Don’t have the time to read all the marketing news, blog posts, announcements, and other content related to SEO/social media/online marketing published each week?
I’ve got you covered.
I sift through trillions (well, hundreds) of online publications to stay on top of marketing news that might affect your online business.
Let’s start with the news from Traffic Generation Café.
At TrafficGenerationCafe.com
Guest Blogging Penalties and the Decay of Links as a Ranking Signal: An Open Letter to Matt Cutts (Part 1)
In this post, Gerald Weber, MyBlogGuest team member and Ann Smarty’s long-time friend, shares his thoughts about Google penalty of MBG.
Although the most recent MyBlogGuest.com penalty is the main topic that inspired me to finally speak my mind, this post isn’t just about guest blogging and how Google and Friends Google Inc. unfairly penalized MyBlogGuest.
There are other issues I am going to address as well (that will be in Part 2 of this post), but let’s start by discussing the MyBlogGuest debacle, shall we?
Also, an interesting and bold move from Ann Smarty:
+Ann Smarty of +MyBlogGuest puts her robot.txt file where her mouth is…
How To Create a Blog Post Image That Gets Noticed And Drives Traffic
Are your blog posts falling flat because of your dull and generic post images?
Blog images are often an afterthought, yet they can make the difference between a shareable post and an unread masterpiece.
Throwing any ole image on a blog post that you labored on for hours is like riding to the prom in a hoopty.
Your content needs to travel in style across the social web.
Read the step-by-step tutorial on creating your own original blog post images here.
More About Ana: The Aha!NOW Chat With Ana Hoffman [Interview]
Love how Harleena Singh introduced me in this interview - who wouldn’t, right?
She’s no self-proclaimed queen of traffic generation. In fact, we all have crowned her because she really deserves the crown!
Yes, I’m talking about Ana Hoffman, who brought her blog in the under-20k Alexa club in less than 6 months.
She didn’t stop there but went on to achieve 12k Alexa rank within 8 months and under 9k Alexa rank in just 1.5 years.
Now, she might not be the only one to do it, but isn’t this a remarkable feat!
Do you agree she deserves the title? Some people also call her a Mad Russian and Tzarina of SEO, and they too have a reason.
Harleena asked me some tough questions - made me sweat a couple of times, but that’s what makes this interview very worth reading.
Read The Aha!NOW Chat With Ana Hoffman [Interview] here.
More About Ana: Interview at TodaysLeadingWomen.com
If you are on the go, here’s a podcast interview you can listen to.
TodaysLeadingWomen is a podcast with you in mind, THE WOMAN ENTREPRENEUR, YOU, the Small Business Owner, YOU, the Aspiring Entrepreneur.
We all have to battle with day to day challenges that face women entrepreneurs - making sure we have enough money to survive, feeding our children and juggling the many different priorities in our lives.
Here’s my story in a nutshell:
Listen to the full podcast here:
Episode 23: Ana Hoffman of Traffic Generation Cafe - TodaysLeadingWomen by Marie Grace Berg
SEO
Google’s Matt Cutts: Almost All Penalties Are For Quality Violations
How can I tell if my site is affected by a particular algorithm?
Dear Google: THANK YOU for penalizing Traffic Generation Café
Moz: Google Plus +1’s Do NOT Affect Search Rankings
[share]By the way, you should share this post right now before you forget - much appreciated![/share]
Social Media
Preview & select images with new Google+ link posts
Instagram Surpasses Twitter in Mobile Users in the US
Twitter Gets More Social
People Freaked Out when Twitter Briefly Replaced ‘Retweet’ With ‘Share’
Twitter Experimenting With View Counts for Your Tweets
Twitter Fights Back, Files Suit to Lift Ban in Turkey
Infographic: Guide to Facebook NEW News Feed image sizes
Multiple Pinterest Accounts Hacked, Flooded With Butt Pics
On a Side Note…
If you find tremendous value in my Weekly Marketing Skinnies, like thousands of other readers of Traffic Generation Café do, you should consider joining them and sign up to receive the weekly notifications of when a fresh Skinny is published.
Plus, you’ll get complimentary access to my “Mommy, Where Does My Traffic Come From?” traffic hacks report and traffic hacks newsletter:
"Ana has a unique insight into running an internet business."
- Yaro Starak, Entrepreneurs-Journey.com
Needless to say, your information is completely safe with me.
See you in your inbox!
Marketing This & That
Microsoft finally brings Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to the iPad
Chrome Adds Google Now Notifications
Customize Your Google Navigation Bar
Facebook is buying Oculus for $2B
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:
Google Takes Action Against Guest Blogging - Lynn Terry at clicknewz.com
73+ Pivotal Blogging Shortcuts, Tools and Tips for 2014 - Ramsay Taplin at blogtyrant.com
Disable XML-RPC in WordPress to Prevent DDoS Attack - MaAnna Stephenson at blogaid.net
Anything Goes on Sunday – 3 - Corinne Rodrigues at everydaygyaan.com
Linkarati Roundup #7 - Cory Collins at linkarati.com
How to Start an Affiliate Marketing Business - Prince Molak at onlinemoneydon.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!
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To an even better next week,
Afivia says
Hello Ana..
I’m very interesting about slides to help get rangking for my sites. (such as slideshare)
Actually, Is slideshare still efective for my site to get higher rangking from search engine now?
Yes, it is: https://trafficgenerationcafe.online/slideshare-traffic/
Bold move indeed by Ann! I like it. I support here; Google was on the witch hunt, and sought her ought. Awesome network, neat development and I appreciate Ann’s conviction.
Great roundup Ana.
Tweeted to my 27K followers!
I have a lot of respect for Ann and her endeavours, but I do see where Google was going with this. There were way too many people who wrote guest posts for the sake of links at MBG.
Thanks for coming by, Ryan!
I found a plugin called “rel nofollow” on wordpress.org which automatically puts a nofollow tag on all links in a post when you save it.
As a test, I installed it on one of my larger guest-post sites, and did a bulk edit of every post on the site, and saved without explicitly changing anything. Sure enough, it added rel=”nofollow” to every link in all posts. Fairly quick and painless. I am using this on all of my sites, primarily for the benefit of my guest authors, so they will not be arbitrarily penalized.
Although that doesn’t address *inbound* links. I think it’s a bit tacky to penalize a site for inbound links. But it gives me a tool I can use to easily and inexpensively reduce the rankings of my competitor’s sites in a way that is difficult, time consuming, and expensive to counter. For less than $100, I can get a half-million spammy links to any site I want. Of course, if/when they discover who did that to them, they can do the same to me… And so the SEO arms race continues more-or-less unabated. Which is why I, like Ann Smarty (whose service I continue to use), have opted out of that race entirely.
Although I have not yet put the “go away Google” into my robots.txt file yet. I may try that to see if it makes any difference at all.
“Moz: Google Plus +1′s Do NOT Affect Search Rankings” — well, for now, anyway. Google can change its mind about that at any time. I’m just waiting for the announcement that “low quality” (whatever that might mean) G+ +1’s will cause your site to be penalized.
“Google’s Matt Cutts: Almost All Penalties Are For Quality Violations” Yeah. Except when they aren’t. There is lots of easily-discovered evidence that Google is corrupt. For one, they don’t have to play by their own rules. And if you are a Really Big Customer, you don’t, either. In fact, if you are a Really Big Customer, you don’t have to worry about spammy links in any quantity, because Google will disregard them on your behalf. The rest of us are not even customers — we are property.
Don’t depend on Google for anything important. Even Gmail. If you do, you will get screwed. If not now, soon.
P.S. Bing.com, DuckDuckGo.com, and WolframAlpha.com all consistently give more relevant search results than Google does, at least for the types of searches that I do (although that may be due to searching for very specific things, and not doing a Brownian-motion walk through cyberspace looking for stuff to buy). I wonder how long it will take before the overweening hubris of Google (“We may be the only game in town, but if you don’t like it, you can go pound sand, because we are the only game in town.”) reaches the tipping point.
Yes, there are several plugins that will do that, as well as many SEO plugins have that function.
Unfortunately, there’s no way for Google to discern whether we build the inbound links ourselves for SEO purposes or someone has thrown them to our site in an attempt to force a penalty. I do hope they’ll be able to do it in the near future, but for now, we just have to suck it up and deal with them.
Brent Carnduff says
Another great “marketing skinny” Ana! As expected, you’re handling your search issues with class - well done.
There has been a lot of discussion around Google and penalties recently. I know that there is a lot of frustration around it on the web, but the reality is that Google does get to set the rules, and although they have not always been clear about what is (or will be) “penalized”, they have been pretty clear about what they want (and don’t want) from us. No doubt that you’ll recover stronger than ever! Great graffic for the post btw!
Google is definitely shaking our world, Brent, but they do have a good point: most of us have done more than a handful of things to ‘arrange’ SERPs in our favor. lol
Thank you!
Hey Ms Ana,its so sad you missed my Post again in your round up, thanks and have a pleasant weekend
Thanks for the heads-up; happily added it to the Skinny.
Hi Ana,
Awesome roundup as always, though I think this time it’s a lot more special with that lovely interview link within 🙂
It was indeed a pleasure to have you over at my blog as this month’s guest, and I loved the way you answered all the interview questions. Sorry for the little sweat though! I guess that’s what made it all the more special, and my blog readers are just loving to read more about you, something they didn’t know earlier.
Thanks once again for all that you do - much appreciated. Have a nice weekend 🙂
You definitely asked some great questions, Harleena, and the result is clear - you definitely know how to make an interview interesting.
Once again, thanks for having me!