My Five: Five things worth sharing from the last week (or so), brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Matt.
1. RIP guest blogging
In what could be the final nail in the link building coffin, earlier this week Matt Cutts announced that guest blogging could be doing your site more harm than good.
So should you stop doing it? Well that depends on your approach. Like all things SEO, your strategy should be centred around the end user, and not search engines. If your quest for links is compromising that approach, then I’m afraid it’s not going to end well for you. Read Cutts’ full post here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/
2. Dr Dre takes on Spotify
In an effort to further expand his audio empire, Dre has just launched Beats Music – a digital music streaming services which “combines the power of human curation with technology to deliver the right online music at the right time.”
With a team of high profile industry professionals at its helm, and an intelligent algorithm which promises a truly personalised music experience, the likes of Spotify will undoubtedly be wary. Whether Dre can recreate his offline successes in an already populated online space is yet to be seen.
3. Google’s music timeline is fun but useless
Whilst on the subject of music, let’s take a quick look at Google’s latest “research” tool, Music Timeline. Music Timeline is a fun tool which represents the history of popular music in a neat, interactive visualisation.
Trouble is, the data is based solely on how many Google Play Music users have an artist or album in their music library. Given the underwhelming usership of this service, Music Timeline isn’t much use as a research tool, but it is a fun way to waste five minutes.
4. Facebook introduces trending topics
Eagle eyed Facebook users may have noticed a new addition to their newsfeed of late – a ‘trending’ column, located at the top-right of the page.
The Twitter-esque feature pulls in popular topics based on user interests, recency of the news and user engagement levels.
Mentions, hashtags and now trending topics. Is it just a matter of time before Facebook restricts posts to 140 characters?
5. Google improves search results, a bit
In an effort to help you find the search result you’re looking for, Google, starting today, will be introducing some extra information to its SERPs. By clicking on a website’s name, users will be able to see background information about the site, which should, in theory help them decide whether or not to click through.
For more information check out http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/more-information-about-websites-to-help.html.
Image courtesy of Engadget.
