As we start to look towards a new week, here’s a quick roundup of all the best news and views from the past week in the SEO world….

What the…!?
The world suddenly, and frighteningly, became aware of PRISM this week. No need to go into too much detail as I’m sure everyone’s familiar with it by now, but here’s Google’s flat-out denial of any involvement in it: http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/what.html

Lots more Google-based news…
This week also saw Google publish its monthly Webmaster Report, as reported here on Search Engine Roundtable: http://www.seroundtable.com/june-2013-google-webmaster-report-16884.html. V3 had an interesting piece on Google pushing for a UK release of it’s Trused Stores Programme http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2272600/google-pushes-for-uk-launch-of-trusted-stores-programme and Techcrunch (amongst others) reported on Google’s new Web Designer tool – which in their words will “empower creative professionals to create cutting-edge advertising as well as engaging web content like sites and applications – for free.” http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/04/google-will-soon-launch-google-web-designer-a-free-html5-development-tool-for-creating-web-apps-sites-and-ads/

Finally on Google-specific news, Matt Cutts put another one of his videos out – this time explaining the difference between algorithm updates and data refreshes, telling us that Google updates are not about making Google more money (in the short term anyway!) and chastising SEO’s for spending too much time on the mucky business of link building. Here’s Barry Schwartz’s thoughts on it all on Search Engine Land: http://searchengineland.com/googles-cutts-on-seo-industry-misconceptions-updates-revenue-goals-link-building-obsession-161880

A spot of high brow reading…
Charles Arthur’s article in The Guardian about Google+ and its overreaching, slightly dystopian aims took me right back to my A-Level Media Studies course. That’s probably because we studied The Matrix, and all it’s anti-capitalism messages, a lot in that course (happy days!). Don’t let that put you off though, it’s a cracking read: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2013/jun/04/google-plus-the-matrix

Not quite as high brow, but still quite thought-provoking, was the Distilled blogs’ summary of Will Critchlow’s ‘Future Of Search’ speech (at Econsultancy’s ‘Future of Digital Marketing’ conference): http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/the-future-of-search/

Ecommerce is where the money is!
There was a lot of ecommerce news and advice over the week. David Moth had a lot of good tips about product filtering options – which is always a tricky area for ecommerce sites – on Econsultancy: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/62864-nine-tips-to-help-improve-your-product-filtering-options, and Trond Lyngbo published his own ecommerce tips on Search Engine Land: http://searchengineland.com/8-e-commerce-seo-tips-gathered-from-a-decade-of-consulting-161739.
The most interesting ecommerce story to come out over the week though was on Engadget, who reported on Ebay’s plans to place huge ‘retail screens’ in closed shops: http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/05/ebay-window-shopping/ – the High Street in 10 years could literally just be a row of huge touchscreen windows for us to browse and shop on. I don’t know if that’s scary or exciting!?

Google Now is going to change the world!
I keep meaning to write a big post on the potential of Google Now, but as you can see from the fact this blog has so far only consisted of these ‘roundup’ posts – I just don’t have the time! Here’s an interesting piece on it at Search Engine Watch by Rachel Pasqua to tide you over: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2273399/Google-Now-Taking-the-Search-Out-of-Search

The weekly Yahoo! news
Yahoo haven’t been quite as newsworthy this week as they have been, but they did redesign their search results page – going for a cleaner, Google-esque approach: http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-officially-rolls-out-new-yahoo-search-results-design-162023

And finally…
There’s been the usual bunch of Penguin recovery articles this week, but none of them are saying much new – if you want the TL/DR version of them all, it’s basically: disavow all your links that look spammy and change your ways so you only pursue ‘good’ links. Easy really!!!

For the final reading recommendation this week you’re better off checking out this list of 31 SEO experiments by Mikhail Tuknov on Search Engine Journal – which includes a lot of useful SEO nuggets: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/top-31-seo-experiment%E2%80%8Bs-you-want-to-know-about/63855/