Promoted Pins, Action #Hashtags, Negative SEO, Free QuickOffice, Speedlink 38:2013

Hi everyone! Hope you had a great and productive week. This week has been a bit quite on the SEO forefront. Maybe it’s because there are many who started to realize that “paid advertising” is also a valid form of getting traffic, one that done right, can bring faster results. From that end, Pinterest announced this week that they are “going to start experimenting with promoting certain pins from a select group of businesses”. They also promised that this promoted pins will not contain flashy banners or pop-up ads, and will be transparent.

There you have it. Soon enough, marketers will have another “quick and faster” way of promoting stuff through Pinterest.

Also this week, Mashable has reported a very interesting new service from Chirpify. As it so seems, Chirpify which already lets you buy and sell products via tweets, wants to go a step further announcing that a new type of #hashtag, dubbed “action tags”, will allow a user to buy stuff by using a social account. Wow! I’m confused, but I will definitely look into this very closely. How about you, have you heard about Chirpify before? Do you think that the “action tag” may actually work?

Understanding Link-Based Negative SEO

While I did mention above that it was a bit quite on the SEO front, there is this article from SearchEngineWatch.com about negative SEO that I totally recommend you reading. There has been a lot of “chatter” regarding negative SEO and it’s effectiveness. One of the things that this article points out is essentially the art of “manipulating links” negatively. The article walks you through some common features and distinctions of link-based negative SEO attacks, illustrative examples, and preventative steps and ideas for what to do if your site is affected. Great stuff!

Free Quickoffice

Finally, in case you missed it, Google announced earlier this week that they are making Quickoffice available for free to everyone: students, businesses, nonprofits, governments, consumers and anyone with a Google Account. What’s more, if you sign in to your Google Account from the new Quickoffice app for Android or iOS by September 26, 2013, an extra 10GB of Google Drive storage will be added to your account for two years. That alone is already worth it.

As usual, in no particular order: