A backup is needed for obvious reasons
In winter, in spring or any of the seasons

A backup will help you sleep better at night
and even help you from getting into a fight

Your email, your photos and even your files
A backup will leave you with happiness and smiles

To tar, to zip or anyway compress
It will make sure you avoid some un-needed stress

Amazon, Dropbox, or possibly Google
A backup is responsible, sensible and frugal

Put it on a disk, a drive or even a CD-ROM
When all else fails give a copy to your Mom

When you are done, leave a copy sitting in the cloud
At the end of the day it will leave you feeling proud

In a flood, a crash, and many a disaster
A backup will help you recover much faster

WordPress, HTML, Drupal or Prestashop
Backups will help your company avoid a huge flop

Disaster manifests in many different ways
Your system admin will give you much praise

Why are we taking photos of our trash?!

In an effort to be more “green” we’ve officially began recycling all paper, cardboard, plastic and aluminum within our Delray Beach office. Although our building does not recycle, we are taking our own initiative and doing it ourselves.

This recycling effort is a part of our ongoing effort to be “Earth Friendly” within the Elite Strategies community. We’ve previously partnered with Palm Beach Solid Waste authority in

I can’t even remember the last time Scrapebox / Matt / Loopline sent out an email, definitely at least a year so you can imagine the surprise when I popped open my email at midnight on a Wednesday and see a little promo.

—–begin email—–

This is our first email in a number of years so firstly, a Happy New
Year to everyone! We hope you had a great time over the holiday and
New Year period.

2015 was a busy year for ScrapeBox, we released ScrapeBox v2.0 which
was a complete ground-up rewrite of the entire software (over a
million lines of code) that adds tons of exciting new things such as
64-Bit support, Unicode support and many new features like the YouTube
Video Downloader, Phone Number Scraper, Custom Data Scraper, Mobile
Friendly Site Tester just to name a few as well as enhanced hundreds
of existing features.

As promised, ScrapeBox v2.0 is a FREE update so if you have still not
updated you can get ScrapeBox v2.0 here
http://www.scrapebox.com/v2-update

We have also released a new Premium Plugin, the Yellow Pages Scraper
http://www.scrapebox.com/yellow-pages-scraper

This is a great data gathering tool for people in to local marketing,
or those wanting to gather leads in almost any niche.

So for a limited time, to celebrate we are offering a 50% off Holiday
Plugin Bundle:

http://www.scrapebox.com/christmas

Where you can get all 4 Premium Plugins… Automator, RankTracker,
Article Scraper and Yellow Pages Scraper all for only $49 for a
lifetime license. But please note, this is for a limited time only.

Also please make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel for the
latest info and tutorials on ScrapeBox.
https://www.youtube.com/user/looplinescrapebox/videos

We hope you have a Happy and Prosperous 2016, and we look forward to
bringing you many new features and updates again this year as we have
done since 2009.

Regards, The ScrapeBox Team

—–begin email—–

Our good friend and colleague Mark Traphagen noticed on a Google Webmaster Forum that a Google employee had inadvertently leaked potentially crucial information about the Google search algo…or maybe it was a mistake.

A few hours later, this point was removed and replaced with something else about prominence, etc.

This could have been a mistake, or an inadvertent leak of information.

It wouldn’t be surprising to discover that Google uses # of clicks amongst other info as a signal in algorithm rankings, but then again I wouldn’t take it to the bank.

Last week we wrote about some new Facebook features for business that we were kind of excited about. One of those features was the local business “check mark” that we’ve been seeing.

For some reason, the phone verification didn’t work but the manual verification did. We were blessed with this email:

———–
Re: Page Verification Request
Facebook <info+ud5a8ld5.aeauus7d24j56@support.facebook.com>

Hi Patrick,
Thanks for your request to verify your Page. We’ve *approved your request, and your Page is now verified. It will have a verified badge and show up higher in search results* to help attract more visitors.

—

Soon after that I checked and low and behold we got the check mark not only on the page, but in the search results as well. Our company also came up much higher in the results (Facebook results) for certain keywords and similar brand names:

You can check out the example by going to Facebook and searching for “elite strategies” or going to our page and checking it out direct (no pun intended):

http://www.facebook.com/elitestrategies

We’ll keep our eye on this to see if it delivers any sort of new results, likes, impressions or traffic etc and keep you all posted :)

That’s right, after thousands of online hoaxes and millions of opinions, Facebook has finally announced that they are working on a dislike button.

CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg recently announced:

“We have an idea that we’re going to be ready to test soon, and depending on how that does, we’ll roll it out more broadly,” said Zuckerberg.

While he never stated it would be a “dislike” button, many experts are theorizing it will be something of that nature.

Most social networks with a “voting” system have some sort of “up or down” system. Reddit has up and down votes for instance.

He stated that Facebook was hesitant to launch a “dislike” feature on Facebook but realized that some people wanted to “express empathy” on posts about unpleasant news. “Not every moment is a good moment.”

I definitely agree with this. Ever “like” a post on Facebook such as “my dog sparky died” and think “why would I ‘like’ this post?”

The launch of the dislike button will definitely allow users to show their true feelings and definitely offer some much needed comic relief on posts as well.

But don’t get it twisted, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. Facebook’s entire network is built around a huge algorithm that “ranks” posts based on the number of likes that it has.

How will a “dislike” factor into its Timeline and News ranking algorithm?

What will it even look like?

Playing with a mockup today, maybe something like this:

Whatever the case may be, this is huge news that we are going to keep our eye on.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/15/technology/facebook-dislike-button/

Over the past few weeks we’ve been having a blast with Periscope, Twitter’s new tool for video broadcasting. We don’t claim to be experts on the fact, but we’ve written a guide for Inbound marketers who want to use Periscope.

Enjoy!

It just hit me the other day, I never installed analytics on my Tumblr blog! The process was very simple, for those that are interested this is how you install it. In the past I have written an entire rundown on how to do Tumblr SEO and install Google Webmaster Tools (now Google Search Console) on a Tumblr, but never Piwik or Google Analytics.

Start by going into your Tumblr dashboard

Once you are in there, scroll all the way to the bottom and find the </body> tag.

Now go back to the backend of Piwik and get the tracking code.

Go into “edit HTML.” Do a hard break, hit “Enter” and paste the code directly into the HTML:

Hit “update preview” then “save” and you are good to go.

This process also works the same if you are installing Google Analytics.

In this week’s blog post, we talk about sharing websites, blog posts and ecommerce products on social media. There are times when the preview looks great, and times when they do not. In this post, we will show you not only how to make them look great on Facebook, LinkedIn and yes even Tumblr.

Read on to “why does my website preview look bad on Facebook / Twitter etc.”

In a recent Google Hangout with John Mueller, a user posed a question:

I am webmaster for an information based website, when a user fills out a form, in a conversion like that will the algorithm deduce it as a positive ranking factor? Or a user spends time reading a blog article – does that increase the authority of my website?

After John made a joke about needing more hair, he responded with:

In general, I don’t even think we see what a user is doing on the website, if we can’t really see that then that’s not something that we’d be able to take into account anyway. So from my point of view, that is not something that we treat as a ranking factor.

Of course if people are filling out forms on your website, generally that is a sign you are doing the right thing. I do see that as a positive thing in general, but don’t see that as a ranking factor.

I was personally a little surprised by this answer by John. While Google can’t really “see” many of these actions, they certainly would be able to deduce some of them through actions such as bounce rate, time on site, etc.

Marie Haynes commented on SERoundtable:

I have trouble believing that Google doesn’t use user engagement as a ranking factor. Google has told us over and over again that the best way to rank well in Google is to make a site that users prefer. So, how can they tell which sites users prefer if they are not using engagement metrics? (I’m sure they get those from Chrome and Android use.) I’m sure it’s not all about time on site or adjusted bounce rate.

I think that this is one of the reasons why Google has made a big deal of telling webmasters that their javascript should be crawlable. I think it’s possible that Google can say, “Well, users tend to engage with this site…they trust it enough to submit a form or make a purchase, so we’ll rank it well.

Which I really agreed with. It’s a bit odd the fact that Google practically never releases answers about ranking factors then one day we can an answer like this.

Remember the days when there were 7 packs, 3 packs, 5 packs and whatever packs in Google Maps results? Well as of last week, that is no more.

They’ve also made a number of other changes

• exact addresses have been removed, now it only has the name of the street. they also removed the phone number. you have to click on the result to see the phone and address
• It’s official, they also removed Google+ links
• a bunch of other UI changes

Personally I think this is a really poor choice. When searching for a restaurant or hotel, I like being presented with at least 5 options. 3 is just too few. I don’t know what Google’s vitiation is for doing this, but I am not a fan.

Other posts on this subject:

Search Engine Land

The SEM Post

Search Engine Journal