If you are looking to get some great backlinks then stop trying to newsjack and make the news instead.  In the post by Larry Kim, Chief Technology Officer for Wordstream, guest posted over at Search Engine Land “Still Newsjacking For Links? Forget That, Make The News Instead!” in which he lays out how he came across a new change in Google Adwords and was able to bring the news to influential columnists for major publications.  He lays out the ground work and the steps he took to get a ton of press and high value links from the WSJ, Business Insider, Venture Beat, MediaPost, The Drum, WebProNews and dozens of influential publication.

Barry Schwartz posted that “Google’s Matt Cutts: We’ve Taken Action on A Large Guest Blog Network”, namely MyBlogGuest.com, that resulted in the website no longer showing up in search results.  This was a post from a couple weeks back but I still thought it was very important to stress that guest blogging / posting networks can actually end up hurting you.  They will definitely continue to target guest blog networks and other link networks in the future which could affect your websites if you have links from them.

Digiday had a great post titled “‘Hella messed up’: One brand ditches Facebook over algorithm games“.  It talks about Eat24 and how they’ve decided to shut down their Facebook presence.   Ever since the most recent FB algorithm change, brands like these have seen their reach become more and more limited. We’ve seen the same thing on our tiny FB reach ourselves.  We’ve got around 350 likes to our page: Facebook.com/dailyblogcast and on any given day, only around 12 people see our posts.  It’s that kind of ridiculousness that made Eat24 pull the plug on Facebook in favor of Twitter.

Finch had a great post called “2 Small Powerful Concepts to Explode Your Conversions” where he talks about Colleen Szot, an infomercial writer, and how she made a single change to an infomercial script that turned into millions of dollars in more revenue.  This post is short and sweet and highlights (once again) the fact that you must always be testing.