Bill Hartzer Weekly Update: October 18, 2014

Google Penguin Refresh this weekend, and a pricing bug found in GoDaddy’s domain registration.

This weekend, there appears to finally be a Google Penguin refresh, which is affecting a lot of website traffic from Google organic search. There are plenty of sites now reporting that they are seeing increases in search engine rankings, some as high as 30 of 40 places from where their site was previously ranking. I also was shown an interesting price bug at GoDaddy, where they were offering a domain name for $5,000. But if you searched for it in another way, the price was only $29. And in case you’ve missed it, you might want to check out SocialCentiv, a really cool new Twitter marketing tool.

Google Penguin Refresh, Google Penguin 3.0
It’s still so early in this right now, as it’s only been a few hours. But, the SEO industry insiders are reporting that Google Penguin 3.0 is finally here, after more than a year. More on my post:

https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/google-penguin-refresh-widely-reported/

GoDaddy Pricing Bug
There appears to be a bug in how GoDaddy is displaying the prices of some New gTLD domain names. At one point, depending on how you search for the domain name, the price will display as one price: but if you search for a .com domain name, then GoDaddy’s site is showing a different price for the same domain name.

What’s really interesting to note that after I posted this and tweeted on Twitter about it, within minutes GoDaddy had this bug fixed. See my post for confirmation, the GoDaddy social folks commented on the blog post:

https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/godaddy-price-confusion-new-gtld-domains/

Pubcon Las Vegas 2014
The Pubcon Las Vegas conference was in Las Vegas last week, and overall it was a great conference. Made a lot of connections, and met a lot of new folks–and saw a lot of old friends. I even got inspired–again–to complete the book I’m writing.

Here are the links to my presentations in case you weren’t able to attend my sessions (or the conference):

SEO Fundamentals
http://www.slideshare.net/bhartzer/seo-basics-pubcon-las-vegas-2014

Tomorrow’s SEO Today: Social Search and Beyond
http://www.slideshare.net/bhartzer/tomorrows-seo-today-social-search-and-beyond

SocialCentive Twitter Marketing Software Free Trial
SocialCentiv is some new Twitter marketing software (it’s really a dashboard) that feeds you Tweets by people. You give it a list of keywords (and a location if you want) and anyone talking about that particular keyword from that location pops up on your dashboard. You can then easily reply to them.

Let’s take, for example, a car dealership. If they entered “new car” or “new car dealer” and “Dallas, Texas”, they’d see people talking about new cars. And if someone tweeted to their friends, asking them who they recommend, that tweet would come up. Then, the new car dealer could respond to them, giving them, let’s say, an offer code for $1,000 off a new car.

As you continue to use SocialCentiv, it learns what you like and what you don’t like— and gives you more tweets of what you like so you can respond to those people. Cool part of this is that it’s $49 a month for all-you-can-use of it.

I’ve arranged for a free trail, as a reader of my weekly updates. No commitment, you can cancel at any time. Here’s a link to try it out:

https://www.billhartzer.com/socialcentiv

and here’s the post that I wrote about it:
https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/using-socialcentiv-twitter-marketing-software-lead-generation/

In Case You Missed It: The Big Report is Out!
It’s been literally months that I’ve been working on this test, and the resulting 27 page white paper. I tested .Com domain names versus gTLD domain names (new gTLDs) and am seeing some interesting results.

https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/com-better-gtld-domain-name/

That’s it for this week. I usually send an update weekly, unless there is some sort of “big news” or issue that comes up that warrants an update.