Hey folks Austin here and it’s time for another Weekly SEO Recap (Drunk New Years Party Edition).

What happens if you Google SEO?  You get all the latest SEO articles that Google thinks is relevant to your search……but are they relevant to you?  Let me be the judge of that and help you cut to the chase.

a97585_g224_3SEO for Small Business: The Past, Present & Future of Search Engine Optimization

Another article for small businesses and people who have never heard of SEO.  This article is more a conversation about SEO services, and attempting to predict the future of Google.  Probably stuff you’ve SEO experts have heard day in and day out, and not worth reading.  But the beginning of the article has a good Google 2013 year in review summary.  We SEOs are usually so focused on the internet marketing algorithms that we don’t recognize some of the other things Google is doing.  Reviewing these things that I didn’t know Google was doing was actually kind of interesting, and it’s a quick read.

 Positives:

–          Google year in review summary

–          Good conversation about SEO for unfamiliar people

Negatives

–          Nothing to add for SEO experts

Overall: Skim the beginning, Skip the Rest

 

a97585_g224_5-beerMachine Learning for SEOs

We internet marketing professionals love studying the latest algorithm updates, develop strategies to leverage those algorithms for our clients, and measure our results.  But one thing we don’t think about is how those algorithms are created.  Tom Anthony is working on his PhD in artificial intelligence and has taken the opportunity to give us SEOs  a lesson on how Google builds algorithms.  Though we SEOs don’t need to be masters of machine learning, having a better understanding of how Google operates is always something we should be interested in reading about.

 

 Positives:

–          Insights into Google algorithm creation

–          Easy to follow Watermelon example

Negatives

–          More philosophy than strategy

–          Kind of hard to find actionable steps moving forward

Overall: Read it 

 

green_giant_prankGoogle punishes Rap Genius for manipulative SEO tactics

Pure entertainment.  You aren’t going to learn any new techniques.  You’re not going to learn anything that will help you rank better, but you will get a good laugh.  In short a website offered incentives if people linked to their website, and advertised that they did this on their Facebook page.  Google caught wind and released Matt Cutts on them.  As a result they’ve been removed from SERPs and the website said in their defense but our “rival lyrics websites also practice the same types of strategies.”

 Positives:

–          Utterly hilarious

–          Watching Google lay the smack down

Negatives

–          Screw negatives….it’s funny.

Overall: Read it.  It’s funny.