SEO Myths, Yahoo Axis, Microsoft Socl, Facebook IPO, Speedlink 21:2012

Hello everyone. Hope you all had a great week. This week, there has been some interesting stuff going on in the search industry and on the social web. Yahoo has launched Yahoo Axis, their new search engine/browser, which as they say is aimed to redefine what it means to search and browse the web. Pretty bold statement but at first glance, they just might be up to something. I installed the “desktop” addon on my FireFox browser and started to play a bit with the interface. Let’s see how it goes. Have you tried Axis yet? How about DuckDuckGo? Looks like they are attracting more users…

Another interesting stuff that happened this week is the launch of Microsoft’s new social network Socl, pronounced “social”. As with Axis, I also jumped in to see what it has to offer, and first impressions reminds me of certain features (named differently), available on another network. At first, it may look complicated, but once you get the hand of using Socl’s interface, it is actually not that difficult to use. Danny Sullivan wrote a great coverage about Socl, so if you are interested, read what he has to say. Will Microsoft be a major player in the social arena? Remains to be seen. Too early to make any judgements.

On another forefront, I really wanted to skip the whole hulabahlooh related to FaceBook’s IPO. Share price has dropped roughly 17.5% from its original IPO offer price. Scary, if you ask me, and still not sure where all this will end. We’ll see.

Finally, this week’s WhiteBoard Friday of Rand from SEOMoz, is really worth watching. In case you missed it, he explains in detail, why you should not worry about certain “SEO advices” popping up here and there, due to the latest updates from Google. All in all, just apply the most ethical search engine optimization practices, and you should be fine.

10 Myths That Scare SEOs But Shouldn’t

As usual, in no particular order:

Search/Marketing

Content/Online Business Bites

How to Build and Operate a Content Marketing Machine
7 Reasons Content Marketing is Better Than Link Building
4 Ways to Make Instagram Work for Your Small Business
The Inbound Marketer’s Complete Guide to Newsjacking

Social Web/Other Cool Stuff

Around the Web [more roundups]

What should I do if my competitors are using webspam techniques?

White hat search marketers read and follow Google Quality Guidelines. What should they tell clients whose competitors use black hat techniques and whom continue to rank as a result of those techniques?