SEO News from Around the Web Oct 31st

It appears even the National Security Agency has its limits when it comes to spying.
The NSA is refuting a report in an Italian news magazine that accuses the agency of spying on the Vatican.
“The National Security Agency does not target the Vatican,” NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said a statement e-mailed to the media…

In between rolling out new features for Google Analytics, we also like to feature how users and companies are actually using our products. Matt Stannard of 4PS Marketing details how to easily measure Twitter using Universal Analytics. We’ve excerpted parts of his post below; read on to see the results, and don’t forget to click through to see the technical details!How?Step 1 – Create a new account

So firstly, we need to create a new account, very easy although the new look and feel of Analytics remember this is under Admin and then in the Account drop down…

Marketing isn’t for the faint of heart. Whether it’s an unhappy client phone call or a misspelled post (eek!), there are plenty of moments in the average marketer’s day that can inspire terror – or at least a fair amount of of annoyance.
But what are the 13 scariest moments in marketing? We asked around the office and on social media to find the top terrifying tidbits…

Most people with jobs have some kind of way to measure whether or not they’re good at said job.
Are you nice to customers? Do you get your work done on time? Are you making the company money? All of these metrics and many more could go into determining whether you’re effective at your work…

Posted by Dr-Pete
As SEOs, we spend a lot of our collective time afraid of what Google might do next. This Halloween, I thought maybe it was time to turn the tables. It’s easy to think of Google as an unstoppable force, but, like any company, Google has weaknesses and their behavior suggests some very real fears about the future…

My career began at a dedicated search agency, often working with third party vendors and IT teams to accomplish SEO objectives. While I experienced many successes there, I now truly realize the importance of tight-knit collaboration and building SEO into the integrated marketing conversation. For some this might seem repetitive, but based on my experience […]Author informationJeff BedfordJeff Bedford is an Optimization & Analytics Specialist at The New Group, an integrated digital marketing agency in Portland, Oregon…

Webmaster Level: AllWe know that as a site owner, discovering your site is hacked with spam or malware is stressful, and trying to clean it up under a time constraint can be very challenging. We’ve been working to make recovery even easier and streamline the cleaning process — we notify webmasters when the software they’re running on their site is out of date, and we’ve set up a dedicated help portal for hacked sites with detailed articles explaining each step of the process to recovery, including videos…

In 2013, we’ve seen several major changes in the SEO landscape, such as Google Hummingbird and Penguin updates. Here’s how to interpret these changes, and what you need to do to maximize sales and ROI on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and beyond.