Publishers of all sizes; bloggers, newspapers and even those Twitter users who track their Klout score know the value in breaking news and making headlines. Headlines earn page impressions and mentions. These translate into influence and money.

Making the headlines is tricky business though. It requires speed, connections and the ability to point the spotlight at your content or risk a swift second mover out manoeuvring you. Read more »

FPS Russia is a huge YouTube channel. It has over 3.5 million subscribers and has generated more than 500,000,000 video views. Gawker says it is the site’s third most popular channel.

Sadly, 32-year old Keith Ratliff, a producer on the American show, was found dead at the start of the year. He had been killed by a single bullet to the back of the head. It looks like an execution. Police have ruled out a burglary gone wrong since nothing was taken from the scene.

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Google’s Webmaster Tools are currently experiencing quite a serious security issue.

The flaw was identified by Dave Naylor and seems to allow agencies or freelancers who were previously approved to access brands’ Webmaster Consoles to re-approve themselves and take action.

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Last night Google launched a new tool and stressed that only experts should use it. The link disavow tool allows webmasters and brands to divorce themselves from pesky low quality inbound links that will not simply go away.

There is likely to be caution but general approval over the tool. The search engine has gotten better and stricter about noticing and policing attempts to manipulate inbound links.

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In New York it is Search Week. Mayor Michael Bloomberg put his name to the proclamation that cites a strong tech community, digital growth and the goal of being the world’s premier digital city.

The announcement coincides with Danny Sullivan’s SMX East; the search conference running in the city this week. New York are not the only ones to time announcements to match up with SMX East – Google has too. A blog post on the official Webmaster Central Blog last night announced an updated version of the Quality Guidelines.

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“SEO is dead” articles are common. Like many other bloggers, I don’t usually bother responding to them. It’s less common to see a digital savvy site like The Guardian wasting space on such articles or for the author to work in Search. Maybe, this time, there should be a response.

The typical heralds of “SEO is dead” tend to be developers or creative minds who believe we have returned to the “if you build it – they will come” era of the internet or those who understand SEO only in the context to a brief encounter they had with it in 2006.

SEO evolves.

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Penny Arcade is a popular web comic for gamers. I have friends who devote a portion of their lives to the forums. The site’s creators, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik were named by TIME as among the top 100 most influential people in the world. I’m paraphrasing; Google’s ad planner says “OMG! Put ads here!” of the site.

Yesterday, Penny Arcade started a bold and interesting project on Kickstarter. In a campaign called Penny Arcade Sells Out the pair are offering to remove ads from the site in exchange for crowd sourced funding.

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The SEO community has been in a bit of a buzz over the last few weeks. Google, dominant in so many territories, has begun to email tens of thousands of site owners with warnings.

Google’s warnings include alerts of traffic drops, traffic spikes, out of date software but also when the search engine is concerned about the quality of the links pointing to the site.

This is significant. In the past brands and agencies had to work out from changes to the search results as to whether Google was happy with the links the brand site was attracting.

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This week the infographic platform and search engine Visual.ly opened up beta access to create.visual.ly which lets people create infographics for free and automatically.

Create a few infographics on the platform and you will discover that not every infographic is equal; not even if it uses the same template. Some infographics work better than others. Some are certainly easy to outreach with or engage audiences with.

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Search Engine Strategies is in London this week. The conference is perhaps the oldest and most established in the industry. SES London has evolved in such a way that it is largely agency presentations to an audience of agencies. This year, however, I noticed an increase in the number of in-house SEO teams in attendance and that is a welcome development.

It may seem rather odd at first but the conference organisers actively encouraged speakers to give their presentations away via social media. In theory, you did not need to pay a dime to learn from Search Engine Strategies as you could have monitored Twitter for the #seslondon hashtag, picked up the shared presentations and studied them online.

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