Best Buy, in a recent internal communication to their Wolf Bloggers exclusive blogger list, sent out an email to their list of bloggers about an agreement with another affiliate organization. In the email, they CCd everyone. One of the bloggers subsequently Replied All to the list, which then exposed Best Buy’s entire exclusive blogger list. The list contains the email addresses of hundreds of bloggers who Best Buy pays to blog about products sold in Best Buy stores. Best Buy also send those bloggers certain products to test and review. [Read more…]

Domain Name SEO Search Engine Registration scam, Google SERPs Instagram Date Mistake, 7Search Accused of Traffic Stealing.

Last week was a very short week because of the Thanksgiving holiday here in the USA, so I decided not to send an update. There are a few significant updates since then, including two Google Penguin updates, and a few other posts worth mentioning. [Read more…]

Google Updated the Knowledge Graph, and State of Search conference next week.
I only have one update this past week, as it was a short (but busy) week last week, with traveling at the end of last week.

Google Knowledge Graph Update

Last week Google updated the Knowledge Graph, which includes data from various sources like Freebase.com to populate informational data in the search results. Here’s an example of the Knowledge Graph at work (a search in Google for “Bill Hartzer”: [Read more…]

Reddit AMA, Ripoff Report, Klout, and Duane Forrester Leaves Bing.
I have a few interesting updates this week. I did a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything), Ripoff Report’s home page was removed from Google, I don’t trust Klout, and Duane Forrester has left Bing as their Webmaster Liaiason. [Read more…]

Google Penguin Refresh last weekend, and Google adds Inbox by Gmail, which is useful for reading email on your phone.

We have a few updates this week, and the major one was the Penguin refresh (a refresh, not an update. We also had the launch of Inbox by Gmail, which is pretty good, as I’ve tested it out already. And oh yeah, there’s a new Share button added this week to Google’s header.

[Read more…]

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. [Read more…]