5 For Friday – Links, Stories, & Posts For Your Weekend

August 17th, 2012 by Search Influence Alumni

give me five! (CC)We’re back with another 5 for Friday, a collection of the freshest and tastiest SEO news stories, blogs and recommendations from across the web!

Brace Yourself: The Next Penguin Update Will Be Big — SEO Round Table

Matt Cutts didn’t just hint at the Search Engine Strategies San Francisco conference, he outright warned “You don’t want the next Penguin update.” More importantly, he gave insight into how the black-and-white creatures update. Panda is now a regular and quiet update, more like a ranking factor than an “update,” while Penguin still has some iterations before it will settle into the same kind of rolling boil. All this means for your online marketing is to be aware of the ever-changing search engine rank and to weather storms with sharable and linkable content.

Saudi Arabia thinks .anything is .offensive — CNN

Saudi Arabia and other countries are objecting to a variety of the new TLDs released for sale by ICANN. While Saudi concerns center around prurient and religious topics, other countries such as Australia are running into existing laws that prohibit certain terms in advertising. The ICANN has a detailed process to handle these concerns, but the simplest solution for this issue is something that many liberal democracies and net privacy folks might balk at: nationalized domain and TLD blocking.

Consumer Watchdog asks the FTC to Support Google’s competitors by blocking Frommer’s acquisition — The Inquirer

A decades-old consumer advocacy nonprofit is lobbying the FTC to block Google’s acquisition of travel guide publisher Frommer’s, echoing a statement from the Google competitors’ group Fairsearch.org. Consumer Watchdog cites the recent Cookiegate, which ended in the largest FTC punishment to any company ($22.5 million) to Google, as an example that the company “has repeated [sic] demonstrated it does not honor its promises.” Consumer Watchdog had no comment on the great value to Google that a combination of Frommer’s and Zagat would have, saying “What’s important is that it’s blocked.”

Google Plus Ghost Town? — UMPF

PR and social media agency UMPF posted an infographic comparing Google+ shares per user to other social networks. Per 100 million users, Twitter reigns supreme with nearly 200 shares; followed by Facebook and LinkedIn before Google’s 6 shares per 100 million. Yet, anyone on these social networks might smell a rat: . Marketing Land’s post on the subject brings up a variety of issues with the studies, but the most striking is that 100 posts is hardly enough to judge this kind of interaction. Interesting too is that “likes” and “+1s” aren’t shares, while Twitter only has a “share” feature through retweets and simple posting.

Guys! Bing Has Human Raters Too! — Search Engine Land

Search Engine Land reports that Bing’s quality judges are not too far off from their counterparts at Google. These contracted workers use a rubric based on relevancy to search intent as the main way to evaluate search results. Bing’s judges also should take “freshness” into account, echoing Google’s QDF status on certain search phrases. While the substance isn’t particularly different than Google’s evaluations, the subtleties show what a business can do to ensure high evaluations in the major search engines.

Got a killer link from this week? Let us know in the comments!