This Week’s Industry News

Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff

SEO Wars: The Panda 22 Bites Back

Last Tuesday, Google said the Panda algorithm had not been updated, but it soon would move to its 22^nd iteration within the week. Last Wednesday, Panda 22 went into effect, impacting ~.8% of search queries. Oh, those sneaky Googlers.

Source: Search Engine Land

SEOmoz Acquires GetListed.Org, David Mihm For A Player To Be Named Later

For a cool $3 million, the folks at SEOmoz are officially getting into the game of local search visibility. The software and Internet marketing company has purchased GetListed.org, a prominent small business listing tool that helps companies maintain uniformity across multiple local search websites. Perhaps even more significant, local search expert David Mihm has joined the SEOmoz team.

SEOmoz is justifiably ambiguous about their plans for the website, but they provide a readable rundown of some short and long term goals for the popular program. All of it will be executed in the spirit of helping small businesses with their online profiles.

Source: SEOmoz

90% Of Google Webmaster Tools Messages Are About Black Hat Issues

In a recent video, Matt Cutts revealed that 90% of message sent out via Google Webmaster Tools are in response to black hat issues, not specifically about unnatural links like many webmasters had assumed. Three percent of those messages were specifically related to unnatural links. Only 25,000 of the 700,000 messages Google sent out in the first two months of this year were directly link related.

Source: Search Engine Land

Fraudulent DMCA Takedown Request On The Rise

Fraudulent DMCA takedown request have increased after the Google “Pirate Update” rolled out in August. The “Pirate Update” looked at the number of valid DMCA takedown requests and used that data to decrease the rankings of sites found to be in violation of copyright laws. However, since, it appears that some are abusing the algorithm, including “Yes It Is-No Piracy” a company issuing takedown requests for perfectly legal content, like movies on Amazon, on behalf of several large movie companies.

Source: Search Engine Land

Instagram And Twitter Aren’t Good Friends Anymore

The minute Facebook announced they had acquired Instagram, it was pretty apparent that the popular photo-sharing platform would be changing its social media gears. Recently, Instagram has removed its auto-preview feature from Twitter by disabling its Twitter cards integration. Not so surprisingly, these preview options remain the same on Facebook, Tumblr, and Foursquare.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Google+ Creates Community Pages, Adds Photo App To Android

Ironically, as Bing sprints to catch up to Google in the search game, Google is running equally as fast to touch the coattails of Facebook in the social game. Recently, Google+ introduced “Communities,” which act very similar to Facebook’s Groups. They’ve also introduced an alternative to Instagram, called Snapspeed, for Android devices. Google bought the photo-sharing company earlier this year, but only recently has made it available for smartphone devices.

Source: Search Engine Journal

People Use Social Media In The Bathroom-Who Knew?

According to Nielsen’s latest report, social networking increasingly goes hand in hand with watching TV and using the bathroom. The reports states that about one-third of Twitter users tweeted about TV shows in June. The rate, while a 27% increase from 5 months ago, still puts the U.S. behind other areas of the world in terms of social media use while watching TV. In Latin America, 52% of people said they used social media during TV watching and in the Middle East and Africa 63% of people said they used social media while watching the tube. One third of 18 to 24 year olds in the U.S. also copped to using social media while in the bathroom.

Source: Mashable

Notable Commentary

That Just Wants You For Christmas

Local Listing Reviews Likely Don’t Affect Your Google Places Rank

Chris Silver Smith has an excellent column on Search Engine Land explaining why great local citation ratings doesn’t necessarily translate into high rankings within the Google 7=Pak. He backs up this claim with research into different industries, as well as his experience talking to Google local engineers. Written reviews are a different story, but it appears that any “gaming” you may use with business ratings online are a waste of time.

Analysis By: Chris Silver Smith, Search Engine Land

2012’s Top Updates To Google AdWords, All In One Post

Both sides of Google’s search business model experienced significant changes over the last 365 days. As such, Alex Cohen has an excellent run down of 2012’s top eight Google AdWords updates, and why they made the list.

Analysis By: Alex Cohen, Search Engine Watch

Understanding How To Set Goals For Your Video SEO, Marketing

As people spend more and more time glued to online videos, optimizing your own movin’ pictures becomes a bigger part of your weekly workload. The technical side of SEO is known in pretty much every industry, but targeting those efforts in conjunction with smart goal priorities can be trickier. If you want to effectively judge the video’s “virality,” the latter should precede the former.

Analysis By: Phil Nottingham, SEOmoz

The MENSA Category Of Link Building Strategies

Search Engine Journal has a wide-ranging article covering seven advanced, link building techniques that add value in the form of brand recognition, user impressions, and general linking authority. Celebrate link diversity!

Analysis By: Pratik Dholakiya, Search Engine Journal

7 New Features Of WordPress Version 3.5

Chris Cree of Search Engine Journal details 7 new features of WordPress Version 3.5, including a new widgetized home page template, a mobile responsive layout and an entirely overhauled Media Library interface.

Analysis by: Chris Cree, Search Engine Journal

The Blessings And Curses Of Big Data

Dr. Riza Berkan contends that the rise of big data will be a double edged sword if cleaning technologies don’t keep pace and the uncontrollable growth of information is left unchecked.

Analysis by: Dr. Riza Berkan, Search Engine Journal

Link Building Is About Building Personal Relationships

Dani Zehra explains that link building isn’t just about getting a few links here and there, it’s increasingly becoming about building real personal relationships.

Analysis by: Dani Zehra, Search Engine Journal

The Very Real Problem of Patent Trolling And Its Implications On Innovation

We’ve covered the technology world’s mad rush to patent anything and everything that turns a light bulb on in their head. Scientific American has a supporting column updating us on the state of patents in the U.S., and why it is nothing but bad news for future and current innovators.

Analysis By: Neuro Bonkers, Scientific American

Mary Meeker’s 2012 ‘State Of The Web’ Presentation Is Dense, Yet Fascinating

Mary Meeker is an extremely successful Venture Capitalist in the tech industry and is referred to as “Queen of the Net”. For about the last decade she has been doing a yearly “State of the Web” presentation that is really popular in the industry.

Meeker gave her 2012 presentation on Monday and a link to her slides is below. She has an amazing feel for the industry and where it is going so it is totally worth taking a look at her slides (there are a lot).

Analysis By: Jay Yarrow, Business Insider