Friday’s Marketing Roundup: Good Reads for January 24th

Last week the world of WordPress was busy talking about acquisitions and funding announcements. This week we were all discussing the bomb Matt Cutts dropped on guest blog posting.

Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company. – Matt Cutts on January 20th

While I could see that this announcement was coming for a while, it still saddens me. There really are some quality guest blogging programs occurring, but the low end SEO consultants and spammers have distorted the process so much, it becomes difficult for the average person to even consider it.

Web Design and WordPress

• Maps and Location Finders on Mobile Devices
• Behind The Scenes In The WordPress Plugin Directory With Mika Epstein
• GoDaddy Launches Managed WordPress Hosting Service (we’re still loyal to WP Engine)
• Life Above and Beyond the Fold
• How to Check For Broken Links On Your Site Using Xenu Link Sleuth
• WordPress Front-end Editor Plugin Gets Major Updates

Internet Marketing, SEO and Social Media

• The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO
• Welcome to The Beginner’s Guide to Social Media!
• Pinterest Adds Refinements to Recipe Search Engine. Paleo, Anyone?
• Google Killed 350 Million ‘Bad Ads’ in 2013
• Changes in crawl error reporting for redirects
• Dissecting Google Penguin 2.1: What Factors Mattered? [Study]
• Are You Tracking the Right Marketing Metrics? [Infographic]
• A new Googlebot user-agent for crawling smartphone content
• Seeking Search Engine Love? Begin With Yahoo, Bing, and Google Quality Website Guidelines

Upcoming WordPress Events

• WordCamp Norway – January 25-26
• WordCamp Baroda – January 25-26
• WordCamp Prague – February 22
• WordCamp St. Louis – March 1
• WordCamp Lancaster – March 1
• WordCamp Dayton – March 7-8
• WordCamp Atlanta – March 14-15
• WordCamp Charleston – May 17
• WordCamp Miami – May 9-11 (we’re sponsoring and we’ll be onsite too)

As always, this is not an exhaustive list. If you know of any posts related to web design, WordPress or SEO then by all means do share! Post a comment below and let us and our readers know what we may have missed.

Many thanks to those of you who have emailed me with suggestions!