Tight-Lipped Networking & Black Hat SEO Tips @ SES

There are a lot of benefits to attending an SES event. If you're new to SEO, there are excellent tracks that will introduce you to the fundamentals of Internet marketing by seasoned veterans, an education that would otherwise cost well over the pr...
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Connected Marketing Week: The Tasty Other Half of #SES SFO 2011

Ah, San Francisco… home to many hip goings-on throughout any given year, from historical walking tours to epic musical festivals, theatrical performances, and exhibits at the pristine Conservatory of Flowers.


This August, a digital market...
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17 Tips for Tip-Based Content – How to Research, Scale & Promote

Tips are the smallest documentable unit of "how-to" do something. Their presence – or absence – within a target market's SERPs provide phenomenal opportunities for link strategists and other content marketers. Here's a proposed definit...
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Google–British Library Partnership to Digitize 250,000 Books

The Google Books project has scanned over 12 million books, largely thanks to the 40-plus libraries in its Library Projects Partner program. The most recent partner, the British Library, will allow for the digitization of 250,000 unique works.


T...
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Google Warns WordPress Site Owners To Update

The Google Webmaster team is now notifying webmasters who are using an older version of the popular content management and blogging software WordPress. Apparently as early as last week, State of Search reports, users whose WordPress was out of dat...
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Google Quietly Launches Panda Update Version 2.2

Webmasters and SEOs suspected the next wave of Google's Panda update began hitting last week, with reports coming in of traffic drops, as well as some recoveries starting around June 16. And it seems that is the case, as Google has today confirmed...
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Google "Photovine" Trademarked – But What Is It?

Google recently filed a trademark for a new service called "Photovine," and the photovine.com domain name just switched to an unnamed owner. But what, exactly, will Photovine be? Let's explore some possibilities.


Details on the Trademark and Dom...
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Google Acquires SageTV for GoogleTV Reinvigoration

Google just picked up SageTV for an undisclosed amount. SageTV, a software and hardware company that built a product for watching and recording TV shows from any computer with a high-speed internet connection, is likely to be integrated into Googl...
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Google's New Homepage Test: No Longer "Feeling Lucky"?

A new Google search interface experiment has been discovered. While there have been a few fun design changes, one major Google element has been removed: the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.


The Luckless Design


The new version of the design was disc...
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SEO Your Website For Foreign Languages in Your Domestic Market

Last week here at Search Engine Watch, Dave Davies raised some key points about strategies for optimizing your website for English-speaking foreign markets, such as (for U.S. companies) Canada or the UK.


But there are also huge – and large...
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4 PRO PR-Optimization Strategies: SEO, Video, Local & Social

Extra! Extra! Optimize all about it.


Is your _________ optimized? Correct answers include: websites, blogs, social media profiles, videos, images, ads, landing pages, analytics, online press releases, tweets, posts, bios, and local directories l...
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Has Same-Sex Marriage Controversy Caused Google To Retreat From Open Gay Support?

During Gay Pride celebrations last year Google was very visible in its support, with banner-carrying employees attending various events throughout the world including Chicago, San Francisco, Dublin, and Jerusalem. This year it's hard to understand...
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U.S. Hotel Industry Could Be Losing $1.9 Billion From Branded Search Terms

Hotel brand managers need to issue much stricter brand guidelines to affiliates and channel partners. That's the message from a recent study by MarkMonitor, who estimate the U.S. hotel industry is losing an $1.9 billion annually in online bookings...
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See the Messages that Matter

UPDATE on Friday, February 11, 2011: We've begun expanding the rollout of Messages to everyone on Facebook. This will happen gradually over the next few weeks. Learn more about using Messages in this tour.

 

 

Originally Published on Monday, November 15, 2010:

Imagine the kind of family you might see in a modern American sitcom: loving parents trying to maintain a family unit with a teenager engrossed in text messaging, a college-aged child who is always chatting online, and various wacky relatives who spend their days sending "funny" emails to the family.

 

This is an admittedly exaggerated stereotype but one we see every day in movies, TV and advertising because most of us can relate to parts of it. Between mobile devices and the Internet we can be more connected today than ever before, but there is still a feeling that the technology can also act as a barrier between us. When I want to share with someone it should be as simple as deciding who I want to share with and what I want to say.  It should feel more like a human conversation.

 

Seamless Messaging

 

Today I'm excited to announce the next evolution of Messages. You decide how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages. They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time.  You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use.  Simply choose their name and type a message.

 

We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one. Now people can share with friends over email, whether they're on Facebook or not. To be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.

 

 

Conversation History

 

Messages is built for communicating with your friends, so it made sense to organize primarily around people.  All of your messages with someone will be together in one place, whether they are sent over chat, email or SMS. You can see everything you've discussed with each friend as a single conversation.

 

I'm intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From "hey nice to meet you" to "do you want to get coffee sometime" to "our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight." That's a really cool idea.

 

The Social Inbox

 

It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement. It's not that those other messages aren't important, but one of them is more meaningful. With new Messages, your Inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into an Other folder where you can look at them separately.

 

If someone you know isn't on Facebook, that person's email will initially go into the Other folder. You can easily move that conversation into the Inbox, and all the future conversations with that friend will show up there.

 

 

You can also change your account settings to be even more limited and bounce any emails that aren't exclusively from friends.

 

This kind of message control is pretty unprecedented and people have been wanting to do this with email (and phone calls) for a long time. Messages reverses the approach to preventing unwanted contact. Instead of having to worry about your email address getting out, you're now in control of who can actually reach you.

 

The Next Generation

 

Relatively soon, we'll probably all stop using arbitrary ten digit numbers and bizarre sequences of characters to contact each other. We will just select friends by name and be able to share with them instantly. We aren't there yet, but the changes today are a small first step.

 

We'll be launching Messages and email addresses gradually and making it available to everyone over the next few months. Once you receive an invitation, you'll be able to get started and also invite your friends to join you.

 

To learn more, take a tour of Messages. Please share your thoughts and feedback with us here.

 

 

 

Joel Seligstein, a Facebook engineer, is relieved he no longer needs to keep track of which friends like texts vs. email vs. chat.

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Google Street View Halted in Bangalore

Just a few brief weeks after Google Street View cars started driving on the streets of Bangalore, India, Google has halted its efforts. It's been confirmed that this is the result of an official notice from the Bangalore Chief of Police.


Accordi...
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A Better Mobile Experience

Every day, hundreds of millions of people access Facebook from their mobile devices to share and connect with the people they care about, whenever and wherever they want. As this number continues to grow, we want to make sure that everyone has a great experience regardless of the mobile device they choose to use.

 

To achieve this, we've been working with several application developers, operators, and hardware manufacturers from the mobile industry.

 

Over the past six months, we built the Facebook for Feature Phones app with Snaptu to bring improved Facebook functionality to over 2,500 different devices. We also launched 0.facebook.com as a faster and free way for people to access Facebook around the world, including locations where connectivity is especially costly and slow.

 

Today, we're excited to share some of our recent collaborations with two mobile device manufacturers.

 

Two upcoming Android devices from INQ, the Cloud Touch and Cloud Q, feature new Facebook integrations with single sign-on and easy one-touch access to popular Facebook features. The home screen features your News Feed (including your friends' updates, pictures, videos and links) and quick links to Chat, Messages, Places, notifications and more. You can also check in to your favorite shops and businesses with Facebook Places, right from the home screen.

 

 

HTC's ChaCha and Salsa phones feature a dedicated Facebook button that gives you one-touch access to your favorite Facebook functions, allowing you to update your status, upload a photo, share a news article and check in to places. Facebook Chat, Messages and your friends are also integrated, so when you make a phone call, the screen displays your friends' status updates and photos, and even their birthdays.

 

 

In addition to these new phones from INQ and HTC, you'll also be seeing similar deep Facebook integration on dozens of other devices over the course of this year. Some manufacturers will be highlighting Facebook as a part of their phones' on-screen interfaces, and others will use our brand as an element of the device hardware itself.

 

We believe almost anything is better when it's social, and this year we'll continue to invest in new technologies so you have a great Facebook experience no matter where you go.

 

 

Charles Wu is a Facebook engineer working on mobile.

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May 2011 Online Video Rankings: Nielsen, comScore Agree to Disagree

The latest video ranking data for May 2011 is now available and about the only thing that any of the market research firms seem to agree upon is that online video and YouTube are bigger than a breadbox.


For example, Nielsen reports that there we...
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The Wisdom of Friends (and Others Too)

Friends are often the best source of advice when you're trying new things: Where should I go to dinner? How do I go buy a car? What new music should I check out? Friends know your tastes, and you have confidence in their opinions.

 

Like many of our products, Questions originated as people began using Facebook in a new and unexpected way. People would update their status with a question, and their friends would answer in the comments. We saw this and began thinking about how we could make this interaction more useful. Over the summer, we began testing Questions with a small group of people, and today we are beginning to roll it out to everyone.

 

We noticed that people were frequently asking for opinions ("what are your favorite restaurants in New York?") or hoping to learn about their friends ("what was your favorite movie as a kid, something you watched over and over?"). For most of these questions, experts weren't going to be the best source for advice. The answers to these questions are meaningful or interesting because you know your friends and your friends know you.

 

We wanted to make questions easier and faster to answer. With the updated Questions you can agree with an existing answer with a single click, or you can add a different response. This makes it easy for many more people to respond to you. It also helps us show you the most popular responses.

 

 

Questions will also enable you to cast a wider net. Now, when your friends answer one of your questions, their friends can answer it too. For more unusual questions, you can get advice from a broader group of people, but to keep it most relevant we filter the answers to show you first what your friends think. You can see more responses by clicking "others" within the question.

 

Questions will be available to everyone soon, but you can try it now here and learn more.

 

 

Adrian, a product manager for Questions, is wondering, "What's the first question you'll ask with new Facebook Questions?"

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DuckDuckGo: Ditch Google, Bing for Unfiltered Search

DuckDuckGo, a small-time search engine, focuses its promotions on showing ways it's (supposedly) better than Google. The current message?: DuckDuckGo lets you escape Google's and Bing's filter bubble!


What Is the "Filter Bubble"?





The concep...
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A New Suite of Safety Tools

Safety has always been a social experience: as friends and family, we look out for each other and pass along advice to help each other stay safe. Safety on Facebook works the same way. By keeping each other informed, people make Facebook a more trusted environment. Today, we're making it easier to stay safe with the launch of new safety resources, tools for reporting issues and additional security features.

 

More Resources for Families

 

During President Obama's White House Conference on Bullying Prevention last month, we announced plans to expand our existing safety resources with new content for families. Beginning today, you can visit the newly redesigned Family Safety Center. There, you'll find useful articles for parents and teens and videos on safety and privacy, as well as many other resources. In the coming weeks, we'll also be providing a free, downloadable guide for teachers, written by safety experts Linda Fogg Phillips, B.J. Fogg and Derek Baird. We hope this guide will help educators with social media in the classroom.

 

Meet some of the team who work on safety at Facebook, many of whom are also parents.

 

 

Social Reporting Tools

 

We also recently unveiled a new social reporting tool that allows people to notify a member of their community, in addition to Facebook, when they see something they don't like. Safety and child psychology experts tell us that online issues are frequently a reflection of what is happening offline. By encouraging people to seek help from friends, we hope that many of these situations can be resolved face to face. The impact has been encouraging, and we're now expanding social reporting to other major sections of Facebook, including Profiles, Pages and Groups.

 

Advanced Security Features

 

We're also starting to introduce Two Factor Authentication, a new feature to help prevent unauthorized access to your account. If you turn this new feature on, we'll ask you to enter a code anytime you try to log into Facebook from a new device. This additional security helps confirm that it's really you trying to log in.

 

We announced earlier this year that people could experience Facebook over a secure connection using HTTPS. This feature helps protect your personal information and is particularly useful if you're uncertain about the security of your network or you're using public wifi to access Facebook. Today, we're improving HTTPS so if you start using a non-HTTPS application on Facebook, we automatically switch your session back to HTTPS when you're finished.

 

We think that social solutions to safety will become increasingly important to using the web. Tools like social reporting will help make our community even stronger, and we encourage you to use them.

 

 

Arturo, a director of engineering at Facebook, is excited about social reporting.

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Google +1 Counts Appearing in Search Results

In what seems to be an attempt to further push its new Google +1 button, Google is beginning to show the number of +1's sites have received in the search results, whether or not you're logged in to a Google account and regardless of which browser ...
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Sharing with Small Groups

It's always been easy to share with all your friends on Facebook, but until we introduced Groups last October, there wasn't a simple way to share with just a few people. Much of what we share in our daily lives is only meaningful to smaller groups of people, like our family, roommates, or co-workers. With Groups, you can create a private space to share with just those friends.

 

In the six months since our launch, people have created over 50 million Groups on Facebook. It's grown quickly because of its social design. Instead of making everyone build and manage individual friend lists, one person can create a group for their families and everyone in the family gets to use it.

 

We've received some great feedback about how people are using Groups and what new features they would like to see. Today, we're happy to announce some new improvements, including integration with Questions, the ability to upload photo albums, and additional membership controls.

 

How people are using Groups

 

People are using Groups to communicate with many of the important communities in their lives, like their families, best friends, and teammates. My own family uses a group to stay connected to each other. As a Californian with a brother living in Peru and parents back in Wisconsin, we use our group to update each other about our lives, share vacation photos, and discuss where we're going to meet up next.

 

I also have a group with my roommates. Because we have such different schedules, we can go a whole week without seeing each other in person. Our group is where we meet to divide up chores, settle our bills, and make plans for the weekend. 

 

 

 

New improvements to Groups

 

You've always been able to post updates to Groups, but now you can post questions and polls for only members to weigh in on. You'll get quick responses to questions like "What movie should we see?" and "When should we should hold our next soccer practice?"

 

Where before you could only upload individual photos, now you have the option to upload entire albums directly to your group, making it even easier to share your photos with the people who most want to see them.

 

For group owners, we're also adding a control that lets you approve people before they are added to the group.

 

For people who were using our older version of Groups, we've created a tool that makes it easy to upgrade to the new Groups format. Owners and members of old Groups will be receiving information about how to upgrade within the coming weeks.

 

Send button lets you share with Groups

 

In addition to the other new group features, we're also introducing the Send button.

 

A year ago, we launched the Like button, which gives you a quick way to share the things you find on the web with all your friends. But there are times when you find something that you only want to share with a few specific people.

 

Say you're on Orbitz and want to tell your roommates about a great idea for a summer vacation, or you come across a Huffington Post article that you only want to share with people at work. With the new Send button, now you can share things with any of your Groups or individual friends on Facebook.

 

Starting today, the Send button will be available on over 50 leading websites, and it will appear in more places soon.

 

 

 

Create a Group today

 

It's been exciting to hear about the many ways people have been using Groups to communicate with the different people in their lives, and we hope you all enjoy the new features, which will be rolling out over the next few days.

 

Ready to start a new group? Visit www.facebook.com/groups.

 

 

 

Elliot Lynde, an engineer on the Groups team, is currently working on scanning in all his old photos to post in his family group.

 

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Hostage Drama Unfolds On Facebook

A woman in Utah was held hostage for 16 hours by a gunman who kept posting to Facebook and even posted photos of the two of them he took with his camera phone. His Facebook page become a popular stop for friends and family, as well as other people...
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Deals: Better with Friends

A few months ago we launched Check-In Deals, to help you get special offers when you check in at local businesses from your mobile. Today we're going a step further and testing a new feature to help you find fun experiences to share with your favorite people: Deals on Facebook.

 

Initially, Deals will be available to people in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego, and San Francisco and we hope to expand this test to other cities in the future.

 

Deals get social

While many Deals on Facebook offer discounts, it's more important to us that you find interesting experiences around you to do with friends.  We've worked with partners and local businesses to help deliver the best social activities in your area.  And once you've found a deal you like, having the deal on Facebook makes it easy to share, buy and plan with your friends. 

 

For example, Austin City Limits Live is offering an 'All Access Experience' for concerts starting in May. You can buy this deal and get backstage passes, sound check access and a catered dinner in addition to attending the show.

 

 

How to find Deals

You can find deals on Facebook in a couple of different ways — for example, you can get deals updates through email and notifications to find out about new deals in your area. You can also check out the Deals tab of your home page. If your friends chose to share this information, you may also see the deals friends buy or like in your News Feed. 

 

 

We are working with aDealio, Gilt City, HomeRun, kgb deals, OpenTable, Plum District, PopSugar City, ReachLocal, Tippr, viagogo, and zozi, so you can buy their Deals on Facebook too.

 

Whether you're making plans for this weekend or your best friend's birthday or a big anniversary, check out Deals on Facebook today to find cool things to do with friends. 

 

Emily White, director of local at Facebook, is looking forward to indoor skydiving with her friends.

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Winklevoss Twins Row Away From Facebook Suit

The Winklevosses and their partner Divya Narendra dropped their legal dispute against Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, deciding not to continue their Supreme Court action for more than the $65 million plus already awarded to them. Their lawsuit was a...
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