If The Avengers Were Social Media Sites…

This week I finally got round to seeing Marvel Avengers Assemble at the cinema and am happy to report that it’s an epically awesome movie. The film brings together a number of Marvel characters including Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk and Thor to fight the good fight and help protect Earth. It’s a great film with some brilliant comedy moments, some great fights involving different combinations of superheroes and an awesome battle towards the end of the film. With this in mind I’d planned to do a unique article comparing the characteristics of the different members of The Avengers to the different social media sites in a witty and humorous blog post. But as is the way with the internet it has already been done. So instead, here’s an internet news roundup… Google Penguin Causing Panic First it was the Caffeine. Then came the attack of the Panda. And now? It’s the Penguin that’s been causing chaos with the latest Google Search algorithm update. Since its launch towards the end of April, the Penguin update has been punishing sites that Google deems have been ‘spamming’ the search results. The aim of the update was remove sites that had been undertaking bad practise with techniques such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, unnatural anchor text backlinks and other practises that breached the Google Webmaster Guidelines. In the wake of the Penguin its certainly been interesting reading on the blogosphere about the panic among certain SEO-ers that’s been caused. Safe to say though that HeadRed’s SEO optimisers only employ techniques that are Google friendly so our clients haven’t fallen foul of the Google Penguin. Facebook App Centre The big blue social giant Facebook has announced a new app centre, simply called ‘App Centre’, which will allow paid apps for the first time on the site. The aim of the centre is to help developers get their apps noticed and discovered by more people with spotlights on both free and paid for applications. An interesting factor of the app centre is that success on there is tied to the quality of the app. Factors include user ratings and engagement and this seems like a clever way to separate the great from the average and the good from the bad. Curator of Content Have you seen the social content site Storify? Combining elements from the leading social media sites and the internet in general, the site is focussed around combining items from websites and YouTube with Facebook comments and Tweets to create what is called a ‘story‘. It’s a very simple to use site that allows you to create a story combining a variety of elements in a matter of minutes. This idea of ‘content curation‘ allows you pull items from across the web together in one place to present your view on a given subject. An example is the recent backing of gay marriage in the US by President Obama. Users of Storify have been combining sites and opinions from the web to show their stance on the issue. It’s a great way of presenting opinions and we’ll be watching to see whether these ‘stories’ have any effect for our SEO Coventry clients. Avengers Assemble Oh and finally, if you were disappointed by the lack of Avengers in this blog post I’ll leave you with this… Have a good weekend y’all and prepare to assemble for another working week on Monday.