Mediaboss Marketing

March 29, 2012

As an independent artist, Sam Brenner has acted as his own manager, booking agent and webmaster, but he still manages to be the type of musician the audience wants to get to know.

Brenner, 24, who will perform at the Student Programming Associations Noontime concert series Friday, said one of his biggest challenges is acting as both a small business owner and a musician.

His performance will begin at 12 p.m. in the HUB-Robeson Center.

Brenner, a native of Buffalo, N.Y., said he began playing guitar when he was 12. He then started singing and writing pop-rock songs influenced by musicians like Paul Simon and James Taylor when he was about 16 or 17.

While Brenner mostly plays original songs, he said he also includes a few covers on songs by artists like Rihanna, Michael Jackson and the Dave Matthews Band in his set list.

Adam Gibson, owner of the Acoustic Moose Caf, 516 Lincoln Ave. in Bellevue, said Brenner recently played at the venue, and his personality is one of his best attributes.

Hes an incredibly talented musician, Gibson said. But what makes him great is that he engages with the crowd. He has a natural stage presence.

The first time Brenner played at the Acoustic Moose was on a Wednesday to a small crowd, but when he returned for the second time, he returned on a weekend to a crowd double the original crowds size.

Gibson said the audience, who was engaged in the musicians show, was hanging on his every word. After the show, Brenner even took the time to get to know his fans by talking and joking with audience members, Gibson added.

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Buffalo, N.Y.-based guitarist to play Noontime concert

26th MAC Awards Presented March 29; Andrea Marcovicci, KT Sullivan, Eric Michael Gillett Among Nominees

By Michael Gioia 29 Mar 2012

The 26th Annual MAC Awards are presented by the Manhattan Association of Cabarets & Clubs March 29 at B.B. King Blues Club & Grill. Jason Graae hosts.

Directed by Lennie Watts, the evening begins at 7:30 PM. Julie Miller produces.

The 2012 ceremony, dedicated to The Year of the Songwriter, honors and pays tribute to five songwriters: Ervin Drake and David Friedman, who will receive MAC's Lifetime Achievement Awards; and Francesca Blumenthal, John Bucchino and Julie Gold, who will receive MAC's Board of Director Awards.

Scheduled to appear are Scott Barbarino, Kenny Bell, Anna Bergman, Liz Lark Brown, Mary Foster Conklin, Scott Coulter, Baby Jane Dexter, Natalie Douglas, Kevin Dozier, Bernie Furshpin, Terese Genecco, Kim Grogg, Sean Harkness, Thomas Honeck, Karen Mason, Sharon McNight, Julie Miller, Sidney Myer, Mark Nadler, Christine Pedi, Don Rebic, Julie Reyburn, Sarah Rice, Ricky Ritzel, Johnny Rodgers, Billy Stritch, KT Sullivan, Steven Ray Watkins, Lennie Watts and Amy Wolk.

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The 2012 MAC Award nominees follow:

FEMALE VOCALIST

Kim Grogg, One-Hit Wonder Woman Don't Tell Mama

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26th MAC Awards Presented March 29; Andrea Marcovicci, KT Sullivan, Eric Michael Gillett Among Nominees

Much of the search marketing industry is up in arms over notifications from Google Webmaster Tools warning users that theyve fallen from Googles graces and should be on the lookout for artificial or unnatural links... that could be used to manipulate PageRank.

What began as a ripple back in February has become a tidal wave of discontent and alarm as more report receiving the notices.

The hardest hit so far, if you can judge by the buzz on the web, are blog networks like BuildMyRank (which is actually shutting down). Its unclear whether its an algorithmic update or manual penalty, but its likely not a coincidence that Google recently discussed the deindexing of web hosting servicesearlier this month. Where Panda set out to rid the web of mass-produced, low quality content, this latest action from Google seems designed to sniff out unnatural backlink profiles and those responsible.

The unnatural distinction is an important one, as until now, SEOs and webmasters have largely been discouraged from creating paid links. Especially since the JCPenney debacle, we all know, inside the search industry and out, that buying links is bad, bad news.

In a 2008 interview with Eric Enge, Google Web Spam Czar Matt Cutts talked about link building specifically, how to do it ethically and within Googles guidelines. In fact, over the years, Cutts has shared link building tipsoften; see the Google Webmaster Help YouTube channel for examples. Some of the strategies he recommends are original research, creating controversy, and using humor. Still, its all about the content.

Recent events seem almost a fundamental shift in the way Google perceives inbound links; theyre now saying not only can you not buy them, you cant try to build at all. Of course, Google is predictably tight-lipped about what it is, exactly, that has relegated the offending sites to the wrist-slap list. That means that, as usual, we can only take best guesses.

The theory I think holds the most water is Frank Watsons, who contributed to this article. It does seem that this round of penalizations and deindexing incidents is the result of Googles sniffing out large quantities of unnatural anchor text alone.

For example, an unnatural link profile for a flower shop might look like: 1,000 links with the brand name as the anchor text; 3,500 links using buy flowers online; 5,000 links using order flowers online, etc. You would expect more links to use the brand name as anchor text; large quantities of links using very specific, high search volume terms, even more than the name of the business, could be a red flag. This is the kind of profile that might signal a stinker to Google.

Any objections Ive seen over how easy a straight anchor text flag is for competitors to abuse have been pooh-poohed, as in, People should just focus on their own sites, or No one is going to waste their time doing that. Oh yes, yes they will. It happens often.

It doesnt seem as though those who have received the notices have suffered greatly... yet. In their closing announcement, BuildMyRank gave clients the option of deleting all of their links. By all accounts, they seem to have handled the situation as best they could. And for their clients, getting rid of those links is probably the most logical option.

Link:
Google Cracking Down on “Unnatural” Links, Deindexing Blog Networks

Almost every day, Matt Cutts and his Google team put out a new short video clip on webmaster related topics on the Google Webmaster YouTube Channel. In about 3 years, they have posted over 450 videos and have over 7 million views!

It is an amazing number. I started doing my weekly (not daily) video recaps on search about a year before and my YouTube channel has just under 5 million views with 450 videos as well and most are from some videos that went viral and not the search videos. Of course, I am me and Matt Cutts is Google, plus he provides short video tips and my videos are dry recaps and summaries of the previous week in search. I should note, I also publish my videos on iTunes as a podcast.

But to reach 7 million views with just 450 videos is a really nice number. This is a great way to help people in masses and love that they keep this going on a daily basis.

The video man behind the camera is a Google Product Quality Operations named Michael Wyszomierski (aka Wysz). He and Matt Cutts do the videos, Matt Cutts gets virtually all of the face time, which is likely how the SEO community wants it but Michael puts in a tremendous amount of time with the videos and publishing them on YouTube for everyone.

Great work!

Forum discussion at Google+.

Continued here:
450 Videos & 7 Million Views On Google Webmaster YouTube Channel

There is some chatter and discussion in the Bing and Yahoo WebmasterWorld forums that an update is happening or started happening a few days ago.

Senior members are taking notice and one said:

At first I thought maybe it was just a hiccup but then I saw additional comments from webmasters and then a thread on a change at Yahoo, which uses Bing's index. That post said:

The issue with this Yahoo post is that this same webmaster is claiming their traffic is up in Bing, which doesn't make too much sense to me. Typically, the results you find in Bing are the same as the ones you find in Yahoo.

In any event, I looked at my own traffic on some sites and there does seem to be slight changes in traffic in Yahoo and Bing and those traffic changes seem to correlate between the two in the same date range.

Here is an example for the past few days on one of my sites with Bing and Yahoo traffic overlaid:

Did you notice an update?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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Bing (Yahoo) Search Update - March 2012?