Top 5 Free SEO Tools For Bootstrapping Small Businesses in 2017

The Internet is an immensely competitive place, and when it comes to Search Engines, the competition can be flat out fierce. Everyone wants to be at the top of Google and other search engines. It’s not an ego thing, it’s all about the cash money. As such, websites and companies are willing to invest huge […]

Yahoo Launches An Online Website Builder

Everyone seems to be rolling out a website builder these days – which makes sense considering how important it is for a small business to have an online presence. Yahoo wasn’t about to be passed by as they rolled out a new website builder themselves. For those of you who don’t know – Yahoo has […]

Twitter Plans To Sell Pre-Roll Ads on Periscope

I recently pointed out that Twitter’s growth is severely behind their competition, both with their user base growth and financially. As such Twitter needs to step things up, and the new plan to help generate some revenue is to start selling pre-roll ads on Periscope videos. Pre-roll ads are shown right before the start of […]

reCaptcha Is Becoming Invisible

Seeing a reCaptcha on a contact form has become pretty standard these days, and while the overall process of passing the captcha is rather harmless – it can still be rather annoying at times. Luckily Google has found a way to make the entire captcha process entirely invisible! Well as invisible as it can get. […]

GoDaddy Launches Business Hosting With Dedicated Resources

GoDaddy has been strongly targeting the small business owner for a while now – and with good reason. Small business owners need websites, and are often the largest buyer of shared hosting. However shared hosting hasn’t always been very fair to business owners, often combining them on the same servers intended for personal blogs and […]

Scam Alert: New Variations of Email-Based Domain Renewal Scams Going Around

Late in 2016 I had first spotted these email-based domain name expiration scams going around, and unfortunately these are making their rounds across the interwebs again, only this time there’s a new variation. Much like the IDNS scam, these scams are also targeting domain name renewals, however these domain name renewal scams focus on sending […]

1 in 5 Websites Still Using Vulnerable SHA-1 SSL Certificates

A new cyber security report from Venafi has revealed that over 21% of all websites are still currently using an insecure SSL certificate. SHA-1 certificates were exposed to be vulnerable for man-in-the-middle attacks, collision attacks, and brute force attacks. Remember Heartbleed? “The results of our most recent analysis are not surprising,” said Kevin Bocek, chief […]

Google Confirms: Quality Blog Comments Signify A Healthy Website

It’s always great to hear a confirmation from Google that helps showcase a positive ranking signal – and Gary Illyes latest tweet essentially gives us just that: DYK quality comments can be a signal of a healthy website? pic.twitter.com/Yugh9AhBWz — Gary Illyes ?( ? )? (@methode) March 10, 2017 Comments on a blog have always […]

Amazon S3 Outage Breaks The Internet

[box type=”success” align=”” class=”” width=”100%”]As of 5:08 PM EST Amazon reported that this issue has been resolved. So all services should be coming back to normal shortly. [/box] Amazon’s S3 service had a few hiccups today – and took down a big portion of the web during it. Have you noticed throughout today that your emails […]

Love Conquers Like When It Comes To Facebook Reactions

Remember when Facebook first introduced the new reaction emoji buttons to supplement the original ?? Turns out Facebook wants to use those reactions to gauge what topics should be displayed within your personal newsfeed. For example reacting with ??, ?, or ? emojis signifies that you feel strongly about a specific topic, more strongly than if […]

Facebook Videos Being Monetized With Ads

Facebook videos are extremely popular, extremely. By the end of 2016 Facebook users were watching 100 million hours of videos every single day! With this popularity it only made sense for Facebook to monetize their videos. What Facebook decided to do was integrate ads 20 seconds into their videos, and then share the revenues with […]

Customer Service on Twitter Just Got More Personal

Twitter is well aware of how popular their platform is for customer service. As such they have launched a new feature allowing customer service agents on Twitter to include their names and profile pictures inside Direct Messages. This gives the entire customer service interaction via Twitter a more personal approach. According to an internal Twitter […]

Google Confirms: Don’t Use URL Fragments

The SEO community has long known that URL fragments such as http://www.example.com/page.html#something cannot be properly crawled by Google. As such Googlebot will only see page.html, regardless of what content may be dynamically displayed via Ajax as part of the #something fragment. This was confirmed by Google’s John Mueller via a Twitter post early this morning: @ryansiddle […]

Facebook Videos Will Soon Auto-Play With Sound

Remember when it was a big deal that Facebook started auto-playing videos as you scrolled by them in your newsfeed? Facebook recently finished up testing auto-playing sound along with those videos – and apparently decided it was a good idea. So, coming soon, everyone gets auto-playing sound along with their auto-playing videos! People are watching […]

Twitter Growth Is Severly Behind It’s Competition

Twitter has many problems these days – and growth is one of the major ones. Over the course of  a 2 year span (2015 – 2016) Twitter has gained only 31 million active monthly users. A recent study showed Instagram gaining 300 million and Facebook gaining 467 million during the same year. Check out the […]

Google Confirms: PageRank Is Still Being Used

Google’s PageRank came about, as we know it anyway, has been around for almost two decades – and Google’s Gary Illyes recently reminded us that it’s still very much alive. In a “DidYouKnow” tweet he states “DYK that after 18 years we’re still using PageRank (and 100s of other signals) in ranking?“. Check out the tweet […]

130 Million Ads Rejected Last Year by Bing

Bing recently released their Ad Quality Year in Review report for 2016 – reviewing the various different actions that Bing has taken towards malicious and misleading ads on their network. The stats are not pretty. Bing rejected 130 million ads and banned 175,000 advertisers – and even with numbers as impressive as these – online […]

Pinterest is Getting Serious About PPC

After months of testing, and with a reach surpassing 150 million unique monthly users, Pinterest is finally ready to jump into the PPC world. Pinterest is common destination for those looking for products and ideas with roughly 2 billion searches each month. Capitalizing on these stats could prove extremely beneficial for Pinterest. The current plan […]

Malvertising Threats Grew 132% In 2016

I like keeping up to date on the latest industry reports, it’s a great way to stay on top of industry trends. The most recent report, however, has me a touch worried, or at least is forcing me to pay close attention. RiskIQ, a leading digital threat management company, has found that malvertising threats grew […]

EIG Announces Plans to Layoff 440 Bluehost Employees

Endurance International Group has an unfortunate track-record of ruining web hosting companies that they acquire – and the recent blow seems to be coming to Bluehost as EIG announces plans to lay off 440 Bluehost employees. That includes staff from accounting, customer support, human resources, and training staff – all of whom add up to […]