5 for Friday — Links, Stories, & Posts for Your Weekend

May 25th, 2012 by Search Influence Alumni

five for fridayWe’re back with another 5 for Friday, a collection of the freshest and tastiest SEO news stories, blogs and recommendations from across the web!

Times-Picayune changes bring strong reactions among subscribers and those farther away — Times Picayune/Nola.com

Much to the dismay of many morning paper readers, the technological media revolution has claimed another victim. Starting in the fall, New Orleans’s Pulitzer Prize-winning paper is dropping to a 3-weekday format, following other Southern papers owned by Advance Publications. However, the future might not be so bleak: web content gives the Times-Picayune writers constant work divorced from a traditional publishing schedule, and the frantic pace of online writing can cover stories effectively as they happen. We mourn the losses, but are hopeful for the future of the paper and online publication from traditional media.

Google AdWords Auction Insights Reveals Who You’re Competing Against — Search Engine Watch

Google recently gave advertisers a new research and diagnosis tool. AdWords advertisers now don’t need to go to a third-party site like SpyFu or KeywordSpy to figure out who is playing in their schoolyard. Now, Auction Insights shows how often your site shows above or below your competitors in the ad auction for a given keyword. Not only does this let you see what keywords have less competition, it also shows how well you’re doing in that competition. No new data is released, but the presentation of the information makes it a critical new tool for AdWords advertisers.

Yahoo launches Axis browser — Washington Post

Yahoo has (sort of) joined the browser world, expanding in a Browser add-on and mobile app called Axis. This visual search and mobile browser attractively displays thumbnails of websites and images, allowing you to immediately see what you’re looking for and make the decision. A small hiccup early on was a security issue on Chrome, but after that, the product has received generally positive reviews and may end up being a killer app from an aging web portal scrambling to find its niche.


PinAlerts: Discover When One of Your Images Gets Pinned on Pinterest
— Small Business Trends

PinAlerts merges the worlds of Google Alerts and Pinterest. It emails you if your site gets pinned, letting you get more from the emerging social media sites. It also lets you identify target markets, figure out what goes viral, and check on competitor sites. Pinterest marketing is an up-and-comer in today’s social media landscape, and PinAlerts is a full-fledged tool for anyone interested in taking advantage of the fledgling image sharing site.

Google Analytics Social Reports Get Backlink URLs, Post Titles — WebProNews

Earlier this month, Google Analytics expanded its social reporting, allowing you to see interactions about your site on social media networks that are a part of the Social Data Hub, a subset of social media sites that provide more data to Analytics. This new report allows you to see what exactly people across a wide swath of social media sites are doing with your posts. Saving links on Delicious, +1ing your post, trackbacks, ReadItLater, and Digg votes can be seen with these reports, letting you see exactly what people are doing with your pages.