Deconstructing The Google EMD Update

Well, it’s official – no more free lunch for EMD, now that the Google EMD Update has launched. It worked well, for a long time. A whole industry of exact match domain tools and brokers came up. Huge premium prices for good names just went through the roof when it was a real “money keyword.”

For quite a while, it was possible to rank in the TOP3 with literally no backlinks, compared to non EMDs, often after only a few days in literally every niche you can dream of.

Exact Match Domains (AKA Keyword Domains) are, in general, domain names that exactly match the keyword a website wants to compete for. For example, if a website wants to rank for the term [minor weather report], an exact match domain would be [MinorWeatherReport.com].

Foursquare Takes On Yelp With New Homepage Search Box

Perhaps it was always inevitable that Foursquare would shift its emphasis from location-based social networking to local search. Indeed, the site has been moving in this direction for quite some time, and very self-consciously for the better part of the past year. 

This afternoon the company is rolling out a new PC homepage for users who aren’t logged in: it prominently features a search box. In doing so Foursquare takes aim at Yelp as its chief rival in the local space. And in some ways the move completes Foursquare’s evolution from a more narrow and novelty oriented friend finder, game and check-in app to a genuine local search utility with much broader “mainstream” ambitions and appeal.

5 Important Post-Penguin Guest Post Prospecting Questions

Several months have passed since Google announced its game-changing Penguin algorithm update back in April of this year. In terms over overall site impact, most SEOs noticed an immediate impact in rankings as a result of Penguin, however, only the ones who tried to get away with SEO shortcuts (like deliberate keyword stuffing, spamming, and link exchange schemes) rather than legitimate link building methods experienced truly negative impacts.

But regardless of whether you have ever practiced any of the shortcuts above, there are several considerations that any SEO professional with any kind of link building strategy can benefit from to ensure that your site performs well with post-Penguin Google bots.

6 Steps on How to Cash-In on the New SEO

Author Rank. Panda. Penguin. Mobile. Google+. If you think about it, these things were not on most SEO and online content marketer radars in the early 2011. But in just a year’s time, they have become major components of Web marketing.

Media.net Partners with Yahoo! Bing to Provide Context Ads

The doors are now open to a fresh supply of targeted contextual ads for Web publishers from the Yahoo! Bing Network. Thanks to a partnership with Media.net, Web publishers can now create and customize highly relevant, targeted contextual advertising units for their websites from among the ads running on the Yahoo! Bing Network.

Here are the key features of the program for publishers as outlined by the press release:

Facebook Fakes: Did You Lose Fans?

Yesterday, Facebook confirmed that it was indeed purging fake accounts and page likes from the system. According to Josh Constine of TechCrunch, “Illegitimately created accounts are being deleted, and Likes gained from malware, compromised accounts, or deceived users are being removed.”
Business pages with huge fan numbers could have seen losses of hundreds to thousands of fans.  For many businesses, this sort of thing could be panic inducing.  But let’s take just a moment to understand a social media reality.

A fan or follower count is a raw number with very little real meaning or intrinsic value.

Ruminate on that for just a moment. A steadily climbing fan count makes us feel good, and that’s about all its really good for. Its a number that’s easy for community managers and marketers to point to and tell decision makers that somebody (lots of somebodies) is paying attention. It makes us feel good. It makes us feel as though the time we’ve spent curating that account has been worthwhile.

Social Meme Monday

For today’s Meme Monday, we have some funny cartoons about Facebook. Have a good and happy Monday, everyone!

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