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Google changed its Webmaster Guidelines this week. The search company issued new instructions about using encrypted web pages, mobile friendly content, accessibility, and lots of technical pages. Our motto: do what Google says because it’s hard enough to be successful without fighting them.
Those icons are part of the new Facebook Reaction buttons that will supplement the Facebook LIKE button “in the next few weeks” after testing in Ireland and Spain. The Facebook like button is clicked 6 billion times every day. It’s a treasure trove of data–and now users will sort those billions of interactions for Facebook.
Facebook also announced that last year’s revenue was nearly $18 billion. That gives Mark Zuckerberg (above) plenty of reasons to smile. Profit? A measly four billion dollars.

QZ, a popular digital business blog, did some rough calculations by continent and found that each North American account was worth $41.65 in revenue to Facebook. It’s a simple calculation that shows the power of Facebook advertising.

Google’s John Mueller is issuing guidance for websites and small businesses nearly every week. In Tuesday’s online chat, he announced that Google would pick a shorter URL (web address) if there were two pages with similiar content and ranking signals. We’ve always advocated for short, simple, and descriptive URLs. Now there’s an even better reason to continue advocating for them.
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You know Google controls North American search engine market share. Yahoo! and Bing combine for more than half of Google’s share. Don’t ignore them. Even Ask had 500 million searches between Nov 1 and Dec 31. 
Meet Facebook Sports Stadium.

The social media giant promises to provide live scores, statistics, and play-by-play information. They will mix that with posts from sports journalists and the teams.  So far it sounds like ESPN, right?

They will do all this with posts and comments from your friends made directly in Facebook. And you access the center by searching for the game inside Facebook.

Just in time for March Madness too. 

The feature is only available on Facebook using an iPhone in the U.S. and will spread to other devices.

Pinterest calls its recent blog post their “battle of the sexes“. 

A better phrase might be a treasure trove of marketing information even if you and your organization have no interest in using the social media site. 

Included are lists for top topics among males, females, and a list for both. There is a lot of good trending topic information in this post, including minimalism in both food and travel, men’s luxury accessories including pocket squares and watches, and women on apparel, budget travel and more minimalism.

Google paid Apple ONE BILLION DOLLARS in 2014–allegedly to be the default search engine on iPhones and iPads. Why should you care? Because it shows a substantial marketing deal between the two continues to exist. The deal was detailed in another case’s testimony and has since been sealed.

And the Apple CEO’s criticism of Google ad model? Hard to consider it anything but bluster when Apple took that much money using the same model.

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google ranking
This may be the best insight about Google’s update published in the last week. The complete answer isn’t here, but the author makes a compelling point about “brand-based” keywords for Google ranking.
Yahoo! announced it released search data for 20 million “anonymized” users for academic purposes. AOL did EXACTLY the same thing in 2006. It took the New York Times less than one week to begin to identify individuals from their searches.
Advertising spending on Facebook increased 11 percent in the fourth quarter. Why? Because they work. The “click rate” of those ads has reached a Google-like level, making the ads more profitable. 
So how would you like to tweak some of the types of ads you see on Facebook?  Have a look at this easy-to-use guide on changing Facebook advertising choices by Kristen Goldel of Search Engine People.