It’s Facebook!  It’s Stumbleupon!  It’s Flickr!  It’s WHAT IS HOT!

Two months ago I had not even heard about Pinterest.  Today I can’t turn-around without reading more about it and according to Alexa, (a decent barometer of website traffic) Pinterest is going through the roof!

The Pinterest terms don’t allow outright spamming and I doubt the spammers would be successful anyway because nobody would follow them – but if done properly Pinterest can be a good way to increase your brand recognition especially if your brand/product/website is visual in nature.

Don’t miss out on the next big thing, jump in before it’s too late!

(Read to the tune of Video Killed The Radio Star)
I can remember, a long time ago, way back in my early days of webmastering and SEOing circa 2006, many blogging and SEO ‘experts’ were predicting that the end of SEO as we knew it would soon be upon us. They pointed to many of the changes that Google was beginning to make for determining search-ranking results such as personal web-browsing habits, bounce-rate, time spent on-page, etc – metrics that were not easily controlled or gamed by webmasters.

Fast-forward to 2011: Google now has Chrome, Google+, Android, near-full saturation of websites using Analytics, and a variety of services, websites, and systems all with the ability to do one very important thing: Collect user data and browsing habits.

It now looks like with Google’s Panda updates beginning earlier this year, the search engine giant is beginning to leverage all of that data to rank websites more on this new data than on the traditional metrics such as inbound links and keyword saturation that spammers “SEO Experts” have been using to game Google search results for years.

ZDNET’s Tom Foremski wrote an article this week underscoring the apparent fact that effectively, Google has killed SEO. In the article, he points out a few items about our new non-SEO reality:

- If you are negatively affected by Google’s new search rankings, no matter what you do (based on ‘old style’ SEO), you probably will not be able to regain your previous search engine ranking

- The seemingly random elements of Google’s recent updates could be a way to prevent webmasters from putting their heads together to reverse-engineer the changes (Google is smarter than we are)

- Blogger.com (owned by Google) has been unaffected by the recent changes. Perhaps Google is protecting their own interest – or, maybe they are saving the spammer-haven for last.

What does all this mean to you?

Hopefully it means that as the owner of a quality, original, content-rich website, you will now be able to reap the rewards of all the new traffic coming your way and will no longer have to worry about “SEO”.

Or..

If you are the owner of shitty, copycat, spammy, worthless websites, it’s time to quit being a lazy slacker and go start your new career at McDonald’s.

I’ve felt the sting of the Google-Slap and trust me, you no wanna get it. Seoptimize.com has a list of 33 ways to get yourself bitchslapped by Google: Avoid The GoogleSlap

“When Google rolled out the first Panda update on 23 February 2011, we saw our site traffic plummet by 40%. I learned about this four hours after quitting my day job to become a full-time blogger.”

Guest-Post at Problogger about the Google Panda Update and how it affected OneProjectCloser.com.