Google Webmaster Tools, New Digg, Infographics LInks, Speedlink 28:2012

Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great week. This week, most noteworthy news include “a hint” from Matt Cutts saying in an interview that Google is thinking of devaluing links from infographics.

“In principle, there’s nothing wrong with the concept of an infographic,” Cutts says in the interview. “What concerns me is the types of things that people are doing with them. They get far off topic, or the fact checking is really poor. The infographic may be neat, but if the information it’s based on is simply wrong, then it’s misleading people.”

He further adds that “… people don’t always realize what they are linking to when they reprint these infographics. Often the link goes to a completely unrelated site, and one that they don’t mean to endorse.”

This is quite interesting and if you have been using infographics as part of your SEO link building campaign, you may want rethink your strategy. When Matt “hints” about something, usually they are already doing something about it. Anyway, this also takes me a bit further and wonder about “how would they treat images” from Pinterest? Yeah, that’s because its where I see tons of infographics all together. Do you think that Pinterest has any SEO value at all?

More from Google, and this time, webmaster are starting to get messages about “crawl errors”. Google says that if your site often returns, 404s, 403s, 503s, etc., you probably would want to do something about it. If your site is timing out or is exhibiting systemic errors when accessed by Googlebot, other visitors to your site might be having the same problem! Hmmm, all the more reason to use webmaster tools. Here is the official announcement.

Finally, and as you may already know, BetaWorks (owner of bit.ly and more), has acquired DIGG probably with a coupon code. Yeah!, $500K is the reported amount, and that is absolutely a shocker. Anyway, what’s interesting is part of the statement that reads … “to make Digg as good as it used to be. Then we plan to make it even better, through innovations in both Top News and My News.” – Something to look forward to?

As usual, in no particular order:

Content Marketing/Online Business Bites

7 Content Marketing Links Worth Clicking
How to Boost Your Brand on Facebook and Drive Traffic to Your Blog
Why You Ought to Build an Online Brand Through Guest Blogging and Not Just Chase SEO Tricks
54 Quotes from Startup Leaders on How to Improve Conversions

Search/Marketing

The Strategic Inbound Marketing Guide to Big Results Without Big Budget
Road to MozCon: The State of SEO in 2012(Looong post, but highly recommended read)
An In-depth Analysis of Authorship, Google+ and Snippets

Social Web/Other Cool Stuff

Yahoo Password Breach Is Worse Than Originally Thought
Social Media Content Marketing & Search Engine Optimization
12 Tips to Optimize Facebook Page for Maximum Reach and Brand Visibility

Around the Web [more roundups]

Help Desk Hangout- SEO and Webmaster Academy

This week, we’re joined by Alexi and Michael, two SEO experts, to talk about how to build a website that really works with Google Search. We were also joined by Google celebrity, Matt Cutts, who shared some tips, tricks, and information about the Knowledge Graph.

That’s it! Enjoy and have a great weekend.