Today, a colleague and I were talking about the Google Sitemaps error: URLs Not Followed. If you see this error in your Google Webmaster account, you know how irritating this can be! But fear not, because there is a relatively simple solution that you can implement to get rid of this error. Here is the most common error seen:

URLs not followed
When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot because they contained too many redirects. Please change the URLs in your Sitemap that redirect and replace them with the destination URL (the redirect target). All valid URLs will still be submitted.

Complete article on The Dreaded ‘URLs Not Followed’ Error

Here’s a cool tip I learned from Eric Ward, THE link building expert. If you want Google to think you’re the expert in your niche, simply change the title of your homepage. So it would look something like this:

<Niche Keywords> Strategies From <Niche Keywords> Expert <Your Name>

Let’s see this tactic in action:

Here’s his homepage title…

Complete article on Getting Google to Think You’re the Expert in Your Niche

I found a great video by Sage Lewis on Youtube, explaining how you can easily use advance search to find more specific results. This is also a great way to check out what your competition doing in your niche market with certain keywords.

There’s been so much talk from Google about undervaluing links that are bought for the purpose of passing pagerank. And recently, there’s been even more discussions in regards to cracking down on sites who try to manipulate SERPs through blog links. Google might have covered up the obvious adwords for searches on “text link” but there’s still money made (for Google) with searches on “blog links” in their search results. Even more ads show up for “buy blog links“. So why promote these sites if you want us to stop using services like Sponsored Reviews & Pay Per Post? Complete article on Google Still Making Money From “Blog Links”

“Chinese Wall - The ethical (not physical) barrier between different divisions of a financial (or other) institution to avoid conflict of interest…”

Investopedia.com

“While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results.”

Complete article on Google’s Paid Search vs. Organic Results – A Rickety Wall of Separation

If you own or work with a search engine optimization company, or even if you’re just hoping to better your search engine placement, then you are probably aware of the recent acquisition frenzy that took hold among the major search engines. Google paid $3.1 billion for DoubleClick, Microsoft paid $6 billion for Aquantive, and Yahoo paid $680 million for the 80 percent of Right Media that it did not already own and another $300 million for BlueLithium. The companies purchased are all intended to help widen the advertising range of each of the engines in question, and to take advantage of increasingly sophisticated behavioral-based ad-serving technologies that the acquired companies owned.

Complete article on A Slippery Slope: Google Owns a Search Engine Optimization Company

It’s about time Google has taken some action about the page rank addiction. Not sure about other SEO’s out there but Im fairly sick and tired of webmasters asking for page rank or obsessing over that little green bar. Don’t get me wrong. Page rank is a great quick reference guide to judging the quality of a page, but what use is it if you have page rank 10 but have only 100 unique visitors per day (bit extreme but you know what I mean). Complete article on Three Reasons Why Google’s Page Rank is Useless