SearchInfluence

Deep thoughts by bigtime lawyers...

Nearly everyone in the technology sector, especially those focused on the Internet, have een talking about the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Act. We’re not here to debate the finer points of combatting intellectual property theft on the internet — the “SOPA Blackout” has done a fine one-sided job of that. (If you’re interested in a very in-depth look at the whole saga, try Forbes’s information dump.) This “Blackout” has all the right components of a perfect case study of SEO, technical site architecture, viral marketing, and the nature of the internet.

More Bang for Your Buck: Maximize New Links on Old Pages – Whiteboard Friday — SEOmoz

SEOmoz’s internet-famous Whiteboard Friday series explains the best practices for making the most of links from old pages. Working from an SEOWizz study, Cyrus Shepard walks you through 4 solutions to make sure Google passes all the power from an old page to your new link. The key takeaway? Make sure the old page is significantly updated and Google crawls the page again by using “bank shot” links.

Building Links & Driving Traffic with How To Posts — Wolf Howl

3 Ways to Optimize Images: Search, Social Media & User Experience — TopRank

Does your website utilize images to catch your audience’s eye and promote user interaction? You may not be getting as much out of them as you can. Graphics add spice and break up potentially dull straight-text content, but are also a great venue for promoting your brand and drawing in surfers using image-specific searches. Here, TopRank shows you a variety of different ways to make sure all your image optimization bases are covered.

How Siri Makes Computers (and Coders) More Human — Scientific American

You may recall that we were mulling over the whole Netflix situation only a few weeks ago, which has seemed to be getting more ridiculous ever since the company announced pricing changes in July that made users choke on their dinners. Twice the price for what they were getting before? Streaming-only services? People were just starting to recover, but Netflix had clearly spent a lot of time sitting alone in the dark listening to sad music; they knew they hadn’t pleased their audience. And so they decided to try to make it better (which as, many men can attest to, never works).