Guess what. We’re almost 2 weeks into the new year already. Can you believe it?

Now that we’re in the swing of things, it seems like companies everywhere are picking up some serious steam. You can tell they’re planning for a long 12 months ahead to start their fiscal year out right and please their devoted users, fans, prospects, and customers.

How can you tell? Updates! Updates everywhere!

That’s right. Facebook has a secret announcement coming up, hot new measurement tools are coming out for Instagram, Yahoo! is improving its search feature, and even Digg is playing along. The real question is, how can your company take advantage of these updates to improve its own marketing? We’ll give you some fun, actionable tips throughout this weekly round-up so you can also kick your year off strong. Ready to get started? Here are the top marketing stories of the week.

Why Asking StumbleUpon to Remove Your Links Is Dumb, From Search Engine Land

This sounds frighteningly similar to a story from this summer in which a certain website (which shall remain nameless) sent a lawyer at Guardlex to sue another website … over an inbound link. Well, as it turns out, StumbleUpon is getting regular requests every week from users asking StumbleUpon to remove links to their sites for fear that Google is punishing them for it. The reasoning behind this thought process? Google’s algorithm changed by leaps and bounds in 2012, especially with its Penguin Update, which punishes websites that have accumulated bad, spammy inbound links over the years. Because of this, people are in an absolute panic.

But what they should understand is that Google is punishing sites that have bad inbound links, not all inbound links. In other words, StumbleUpon is an established, reputable social network, and links from this site will not hurt you in the SERPs. Furthermore, Google’s Disavow tool can also help safeguard you against bad inbound links. So don’t go blaming StumbleUpon for those inbound links — they’re the good kind. To learn more about what links you do and don’t want, read the full post here.

Our Top Predictions for Facebook’s Secret January 15th Announcement

Have you heard? Facebook is revealing something on January 15th, but nobody seems to know exactly what that “something” is just yet. So let’s speculate a little, shall we? Search Engine Journal reported that a new, single-column Timeline design has rolled out in New Zealand. Do you think this could be what the secret announcement is about? It’s possible, but we didn’t want to settle on just one idea. Facebook could be releasing a smartphone, launching a gaming platform, or even acquiring Google! It could be anything.

That’s why we thought it would be more fun to share our list of 10 creative predictions for this secret announcement on January 15th. Even more fun, we invited our readers to join the discussion by leaving their personal predictions in the comments, and we’d like to invite you to participate if you missed your chance the first time around. What do YOU think Facebook will reveal? Please feel free to read all 10 predictions and leave a prediction of your own in the comments there.

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