Guys! Look at that ugly penguin hiding...

Google is constantly changing (improving...) and this time many got a hit because of their new Penguin update. In my case, the latest changes have been rather positive, but many people got hit the wrong way around and their ranking went down, possibly very much so (some talk about receiving a negative ranking and suing Google over it!)

The latest change can affect anyone, although if you've done nothing wrong, you should be just fine. This being said, the way this new release works can lead to your website losing its rank because someone else played a trick on you. Whether Google can detect and/or accept that you weren't responsible is a different question. At this point, it is still a bit early to say that it is all bad.

So? What did they do this time?

Yesterday I created a new Twitter account and I could not get my Profile Picture to load (they also call it the Twitter Avatar).

I tried I do not know how many times, changing the format of the image (JPG instead of PNG) and it still wouldn't work.

Today, I found this message explaining that somehow it's a major technical problem on their end.

I Can't Upload My Profile Picture or Avatar

Bug alert:

• The avatar upload feature has been temporarily disabled. Users will not be able to upload new profile pictures at this time.

Engineers are aware of the above issue and working ...

Today I wanted to touch one of the most important point about Email Marketing with you. You may actually be surprised... but this important point actually applies to writing a blog like I'm doing right here, right now in my Snap! Websites journal.

First and foremost, I noticed a trend in the last two years of people saying that when building your list of subscribers you shouldn't ask for the user's name. Apparently, some people noticed that they were getting more subscriptions to their marketing lists by just and only asking the users to enter their email address.

My personal (and I insist on that term: personal) feeling is that such marketers are missing the point. Either that, or they are building a list of subscribers that they only want to keep for a very short time (possibly a good thing for MLM, as those marketing an MLM product generally expect a very quick Yes I'll Do It answer.)

Picture by Mdf

The very first tweet posted on Twitter was March 21, 2006 and within this short period of 6 years, well over 500 million accounts where created.

It changed the Social Media landscape allowing many fans to talk with their favorite stars and Internet Marketers to grow the number of people who hear about them and their services or products. Many large companies are also using the system to closely keep in touch with their customers, giving them a great marketing advantage.

Like with any other Social Media system, once you created your account and are actively using it, it just ...

Today I was looking for a way to add a Google +1 button that looked like other buttons. Suppose you have a website where you already added buttons: Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest. You created a very specific look for those 3 buttons to match your website. It looks really nice. Now you want to add a Google +1 button...

The image on the right shows you the default Google +1 look.
If that is not what you want on your site, you'll want to use the following trick.

To my point of view, one of the most prominent thing on the Internet these days is:

I want to make money!

Although many people are happy with just their regular job and use the Internet to work faster, play games at home, and find delicious recipes, there is a large number of people who think of the Internet as a money making machine. Well... it indeed created quite a few millionaires and will continue in doing so.

But...

I often receive spam in my mailbox and on my websites. It is expected that emails will include one link that's repeated several times so the readers are much more likely to click on it at least once1. If they don't click on the first one, they are likely to click on the second or the third. When they skip all of those links, maybe they'll click the one in the P.S. area? This technique makes it easy to funnel people to a specific location on your website.

Now this is completely different from good SEO.

• 1. As a rule of thumb, you do not want to have more than one link per paragraph, and if you have really small paragraphs, probably one every other paragraph. If the link doesn't really fit in the paragraph or you decided to send text emails, you may also place the links between paragraphs.

I learned today that in the last couple of months two people tested content using an IFRAME to see whether the links in the IFRAME would generate the expected juice1 to the destination page, and it does!

The image to the right shows you what the test is about:

1. You create a new page

2. You create a link from a low ranking page2

• 1. In SEO terms, juice means passing ranking value from one page to another.
• 2. You do this because that's where the link really belongs! Remember that for clean SEO and high ranking, you want links to look right for the page.

Today I watched this video about Übercart which is the e-Commerce system we offer with Snap! Websites.

The last slide presented in this video1 shows a list of pages by importance. This entry really caught my eye because the order of the pages is different from what I've seen before.

If you also have a cart and offer goods to your customers, this is very important to you because if you are like me you want to increase your sales and not just spend your time on beautifying pages that are not significant to your actual customers.

For example, my company's main website has an okay front page. We actually don't change it (it could definitively be better!) because not even 10% of our traffic ever visits our front page (i.e. out of 3,000 hits or so a month, we'd get a whooping 260 hits on the home page, often not the same people who landed on another page.)

• 1. The slide of interest appears a little after 9 minutes. Note that the video is pretty awful otherwise...

On October 18, Google announced that all the searches for logged in users (say you have a G+ account...) will make use of their secure pages (i.e. using encrypted data.) Our new upcoming Snap! Websites version will also let you log in your account using SSL.

This is important for users of Google+ since a bar appears at the top and the functionality of that bar includes a cookie. This is a security issue since your account could get hacked since your cookie is traveling on the Internet in clear while doing searches (unless you log out of G+ each time you use it?)