In the spotlight this week:
- Penguin 4 (what else!);
- Triberr;
- Tumblr;
- Flickr;
- Speak to Chrome or forever hold your peace.
Let’s start with the news from Traffic Generation Café.
At TrafficGenerationCafe.com
Triberr: Your Step by Step Guide to Being Heard
Triberr sends over 2 Million visits to its member blogs every month.
And these are not big blogs either.
Triberr is built for small bloggers and small blogs, which is more or less 99% of blogs in the blogosphere – blogs that previously got little or no website traffic.
Unfortunately, most small bloggers still have no idea on how to take advantage of this power of influence and reach.
My post explains step by step how to set up your Triberr profile, find tribes to join, and different ways to use Triberr above and beyond social media networking.
A must-read for anyone looking to build social media reach.
Can Triberr Get You More Web Traffic [Or Is Traffic a False God]?
When I think of any [new] way to build my business, it always comes down to “how much targeted, engaged traffic can it bring to Traffic Generation Café?”
That’s my more or less measurable way to evaluate its effectiveness.
In my mind, everything we do online has one ultimate goal: get more eyes (i.e. more web traffic) to see what we have to offer.
Dino disagrees.
He says “traffic is a false god“.
As you can imagine, this difference of opinions turned into a very interesting discussion.
SEO
The big talk of the week is, of course, Google’s latest major update: Penguin 4 (you’ll also hear Penguin 2.o in conjunction with it).
Penguin 4? Penguin 2.0?
Each release of Penguin is numbered in sequential order, so it’s easy to know when one happened. The list so far:
- Penguin 1 on April 24, 2012 (impacting ~3.1% of queries)
- Penguin 2 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)
- Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012 (impacting ~0.3% of queries)
- Penguin 4 on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)
But after the first release, the second and third still were data refreshes of the same basic Penguin algorithm with only minor changes.
This fourth release is a major change, so big that Google has referred to it as Penguin 2.0 internally.
Who are the top losers from the Penguin 2.0 update?
The SEO software company, SearchMetrics, has shared its SEO Visibility stats, which show what sites have been affected the most by the latest Penguin update.
In his blog post, SearchMetrics founder Marcus Tober says the impact from this latest Penguin update is smaller than he expected.
It’s not the update I was expecting. I thought that this Google Penguin update would have had a bigger impact similar to Panda 1. But that didn’t happen. My first analysis shows that many thin sites, sites with thin links and especially untrusted links face the problem. In addition, some small business sites were hit because they haven’t taken SEO serious enough.
Social Media
Google+: Game Over
Google+ users who enjoy social gaming will soon have to look elsewhere as Google+ games is being shut down.
After June 30th, Google+ Games will be officially retired as Google will move forward with one united front, the Google Play Game Services platform.
Instagram Panic
Instagram users of the world can relax again.
It’s unclear how it happened, but apparently, some on Instagram were living in fear the service was about to delete their accounts, if they weren’t posting or are using Instagram directly to take pictures.
That’s not the case, though some people may have had accounts deleted for other reasons, like a term of service violation.
Flickr Update
Yahoo! announced a relaunch of a “better, brighter Flickr” at a press conference in New York City.
All photos are now full resolution and each user will have a free terabyte of storage space (this will give users 70 times more storage space than any other service currently offers.)
Before today, Flickr Pro accounts ran about $25 per year and included several benefits that Free accounts didn’t have like unlimited photo and video uploads, unlimited storage, etc.
So what now?
Starting today, Flickr is offering Free and Ad-Free accounts. The ad-free account is now $50 per year (double the old Pro price), and the only benefit it offers is the ad-free experience. All other benefits of paying to use Flickr are gone.
Since no one in their right mind would pay Flickr $50 a month not to see ads, it simply means more ad revenue for Yahoo!.
WordPress
WordPress turns 10 and is planning to celebrate with WordPress 3.6 release on May 27th.
Marketing This and That
Yahoo! Will Buy Tumblr
On Monday, Yahoo announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire the massively popular social blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion.
Like most major Internet acquisitions, the move has proven controversial.
According to Matt Mullenweg, WordPress creator:
Imports [from Tumblr to WordPress] have actually spiked on the rumors even though it’s Sunday: normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000.
He also noted in the comment section on that post that…
I don’t think there will be any sort of exodus from Tumblr. For most folks habits overcome internet-outrage. Even if a million people left, that’s just about a week’s worth of signups.
Wouldn’t be the first time we scream “the sky is a-falling!” and not the last one either…
Why would Yahoo! have a $1Bil interest in Tumblr?
- Let’s Talk About Why Yahoo Really Bought Tumblr: Native Advertising
Combine that with their new Flickr business plan and Yahoo! will be raking ad revenue like they’ve never been before.
Google Chrome “Conversational Search”
Typing is out, speaking is in: The “conversational search” that Google demonstrated at last week’s Google I/O conference is now available to users of its Chrome browser.
All jokes aside though, this is pretty incredible.
Check out SearchEngineLand.com’s Google’s Impressive “Conversational Search” Goes Live On Chrome to see what the new search feature can do. Impressive!
Yelp
Have you heard the rumors that Yelp was manipulating their reviews favoring those businesses who opted for paid advertisement?
Here’s what Yelp is saying in No, Yelp Doesn’t “Extort” Small Businesses. See For Yourself.
Some news outlets have recently run stories or columns re-hashing the sensational allegation that Yelp manipulates reviews and ratings to reward advertisers or punish non-advertisers. Let me be clear: This claim is not — and has never been — true.
…..
So why does this misbelief exist? Ironically, it stems from Yelp’s efforts to protect consumers from those who are constantly trying to game the system. Yelp uses automated software to showcase the most helpful and reliable reviews from among the millions submitted. Those that don’t make the grade — about 20 percent — are posted to a separate “Filtered Review” page. So, in trying to prevent unethical wrongdoing on Yelp, Yelp gets accused of the same.
“The Internship”: Feel-Good Movie about Google
“The Internship” — starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn and filmed in part on the actual Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. — comes out June 7.
Personally, I love the Wilson/Vaughn duet, plus I am naturally curious about Google.
If you are as well, here’s a good interview with “The Internship” director, Shawn Levy.
I got a chance to see a screening of the movie, and my quick take is that it’s a two-hour commercial for Google. But it’s also actually funny, so it’s an even more effective commercial.
~Liz Gannes, All Things D
Memorial Day
Memorial Day is a day to express our gratitude to all those brave hearts who laid down their lives to safeguard our nation.
My husband Marty in Normandy, France
“This weekend I am going to do something different.
I am going to buy some carnations each day and go to one of the nearby cemetaries and walk through the sections for soldiers. When I find a grave that has no flowers, I’ll leave one and say a prayer for the family of that person, who for some reason could not bring their soldier flowers.
I will pray for our country and all who serve or have served. For their families, who also serve by losing precious days, weeks and months spent with their loved ones who are off serving, preserving peace and the freedom we have in this country.
I’ll pray for the families who paid the ultimate price, who’s loved ones died, or were taken captive and never returned. I’ll pray for anyone who may still be held in captivity and thinks perhaps they are forgotten. I do NOT forget.
I’ll say a prayer for every person on the Internet who takes a moment from their time to come to sites like yours and be reminded of what this holiday really means. And I’ll say a prayer of thanks and ask God’s richest blessings on you.
Thank you again…. and God bless!”
~Sylvia Mohr, source
We do NOT forget.
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:
Case Study – How To Improve By 50% Resulting In Win-Win-Win When Launching A Product - Ruan Oosthuizen in his guest post at Jane Sheeba’s probloggingsuccess.com
Social Media Bonanza, Top SEO Forums, List Of Google Products, Speedlink 20:2013 – Francisco Perez at iblogzone.com
Blog Comments Count: Does it Equates to Traffic? – Theodore Nwangene at topbloggingcoach.com
12 secrets for email list building – Iain Robson at marketingyourfarm.com
How to Make Yourself a Marketing Einstein - Kurt Frankenberg at shoestring101.com
Use Triberr to Expand Your Online Reach – Stacy Claflin at growwithstacy.com
SEO content marketing roundup, week ending May 22nd – Laura Crest at seocopywriting.com
The social dead - Giovanni Tiso at bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com
This one is a very interesting for me.
The core of the post goes towards reciprocity in engagement; social media in particular.
He writes:
Every day most regular people are involved in another kind of traffic: a smaller, distributed version of the celebrity social media theater. In this play we are but numbers on a ledger. People whose main quality is to be better at pretending to be human than most software routines.
Then he gives Ana Hoffman as an example of someone pretending to be human for the sake of gaining more Twitter followers.
Hence the abundance of frank and unsentimental advice on how to fool other people into thinking that you are interested in them; advice that purports to help you to drive traffic to your blog, or increase your reputation as an influencer.
It’s an interesting discussion: quality vs quantity of Twitter followers. The kind of discussion that’s been going on and will continue to go on for as long as social media is based on a friend/follower acquisition.
Sounds like Giovanni doesn’t know much about me and my social media philosophy:
Truth is I believe that the more followers I have, the more opportunities I’ll have to “invite” them to my blog, where the REAL networking starts.
~ Quoted from NICK CARDOT VS ANA HOFFMAN TWITTER FACEOFF guest post at SiteSketch101.com
Those of you who’ve been around Traffic Generation Café for any length of time know exactly what I am talking.
My BLOG is my reader engagement hub. Not any third-party platform that can be shut down or bought out at any given time.
I bet you have an opinion on this one. Would love to hear about it in comments.
What’s your Excuse for NOT Writing your Posts? – Servando Silva at stream-seo.com
Have I missed your mention? Let me know in the comments!
Want to see your name here? Mention Traffic Generation Café in your next blog post!
To an even better next week,
