Here’s a quick look at what we’re reading today:

Google released their updated webmaster guidelines yesterday.

The main message of our quality guidelines hasn’t changed: Focus on the user. However, we’ve added more guidance and examples of behavior that you should avoid in order to keep your site in good standing with Google’s search results. We’ve also added a set of quality and technical guidelines for rich snippets, as structured markup is becoming increasingly popular.

Google’s webmaster guidelines are essential for anyone wanting to understand SEO. They describe what elements of a website Google’s search algorithm values and how to allow Googlebot to effectively crawl a site. The guidelines contain basic information that are valuable to someone just starting out with a new website.

The guidelines also contain technical information that advanced webmasters and developers should be aware of. One of the most notable updates includes expanded guidelines about rich snippets, which allow a website to provide additional information to Google. That expanded information may then show up in search results, which could encourage a potential client to click through to that site.

Over at Gizmodo, we’ve learned that narcissism knows no bounds when it comes to Facebook. Individuals are paying for people to see their status updates via Promoted Posts.

Today Facebook began testing Promoted Posts. You’re familiar with these advertisements from brands, but now civilians can get in on the game too. If you want more of your friends to see your funny one-liners or important life announcements, you can pony up a little cash money and Facebook would give these posts more visibility.

So hey! If you think the people who hid your Facebook feed made a HUGE mistake, you can pay to correct it on their behalf.

Speaking of Facebook, they finally hit 1 billion active users.

Accompanying the release is a fact sheet, which says the milestone was reached on September 14 at 12:45 PM PST, and breaks down some really impressive statistics. Since Facebook launched, it has seen 1.13 trillion Likes, 140.3 billion friend connections, 219 billion photos uploaded, 17 billion location-tagged posts (including check-ins) and over 62.6 million songs (played 22 billion times)..

Big news today as Facebook had announced it finally reached the 1 Billion member mark (active users) making it the first social network to reach 10 figures. This article from The Next Web has a breakdown of some of the company statistics, including this important one: 600 million of Facebook’s 1 billion users are mobile.

Have a great Thursday!

The post What We’re Reading: Facebook and Narcissism appeared first on 435 Digital.