Robots.txt Tester to test RSS/Atom Feeds

clipped from googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com RSS/Atom feeds have been very popular in recent years as a mechanism for content publication. They allow readers to check for new content from publishers. Using feeds for discovery allows us to get these new pages into our index more quickly than traditional crawling methods. We may use many potential sources to access updates from feeds including Reader, notification services, or direct crawls of feeds. Going forward, we might also explore mechanisms such as PubSubHubbub to identify updated items. In order for us to use your RSS/Atom feeds for discovery, it's important that crawling these files is not disallowed by your robots.txt. To find out if Googlebot can crawl your feeds and find your pages as fast as possible, test your feed URLs with the robots.txt tester in Google Webmaster Tools.

List Of Video Distribution Sites

• YouTube
• DailyMotion
• Yahoo
• MySpace
• Metacafe
• Revver
• Blip.tv
• Veoh
• Viddler
• VimeoPlus
• Sevenload
• VideoJug
• Zoopy
• MSN Video
• Break
• eBaums World
• Scilpo
• Howcast
• 5min
• Graspr
• i2TV
• GrindTV

TwitterFeed now offering FaceBook Integration, Real-Time Publishing, and Google Analytics Tracking

For beginners TwitterFeed.com is a free service that allows you import RSS feeds and automatically post a tweet on your Twitter account.

Twitter has recentely announced their newly released features. This feature includes FaceBook integration. With this feature you can now publish your RSS feeds into Facebook. TwitterFeed provides track statistics and you will be able to view traffic from FaceBook.

With their new Google Analytics Integration, TwitterFeed includes special 'UTM' tags within each post so that you can understand traffic patterns from Twitter and FaceBook.

Optimizing Images for Search Engines

• Save your pictures of products/news/events related images in one folder and ensure that the folder is not blocked by your robots.txt file.
  

• Use the Alt, Width and height attributes of the IMG tag.
  

• Use a caption, be more descriptive about the image
  

• Add images to articles and press releases. This will help you get direct links to image from websites.

Classifieds Submissions

Here goes the list of classifieds sites for submitting your website...

whynotad.com
thomasnet.com/
olx.com
pennysaverusa.com
recycler.com
buysell.com
sell.com
classifiedads.com
traderonline.com
kudzu.com
domesticsale.com
usfreeads.com
craigslist.org
backpage.com
livedeal.com
gumtree.com
adpost.com
buysellcommunity.com
inetgiant.com
adlandpro.com
freeadlists.com
esofthub.com
make-money-work-from-home.com
pedrosplaza.com
adsanddeals.com
recoupgear.com
phclassifieds.com
phoenixmetroclassifieds.com
pixel4less.com
probikeoutlet.com
psdplace.com
rosevalepark.com
searchforks.com
inetgiant.com
adlandpro.com
808classifieds.com
recycler.com
salespider.com
usfreeads.com
adquest3d.com
chooseyouritem.com
splut.com/
bestadforum.com/
buysellauctiononline.com
webcosmo.com/
websitetrafficforum.com/
usscope.com/
cweb.net/
clickstarter.com/
usedflutes.com/
latimes.com/
freelocalclassifiedads.us/
pressmania.com/
canetads.com/
freeukclassifieds.co.uk/

Feel free to add to the list...

Black Friday is the New Cyber Monday

clipped from www.ysmblog.com Which post-Thanksgiving shopping day gives the biggest online bang? While most people identify the day after Thanksgiving—or “Black Friday”—as the biggest shopping day of the year for in-store sales, some new Yahoo! research shows that the day of turkey leftovers may actually be turning into the new “Cyber Monday.” The Yahoo! Network Insights team looked back at last year’s consumer patterns to help marketers improve their sales during this critical time of year. Online advertising effectiveness on Black Friday and Cyber Monday—the Monday after Thanksgiving, traditionally the biggest day for online sales—was analyzed and compared to data in the preceding four weeks of November. For more details, please see the complete post on the Yahoo! Advertising Blog.

For Yahoo Advertisiers - Sponsored Ads now appear in Filtered Search Results

One of the key features of Yahoo! lets users filter results by website. Starting Oct 8th, the sponsored ads appears for those filtered search results.

Highlights from Jeff Hecox post in Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog

What does this mean for advertisers?

All advertisers will still get the same chances at clicks before any filtering takes place. But those advertisers whose sites show up as a filtering option will get further opportunities for clicks when their ad shows up in the narrowed results—without any competing ads. And the ads may be more relevant to consumers, as our systems take the user’s choice into account.

(FYI, the domains our system uses to filter results are chosen based on a number of factors, such as their listings’ quality, popularity and user response.)

The filtering option, along with the other cool features added to Yahoo! Search last month, is designed to increase relevancy and user control of the search experience. And when results are more relevant to consumers, that can translate to a better return for advertisers.

Twitter Search Tools

Areaface - Areaface lets you search for Twitter users in specific city or town. Areaface loads recent tweets from a particular location you click on the map.





TwitterJobSearch.com - Lets you search job listings that have been advertised via twitter. You can sort the search results by setting filters like date, job title, salary, location.

How google handles the robots.txt file?

Google Making Ajax Crawlable

Google Paid Link Policy

Buying or Selling links violates Google's Webmaster guidelines and it can have a negative impact on your website rank in search results.

Use "No Follow attribute" that will let the search engine know that you don't want them to crawl the link and give credit to the link that your linking..

Example:

Anchor Text

If you are concerned about page rank, then think about having any paid links on your website.

Twitter Tools for Local Businesses

Local businesses might find these tools and applications useful in finding their audience on Twitter.

1. Twitter Search allows you to begin your quest for people on Twitter. Search for your business name, your location, and for keywords related to your products and services.
2. Advanced Twitter Search helps you find people and conversations you may be interested in within the radius of your choosing for any geographic location.
3. Twellowhood offers a simple tool to drill down by map to find other Twitter users in the towns or cities of your choice.
4. Localtweeps maps Twitter profiles to locations through ZIP codes to facilitate local connections among Tweeple. It helps you find people on Twitter near you and helps them find you.
5. TwitterLocal allows you to filter the tweets you see by location. It lets you keep track of as many location-based feeds as you choose by picking a location and setting a radius around it.

Source: clickz.com

Steps for dealing with duplicate content within your website.

# Recognize duplicate content on your website.
The first and most important step is to recognize duplicate content on your website. A simple way to do this is to take a unique text snippet from a page and to search for it, limiting the results to pages from your own website by using a site:query in Google. Multiple results for the same content show duplication you can investigate.

# Determine your preferred URLs.
Before fixing duplicate content issues, you'll have to determine your preferred URL structure. Which URL would you prefer to use for that piece of content?

# Be consistent within your website.
Once you've chosen your preferred URLs, make sure to use them in all possible locations within your website (including in your Sitemap file).

# Apply 301 permanent redirects where necessary and possible.
If you can, redirect duplicate URLs to your preferred URLs using a 301 response code. This helps users and search engines find your preferred URLs should they visit the duplicate URLs. If your site is available on several domain names, pick one and use the 301 redirect appropriately from the others, making sure to forward to the right specific page, not just the root of the domain. If you support both www and non-www host names, pick one, use the preferred domain setting in Webmaster Tools, and redirect appropriately.

# Implement the rel="canonical" link element on your pages where you can.
Where 301 redirects are not possible, the rel="canonical" link element can give us a better understanding of your site and of your preferred URLs. The use of this link element is also supported by major search engines such as Ask.com, Bing and Yahoo!.

# Use the URL parameter handling tool in Google Webmaster Tools where possible.
If some or all of your website's duplicate content comes from URLs with query parameters, this tool can help you to notify us of important and irrelevant parameters within your URLs. More information about this tool can be found in our announcement blog post.

Source: Google Webmaster Central Blog