Webcology Episode #249: Matt Cutts and SMX Advanced 2013

Airdate: June 13, 2013

With Jim busy with SES Toronto, Dave Davies welcomes guests David Harry of SEO Training Dojo and Terry Van Horne of SEO Pros to break down what we learned this week. We’ll also discuss some of the key takeaways from Matt Cutts at SMX Advanced 2013: Page Speed, Bounce Rate, Authorship, Panda Updates and more. Is Short Term Social vs. Long Term Social overrated for SEO? All this and more on this week’s episode.

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Social Media Measurement Hangout

Measuring the Size of Your Social Campfire

Earlier today, Digital Always Media partner Alan K’necht and President Michelle Stinson Ross cohosted a one hour, Hangout discussing how to think about and measure the value of your social media engagements.

Joining Alan and Michelle are, Kevin Mullett, Director of Visibility and Social Media at   (@kmullett), Sam Fiorella, Partner at (@samfiorella), and Courtney Seiter, Social Media Coordinator at (@RavenCourtney).

Webcology Episode #248: U.S. Monitoring Phone and Internet use; Is Google America’s Third Political Party?

Air Date: June 6, 2013

U.S. Secretly Collecting Records of Verizon Calls; Is Google America’s third political party. Jim and Dave also preview SES Toronto 2013, and discuss how Google Analytics is becoming A Robust Testing Platform With Content Experiments API, and how Google has No Plans for Glass Facial Recognition Apps.

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Webcology Episode #247: Matt Cutts and Google: New Warning on Advertorials and Paid Content

Webcology Episode #247: Matt Cutts and Google: New Warning on Advertorials and Paid Content

Air Date: May 30, 2013

This week, Jim and Dave discuss the new warnings from Matt Cutts – if you’re using paid content and don’t disclose, there will be consequences. We’ll also discuss Disavowing links, Facebook, and businesses and Google Plus.

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Penguin 2.0: Organic Link Builders Have No Worries

“Penguins are so sensitive/To My Needs”

If you’re a Lyle Lovett fan, you probably know what I’m talking about. If you’re not, should explain my otherwise unusual outburst. It’s surprisingly appropriate to this week’s Penguin update – the fourth major update (arguably the 25th overall) of the major Google algorithm that’s targeting spammy links. This update has mainly affected Adult and gambling sites, or websites that have blatantly disregarded Matt Cutt’s advice over the years. Although it’s going to affect 2.5% of English sites (which seems like a lot), it actually shouldn’t cause your site any penalties if you’ve been paying attention to current Google Values.

Current Google Values can be explained very simply – the overall confusion often comes from the fact it is constantly evolving, and people sometimes work off antiquated information (ironically, one of the issues Google will no longer value).

What Google Values Now What Google does not value anymore
Quality Content (ie. Something a reader actually needs) Links! Links everywhere!
Natural links placed organically Keyword stuffing
New and relevant content Canned or poorly developed content
Authorship

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Webcology Episode #246: Google Penguin 2.0, Teens Leaving Facebook, Crackstarter Crowdfunding

Air Date: May 23, 2013

Michelle Stintson Ross sits in to talk about Google’s bad-link chasing Penguin 2.0. We also talk about rumours of teens leaving Facebook.

In our feature segment, we discuss the bizarre Crowdfunding effort to raise $200,000 in order to purchase a cell phone video of Toronto mayor Rob Ford allegedly smoking crack cocaine. Talk about crowdfunding leads to a great conversation about crowd funding and crowd sourcing with the founder of Boca Raton, Florida based co-working facility Caffeine Spaces (and the co-founder of the South Florida-based New Tech Community) Mark Laymon and 17-year-old Jared Kleinert , Founder/CEO of Synergist, a crowdsourcing platform for social entrepreneurs.

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Integrated SEO in 2013 – A Google Hangout

Integrated SEO in 2013 – A Google Hangout Interview Panel

Jim Hedger and Michelle Stintson Ross from Digital Always Media are joined by David Harry of Verve Developments, Dan Thies of Braintrust Labs, and Dave Davies of Beanstalk SEO discuss the future of search engine optimization, social media and digital marketing integration in a unique Google Hangout environment.

Webcology Episode #245: Inside Interactivity Digital 2013, Google I/O Developer Conference

Air Date: May 16, 2013

Jim is joined by David Harry aka TheGypsy from to discuss the fallout that came from the 6th annual Google I/O Developer Conference featuring changes to Google+ Chrome and search via spoken answers. We also get a report from Michelle Stinson-Ross from on location from Interactivity Digital 2013, including the anticipated session from former Blueglass executives Loren Baker and Greg Boser.

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Online vs. In-Person Training & Workshops

Online vs. In-Person Training & Workshops

K’necht Delivers: Parenting & Social Media

I’ve been teaching people of all ages for over 30 years one subject or another. My early days as a technology instructor started by running software classes (Lotus, WordPrefect, desktop publishing) in the late 80s. Since then I’ve taught everything from web development, to SEO, web analytics and Social Media Marketing. My training background evolved to where I’m now an on-line instructor for the and head up the.
With this experience I’ve had countless opportunities to teach and run workshops both online and in-person. When deciding if on-line workshops class are better for you or organization versus in-person training there are a few things to consider before making your decision.

Step 1: Which Types of Corporate Training are Right for Your Organization

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Measuring the Success of a Well Posted Presentation

Measuring the Success of a Well Posted Presentation

The evolution of the digital marketing sector has been propelled by free information.

Digital Always Media partner Alan K’necht uploaded his April presentation, “Measuring Success: Up the Down Escalator” to last Tuesday.

The DAM team started promoting the presentation through social media applications minutes after Alan’s slide-deck was posted. A bunch of our friends in the industry shared, retweeted, blogged about, or otherwise noted it in their blog posts. Twitter - Interactions-slide-share2

It quickly became a top SlideShare download. It was then featured on SlideShare’s Facebook page and LinkedIn feed. That’s a long way for a quickly posted and promoted presentation to go in a few days.

Here’s a copy of Alan’s presentation. He is always available to deliver it in person.

from
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Webcology Episode #244: 5 Ways You May Be Stuck In the Good Ol’ Days of SEO

Air Date: May 9, 2013

Jim and Dave discuss based off a recent Search Engine Watch article by Kristine Schachinger that discusses all the algorithm changes of years past and various techniques SEOs used over the years.

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Gearing Up But Dumbing Down

On May 2, a patent was filed with the USPTO for a smart-watch that will potentially include touch-pads, a screen, processor, wireless transceiver and communication abilities. The way it’s wired would essentially allow it to serve as a secondary body computer to Google Glass, or possibly compliment other Google products. While not a guarantee that the smart-watch will come to market, it’s in line with staying competitive with Apple, who are apparently developing an iOS-based watch device of their own.

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SEO Hangout 1 – Integrated SEO 2013

SEO Google Plus Hangout – Integrated SEO in 2013

Featuring: , , , , and

Next Thursday, May 16 at 3:30pm, we’re going to do our first open Google Plus Hangout session on the new roles played by search engine optimization specialists in the digital marketing environment. Social media communities and rapid adoption and innovation of smart phones and tablets have fundamentally changed the search environment.  Today’s SEO is far different from what was standard technique five years ago.

This G+SEO Hangout will put five search and social media marketers together to discuss how SEOs work and focus have changed in 2013.

Putting this session together has required a large team. Debbie Horovitch of will be producing the Google Plus Hangout. David Harry of is doing all pre and post production video work.

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Link Values Simplified

Earlier I read a piece on in SearchEngineLand. The article notes an experiment conducted by Daniel Tan, founder of WordPress SEO evaluation plug-in SEOPressor. Tan set out to disprove a Christmas Day comment made by Google Quality Control Czar, Matt Cutts to a Google Forum discussion of press releases.

Cutts wrote “I wouldn’t expect links from press release web sites to benefit your rankings…”, in response to a vague question about the pagerank value of a link in a press release. It was a one-off sentence that apparently had greater implications than it should have. I expect Cutts was really saying, “Don’t waste your time and money on bogus press releases to gain stronger Google rankings”.

For the most part, that’s good advice. People have spammed search results using press releases for years. The Penguin updates were designed to destroy poor quality links and degrade the ranking of pages profiting from them.

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Technology Changes the Chaos of Tragedy

As the tragedy at the Boston marathon unfolded, everyone who knew competitors in the race wanted to know the same things. Are my loved ones safe? How do I get in touch with them? Where are they? There are always more questions than answers as a tragedy takes place. As time goes on, these questions pose huge problems for both those concerned and authorities trying to communicate with the public. Addressing these questions is a prime example of how technology influences the way we deal with tragedy. Through the mobile network, smart phone technologies and social media platforms society has begun to shift how we source news and cope during extreme events. We’re no longer content to have information delivered to us. Instead we’re becoming the news source and using technology as a means to affect positive change more quickly and effectively than before.

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