The Penguin 2.0 release was actually, Matt Cutts explained, the 4th release of Penguin, but they called it 2.0 because it was the first one since the launch to include major changes in the way it works.

A quick explanation of Google Penguin

The Wikipedia definition for Penguin says this: “Google Penguin is a code name for a Google algorithm update that was first announced on April 24, 2012. The update is aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by using now declared black-hat SEO techniques, such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, participating in link schemes, deliberate creation of duplicate content, and others.”

Before Penguin came other changes to the way Google works – the largest being Panda. The difference between Panda and Penguin are quite simple:

• Google Panda was designed to target poor quality
• Google Penguin was designed to target spammy page rank sculpting

Many websites lost rank in April 2012 when the first Penguin filter was launched – those with home pages full of irrelevant and apparently paid-for links were particularly affected.

What’s the difference between Penguin 2.o and Penguin 1.0?

Penguin 1.0 did not go deep into a website. It judged a site very much on the content of the home page and the relationship of that home page to other websites. If your home page linked out to irrelevant sites, or had lots of links pointing in from suspect sources, Penguin may have penalised you.

Penguin 2.0 goes deeper into the site, looking at more pages.

To understand how to diagnose a Penguin penalty and what to do about it, you have to look through your Analytics data and identify anysudden losses.

Here is a round-up of useful articles that are worth reading about Penguin 2.0

• Penguin 2.0/4 – were you jarred and/or jolted? – Moz.com by Dr Peter J Meyers
• Penguin 2.0 losers – porn sites, game sites and big brands – Searchengineland.com by Matt McGee
• Penguin 2.0 – your road map to recovery – Search Engine Journal by Jayson DeMers
• The true value of link building in the post-Penguin era – by Kaiser the Sage

In this superb infographic by British Logo Design, you can see examples of logos and understand the impact of the colour choices.

• If you want to create a sense of urgency, go for red (think of the red-top tabloid newspapers).
• Blue engenders trust and is favoured by corporate institutions like banks.
• Some banks like green, which is an organic colour signifying growth and trust.
• Grey is a calm, neutral and professional colour.

And do it goes on. The infographic is well worth a read.

You can see the full infographic here.

TechnoGym suggests sitting on a wellness ball, which increases trunk motion by 66% and abs movement variation by 33%.

“I was getting bummed in a public toilet and slipped on a wet floor and split my head open… my boyfriend had to rush me to hospital. I just received a £2k cheque for 10 stiches in my head and a burst anus… thanks! Mr C Eyley”

The story was picked up on Twitter and various websites. Pink News said it tried to contact Accident Claims to find out whether it was a hoax or whether the website had been hacked. Digital Spy also reported the story, with a language warning at the top of the page.

If this testimonial is a genuine one, insurers may suddenly be hit with a flurry of claims as more cottagers slipping on wet bathroom floors take out accident claims.

This is the Accident Claims website in question. NOT to be confused with this or this.

Surely I am being sensationalist. Even if I’m right, does it really matter? What harm can it do if Instagram wants to include your photo in advertisements? Are you going to make money out of that photo on your own? (Well, you might be able to.) Facebook and Instagram are not likely to use your photo and make it look like you are endorsing something unfairly, so where’s the harm? We get to use the sites for free, right? They have to make money somehow.

What Facebook says about how it uses your information

Facebook’s Data Use Policy includes this statement:

While you are allowing us to use the information we receive about you, you always own all of your information. Your trust is important to us, which is why we don’t share information we receive about you with others unless we have:

• received your permission;
• given you notice, such as by telling you about it in this policy; or
• removed your name or any other personally identifying information from it.

Of course, for information others share about you, they control how it is shared.

Take note of those parts I have bolded. I’ll come back to them in a minute. Now look at what Facebook says about how your data is shared with third party apps.

Your friends and the other people you share information with often want to share your information with applications to make their experiences on those applications more personalized and social. For example, one of your friends might want to use a music application that allows them to see what their friends are listening to. To get the full benefit of that application, your friend would want to give the application her friend list – which includes your User ID – so the application knows which of her friends is also using it. Your friend might also want to share the music you “like” on Facebook. If you have made that information public, then the application can access it just like anyone else. But if you’ve shared your likes with just your friends, the application could ask your friend for permission to share them.

In other words, you can restrict your own likes to your friends, but if those friends use apps in an open way and decide to share more information than you would want them to, tough luck.

The short reality is that you cannot actually control your privacy on Facebook. No matter how many lines Facebook adds to its privacy statements or how many granular controls it adds to your account settings – the whole system of you being in control of what people see about you falls over completely because anything any of your friends does can make you public.

Facebook uses your likes to endorse paying sponsors

A recent development on Facebook is “sponsored stories”. These give advertisers the chance to pop up on people’s timelines next to recommendations by friends. For example, if you check-in at Starbucks and post on your timeline, your friends may then see a sponsored story showing that activity. Starbucks pays Facebook, you star in the advert but you get nothing.

You can also appear in sponsored ads if you like the Facebook pages of companies that pay Facebook for Sponsored Stories appearances.

You control your own content, but you don’t

Facebook’s legal terms page says clearly that you own everything that you upload to Facebook or type into Facebook, presuming it is yours to begin with. You can now also delete your account and remove all your content (something you couldn’t do a few months ago). That’s good, right? But, you can only delete what you post. If content you have posted has been shared by others, Facebook can carry on using that content as much as it likes.

Here’s what Facebook says.

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

Let’s examine that in the context of the earlier statements. I can post pictures of my kids in fancy dress at a party for friends to see only – then one of them can share it with their friends, so I no longer have control over it even though I chose to make that content only private. (Here’s a good place to refer you to my earlier post on how to control privacy with Google Plus circles.) Additionally, I might like the Starbucks page just to enter a prize draw, then my name and picture will appear in adverts for my friends to see, showing me endorsing Starbucks. Great. Way to go Facebook.

At this point, deleting my account looks like the most sensible thing to do. But I want to use Facebook for at least some things. It’s ubiquitous. I have to log into Facebook to manage Facebook pages on behalf of clients. The best option is to be aware, which of course most people are not. The more things you click on, like and share that are connected to Facebook (you don’t even have to be ON Facebook), the more you are allowing your own name to be used commercially. Whether you care or not is up to you.

Instagram is likely to wake people up

Today Instagram announced that it will be changing its policy to fall into line with Facebook. From mid January 2013, everything you post on Instagram (or have posted) will be deemed to be usable commercially. Unless you remove content before the date, you will be deemed to have given permission for that content to be sold to advertisers for use in ads. Let’s think of an example. You go to Starbucks and take a photo of a coffee cup and a cake and you upload it to Instagram with “Starbucks” in the caption. Next thing you know, that picture is showing up on the timeline of your Facebook friends under a “Sponsored” banner with the news that you love Starbucks. Even if you don’t.

The reaction to Instagram’s announcement was swift and wide, and it may cause people to desert the site. It may also wake people up to the lack of privacy control that Facebook offers altogether. Then again, is it really that important? You decide, just be informed.

Typos in advertisements though? Not really acceptable when you are claiming to be “proffesional”. Even if the fee is just $5, would you want to buy a piece of creative work from someone who makes such a blatant error twice in their advert? Would you trust someone to help you “BEEN SEEN” on the net? Even if they only wanted $10 for the service?

You might fail to spot mistakes in articles but when you are writing an advert of around 25 words to ask people to pay you for your skills, surely accuracy is vital. If people are judging you on those 25-or-so words, a lack of accuracy is going to make them think less of you. Even those who are writing in a second or third language have tools at their disposal to check spelling and grammar and, of course, social networks full of friends to ask.

A page one ranking on Google for a hero search term is likely to drive good traffic to your website. At least 90% of all clicks on Google search results go to sites on page one, and the vast majority of those clicks go to the top three results. If hundreds of thousands of people search each month for the top phrase on your site and you rank in the top three results, you are going to get a considerable amount of traffic. However, not all high ranks have high volume. While it’s important to shoot for the moon by trying to get good ranks for top phrases, a website can be equally successful with a much wider array of long-tail phrases. A long-tail phrase is a more specific, longer search term, such as “How to change the headlamp on a Ford Focus”.

The other assumption about link building is that the more links you have the better. Since Google launched its Penguin filter in April 2012, websites had to think a lot more carefully about their linking strategies. Many SEO companies place high importance on link building, promising to create X backlinks each month when that may be a waste of money. One or two good links to your website each month may be as valuable as hundreds on bad websites.

SEO is about rank and links but what it is really about is optimising for conversions. This point was made strongly by SEO expert Danny Dover in a recent video interview on the Business Frame website. Danny said, “I put all of my focus on conversions as opposed to rankings themselves. What I’m trying to do is optimise for the entire funnel… whatever act it is I want them to perform on my website. It’s really that I care about. I couldn’t care less about rankings. I know I can drive more traffic with higher rankings, but that’s not always true. Sometimes the longtails win out.”

Danny is a former member of the SEO team at SEOMoz and author of Search Engine Optimization Secrets.

The company received a post from a Facebook user, a man, who jokingly called the company liars because it claimed periods were a happy occasion where everyone smiles and takes part in exciting activities. The truth, he said, was that he can’t bear to be around his partner when she has Aunty Flow visiting.

Here is the video from Bodyform, which has already had more than two million views.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bpy75q2DDow

This piece of marketing ticks several boxes in one fell swoop:

• Uses humour to laugh at itself
• Uses a classic joke to suddenly “own” the joke
• The content is massively shareable
• Reinforces the brand messages that Bodyform has paid millions for over the years

Poster from the movie Chain Letter.

Which is worse – people who write chain letters or people who fall for them? Facebook has become the new place for waste-of-time chain letters to flourish because of the ease of sharing. It used to be email.

The worst ones are those that tell you some sad story about an abused child or a sick animal with the added message that something bad will happen to someone if you don’ forward it to five friends. Slightly nicer versions say something good will happen to you if you forward it to five friends.

People who believe that crap are the same people who believe horoscopes. I don’t care how much Russell Grant and Mystic Meg have read up on astrology, numerology and psychology, you will never convince me that horoscopes are anything more than bollockology. Chain letters are exactly the same.

One popular variant which started out as snail mail was “this letter is being tracked by Royal Mail for charity. Every time it is posted on, Royal Mail is counting and money will be donated to charity”. Words to that effect. There is no way Royal Mail would or could do anything of the kind. This scam became an email a few years ago but suddenly it was Microsoft that was supposed to be doing the tracking – again, not something Microsoft can do because it doesn’t handle or route every email on the planet.

In the past few years, we’ve seen a growth in ridiculous claims made on Facebook about privacy breaches and the idea that you are going to be charged to continue to use it.

The sad thing is that most of the people who share such crap are intelligent, thoughtful people. They just share it “just in case”, usually with a message along the lines of “I don’t usually believe this stuff but this one I’m sharing just in case”. Why? It is always a scam, always made up by some loon just trying to have a laugh or, worse, harvest email addresses or get you to open some link that installs a Trojan virus.

How ironic it is that we have more fast access to information nowadays such that we are better informed (if we bother to look) yet it is so easy to keep sharing and liking stuff without thinking, people tend to choose the latter over the former.

Comment spammers cheer me up. I’m talking about the people who post spam into the comments of blogs. This blog in particular gets a fair amount of spam comments a day. I rarely get a proper comment. Yes I would like to see more people commenting, but I’d rather have none than just allow the page to be filled with rubbish.

BUT, that’s not to say the rubbish being posted by these spammers is not good quality rubbish. It’s comedy gold, I tell you. Some of the comments I read makes me chuckle – physically. That’s supposed to be good for you isn’t it? So let me share some of these comments with you, without including the links these people are promoting.

Spam should have its own show. Maybe Harry Hill will present it.

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