the digital marketing environment. Social media communities and rapid adoption and innovation of smart phones and tablets have fundamentally changed the search environment. Today’s SEO is far different from what was standard technique five years ago.
This G+SEO Hangout will put five search and social media marketers together to discuss how SEOs work and focus have changed in 2013.
Putting this session together has required a large team. Debbie Horovitch of The Sparkle Agency will be producing the Google Plus Hangout. David Harry of Verve Developments is doing all pre and post production video work.
May 13
6
Link Values Simplified
Earlier I read a piece on Google, press releases and link values in SearchEngineLand. The article notes an experiment conducted by Daniel Tan, founder of WordPress SEO evaluation plug-in SEOPressor. Tan set out to disprove a Christmas Day comment made by Google Quality Control Czar, Matt Cutts to a Google Forum discussion of press releases.
Cutts wrote “I wouldn’t expect links from press release web sites to benefit your rankings…”, in response to a vague question about the pagerank value of a link in a press release. It was a one-off sentence that apparently had greater implications than it should have. I expect Cutts was really saying, “Don’t waste your time and money on bogus press releases to gain stronger Google rankings”.
For the most part, that’s good advice. People have spammed search results using press releases for years. The Penguin updates were designed to destroy poor quality links and degrade the ranking of pages profiting from them.
As the tragedy at the Boston marathon unfolded, everyone who knew competitors in the race wanted to know the same things. Are my loved ones safe? How do I get in touch with them? Where are they? There are always more questions than answers as a tragedy takes place. As time goes on, these questions pose huge problems for both those concerned and authorities trying to communicate with the public. Addressing these questions is a prime example of how technology influences the way we deal with tragedy. Through the mobile network, smart phone technologies and social media platforms society has begun to shift how we source news and cope during extreme events. We’re no longer content to have information delivered to us. Instead we’re becoming the news source and using technology as a means to affect positive change more quickly and effectively than before.
May 13
1
HashTag Attacks (HashTagBombs)
HashTag Attacks (HashTagBombs) – Simply Bad Marketing
Recently the weekly Twitter-Chat I co-host, #SocialChat, started trending on Twitter. While this made myself and co-host Michelle Stinson-Ross happy, we were surprised by one of the consequences.
We knew #SocialChat had become very popular when various people started leveraging the #SocialChat HashTag to reach our audience with regular tweets and not just during our weekly chat. This initially caught us us by surprise but we quickly realized it was a good thing.
Jawed Karim and two other former PayPal employees named Chad Hurley and Steve Chen opened their new streaming video service YouTube for beta testing in May 2005. They spent the next six months bootstrapping their company as it grew by millions of new videos per day. In November 2005, Sequoia Capital invested $11.5 million. A year later, Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion. That chain of events started eight years ago this week.
On April 23, 2005 the soon-to-be multimillionaire Karim uploaded the very first YouTube video titled, Me at the zoo. In it, he describes how cool it is that San Diego Zoo elephants have really, really, really long trunks. And that’s pretty much all there is to say…
.. except to note that Karim’s dumb video of himself appreciating the elephants is as significant as the first moving picture itself, 1888′s Roundhay Garden Scene. Interestingly, Me at the zoo is weirdly banal, just as the three second Roundhay film is however both are the first of things that absolutely changed the world.
Today, YouTube is the third most visited website after Google and Facebook. It serves over 4 billion videos each day and is among the premier platforms of digital communication. Eight years ago it was three ex-PayPal employees and footage of a pack of packin’ pachyderms.
It has been a tragic, difficult week. Two major back to back incidents in the United States put the world on edge. Many were slammed back to the darkest days following 9/11 with feelings of fear, anger, sadness and confusion playing on our minds. It has been hard to avoid glancing at news websites to catch the latest updates. We’re worried and wired and looking for hopeful signs in a series of very real crises.
Given those circumstances, try to imagine how Twitter and Facebook users might have felt seeing preset social media promotions regarding the Boston Marathon in the hours after the bombings.
That nobody expected the Boston Marathon to become a national tragedy when they pre-set their social media messages the Friday before made little difference, it was still insulting to see Tweets and emails from Foursquare to users who had checked in leading to a page asking how the Boston Marathon was for them.
This was a clever preset promotion, something any company like Foursquare would do, until circumstances around the event in their promotion went so horribly bad. In seconds, the clever preset promotion became a thing that could cause sorrow, anger and long term damage to a user’s trust in the Foursquare brand.
DAM Speakers Speaking:
Hear Alan and Jim speak at
Search Engine Strategies Toronto, June 12 - 14, 2013Catch Us On Radio:
Check Past Episodes in the WebmasterRadio.FM archives.
Download a Chapter
Get a free chapter from Alan K'necht's "The Last Original Idea"
The Last Original Idea actually is an original idea - highly unusual in a world where "recycle" is the order of the day.
It takes a light hearted look at the state of Internet marketing today and traces back each of the elements to its historical roots, clearly demonstrating that companies who understood the mistakes of the past were able to be profitable in the present. Others are a mere memory, lost in cyber-space.