Today is quite the milestone for YouTube. YouTube announced via their blog that users are watching and uploading more videos than ever before. The fascinating rate at which a video is being uploaded is one hour of video to YouTube every second. That means within the next 24 seconds of reading this article, YouTube will have another 24 hours of video ready for you to watch.  Speaking of watching videos, users are watching videos more frequently, a lot more. YouTube is now exceeding four billion views every day which is surprising.

The Facebook-only e-commerce player (Payvment Shopping Mall) has seen customers rise more than double from 500,000 to 1.1 million. This has been achieved by not having to buy an ad space on Facebook says Payvment CEO Christian Taylor. What the want and own buttons do is spread the word about certain products that you choose to share, enhancing social media marketing. When you or your friends tap these buttons, those products appear on people’s news feed, allowing your friends to see what others are looking at and are interested in. The like button has always been in place for every product from the 150,000 sellers on Payvment but has never been very effective.

Google announced it would begin penalizing websites heavy-laden with advertising, updating their algorithms to exclude sites with buried content. As stated in the blog post announcing the changes, Engineer Matt Cutts explains that users simply want to see the page content without having to scroll down and search. The changes target sites with too many ads stacked on top of the page, or “above the fold.” Following a flood of complaints from users, Google is rolling out the new “page layout algorithm” to downgrade search rankings of sites with a higher ratio of advertising than content, and to reward and encourage sites with good practices.

In this week’s video, I cover four key tips to consider when marketing your business to a global audience. Expanding your business to international territories is great for growing your company and brand, but implementing international marketing campaigns can be very difficult. Whether you are looking to implement an international SEO or international PPC campaign, these marketing tips should help you start off in the right direction.

Many people took time out of their day yesterday to take action against the passing of two proposed bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property  Act (PIPA). An astounding 4.5 million people signed Google’s Anti-SOPA petition, according to the LA Times. Eighteen senators pulled back their position on PIPA, including Senator Marco Rubio (co-sponsor from Florida), and SOPA co-sponsor Arizona rep. Ben Quayle also changed his stance to opposing the bill on Tuesday.

As blackouts roll across the web this week, some sites opposed to SOPA/PIPA legislation have kept the lights on in order to maintain their search engine rankings. As one of many tech sites to openly protest the bills facing Congress that would censor the web, Google first offered advice to webmasters on how to close or limit access to their sites without medium-term effects. Now taking it a step further, Google has slowed their web crawlers in an effort to support sites eager to participate in the online demonstration.

We all have apps that we downloaded just to try out and hardly ever use but don’t want to get rid of. The new iCloud service offers a search engine for all apps that you have ever installed or purchased on your iOS device. Now available on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, this service allows you to store all your apps without having to delete any of them. It gives your iOS device the ability to clean your screen from all apps that are not consistently used, while being able to later search for them through iCloud.

ComScore reported December 2011 U.S. search engine rankings this past week with, to no surprise, Google still in the lead. On a more noteworthy finding is Bing surpassing Yahoo, coming in at the number two spot. When Bing launched as a search engine in June 2009, they were at a mere 8.4 percent search engine market share. As of this past year they now account for 15.1 percent of internet searches.

What is a better way to share those special moments between your family and friends then with Google+ Hangouts? Google announced last month via their blog that their social networking site will offer you the ability to “hangout” with your friends online. The days of commenting back and forth on a status update are over as users can go beyond the typical “status sharing” and begin a live face-to-face video chat.

The Chinese calendar has 2011 as the year of the rabbit, but on the SEO calendar, it was year of the Panda due to the numerous waves of Panda/Farmer Google Algorithm update. But aside from these updates, there were many other things happening in the SEO world this year.