I’m a bit late on this week’s round-up – sometimes work and life combine to the detriment of my blogging, unfortunately – but not to worry, as always last week saw plenty of great new developments and tips in the world of SEO. So let’s dive straight in…

Penguin 2.0 rolls on and on

Naturally, the aftershocks of the Penguin 2.0 update on 22 May are still dominating the SEO industry. Jayson DeMers wrote a good piece on recovering from Penguin at Search Engine Journal (http://www.searchenginejournal.com/penguin-2-0-your-roadmap-to-recovery/63906/), and Kaiser The Sage had a good piece on the ‘True Value Of Link Building In The Post-Penguin Era’ (http://kaiserthesage.com/post-penguin-link-building/) – in which he slightly reframes link building in his conclusion:

Great links begin with great content/experience. And great content/experience over the web wouldn’t be accessible to people without links. That’s why link building will still and always be significant.

Link building is valuable, because it’s a part of a bigger process. SEO, branding, content marketing and traffic/lead generation are far more effective with links!

Elsewhere, Stephen Kenwright at Branded3 put together a good post on the merits of shifting to a content marketing strategy in response to Penguin (http://www.branded3.com/blogs/should-seos-become-content-marketers/), while Search Engine Watch reported on the casualties of Penguin 2.0 (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2271305/Google-Penguin-2.0-Casualties-Why-Sites-Got-Hit) and Matt Cutts’ recent revelations about how and why Google are targeting advertorials (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2271704/Googles-Matt-Cutts-Issues-New-Warning-on-Advertorials-Paid-Content).

A few Google developments

As well as Penguin, Google has been busy in other areas. Christina Farr wrote a short but interesting piece on VentureBeat about Google’s ‘partnership’ with ecommerce ratings site StellaService – which could have a massive impact on how Google ranks online merchants (http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/29/google-ramps-up-its-e-commerce-focus-with-new-partnership/), and the Google Webmaster Central blog introduced a new, easy-to-use Structured Data tool (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/getting-started-with-structured-data.html).

Yahoo! continues to manoeuvre

Of course, there’s more than one search engine out there – and with Marissa Mayer at the helm Yahoo! are starting to make a lot of noise in the industry. We’ll have to wait and see how successful Mayer’s positioning of Yahoo! will prove to be, but for now it’s safe to say the SEO industry is starting to pay a lot more attention to the sleeping giant. Ryan Tate wrote a very good thought-piece on Mayer’s tactic of reinforcing Yahoo!’s original tactic of being a full-on web portal (http://www.wired.com/business/2013/05/marissa-mayer-makes-portals-fashionable/) – something that will only increase if their rumoured buyout of Hulu is true.

Talking of Yahoo! buyouts, their recent acquisition of Tumblr is already starting to annoy fans of the ‘trendy’ blogging platform – particularly with the introduction of ads. Here’s a comprehensive piece on it by Sarah Perez at TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/30/tumblr-brings-more-ads-to-users-dashboards-rearranges-buttons-teens-freak-out/.

If you’re thinking you might need to start working more on ranking on Yahoo!, then you may want to start with their local listings. Amanda DiSilvestro wrote a handy guide about just that subject on Search Engine Watch, which you can read here: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2271750/Yahoo-Local-How-to-Set-Up-Optimize-Your-Business-Listing

The obligatory Econsultancy post…

Whether you are new to the SEO world or a grizzled veteran (I think I’m somewhere in between!) then the Econsultancy blog is an absolute must-read. I could add about 10 of their posts every week to this roundup – but that would be a bit silly – so I’ll just try and pick out the one I found most useful. This week, it was Matt Owens’ roundup of different experts’ thoughts on what the most important digital trends of 2013 are: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/62813-thedigitals-what-are-the-most-important-digital-trends-for-2013

And finally…

Nathan Safran wrote an excellently-conceived piece on Search Engine Land on how in-house SEO’s can get buy-in from their ‘SEO-ignorant bosses’ – which is formatted like a conversation between the SEO and the boss: http://searchengineland.com/how-to-counter-misconceptions-about-seo-with-your-ignorant-boss-153387, and Brian Dean presented a handy infographic covering all the (basic) Google ranking factors on Search Engine Journal – which is great as a quick reference guide: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/infographic-googles-200-ranking-factors/64316/

What have you been reading?

As always, feel free to share the most useful/entertaining/valuable new SEO articles you’ve read over the past week in the comments below….