Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

October is a trade off between birthdays (New-years babies unite!), feasting, and parties, vs. bearing witness to the lament caused by waking up in the dark, low energy, and the changing seasons.

Google can’t change the position of the sun, but it could improve your mood by helping quickly add events to your calendar.

I tried to get a screenshot of the weather feature but only so much fits in 550px

 
To get more events on your calendar, without importing or adding them one at a time you need to ‘subscribe’ to additional calendars.

The first step, after getting logged into a Google account is to click on the Other Calendars menu and choose the “Browse Interesting calendars” option:

 
On the next page you should see three tabs, “Holidays”, “Sports”, and “More”.

I’d say everyone should add their national holidays, even if you’ve done this before, take a moment to preview the official calendar for your country, as the official version is likely a lot better than what you’ve been subscribing to.

The sports tab is pointless, since we’re nerds, and there’s no WRC/Drifting events in the list. (I kid, I kid.. No, not really.)

Finally the ‘More’ tab is where the magic happens.

Under the ‘More’ tab you want to seek out: “Contacts’ birthdays and events”

Subscribing to this calendar and allowing it to show on your main calendar will help you track all those birthday parties that will help get you through this dreary fall season.

Keep in mind however that subscribing to a calendar does not modify your calendar, nor does it add notifications or alerts to your calendar.

If you want to be reminded a week ahead of your best friend’s birthday, you should go make that event manually.

If you just want to know on the day of his birthday that you forgot, then you can simply click on the birthday’s calendar item and then click on “copy to my calendar” to get that event on your personal calendar.

All my friends use FB not G+ so who cares?

Well, at least in New Zealand, G+ user interest is actually passing Twitter/Linked In for new users, and making up ground quickly on Facebook.

Roy Morgan’s analysis of Social Media trends in NZ is a bit hard to look at (even upsidedown) but his data is very telling of the growth that G+ is getting from the adoption of Android phones and other Google products.

I’d love to say that G+ is just more social/edgy/trendy than FB but that’s never what it’s been for/about.

If you’ve read any of my rants about comparing the two social networks you’ll know I look at it like replacing a banana (FB) with an orange (G+).

On one hand, a banana can be fun, especially if you’re care-free about discarding the peel, but an Orange has some serious potentials that a Banana lacks, especially in clean presentation.

Ultimately as SEOs we would advise paying respects to both networks as each has it’s perks, though G+ hasn’t made news this week for app developers selling 1 million user profiles for $5 US.

TL;DR: Man buys 1 million user data records (mainly First/Last Name, Gender, Age, Email, Phone #,etc.. data) for $5 and FB thanks him by telling him not to talk about it.

So really, enjoy your access to private data while it lasts, build those calendars while it’s easy, because if we have app developers selling a million user data records for $5, you can be sure people won’t want to share valid info with insecure sites. In fact due to this, it’s better to put in intentionally incorrect info and only trust services with solid security reputations.

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 11:47 am