A natural link is a link that was added for free. Social networks are an ideal platform for acquiring such links. From an SEO perspective and ranking factors, links from social networks do not directly influence search rankings, as Google employees explained in 2014. Does this mean they should not be used?

Links from social networks typically have a nofollow attribute, meaning they are not taken into account during indexing. However, they still hold value as they help maintain a balanced link-building strategy, preventing search engines from viewing the site as a potential ranking manipulator. While social signals are not a ranking factor, they do influence many other aspects.

Social media platforms like VKontakte, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn are accessible not only to logged-in users but can also be accessed by search engine web crawlers. Interactions on the Internet have an impact on rankings.

Advantages of having links from social media platforms

Increased traffic

Social networks are one of the best sources of traffic for a website. Restaurants, hotels, shops, cultural institutions, and even government agencies, all have at least one account on social media. By placing a link to your homepage in your profile, you can attract users who may visit your official website if you create interesting content.

Expanded audience reach

Facebook, VKontakte, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube – these are major social media platforms with billions of users. Each platform caters to different target groups. By using all of them, you can increase your chances of reaching a new audience.

Building a trustworthy image

Social proof is one of the most effective marketing techniques for influencing the viability of an e-commerce website. This is because it involves the ability to influence other people who are seeking authorities to follow on the Internet. Social networks provide an opportunity to present oneself in a more down-to-earth manner, tell your story, explain your mission, or engage with your audience.

Brand visibility enhancement

The aforementioned elements contribute to the overall image of a company. Interacting with subscribers allows you to increase brand visibility, creating positive associations with your activities. In today's world, everyone seeks a connected online community, so offering your audience something more - a friendly, safe environment that embraces diversity - is essential.

Audience data insights

From an analytical point of view, social media helps gather demographic data about your audience, which can be used to create better advertising campaigns. It allows you to check:

• The best time of day and days of the week to publish content.
• Which posts are the most popular.
• Whether subscribers share the content.
• What competitors are doing.
• If your advertising is correctly targeted.

Sales support

Finally, there's an impact on sales. Through posts, you can provide links to specific product pages on your website, thus shortening the potential customer's path to making a purchase. Collaborating with influencers can also help in acquiring valuable backlinks from their followers.

Conclusion

Placing links on social media should be a part of any online popularity strategy. It's essential to remember that Internet resources are growing every day. Everything a user interacts with in the virtual world is interconnected, and social networks are a part of this structure. So, if you want to be popular and earn the trust of your audience, you shouldn't ignore them.

Financial systems should start using cryptocurrencies if they want to remain relevant and competitive. Institutional investors and private banking clients have already shown increased interest in Bitcoin and other virtual currencies.

Blockchain technology and its potential have especially caught the attention of investors and traders. Such innovations cannot be ignored. Today, FinTech companies, investors, and public funds are getting involved in cryptocurrencies. They see cryptocurrencies as the money of the future. Banks should take note of this trend.

People who used traditional banks and brokerage firms for currency conversions can now use applications. However, decentralized currency is changing the way traditional banks operate for many reasons. Let's explore why Bitcoin is altering the functions of traditional banks.

Eliminating Banks

Some aspects of banking have turned into separate products that customers can obtain at a price or scale that traditional banks cannot compete with. FinTech companies combine traditional transactional and payment solutions for fiat currencies. They focus on improving customer service, optimizing banking processes, enhancing convenience, and improving the quality of card payments.

Some banks cannot handle the customer experience independently, so they have to move to the end of the value chain. FinTech technologies now threaten the market in terms of cryptocurrencies. The reason is that they combine technology and finance, effectively reinventing the financial system. The only way out for a bank is to change its business.

Exponential Growth

Experts believe that Bitcoin will take from five to ten years to establish itself in the world. Its popularity is steadily growing. Today, this virtual currency has an exponential growth curve. Therefore, in the next few years, Bitcoin will become revolutionary.

New digital technologies also face problems before they start growing exponentially. Experts claim that Bitcoin will follow the concept of 6D. This means digitization, deception, disruption, dematerialization, demonetization, and democratization.

Currently, this cryptocurrency is in the deceptive phase. The next stage is dematerialization, which will mark the abandonment of physical money and credit cards. Digital money will demonetize transactional costs and then eliminate intermediaries (banks).

Napster Moment

This is the moment when a new platform emerges and expands the industry with a simplified interface at a lower price and on such a scale that other players cannot compete. While institutions may try to maintain the solved problem, eventually, their position becomes unsustainable.

For example, banks can no longer profit from transaction costs and money transfers. Bitcoin eliminates them when people use it to send and receive money.

At some point, people will no longer need banks to store and spend money. All they need is the Internet and digital wallets to conduct transactions online.

With the advancement of AI and machine learning, companies are starting to use complex machine learning pipelines in various applications, such as recommendation systems, fraud detection, and more. These complex systems typically require hundreds to thousands of features to support critical business applications, and feature pipelines are maintained by different team members in different business groups.

In these machine learning systems, we encounter numerous challenges that consume a lot of energy from machine learning engineers and data specialists, including duplicated feature development, online-offline skew, and low-latency feature serving.

Duplicated Feature Development

In organizations, thousands of features are hidden in different scripts and formats; they are not captured, organized, and preserved, thus cannot be reused and amplified by other teams except those who created them.

Since feature development is crucial for machine learning models, and features cannot be shared, data specialists must duplicate their efforts in feature development across different teams.

Online-Offline Skew

When it comes to features, autonomous training and interactive serving usually require different data serving pipelines—ensuring feature consistency across different environments comes at a high cost.

Teams refrain from using real-time data for serving due to the complexity of providing the right data.

Providing a convenient way to ensure data correctness at a specific point in time is key to preventing label leakage.

Low-Latency Feature Serving

For real-time applications, retrieving features from a database for real-time serving without compromising response latency and with high throughput can be a challenging task.

Easy access to low-latency features is crucial in many machine learning scenarios, and optimization is needed to consolidate various REST API calls for features.

To address these challenges, a concept called the Feature Store was developed, so that:

• Features are centralized within the organization and can be reused
• Features can be served synchronously between offline and online environments
• Features can be served in real-time with low latency
• Introducing Feathr, a battle-tested feature store

Building a feature store from scratch takes time, and much more time is spent making it stable, scalable, and user-friendly. Feathr is a feature store that has been in production and tested at LinkedIn for over 6 years, serving the entire LinkedIn machine learning feature platform with thousands of production features.

At Microsoft, the LinkedIn team and the Azure team have collaborated closely with Feathr as an open-source project, made it extensible, and created built-in integration with Azure. It is available in this GitHub repository, and you can learn more about Feathr in the LinkedIn engineering blog.

Some key points about Feathr include:

• Scalability with built-in optimizations. For example, based on certain internal use cases, Feathr can handle billions of rows and PB-scale data using built-in optimizations such as Bloom filters and salted joins.
• Wide support for time-travel connections and aggregations: Feathr has high-performance built-in operators designed for the Feature Store, including time-based aggregations, sliding window joins, lookup functions, all with timestamp precision.
• Extensive user-defined function (UDF) customization capabilities with native PySpark and Spark SQL support for simplifying data processing and analysis for data practitioners.
• Pythonic API for low learning curve access to everything. Integration with model building, so data practitioners can be productive from day one.
• Rich type system, including embedding support for advanced ML/DL scenarios. One common use case is creating embeddings for customer profiles, and these embeddings can be reused across the organization in all ML applications.
• Native cloud integration with a simplified and scalable architecture, illustrated in the next section.
• Easier feature sharing and reuse: Feathr has a built-in feature registry, making it easy to share features across different teams and empower team productivity.

A data or machine learning engineer creates features using their preferred tools (such as pandas, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Databricks, and others).

These features are loaded into offline stores, which can be:

1. Azure SQL Database (including serverless), Azure Synapse dedicated SQL pool (formerly SQL DW).
2. Object storage, such as Azure Blob storage, Azure Data Lake Store, etc. The format can be Parquet, Avro, or Delta Lake.

Threads

While Twitter is experiencing some issues, Meta has decided to lure users to its new product. Threads is the name of the new application, which looks like an Instagram clone but functions more like a basic version of Twitter. It is said that within a few hours, the app has been installed by over 30 million people from around the world, except Europe. This is due to the "Digital Markets Act." According to Meta, regulators do not want any app in Europe that is "not designed for the future." Here's how to download the Twitter clone:

Android

For Android users, it's relatively easy: various websites offer the option to download the APK - an alternative app market can be easily found using a Google search. However, this entails the usual risks: the files don't come from the Play Store, so they are not protected by Google Play Protect - which, in the worst case, could introduce malware to your device. Android requires permission to download apps directly from Chrome. This permission can usually be activated in the app settings. To stay safe, it's important to manually check the APK for viruses, for example, using a classic antivirus app for Android.

iOS

iPhone owners will have to put in more effort to download Threads. There are two options: you can change the country and region in the settings of your Apple account. Since Threads operates in many other regions worldwide, simply look for a region outside of Europe. However, this only works if there are no active subscriptions in the "old" location. Alternatively, you can create a US Apple ID. To do this, go to Apple's "Manage your Apple ID" page and create a second ID. This requires a US address, but Apple doesn't verify the information. Dealing with incorrect addresses is not in Apple's interest, so it's unclear if this could have any negative consequences. Once you enter the address, the new ID should work. Then, simply sign out of iCloud and sign back in using the US ID. The Threads app should remain on the device if the actual ID is reused.

Using social networks can be a tiresome process. Fatigued individuals are more likely to click on advertising posts that lead to product purchases. Professor Matthew Pittman from the University of Tennessee proposed this thesis and investigated it in an experiment. Pittman specializes in advertising.

The professor, along with his colleague Eric Haley, conducted an experiment among Americans aged 18 to 65. Pittman divided the users into three groups. One group had to memorize specific information in a post. The second group had no particular task. The third group was given 30 seconds to scroll through Instagram posts. The selected advertising posts displayed food, ice cream, and coffee beans. The advertising theme was the same for all three groups but was chosen randomly.

The group that had to scroll through Instagram posts most often expressed that they would like to buy the displayed products if the posts had many likes or comments. However, these users also indicated that it took them a lot of mental effort to evaluate the advertisements. People who had not previously scrolled through the Instagram feed could clearly state why they liked a particular ad and why they would purchase the product. According to the professor, users who quickly skimmed through Instagram posts responded meaninglessly to clarifying questions about the advertised products.

According to Pittman, this is "cognitive overload." The researcher states that it is a state in which people have to constantly evaluate different types of text, photos, and videos. Through this study, the professor wants social media users to realize how much their activity on social networks can influence consumer behavior.

The business world has undergone significant changes thanks to the emergence of the internet. One of the most notable changes in the business world is the use of internet marketing or digital marketing. Companies employ digital marketing methods to promote their brand, connect with customers, and achieve economically effective growth.

One of the most crucial aspects of internet marketing is the ability to identify and target a specific audience. Companies must identify their target audience and select the most suitable social media platforms to reach them. For example, a younger audience may be more active on Instagram and Snapchat, while business professionals are more active on LinkedIn.

Another essential aspect of digital marketing is creating high-quality content. Informative and engaging content can attract potential customers and retain existing ones. Businesses use various types of content, such as blog posts, videos, images, and infographics, to engage their audience. Consistency in tone and style is crucial for creating a recognizable brand identity.

Effective communication with customers is key to successful digital marketing. Timely and professional responses to comments and messages can help strengthen customer loyalty and increase satisfaction. Social media platforms can also be used to conduct surveys and gather feedback, which can be utilized to improve products and services.

Analytics tools are an integral part of digital marketing, allowing companies to track the effectiveness of their activities and refine their strategies. These tools provide data on metrics such as engagement, reach, and conversion rate. By analyzing this data, companies can optimize their content and improve their strategies to achieve better results.

Successful companies have demonstrated the importance of digital marketing in conducting business. Apple and Coca-Cola are examples of companies that effectively use digital marketing to promote their brands, engage with customers, and foster growth. Apple utilizes social media platforms to announce product launches and promotional campaigns, while Coca-Cola's "Share a Coke" campaign encourages customers to share photos and videos on social media, resulting in a massive response.

In conclusion, digital marketing is an integral part of modern business. By identifying a target audience, creating high-quality content, engaging with customers, utilizing analytics tools, and learning from successful companies, businesses can develop a solid digital marketing strategy that contributes to growth and success.

Achieving a good ranking in search engines requires constant tracking and monitoring. You can facilitate this assessment by using tools that automatically identify opportunities and failures. Below is a list of 5 platforms that will help you optimize your SEO strategy.

1. SEO Powersuite.

This is a set of 4 applications for desktop computers running Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. Each of these tools has a specific utility:

• SEO SpyGlass: With detailed competitor backlink analysis, this feature provides information on how to optimize, manage, and create new links.
• Rank Tracker: Great for keyword research and tracking organic search engine results.
• Website Auditor: Finds weaknesses on pages, fixes them, and optimizes the elements they consist of.
• Link Assistant: Helps plan campaigns based on high-quality links.

2. SEMRush

This is a classic tool that you can use to improve your SEO positioning, allowing you to "spy" on your competitors' SEM (paid positioning) strategy:

• You can find the best keyword options for your brand.
• This is especially useful if you use AdWords, as it provides information that allows you to better leverage auction advantages and outperform competitors.
• You can also find new market segments that will allow you to explore untapped business opportunities.

3. Ahrefs

This online application is very useful for digital marketing campaigns as it provides detailed information about the external links of one or multiple pages, analyzing the profile and comparing it with others. This application offers:

• Domain authority analysis based on the number of inbound links.
• Detailed analysis of organic search results for each keyword to leverage the ones that offer the best positioning.
• Study of pages and their results according to the adopted backlinking strategies and the number of times they have been shared.

4. Google Search Console

Formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, this tool has some very interesting features:

• Provides overall performance reports for a period of up to 16 months.
• Index coverage reports that mainly show how Google views information about each URL.
• This is useful for increasing the visibility of your website, which directly translates into an increase in click-through rate (CTR) over time.

5. SERPWatcher.

Its simple yet useful interface analyzes keywords and shows how each of them has risen in ranking. Its metric, known as the "Dominance Index," allows you to determine the share of organic traffic captured by the website based on keyword analysis and search volume.

You can use any of these 5 tools to achieve the desired SEO positioning; you just need to determine which one is best suited for your SEO strategy monitoring plan.