Google Copyright Penalty, Pinterest Drops Invites, Speedlink 32:2012

Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great week. This week, one of the most noteworthy news definitely goes to the announcement of Google saying that they will be penalizing sites who repeatedly been accused of copyright infringement. Already dubbed “Emanuel“, some fear that such a signal may trigger abuse as removal requests have dramatically increased. According to Google, in the last 30 days alone, more than 4.3 million URLs where submitted for removal. That’s a lot and while most sites that appear on Google’s transparency list are mostly “torrent and related sites”, there may be “others” that are just a victim of “false accusations”. We’ll see how this goes.

Here’s an excerpt of Google’s official announcement:

We aim to provide a great experience for our users and have developed over 200 signals to ensure our search algorithms deliver the best possible results. Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results …

Other noteworthy news comes from Pinterest who this week decided to open registration to anyone without the need of an invitation. If one of the reasons you have not joined Pnterest yet was due to lack of an invitation, you should know that you can now register with your FaceBook/Twitter account, or even with your own email address. Hmmm, what do you think? Will this encourage more “spammers” to create Pinterest accounts?

Finally, if you are interested to know more about Google’s advertising products and solutions, among other things, here is the calendar of their upcoming webinars. There might just be something that may interest you.

As usual, in no particular order:

Content Marketing/Small Business Bites

• Nine Articles for Serious WordPress Publishers
• Content: A Blessing, A Bubble, A Burden
• 13 Ways to Spice Up Your Marketing Content With Data
• Should You Create Your Business Plan on Pinterest?

SEO/Inbound Marketing

• 101 Ways to Link Build in 2012
• Is Your Linkbuilding Working? How to Easily Check Using Webmaster Tools and a Pivot Chart
• How YouTube Will Escape Google’s New Pirate Penalty
• 10 Old SEO Methods You Need to Stop

Social Web/Other Cool Stuff

• The Buffer API is ready: check out 15 awesome apps you can use to share with Buffer
• @HootSuite Review, Simply The Best Social Management System Ever!
• How To Check PageRank For All Pages In A Website At Once
• Facebook Mobile for Business: What You Need to Know

How malicious parties can spam your site

Malicious visitors to your site can create spam through mechanisms such as comment spam, forum spam, and freehost accounts. Learn about these tactics and how to prevent them early on.

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