1. Facebook Acquired Glancee
FB has acquired another company, this time focussed more on Local Mobile or rathe location based discovery app. Second aquisition comes within a month of buying Instagram (mobile based photosharing app) for $1 billion. Just before the public offering, Facebook has taken some steps to show the potential and growth that it can bring in.
2. Foursquare with a new timeline
Yes, finally foursquare has decide to bring in a timeline, this is ‘searchable’.
The evolution of timeline has come up after tweaking the existing ‘History’ page. The social site has a usability concern and have limited asian audience as of now.
3. Google’s Penguin Update and Panda 3.6
while both of them are targetted towards better user search experience by reducing spam indexing and ranking, Google’s Penguin is a Webspam Update affecting 3.1% queries. So link spamming and stuffing will be handled by an iron hand ( or penality algo). While Panda updates, now they are many and rolled out in phases, are impacting Domain level ranking.
In one way, unique and fresh content will be given importance. Go Blogging!
4. Pandia.com has gone on a break.
The site says and I quote:
To our readers.
Pandia is a project we as editors have rund since 1998 on our spare time. It has been a labor of love, but we readily admit that it has not always been easy to combine with our offline life and our daytime jobs.
At the moment we find that we are not able to deliver the amount of original content our readers should expect from us. We have therefore decided to take a break while we consider the future of the site.
We might find ways of engaging other writers, or we may pass the torch to others interested in search and social media. We would prefer to keep the current content, however, and will not sell the domain to be used for other types of content.
Susanne and Per Koch
5. Google added new Backlink URL report via Google Analytics
The reports come under ‘social’ influence of your content and is a useful dimension to let the webmasters know which content is creating buzz, going viral etc.
6. Google not to allow Ads rotate evenly
In a bid to demotivate search marketers doing A/B and multi-split tests, Google Adwords has decided not to continue rotate ads feature for more than 30 days. This will also help in adding more revenue as ‘clicks’ and ‘ctr’ will be the factors on which the ad will be shown.
