It's time for another issue of the SEO Chat newsletter. It's also time -- almost -- for Daylight Savings. Remember to turn your clock ahead an hour on March 9 if you live in the US, or the parts of it that observe Daylight Savings Time anyway (there may still be a few holdouts). Speaking of timing, you should have already been optimizing your sites for Easter, Spring Break, St. Patrick's Day, and other relevant holidays. But you already knew that. So let's get to this week's great content!

We'll start with the article we're highlighting this week from eWeek. If you didn't make it to the Mobile Show at Barcelona last month, you'll want to check out this review. It may not be as good as getting there yourself, but we give you the lowdown on what happened.

We kept you up on the news and helped you sharpen your skills this week. On Wednesday we took a look at Google Android. What does this platform promise for the future? Tuesday, meanwhile, we published the second part of a three-part series on social media optimization. You'll definitely want to add these skills to your "bag of tricks" as an SEO. And speaking of mad SEO skills, we kicked off the week on Monday with an article on SEO troubleshooting which will hopefully keep you from pulling out your hair the next time you spot issues with your rankings in Google that you can't easily track down.

You're going to love the assortment of SEO-related tutorials we're highlighting for you this week from Tutorialized. Want to earn money from educational/tutorial websites, or get your site listed in Google and Yahoo in 24 hours? It's all here, and then some...stop by Tutorialized today and check them out!

Our Thread of the Week, we're almost ashamed to admit, stoops to blatant rumor-mongoring. Well, maybe not TOO blatant. After all, it's no rumor that Google is cracking down harder on those it thinks are buying links -- but what exactly does this mean? Several of our forum members think they've spotted signs of this. Be sure to stop by the thread and be enlightened...or do some enlightening of your own.

Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, tries to straighten out a common confusion about nofollow tags and robots.txt. One prevents web pages from being indexed, and one prevents them from receiving PR. Quick, can you say which is which? No? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out.

Thanks again for reading.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

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Out of all the companies Google has acquired, the purchase that led to what we are going to talk about today was of a small little company called Android Inc. This company was not even around two years before Google swept them up. Of course, this only added fuel to the fire that Google was going to get into the cell phone market. This is what I am here today to talk about -- the Google Android.

Everyone has heard of Google and knows what they do. It seems like you can't read the Wall Street Journal or any tech news without seeing Google in there at least twice a week. Ever since they went public, they seem to have a little extra cash laying around for various projects they wish to pursue. Their biggest buy would have to be Youtube. Their own online video site didn't catch on the way Google wanted, so they bought the leader.

If you happen to see the term Google Android, you might be a little confused, and maybe even a little scared. Google is a very powerful company; their android sounds like something from the future, perhaps a type of Google robot. Luckily for us, there won't be Google robots running around any time soon. [At least, not the hardware kind anyway. -- Ed.] The Google Android is a new OS for cell phones and PDAs, so we might see Google Androids running around on people's cell phones, but that is about it.

Read Google Android

Digging into Social Media Optimization
by Akinola Akintomide
2008-03-04

In this second part of a three-part series, we will continue talking about how to avoid being buried by Digg. Then we will discuss how to create viral applications for Facebook and MySpace and look at the looming commercialization of the art of "friending." Finally, we will look at the commercialization of the blogosphere, which is far more inevitable than the commercialization of other social media, though not necessarily less derided by several "armchair" analysts.

From SEO to SMO/SNO: The Big Bang?

The first article I ever wrote about social media was about Digg. It is on SEO Chat and I truly enjoyed writing about it. I made one prescient call when I said that "it could very well become the next port of call for website promoters and advertisers." Then I made a blooper and called Digg a "Social bookmarking" site. Ah, semantics will be the undoing of us all. That is akin to calling a wolf a dog. It just won't do. Since then, let's just say things have changed. Social bookmarking is totally different from social networking To put it simply, bookmarks are for insiders to view, networks are for outsiders to view. The two models are totally different. And that brings us to this article.

What started as one article led me to the conclusion that social media pundits are pushing their agenda aggressively, and it seems they are seeing results in their efforts to commercialize the social media networks. Then again, the social media networks, like the search engines, are taking steps to ensure that their media does not turn into the hunting ground of large corporations intent on feeding off of their millions of members (well not all of them, but at least the ones we will be talking about today).

Read Digging into Social Media Optimization

Basic SEO Troubleshooting
by Terri Wells
2008-03-03

There are a number of good SEO checklists you can use when you start to optimize your web site for the search engines. They will help you make sure you do not miss anything as you climb to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). But what do you do if you have done everything you can think of and your site does not seem to be going anywhere?

Every SEO seems to confront this frustrating situation sooner or later. Fortunately, there are forums devoted to SEO. Many heads with lots of experience, often with very different kinds of sites, can come up with things to check that one person beating his or her head against a bunch of pixels might not have considered. Developers call the practice of trying to figure out why a particular program is not working the way it should troubleshooting. This article will cover some of the things you will want to consider when troubleshooting your web sites SEO.

It was inspired by a thread in our own SEO Chat forums. The original poster mentioned that he maintained a site that had less than half of its pages listed in the main index of Google. He made some major changes to its internal linking structure to fix some mistakes he had made earlier; Google also is not listing his internal links correctly now. He is looking for some kind of checklist so he does not feel like he is just stabbing in the dark.

Read Basic SEO Troubleshooting

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The Best Way How To Improve Link Popularity
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How to earn money from educational/tutorial websites
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SEO the magic of Meta Tags Generators
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Understanding Meta Tags
Preparing your web pages with meta tags for effective search engine submission and ranking
Read the tutorial.

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Is Google going too far in its attempts to discourage the buying and selling of links? Rumors are flying about the latest penalties, and as you'd expect the topic has come in for avid discussion on our SEO Chat forums. Stop by the thread and share your experiences.

Link bombs are on me!

In recent weeks I have have seen an email in which Google quite clearly states that they have placed a penalty on a site solely due to the fact that they think it has bought links from other sites.

i.e. that bought links got a site an x point penalty from the Google abuse team.

Added to this Google webmaster guidelines now say this

"Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results."

and I can now find no mention of the previous "there is virtually nothing a competitor can do to harm your rankings."

This make me think the abuse team are going after bought links guys in such a way, that they are willing to leave the door open to link bombing.

I would suggest a 100 blog posts from sponsored reviews or pay per post followed up with an abuse report to Google will see your competitors drop out of those rankings in double quick time.

Was their any indication of the duration of the penalty and what actions a site has to take to have the penalty removed?

It might not be simple to get paid links removed from third party sites!

Surely that would be disastrous for search? I mean Google will not be able to tell which websites are legit and which websites aren't. Competitors will just do the same for all their competitors and then their competitors will do the same to them. Cant swallow that one I'm afraid.

Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts.
Read the full thread.

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Nofollow vs. Robots.txt

Lately there has been a little confusion in the SEO Chat forums about the use of the nofollow tag and robots.txt. If you use rel="nofollow," does that mean that the search engine spiders will not follow the link at all? Or will they follow it, but just not pass along any "link juice"? If a URL is in the robots.txt file, will it still receive PR?

The confusion is understandable. It helps to keep in mind the different purposes of these two techniques. If you have URLs on your site that you don't want to be indexed or listed at all, you should set up your robots.txt file to block them from being seen by the spiders. The implication is that, even if someone else links to that page of your web site, Google won't index it because you have told them not to.

The nofollow tag is a different animal entirely. It doesn't pass any link juice, and if Google comes up against a nofollow, it won't follow the link to index it - THAT time. But it's not permanently off-limits. SEO Chat forum member Swirleigh says as much when quoting Danny Sullivan: "Google WILL follow nofollow links in the sense that if someone else links to a page without using nofollow, then Google might find the page that way. Nofollow on one link to a page doesn't somehow cause ALL links to be off limits." Indeed, Yahoo supposedly follows and indexes nofollow links.

This is a good distinction to keep in mind. There are certainly cases where you may want information on your site to not receive any "link juice," but to be indexed nevertheless. For example, you might have a page with a map and driving directions to your store's brick-and-mortar location. You don't really want that page receiving link juice or PageRank, but you would like it to get into Google's index. In that case, you'll want to use a nofollow tag.

Then again you may have other pages that you don't want to see in Google's index at all. The most obvious example of this is content available to subscribers only, or other password-protected information. You can probably think of other kinds of information that you don't want Google to see and/or index. Google has problems with passwords, but you should still block the URLs you don't want to index with proper use of robots.txt.

Oh, and there's one more thing to keep in mind: you can't disallow indexing or following of an outbound link with your robots.txt file. It's only for URLs on your own site. Things could get nasty otherwise, as Swirleigh noted: "Wow, wouldn't that be great if you could disallow outgoing links?! List all your competitors' links and disallow indexing of them." We'll just have to play fair and compete on who has the best content.

Read the thread for this article.