SearchInfluence

Google’s New Privacy Policy May Violate HIPAA, Congresswoman Says - Search Engine Land
Because Google’s new privacy policy intends to make its services more user-friendly by integrating all of its privacy policies into one.  Some members of Congress, however, fear that this single new policy will violate HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Google states that ads will not be associated with sensitive issues, such as religion, sexual orientation or health, but should Google be forced to comply with HIPAA regulations?

LeGoogle

Google has landed in hot water in France after offering its Google Maps product for free in the country. America is known as the land of the free, and we all know big businesses get to do pretty much whatever they want. The idea of a government stepping in to say a business can’t give away a service for free strikes me as particularly French.

But while this move may not slow down the Google machine, it could open the door to similar lawsuits as Google sets its sights on new markets in previously un(Google)mapped countries. Could this be the beginning of a real life game of Risk that Google might not want to lose?

No joke, this is what my wife's inbox looks like.

I’ve sent out a few newsletters in my time at Search Influence, and I’ve had to curb the client’s expectations more than once. Email marketing can be a time-consuming, arduous process and returns what seems to be very little. While email marketing is becoming more obsolete in this social media-dominated world, it’s still worth pursuing. Your expectations just need to be adjusted (read: lowered). Below I’ll break down the different metrics, what they mean, if you should care about them and what you should be expecting out of a successful campaign.

Search engines are designed to do one thing — make sense of the various documents found on the Web. Originally using just on-page factors like content and meta information contained in specialized tags, search engines moved to analysis of links in the late 90′s with the advent of the PageRank algorithm. This new method treated links as “votes” for websites, using anchor text and website clout to determine what is relevant to a search query. Recently, though still relying on links as the main source for determining a page’s worth, search engines and other Internet spiders are returning to on-page factors to find information that’s meaningful to users.

“New” On-Page Meta

These “new” on-page factors are the culmination of work dating back to the beginning of the modern Internet. The original diagram showing the basics of how the Web would work devotes much of its space to showing the connections between pages, but one corner lays the foundation for what is now known as the semantic web. This image shows a few of the basic properties in the semantic web: rel=author and other relationship markups, Schema’s breadcrumbs and on-page descriptions, and the hCard microformat.

Much like our weekly 5 For Friday series, Read This! is a monthly feature on our blog that collects all the practical guides and how-to’s you could ever want to help your business compete online. What’s on the roster for this month? Check it out:
 

StumbleUpon: A Forgotten Social Media Goldmine — Nifty Marketing

With the proliferation of people tumbl’ng, digging, tweeting and sharing, it’s easy to forget about one of the classics of link sharing: StumbleUpon. This powerful little tool has been around for years, and it may be time for you to think about utilizing it for your business.