Illinois Based Amazon Affiliates Disappear
Amazon.com notified its affiliates in Illinois yesterday that it would sever their business relationships because of a new tax bill signed by the Illinois Governor.
WordPress.com vs. Self Hosted WordPress Blogs
Wordpress is by leaps and bounds the strongest blogging platform out there — Wordpress is intuitive and easy to use, robust, regularly updated, infinitely expandable, and best of all Wordpress is entirely free. There are, however, two different ways to start a Wordpress blog: you can host it yourself, which requires you to have web hosting somewhere, or you can let Wordpress.com host it for you.
Google Panda Update to Include User Site Blocks in Rankings
Google’s Panda algorithm change hit about a month ago with major changes to search results. Now they are making another significant change by including data from the Google Chrome browser about blocked sites as a ranking signal. Now if enough users block a site through Chrome, that site could rank lower for all searches.
How Long Does Google Punish a New Site: Google Sandbox
When a brand new site on a brand new domain launches, it gets put in what SEO professionals call the Google Sandbox. In effect, Google lowers the search engine rankings for new sites for several months after launch.
Social Media Icons on Your Blog
If you want something done right — do it yourself. This is the lesson we learned when we tried to find a good Wordpress plugin to provide those social media icons at the bottom of posts. After a lot of searching, the existing ones often didn’t offer tracking options, and nearly always shared all your user’s information with a 3rd party company.