There’s a useful thread over at Google Webmaster Groups that highlights an issue with default filenames such as index.html and sitemaps. As user edralph888 explains: The URL in our sitemap is in the format: http://www.domain.com/index.html?whatever=value The problem with Googlebot is that even though that is the URL we put in the sitemap, it doesn’t use [...]

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When Dave Naylor first reported some issues with his blog, I fired up SERPGuard.com to check out his URL. Our tool interacts with Google’s API to find compromised sites which are listed on their malware or phishing blacklists. Dave’s pages were being dropped from Google’s SERPs, which raised my suspicions he had been blacklisted but [...]

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John Mueller is a well known face in Google’s Webmaster Help Group and works as a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Zürich. He’s also a regular on Twitter under his familiar username JohnMu. Seeing as it’s Friday, he’s allowing people to send him Webmaster questions through the service. I don’t know if this is official [...]

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Hamlet Batista has written a useful post on using the PAD system to distribute software and build links. My first online job was in the shareware industry so this is a familiar technique for me. Here are a few notes to add to the conversation Hamlet started. I would recommend that you read his article [...]

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This year has seen the arrival of some new US-based SEO/SEM conferences on the scene. Locally focused or more select than PubCon, SMX and SES they are aiming to offer a different atmosphere from the main conference stream. Here’s three of the best and why you should be attending. SearchCamp Philly Online Marketing Conference The [...]

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Twitter has released their most detailed guidelines yet on what they consider spam within their system. Commercial users take note. Although they emphasise that commercial or promotional use of Twitter is allowed the following activities may be considered spam and result in account suspension. 1. Following other accounts in order to gain attention to your [...]

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