For power users, the Twitter website is often just a thing of the past. We’ve moved on to third party interfaces with multiple columns, special user list navigation, search, and so on. But what about the novice user that wants something more than Twitter.com?

For that, there’s Brizzly, a web-based Twitter client that today is announcing the release of its awaited iPhone app, along with a neat feature or two.

Sponsor

The web-based version of Brizzly takes the Twitter stream and opens it up for the average user. It expands shortened links into full URLs, making it easier to know what you’re clicking on, and turns links to YouTube videos or images into just that – embedded images and videos. In a way, it takes the guess work out of Twitter.

Today, the company is releasing a full-featured iPhone app that was built off of the skeleton of Birdfeed, the company acquired by Brizzly last fall. The app is a simple and doesn’t offer some of the opening up of Twitter that you find on the website, but that would be difficult for an iPhone app to do, with it’s limited real estate. Links are shortened and images hidden behind links, but that’s as expected. Still, it handles multiple accounts, each of which you can view in its own stream. It also supports lists, mentions and DMs – all the standard stuff you would expect.

As we mentioned the last time we wrote about Brizzly, when the company added Facebook to its stream, the tool tries to make the experience of twitter simple for the non-geek. In that way, it interprets and explains Twitter Trends, the hashtags that are most popular at a given time. The Brizzly staff looks at hashtags and writes up a quick little blurb that explains what the Trends are that day and why. The iPhone app prominently contains these guides as a separate tab called “News”.

Brizzly is expanding on this trend explanation feature with its launch of the Brizzly Guide on its website. The Guide gives each of these trends its own page, which is a “permanent source for up-to-date information on topics people are talking about,” it says in its press release. In addition giving these explanations a permanent home, Brizzly has acquired WikiRank, a visualization web application based on Wikipedia data. It will be “integrating WikiRank technology into the Brizzly Guide” the company says in its press release. We can only wonder what will come of that, but it sounds interesting.

Discuss

Google has at some point quietly increased its sitemaps limit from 1,000 to 50,000. In a discussion on a Google Webmasters forum thread back in April of last year, Google employee Jonathan Simon said that each sitemap index file can include 1,000 sitemaps.

Just recently, however, David Harkness posted to that same thread, pointing to official Google documentation for sitemap errors, which says under the "Too many Sitemaps" error:

The list of Sitemaps in your Sitemap index exceeds the maximum allowed. A Sitemap index can contain no more than 50,000 Sitemaps. Split your Sitemap index into multiple Sitemap index files and ensure that each contains no more than 50,000 Sitemaps. Then, resubmit your Sitemap index files individually.

The larger number was confirmed by Simon, who came back to the conversation, saying, "Thanks for resurfacing this thread as we’ve improved our capacity a bit since then. The limit used to be 1,000. The Help Center article you point to is correct. The current maximum number of Sitemaps that can be referenced in a Sitemap Index file is 50,000."

As Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable, who stumbled across this post points out, "This is a huge increase in capacity…Still, each Sitemap file can contain up to 50,000 URLs, so technically 50,000 multiplied by 50,000 is 2,500,000,000 or 2.5 billion URLs can be submitted to Google via Sitemaps."

In other words, you can have a lot of sitemaps in one sitemap index file. That’s some good information to know, and it is a little surprising that there wasn’t a bigger announcement made about this.
 

Related Articles:

> Google Highlights Answers in Search Results

> Google Addresses Sitemaps Issues for News Publishers

> Make it Easier for Google to Crawl Your Videos

Google has made some changes to the way Webmaster Tools users verify their websites.

Before, the user’s verification meta tag was based (partially) on the email address of their Google account, which meant that if they changed the email address in their account settings, their meta tags would also change, and they’d become unverified for any sites that used the old tag. Google has made a new version of the verification meta tag, which is unrelated to the email address to prevent this from happening.

Google has also changed the way it handles verification by HTML file. In the past, if a user’s site returned an HTTP status code besides 404 for URLs that didn’t exist, they wouldn’t be able to use the file verification method.

"A properly configured web server will return 404 for non-existent URLs, but it turns out that a lot of sites have problems with this requirement," explains Google software engineer, Sean Harding.

Google has simplified the file verification process, eliminating the checks for non-existent URLs. Now users can just download the HTML file Google provides and upload it to their site without modification. Google checks the contents of the file, and if they’re right, no further action is required.

"We hope these changes will make verification a little bit more pleasant," says Harding. "If you’ve already verified using the old methods, don’t worry! Your existing verifications will continue to work. These changes only affect new verifications."

Sites and software that have features, which help you verify ownership by adding the meta tag or file for you may need to be updated, Google says. The company also says it is working on further changes to the website verification process. In the future, they will begin showing the email address of all verified owners of a given site to the other verified owners of that site.

You may recall back at SMX Seattle earlier this year, Google’s Matt Cutts talked at length about paid links. He touched upon the topic of Google being able to read javascript after giving out advice for so long to use javascript as a way to keep Google from reading paid links.

When asked about this, Matt said Googlebot had gotten smarter. He noted that Google began changing its messaging on the subject around 2007-2008 to stop mentioning javascript but to nofollow or do a redirect through a URL which is blocked through robots.txt.

Cutts noted that even on the onclick in javascript, the crawl and indexing team had submitted code so that it would respect a rel="nofollow". So you can put a rel="nofollow" attribute on a link that’s running in javascript, and more often than not, Google will make sure it doesn’t flow pagerank even if they’re executing the javascript.

Cutts did say, however, that if you want to be completely safe, to nofollow or link through things that are blocked.

Cutts revisited the topic in a recent upload to the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel, in response to the following user question:

Now that Google can crawl JavaScript links, what is going to happen with all those paid links that were behind JavScript code? Will Google start penalizing them?

Matt reiterated that Google has gotten better at crawling javascript, and that URLs you put into javascript that you didn’t think would be crawled, might now possibly be crawled and indexed. He says the vast majority of people who do javascript links are ad networks and that Google handles these very well.

He then reiterated the use of nofollow, even within the javascript code, and the use of robots.txt to block out URls, and redirects.

"We find that the vast majority of paid links are typically not done with javascript," says Cutts. "They’re typically completely straight text links. so that’s where we’ve been spending the vast majority of our time."

Cutts says that Google is not currently penalizing paid javascript links, but they may start looking down the line. He says it hasn’t been a big issue at all in his experience though.

"If you’re selling text links, just make sure they don’t flow page rank and they don’t effect search engines," he says.

Google has added a new way for webmasters to tell it which parameters in URLS, they wish to be ignored. They have added a new feature to Google Webmaster Tools called simply, "Parameter Handling." Google provides the following explanation with the feature:

Dynamic parameters (for example, session IDs, source, or language) in your URLs can result in many different URLs all pointing to essentially the same content. For example, http://www.example.com/dresses?sid=12395923 might point to the same content as http://www.example.com/dresses. You can specify whether you want Google to ignore up to 15 specific parameters in your URL. This can result in more efficient crawling and fewer duplicate URLs, while helping to ensure that the information you need is preserved. (Note: While Google takes suggestions into account, we don’t guarantee that we’ll follow them in every case.)

The feature is yet another option webmasters can use when trying to eliminate duplicate content issues, which as we all know can be harmful to rankings, even though Google says it’s not a penalty. Either way, eliminating duplicate content when possible is likely to be in your best interest.

To use the feature, just go to Google Webmaster Tools, click on site configuration, and settings. There you will find the "parameter handling" option.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable notes that Yahoo has had a similar feature for quite some time, which it calls the "Dynamic URLs" feature. Ex-Googler Vanessa Fox has a very informative piece on the topic of URL parameters available here.

Probably the most important step in getting your site found in a search engine is the one in which the search engine crawls it. There are things that can be done and things that can be avoided to make this process as painless as possible for the search engine, which will in turn, make it as painless as possible for the webmaster.

Since Google dominates the search market share by such a large market share, it is always a good idea to listen to what they have to say about such matters. So when they post a presentation with tips on optimizing crawling and indexing, you’ll probably want to pay attention.

Google has done just that, highlighting things to stay away from, and things you can do to enhance your site’s crawlability. Here is that presentation with specific examples of URLs.

"The Internet is a big place; new content is being created all the time," says Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa. "Google has a finite number of resources, so when faced with the nearly-infinite quantity of content that’s available online, Googlebot is only able to find and crawl a percentage of that content. Then, of the content we’ve crawled, we’re only able to index a portion."

"URLs are like the bridges between your website and a search engine’s crawler: crawlers need to be able to find and cross those bridges (i.e., find and crawl your URLs) in order to get to your site’s content," continues Moskwa. "If your URLs are complicated or redundant, crawlers are going to spend time tracing and retracing their steps; if your URLs are organized and lead directly to distinct content, crawlers can spend their time accessing your content rather than crawling through empty pages, or crawling the same content over and over via different URLs."

If you want to get crawled faster by Google, you should remove user-specific details from URLs. Specifics of this can be viewed in the slideshow.  Basically, URL parameters that don’t change the content of the page, should be removed and put into a cookie. This will reduce the number of URLs that point to the same content, and speed up crawling.

Google says infinite spaces are a waste of time and bandwidth for all, which is why you should consider taking action when you have calendars that link to infinite numbers of past/future dates with unique URLs, or other paginated data.

Tell Google to ignore pages it can’t crawl. This includes things like log-in pages, contact forms, shopping carts, and other pages that require users to perform actions that crawlers can’t perform themselves. You can do this with the robots.txt file.

Finally, avoid duplicate content when possible. Google likes to have one URL for each piece of content. They do recognize that this is not always possible though (because of content management systems and what have you), which is why the canonical link element exists to let you specify the preferred URL for a particular piece of content.

Just last month, Facebook announced that they would allow users to choose a custom username, a.k.a. vanity URL, for their Facebook profile. A post on the Facebook blog warned users to:

"Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it."

Well, that’s not true anymore. You can now change your username, but only once. At the time of this writing there is no official announcement from Facebook about the username change option.

Are you dissatisfied with your initial Facebook username choice? Let us know.

It’s unclear when Facebook added this new option, but we’re sure some Facebookers will appreciate it, as ReadWriteWeb points out. If you wish to change your username, go to the "Settings" tab at the top of your profile and click on "Account Settings". The second option down is "Username", just press "Change" and pick your new username.
 
Last month, Mashable put together a pretty comical list of the "15 Silliest Facebook Vanity URLs", maybe some of those users would like a mulligan on their initial username choice.

Will you be changing your Facebook username? Tell us.

InsideFacebook has an interesting page that showcases the popularity of Facebook pages with Vanity URLs. For those interested in celebrity social media statistics, it may be worth a look.

Michael Jackson was launched way ahead after he died. Currently, the Michael Jackson page has 10,006,304 fans. Before he died, he only had over 800,000. At that point, President Obama was the leader, but now he sits in 2nd place with 6,487,191. Here’s a look at the top 30 according to InsideFacebook’s data:

Then there are the current biggest gainers:

And the current biggest losers:

It’s interesting to see that Pop Tarts are on their way up, while the guy that successfully landed a plane in the Hudson River is losing fans. It makes you wonder what Toaster Strudels are working on to up their game.

The information here may seem like the results of a popularity contest, but InsideFacebook’s data is worth keeping an eye on simply to see what brands are making it in the popular categories. If you are still looking for successful ways to utilize Facebook for marketing your business, you can see what brands are successfully gaining fans, and look at what they’re doing right.

Just last month, Facebook announced that they would allow users to choose a custom username, a.k.a. vanity URL, for their Facebook profile. A post on the Facebook blog warned users to:

"Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it."

Well, that’s not true anymore. You can now change your username, but only once. At the time of this writing there is no official announcement from Facebook about the username change option.

Are you dissatisfied with your initial Facebook username choice? Let us know.

It’s unclear when Facebook added this new option, but we’re sure some Facebookers will appreciate it, as ReadWriteWeb points out. If you wish to change your username, go to the "Settings" tab at the top of your profile and click on "Account Settings". The second option down is "Username", just press "Change" and pick your new username.
 
Last month, Mashable put together a pretty comical list of the "15 Silliest Facebook Vanity URLs", maybe some of those users would like a mulligan on their initial username choice.

Will you be changing your Facebook username? Tell us.

Google is traditionally the main area of focus when it comes to search engine optimization. With the search engine giant so far ahead of the game in terms of search market share, it’s not hard to understand why.

Search is changing though, and there are always new elements coming into play. Since social media has come into its own, more opportunities and questions have come along with it. Now Microsoft is going for Google’s throat with a new search engine and an aggressive marketing campaign. What this means for the future of search market share is yet to be determined, but there’s no denying Bing is capturing some attention, and that means there are people searching with it. Altered your SEO strategy for Bing? Tell us why.

SEO for Bing

Microsoft’s stance on search engine optimization really doesn’t appear to be all that different from Google’s. You’re not going to get the same results on both Google and Bing in many cases, but that is after all why the two can co-exist. The real difference is in how the results are presented, and not as much in how the two determine quality and relevancy.

Bing and Google have separate algorithms, but both like quality, relevant links and good content, as opposed to deception and spam. Bing in fact, hasn’t really changed much (from Live Search) in terms of crawling.

"There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing," Microsoft says in a Bing white paper for webmasters (pdf). "However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn’t changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBog."

Sidenote: Webmasters will want to acknowledge that Microsoft has increased the size limit of sitemaps from 10,000 URLs to 50,000. Google is also now supporting up to 50,000 "child sitemaps" of sitemaps index files.

Like I was saying, the biggest difference between the two search engines is in the presentation. Bing of course separates (some) results into categories. This has worried some search marketers, but Microsoft says good SEO will work just as well with this set up. Bing also has the explore pane (navigational menu on the left-hand side of search results), which corresponds with the categories in the SERPs. In some ways, this is similar to Google’s recent addition of "search options."

I discussed what Google’s search options would mean for SEO here. Basically, I just broke it down section by section, and you could do the same thing with Bing I think. Look at the keyword phrases you want to rank for, and see how Bing breaks it up. Let’s say "cell phones" for example. Bing gives you categories like shopping, brands, buying guide, providers, accessories, images, videos, and local.

This tells me that you want to play up the appropriate categories on your site, so that it shows up in the relevant categories on Bing. If you sell accessories, place emphasize that, and you’ll probably have a better shot ending up in that category. With Bing, it’s not about getting to the top of the SERP. It’s about getting to the top of the right part of the SERP. I’ll let you in on a little secret. Having quality and relevant (to that part of the SERP) content is the best thing you can do. Incidentally, this will probably help your cause in Google (and other search engines) at the same time.

"Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design," says Microsoft.

Curious About What Bing Looks for in Links?

Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center recently posted a pair of blog posts looking at what makes some links good and some bad. You may find some of these things familiar:

- "If you don’t feel you can endorse the quality of the content at another site, you shouldn’t be linking to them."

- Don’t seek links from sites whose content isn’t worthy of your endorsement.

- Links to and from your site should be relevant to your site (or at least the page you’re linking from/to)

- Focus on quality, not quantity. Few highly relevant links are better than a bunch of crap links

- Avoid "bad neighborhoods" like dedicated domains or IP ranges that do nothing but set up meaningless link exchanges.

- Avoid hidden text

You can’t stop bad links coming to your site. "We take the approach that bad inbound links won’t adversely affect your site ranking unless most or all of your inbound links are from bad sites," explains DeJarnette.

But in a nutshell, that’s essentially where Microsoft stands on SEO practices, or at least what they are giving to the public.

Social media Really Is Important to SEO

Social media definitely enters the SEO equation. "Effective social media management can be a tremendous source for generating buzz, those all-important inbound links and just plain direct referral traffic," says Mike McDonald of WebProNews, as he discusses a recent interview he did with SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin.

More WebProNews Videos

Facebook

Copyblogger has an interesting article about how Facebook is "killing SEO." I think that’s a bit sensationalist, but the points made by author Mike Wasylik are valid, nonetheless.

"The rise of Facebook creates a growing segment of the web that’s completely invisible to search engines – most of which, Facebook blocks – and can be seen only by logged-in Facebook users," he says. "So as Facebook becomes ever larger, and keeps more users inside its walled garden, your web site will need to appear in Facebook’s feeds and searches or you will miss out on an important source of web traffic."

"What’s the best way to keep your links in front of Facebook users?" asks Wasylik. "The ever-more-important linkbait strategy."

The term linkbait sometimes carries a negative connotation, but generally, again, it’s just good solid content that people want to link to.

Twitter

Twitter has gone from a confusing (to many) communication tool/social network, to that plus a way to  find information in real time. This means that it is a good idea to tweet regularly. When someone performs a search on Twitter, they are searching right now. The fresher the tweet, the more likely they are to see it.

But Twitter’s search implications are not limited to its own search. "Although Twitter is a social media tool meant to create community and relationships, it does have an SEO value," says Mihaela Lica at Sitepoint. "For example, Twitter can affect positively your Alexa rankings by sending visitors to your pages. Usage data is a sign of quality for Google and all the other search engines. If you can make people come to your site via Twitter, then this is an SEO advantage you cannot afford to miss."

With both Twitter and Facebook, good content that you create will be shared. The links within the social networks may not boost your rankings, but they can lead to more links outside of them. Either way, it is added exposure.

Wrapping Up

The roots of search engine optimization really haven’t changed that much. Creating great and fresh content is still your best bet. That’s what people will share, and that’s what will be considered relevant for searches it pertains to. For some great SEO tips and items of note, check out these recent articles:

What’s the Future of Search?

SEO Checklist with Vanessa Fox

SEO Ranking Factors for 2009

Could Comments Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings?

Google Improves Flash Indexing Capabilities

Google Changes to No-Follow on the Horizon?

Are SEOs the "Bad Guys?"

Google vs. Bing – Side by Side

What changes have you made to your SEO practices as a result of Bing’s release? Twitter? Facebook? Tell us what tweaks you’ve made.

One of the three major pillars of Search Engine Optimization is a website’s content, and onsite content optimization. All of the major search engine ranking algorithms have components that relate to the content that is contained on the website. Typically these components relate to Keyword Densities, number of words, content location, and sometimes age of content. In regards to the code that the content is contained in that falls under the topic of structure and not content, and will not be discussed in this article.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is an advanced web development method which can be used to create more responsive and interactive dynamic websites. AJAX accomplishes this by making object request calls back to the web server without having to refresh your browser, these object calls are then processed and are typically used to update the content of the page on your website that is currently being viewed. For the sake of this Article I’m going to ignore the XML component of AJAX as the search engines never view any of the XML data. Websites that use Javascript to manipulate content without using AJAX will also suffer from the issues described.

When a search engine sends out a robot / spider to visit your website with the goal of indexing your content it is only looking at what is being presented in the Markup Language. Generally a search engine does not behave like a user when indexing your website, it doesn’t click buttons or links it simply makes note of URLs associated with each page then individually then visits these pages to index them. This largely goes against the goal of AJAX which is to have as few pages as possible by interacting with the web server in a smarter method as the users interact with the website.

To put the last paragraph simply any content that is changed via AJAX or Javascript on a webpage that is not hardcoded in a page won’t be cached by the search engines. This essentially means that if you have great content that the search engines may love but you’re using AJAX you may be missing out on traffic. There are two approaches to rectifying these which may even give you an advantage over sites that don’t utilize Javascript / AJAX.

The first approach is to make sure that your website degrades to normal flat markup language for non javascript capable browsers and search engines. Essentially every time you would have used an AJAX call make sure you have a page with the same content. Unfortunately for a lot of people this could mean a lot of work, for those individual using a database with PHP or ASP it is not too hard to build a site that builds itself with some effective web programming.

The second approach is to use AJAX in a more minimalist fashion. The goal here is to present the search engines with your optimized content while making sure that any AJAX calls a user would do has no bearing on what you want the search engines to see. In fact this can be used to remove content from your website which may negatively affect your rankings such as testimonials. I’ve seen very few testimonials that actually do good things for a sites keyword density, I’ve even been known to optimize testimonials on client’s websites. With Javascript / AJAX you could insert a random testimonial into a page and therefore not affecting that pages keyword density. The only downside to this approach is that some offsite keyword density tools actually use Web Browser rendering engines so they may get false results as it takes the Javascript into account.

Now you may think that I’m anti AJAX from everything that I’ve said, but there are times and places for AJAX, provided it doesn’t affect how the search engines see your beautiful relevant content your trying to rank. AJAX is great to use for Member sections of your website, interactive forms, slideshows, and a lot more it just needs to be leveraged correctly to avoid missing out on search engine visitors. The final thing to keep in mind is that most search engines like to see more than a single page website which many AJAX website appear to be, always strive for at least 5 or more indexable pages as internal links and anchor text can have a lot of value.

---

Daryl Quenet is the Director of SEO Services at Beanstalk SEO. Beanstalk offers performance-based SEO services, consulting, training, copywriting and link building. To keep up-to-date on the latest going’s-on in the SEO real be sure to visit Beanstalk’s SEO blog regularly and read other SEO articles on their site.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

How To Search Engine Optimize (SEO) an AJAX or Web 2.0 Site

Google is traditionally the main area of focus when it comes to search engine optimization. With the search engine giant so far ahead of the game in terms of search market share, it’s not hard to understand why.

Search is changing though, and there are always new elements coming into play. Since social media has come into its own, more opportunities and questions have come along with it. Now Microsoft is going for Google’s throat with a new search engine and an aggressive marketing campaign. What this means for the future of search market share is yet to be determined, but there’s no denying Bing is capturing some attention, and that means there are people searching with it. Altered your SEO strategy for Bing? Tell us why.

SEO for Bing

Microsoft’s stance on search engine optimization really doesn’t appear to be all that different from Google’s. You’re not going to get the same results on both Google and Bing in many cases, but that is after all why the two can co-exist. The real difference is in how the results are presented, and not as much in how the two determine quality and relevancy.

Bing and Google have separate algorithms, but both like quality, relevant links and good content, as opposed to deception and spam. Bing in fact, hasn’t really changed much (from Live Search) in terms of crawling.

"There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing," Microsoft says in a Bing white paper for webmasters (pdf). "However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn’t changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBog."

Sidenote: Webmasters will want to acknowledge that Microsoft has increased the size limit of sitemaps from 10,000 URLs to 50,000. Google is also now supporting up to 50,000 "child sitemaps" of sitemaps index files.

Like I was saying, the biggest difference between the two search engines is in the presentation. Bing of course separates (some) results into categories. This has worried some search marketers, but Microsoft says good SEO will work just as well with this set up. Bing also has the explore pane (navigational menu on the left-hand side of search results), which corresponds with the categories in the SERPs. In some ways, this is similar to Google’s recent addition of "search options."

I discussed what Google’s search options would mean for SEO here. Basically, I just broke it down section by section, and you could do the same thing with Bing I think. Look at the keyword phrases you want to rank for, and see how Bing breaks it up. Let’s say "cell phones" for example. Bing gives you categories like shopping, brands, buying guide, providers, accessories, images, videos, and local.

This tells me that you want to play up the appropriate categories on your site, so that it shows up in the relevant categories on Bing. If you sell accessories, place emphasize that, and you’ll probably have a better shot ending up in that category. With Bing, it’s not about getting to the top of the SERP. It’s about getting to the top of the right part of the SERP. I’ll let you in on a little secret. Having quality and relevant (to that part of the SERP) content is the best thing you can do. Incidentally, this will probably help your cause in Google (and other search engines) at the same time.

"Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design," says Microsoft.

Curious About What Bing Looks for in Links?

Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center recently posted a pair of blog posts looking at what makes some links good and some bad. You may find some of these things familiar:

- "If you don’t feel you can endorse the quality of the content at another site, you shouldn’t be linking to them."

- Don’t seek links from sites whose content isn’t worthy of your endorsement.

- Links to and from your site should be relevant to your site (or at least the page you’re linking from/to)

- Focus on quality, not quantity. Few highly relevant links are better than a bunch of crap links

- Avoid "bad neighborhoods" like dedicated domains or IP ranges that do nothing but set up meaningless link exchanges.

- Avoid hidden text

You can’t stop bad links coming to your site. "We take the approach that bad inbound links won’t adversely affect your site ranking unless most or all of your inbound links are from bad sites," explains DeJarnette.

But in a nutshell, that’s essentially where Microsoft stands on SEO practices, or at least what they are giving to the public.

Social media Really Is Important to SEO

Social media definitely enters the SEO equation. "Effective social media management can be a tremendous source for generating buzz, those all-important inbound links and just plain direct referral traffic," says Mike McDonald of WebProNews, as he discusses a recent interview he did with SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin.

More WebProNews Videos

Facebook

Copyblogger has an interesting article about how Facebook is "killing SEO." I think that’s a bit sensationalist, but the points made by author Mike Wasylik are valid, nonetheless.

"The rise of Facebook creates a growing segment of the web that’s completely invisible to search engines – most of which, Facebook blocks – and can be seen only by logged-in Facebook users," he says. "So as Facebook becomes ever larger, and keeps more users inside its walled garden, your web site will need to appear in Facebook’s feeds and searches or you will miss out on an important source of web traffic."

"What’s the best way to keep your links in front of Facebook users?" asks Wasylik. "The ever-more-important linkbait strategy."

The term linkbait sometimes carries a negative connotation, but generally, again, it’s just good solid content that people want to link to.

Twitter

Twitter has gone from a confusing (to many) communication tool/social network, to that plus a way to  find information in real time. This means that it is a good idea to tweet regularly. When someone performs a search on Twitter, they are searching right now. The fresher the tweet, the more likely they are to see it.

But Twitter’s search implications are not limited to its own search. "Although Twitter is a social media tool meant to create community and relationships, it does have an SEO value," says Mihaela Lica at Sitepoint. "For example, Twitter can affect positively your Alexa rankings by sending visitors to your pages. Usage data is a sign of quality for Google and all the other search engines. If you can make people come to your site via Twitter, then this is an SEO advantage you cannot afford to miss."

With both Twitter and Facebook, good content that you create will be shared. The links within the social networks may not boost your rankings, but they can lead to more links outside of them. Either way, it is added exposure.

Wrapping Up

The roots of search engine optimization really haven’t changed that much. Creating great and fresh content is still your best bet. That’s what people will share, and that’s what will be considered relevant for searches it pertains to. For some great SEO tips and items of note, check out these recent articles:

What’s the Future of Search?

SEO Checklist with Vanessa Fox

SEO Ranking Factors for 2009

Could Comments Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings?

Google Improves Flash Indexing Capabilities

Google Changes to No-Follow on the Horizon?

Are SEOs the "Bad Guys?"

Google vs. Bing – Side by Side

What changes have you made to your SEO practices as a result of Bing’s release? Twitter? Facebook? Tell us what tweaks you’ve made.

Google has been working on updates to how it uses sitemaps. Considering research highlighted in this study (pdf), which showed how search engines find new and changed content faster with sitemaps, webmasters should take note.

For one, Google and the other search engines that make up sitemaps.org are now supporting as many as 50,000 "child sitemaps" of sitemaps index files. In the past, they only supported 1,000. With this increased limit, webmasters can submit up to 2.5 billion URLs with one sitemap index.

Google’s Webmaster Tools design update shows users all sitemap files that were submitted for a verified site. By the way, here’s a brief look at the update:

"This is particularly useful if you have multiple owners verified in Webmaster Tools or if you are submitting some Sitemap files via HTTP ping or through your robots.txt file," notes John Müller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland. In addition, the indexed URL count for sitemap files in Webmaster Tools is "more precise" according to Müller.

XSD schemas have been updated to allow sitemap extensions. This allows for the creation of better sitemaps through the verification of more features. Müller says that sitemap file processing is also much faster than before, meaning the time it takes to submit a sitemap file, process it and see initial data, is much shorter.

The question is, are you taking advantage of all of this? If you don’t use sitemaps or aren’t sure if you’re doing it the right way, I would suggest perusing the following resources:

- The Study Mentioned Earlier – Sitemaps: Above and Beyond the Crawl of Duty

- Sitemaps.org

- Google’s Sitemaps FAQs

- Google’s Sitemaps Help Center

- Googles Forum Search

Beginning today, people who sign up for YouTube will be given a Google account. Given that Google has owned the popular video service since 2006, it is a little surprising that this happened in the past, but it certainly makes sense that they would do it sooner or later. Note: I am not yet seeing an indication of this news on the YouTube sign up page, but I assume it’s in the process of rolling out.

It’s a smart move because it opens the door to other Google services that YouTube users may not have otherwise been privy to or taken the time to acknowledge. Things like iGoogle, Google Reader and Google Docs for example.

Really, the move could provide a tremendous boost to Google’s social media efforts, which it has seemingly been taking much more seriously lately. As I’ve discussed before (though I cited Gmail as the central point), Google itself has kind of been a social network for years, and many just haven’t realized it.

Now in recent weeks, they have put much more emphasis on the Google Profile, which is now showing up in search results, and offers the option of vanity URLs for easier visibility. YouTube has long been a huge social network (not to mention the 2nd largest search engine). Why not incorporate that more into the rest of Google? It’s arguably the company’s biggest and most well-branded social media entity.

Users can still sign up for YouTube with any email address, and they’ll still pick a unique username. "So why are we doing this?" asks James Philips of the YouTube Team. "We feel that by jointly connecting accounts, you can take greater advantage of our services both on YouTube and on Google, especially as we start to roll out new features in the future that will be powered by Google technology."

Those who already have a YouTube account but no Google account will still be able to enjoy YouTube just the same, but Philips says they will be rolling out features that will require a Google account in the future. Such features are not elaborated on, but I am very eager to see what these will be.

I would not be surprised to see a prominent YouTube link start showing up on Google alongside things like web, images, maps, news, and Gmail. There is already one for video that goes to Google video of course, but I have often pondered why YouTube would not be featured here. It’s obviously the more popular video engine.