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Google’s warnings include alerts of traffic drops, traffic spikes, out of date software but also when the search engine is concerned about the quality of the links pointing to the site.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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Suspicions where raised that TicketWeb had been hacked over the weekend when their mailings address emailed an instruction to update Adobe Acrobat Reader.

The email pointed to a 2012 branded Adobe.com address and routed clicks through a ticketmaster.com address. It was signed by Adobe Systems Incorporated with a Canadian address.

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On Wednesday night, Google announced they have changed how average positions are calculated in the Top Search Queries report. These changes are effective immediately.

Average position is an SEO truth that seems to struggle to take hold even though it is far more appropriate to today’s personalised search landscape than the old concept of absolute rankings.

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Just before this weekend Google pushed out yet another feature to support Google+.

The “Ask on Google+” prompt appears for users who are signed into Google.com, .co.uk and other properties in an “11th position” on page one of the search results. Searchers do need to be logged in order to see the suggestion but they do not need to be experiencing Search plus Your World results.

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Last night Google announced a new update to their search algorithm. It will be one of about 500 this year and comes into effect immediately.

The blog post announcing the update does not mention the series of Panda improvements Google has been making in order to combat content farms but the algorithm update is very much of that family. The tweak punishes those webpages who have content that is too difficult to find.

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Yesterday Wikipedia announced it would be joining the protest against the American SOPA proposal by going dark and effectively disabling all English language content on Wednesday the 18th. The protest originates from Reddit.

Last week the digital marketing world was rightly focused on CES and Google’s latest evolution: Search plus Your World. I call it Search+ and it was in the headlines for all the right reasons.

However, caught between the importance of Search+ and Google’s embarrassing Kenyan adventures and easy to miss, there was also a humble little post about making better use of page titles.

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