Weekly Marketing Skinny: April 27, 2013

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get the skinny on marketing events of past week In the spotlight this week:

W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache vulnerability;
User-generated content (blog comments) causes Google manual penalty;
Twitter woes;
Scam alerts;
Government sensors Google;
Tax-free online shopping no more;
and more.

Let’s start with Traffic Generation Café recap.

At TrafficGenerationCafe.com

SEO was in spotlight last week at Traffic Generation Café.

orange check First up is an incredible post from Alex Whalley:

Steal Your SEO Competition’s #1 Google Rank – A Guide to Reverse Engineering

Alex explains step-by-step how to find out why your competitors are ranking above you and what you can do to change that by reverse engineering their backlinks – all using free tools.

orange check On page SEO plugins: what are they? What do they do? Do you need one?

On Page SEO Plugin Domination: The Battle of the Best

I also had too much time on my hands (as if…), so I put together an on page SEO cheat sheet to give you no excuses not to do it:

Loved it? Embed this presentation on your blog

(just copy and paste the code below – and make sure to let me know where you embedded it in the comments; I’ll come by to say Hello)

WordPress

Plugin Vulnerability Alert

orange check Sucuri announced vulnerabilities in the extremely popular W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache plugins, in which a hacker can execute code on your site without requiring direct access to the backend.

If you use either plugin you should…

check that you site hasn’t been compromised and
upgrade your plugins immediately.

The check is really simple — just enter the following into the comments form on one of your blog posts:

If, after the comment was submitted, you see a version number (e.g. 5.2.17) in place of the above code, your site has been compromised.

Either way, UPGRADE your plugins now!

(hat tip – Tom Ewer at MaganeWP.com)

Google+ Comments

orange check In the last marketing skinny, I mentioned that Blogger blogs could now incorporate Google+ comments.

Sure enough, turned out WP blogs can now do that as well.

Here’s an excellent post from Kim Castleberry with all directions on how to do it you’d need:

How To Add Google+ Comments To WordPress Easily

Will I add Google+ comments at Traffic Generation Café? I am considering it. You?

SEO News

Mozilla Penalty

orange check Mozilla.org, the non-profit organization behind Firefox, Thunderbird, and many other developer oriented tools, was penalized by Google.

The penalty was a “manual penalty” due to extremely spammy user generated content. (see forum thread here)

As in spam blog comments and addons sections, among others.

A few days ago, I received an email from a reader:

I started my Technology blog a few months ago (blog.pablooliverabrizzio.com). Recently I started to see a boom in visits. The comments are great or at least very positive about the design and content.

The problem is that I have noticed most of the people posting, if you click on their names or website promote creams, or mattresses or similar stuff. It’s evident that they haven’t read the articles and that the only goal is to get exposure.

I’m having a hard time on filtering who to send to spam and who to leave there.

My response was:

I know it takes guts to delete those kinds of comment, Pablo, when you are just starting – after all, a comment is a comment, right?

However, my advice is to not publish them.

If legitimate readers see you publishing junk comments, it might turn them away and harm your site in the long run.

And now I can add Google penalty to the reasons of why you shouldn’t publish spam comments – ever, as tempting as it could be for a brand new blog.

You can’t let others come to your house, make a mess of it, and not have to clean it up at some point.

I had to do that kind of clean-up a while ago and it wasn’t fun:

Why I Deleted 7,000 Comments

Now, as it turned out, the penalty affected only one page out of some 22Mil pages on Mozilla website.

Matt Cutts wrote:

In this particular case, it was the url http://blog.mozilla.org/respindola/about/ that we took action on, and that was because it was so defaced with spam comments. I checked the URL this morning and it was over 12 megabytes (!) of spam from 21,169 different comments. When a page like that lands in our search results, it’s the sort of thing that users complain to us about, so we are willing to take action.

Nonetheless, the mere possibility of getting penalized for publishing unscrupulous comments should definitely give us, bloggers, even more incentive to do what we should be doing all along: growing a health community of engaged readers and not publishing comments for the sake of social proof.

Social Media News

Twitter

orange check Twitter definitely needs two-factor authentication; the kind of authentication Google has implemented back in 2011.

The fake tweet from the hacked Associated Press Twitter account just might give them the kick in the rear they need.

And surprisingly, the hacker’s account is still alive and kicking (at least as of the writing of this post).

They’ve suspended my Twitter accounts for doing a LOT less in the past (like… actually tweeting posts from other bloggers), and they can’t do anything about this one?

Boo!

Facebook

orange check Facebook Home had crossed the 500,000 download threshold on Google Play. Pretty stellar numbers, I’d say.

What’s no so stellar are Facebook Home reviews.

orange check Altoona, Iowa, will soon become the home for Facebook’s newest data center.

They plan to break ground this summer and expect to begin serving user traffic in 2014.

orange check Pinterest listened to the users’ feedback and actually did something about it: reverted back to some original features that were missed.

The features include:

See it now;
Repinned from;
@Mentions;
Find friends.

Scam Alert

Rippln Investigation

orange check I am sure you’ve gotten an email or two or ten about RippIn by now.

It goes something like this:

I’ve been working behind the scenes on a new viral app that’s about to launch, and I thought that you might be interested.

I just signed an NDA to get more info, and was given the ability to invite just 5 people, and I thought that you’d be a perfect fit.

Yep, it is exactly what it sounds like – something to avoid like a plague.

Kim Castleberry just published a post with more information about RippIn with videos from Chris Voss.

You can also read some hilarious (and very true) bullet points on this “opportunity of a lifetime” on TechCrunch.

And who calls a startup “RippIn” anyway? It’s a ripoff and they are not even hiding it?

And, more importantly, how would anyone fall for it?

Reminds me of another “startup” so many folks did dish out a pretty penny to be a part of.

Empower Network

orange check If you haven’t read my Empower Network review, read it.

If you want a second opinion, read the awesome rant my friend Alex Whalley just published:

I’ll Never be an Internet ‘Guru’ Because I Never Lived in a Van

(excuse his language, he doesn’t know any better, lol)

Government

Governments Censor Google (and us)

orange check Even though I try to stay out of this kind of news, I found this very interesting.

Google just published their new Transparency Report that shine some light on the scale and scope of government requests for censorship and data around the globe.

From July to December 2012, Google received 2,285 government requests to remove 24,179 pieces of content—an increase from the 1,811 requests to remove 18,070 pieces of content that they received during the first half of 2012.

As we’ve gathered and released more data over time, it’s become increasingly clear that the scope of government attempts to censor content on Google services has grown.

In more places than ever, we’ve been asked by governments to remove political content that people post on our services.

In this particular time period, we received court orders in several countries to remove blog posts criticizing government officials or their associates.

CISPA Passes House Over Objections

orange check Supporters of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act say it is needed to protect U.S. citizens and companies from computer attacks.

However, opponents including small business owners, worry it lacks any protections on the government’s use of our private data.

Update 4/28: Senate says no… for now

Tax-Free No More

Soon enough we’ll be paying taxes for all online shopping.

The bill, called the Marketplace Fairness Act, would allow states to require online sellers around the country to collect sales tax for them on purchases made by their residents.

A final Senate vote is scheduled for May 6. (full story in Wall Street Journal)

Marketing this and that

Eric Schmidt’s New Book

orange check Google Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt with co-author and foreign policy expert Jared Cohen, have just released their new book The New Digital Age.

Yahoo!

orange check Yahoo! is retiring several products.

Upcoming,
Yahoo! Kids,
Yahoo! Deals.
Yahoo! SMS Alerts
Yahoo! Mail and Messenger feature phone (J2ME) apps

Older versions of Yahoo Mail will be disabled as well on June 3.

Those of you using the older versions of Yahoo! Mail can switch to the new Yahoo! Mail.

Inforgraphics

orange check Love infographics?

Have aspirations to make your own, but have no idea how to approach it?

Here’s a simple guide from HubSpot on how to use PowerPoint to make infographics (hat tip for the link to Tasia Gonsalves-Barriero):

The Marketer’s Simple Guide to Creating Infographics in PowerPoint [Template]

Inbound Marketing Video

orange check Here’s a great way to give your next video a creative spin (from HubSpot):

Can’t sing? Even better.

More people are likely to watch an epic fail. It’s true.

Thank You

To all of you who mentioned Traffic Generation Café in any share or form in the past week, my whole-hearted THANK YOU.

Traffic Generation Café would NOT be what it is today without you.

Here are just some of the mentions I came across in the past week:

orange check Expert Chat: Ti Roberts Shows Us How to Get More Blog Traffic – Ti Roberts in her interview with Joseph Adediji at bloggingtipstoday.com