Will Google +1s Become the New Backlink?
Last week, I told you about Google’s +1 results showing up in your organic search pages. Called “Search Plus Your World” or SPEW, you have probably seen these results showing up already in some of your searches.
As you may know, I live in Florida, so I just did a quick search for “beaches,” for the heck of it, and look what came up at the bottom of my page:
And look at the number of the listings — 11 and 12. I did other searches for “pizza restaurants” and got a tons of local listings at the top of my page, a few organic listings, and a couple of social listings near the bottom, including one from my old friend Tim Linden, talking about list building and how it relates to pizza. Not at all a pizza restaurant, but you see that these local and SPEW results are starting to dominate in some searches.
So, what’s that mean to your business in search? Read More…
Google Ending Five Services in April
Google has given us a lot — Analytics, Google Talk, Google Maps, and on and on — and all of it is free. This is good for us, and good for the Web.
But sometimes, Google starts projects, figures that a) they don’t work well or b) that they do and not many people are using them, and they get shut down. This is what’s happening in April of 2012:
- Picnik: The amzing free photo editing site is going away. All photos can be downloaded to your desktop in a .zip file. Plus, if you’re a premium member, you no longer have to pay. Your premium fee is being refunded. And, the good news is that premium features are being released to everyone for free. If you haven’t checked out this site, it’s pretty amazing. I’m sorry that it’s going away.
- Google Messaging Continuity (GMC): Unless you’re using Microsoft Exchange in your mega business, this probably won’t affect you. GMC is Read More…
Email Marketing: How to Make Money 24/7
Yeah, I know… That title seems a little spammy. People online promise you that you’ll be a millionaire overnight! Do you have any idea how that infuriates me?
Probably not.
But what those unscrupulous people do is just disillusion folks who want to make money online. They hear all these wild claims and promises, and then expect NOT to do any work and that money will just fall out of the sky for them.
NEVER, EVER, EVER Happens! Ever!
The best way to make money is to settle on a niche that you want to market in, and to build a list of people who are interested in that niche. Then, you sell things regarding that niche to them.
See?
It is simple. BUT, it doesn’t happen overnight, and you do have to do some work. You have to build a squeeze page, to drive traffic to it, and to write emails that will go out 24/7 in a killer follow-up series that teaches the people on your list stuff about your niche. Talk about their problems, offer them a solution for which you have an affiliate relationship, and make money, too.
Email marketing is so step-by-step easy, and so lucrative that anyone who says that list building or email marketing is dead is well… Read More…
Blackout for SOPA/PIPA
Last week, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was given a smackdown, at least for a while. Congress delayed making SOPA law until “outstanding concerns” have been ironed out. In fact, the vote has been taken off the floor. Many folks are happy about this delay, and Darrell Issa (R-CA) has remarked that there has been so much blowback that legislators may want to leave it alone.
But hang on… We still have PIPA (the Protect Intellectual Property Act) to worry about next.
PIPA, twin legislation to SOPA, which covers much of the same ground but in a different way, threatens to change the Internet as we know it. A vote is scheduled for January 24, and if that bill passes, we could be open for censorship the like the Internet has never seen. Our free and open society, built by millions of users could come crashing down in legislation that wants to make sites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr into police squads, monitoring what we put up online. Internet providers will have to shut down sites where they feel illegal file sharing is happening, and hold Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines responsible for disallowing those results in their indexes. Either legislation will limit the open creativity and threaten our First Amendment rights. We can’t let this happen!
To protest SOPA and PIPA, a blackout is scheduled for tomorrow, Wednesday, January 18. Some of the biggest sites online are planning to blackout, too, like Wikipedia, reddit, Mozilla, Boing Boing, and even the Fail Blog of the “Cheezeburger” network. More sites are climbing on the bandwagon as I type.
Matt McGee of Search Engine Land even wrote a post yesterday about blacking out your website, if you want to participate, without screwing up your SEO. Read More…
Google+ Hits the SERPs
So, remember a while back when I told you that you just HAD to be on Google+?
You didn’t listen to me, did you? Well, you dummy! Last week, Google made Google+ part of its search engine results pages (SERPs) with “Google Search Your World,” and if you’re not on Google+ now…
Maybe you’ll start listening. If you did listen, good on you. You’re one smart cookie.
Or are you?
You see, Google has decided that if you’re on Google+, you’re automatically relevant. Amazing. But that’s not the only Google service that Google is pulling results from. They’re also using YouTube and Picassa, and if you logged into your Google account while searching, you’ll be seeing results from your G+ circles in your SERP pages from here on.
Many of the SEO and tech sites online are pissed. They claim that Google is monopolizing its own search results. Life Hacker quickly published How to Turn Off Google’s Annoying New Personal Search Results.
But Matt Cutts disagrees that Google is only pulling in results from their own Web properties. He wrote “Sharing a Search Story” in his blog: “Search plus Your World does surface public content from the open web, not just content from Google+.” He mentions that Quora, FriendFeed, and other properties also appear, not just Google websites.
What should you do? Read More…
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-15 #theSEONewsBlog
- Help Me Re-Invent This Blog http://t.co/egVv1lzD via @markjoyner #
- 10 Creative Ways to Use QR Codes for Marketing:QR codes have been around since the early ’90s, but only wit… http://t.co/qRB1tMb5 #
- Apple Mini-Stores Coming to Target:Target has confirmed that it will be introducing 25 Apple mini-shops wi… http://t.co/KU48nXRE #
- After Labor Criticism, Apple Releases List of Suppliers for First Time:Apple released an extensive list of i… http://t.co/kNNJGxsg #
- Finding Nemo Leads Charge of Classic Pixar Films Turned 3D: Turns out that Disney loves the fishes because they’… http://t.co/AywLXc3h #
- iPad 3 to Have High-Def Screen, LTE Compatibility [REPORT]:Another day, another rumor about the iPad 3.
On F… http://t.co/bETfWJAh # Read More…
