Google’s Matt Cutts answered a great question today on the search giant’s Webmaster help YouTube Channel.

The question was: “How does someone begin to SEO their site on a small budget in an overwhelmed industry such as real estate?”

One of the key points Cutts pointed out was to make your site different from all the rest. Make it useful and memorable and that will help your rankings. Check out the video below.

These are my links for June 26th through June 28th:

• Billy Mays, TV Pitchman, Dies – Media Decoder Blog – NYTimes.com – In a week unusually rife with celebrity death, it’s a little spooky to note that the king of pop, Michael Jackson, and the king of pitchmen, Billy Mays, were born within about six weeks of each other in 1958.
• 19 Twitter Desktop Apps Compared – Twitter (Twitter) has become an integral part of our social media lives, marketing strategies, and business objectives. We have multiple accounts, hundreds of followers to watch, Twitter trends to track, hashtags to follow, and a frequent need for continuously updating search results.
• What Bing, Twitter, and Facebook Mean for SEO | WebProNews – 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.
• Facebook Status Updates Going Public | WebProNews – This week, Facebook announced some coming changes to your status updates. Soon, just like with Twitter, you’ll have the option to make them public—but not just to everyone on the world’s most popular social network, but everyone around the world. (You know, with Internet access.)
• Social Media Metrics Superlist: Measurement, ROI, & Key Statistics Resources – Trying to get a handle on how to measure the effectiveness of your social media programs? Boss asking about the ROI of your social media campaigns?

  Need key statistics or metrics that will help you make strategic decisions to refine your social media programs?

  Not sure what variables to measure to determine the success or your social media? Want to know the best options for monitoring your brand’s reputation

The team over at Google in charge of the Webmaster tools and Web spam prevention, put out a good post tonight about how to prevent from falling for fake spam profiles online and keeping your site safe as well. They focused on sites, like Facebook and other social media sites, where spammers can setup bogus accounts. They also made a very strong point saying that just because your site isn’t big and important like the “big dogs” it is still a target for spammers.

Here are some tips the Googlers gave to make sure you site is safe:

What can you do?

This isn’t an easy problem to solve – the bad guys are attacking a wide range of sites and seem to be able to adapt their scripts to get around countermeasures. Google is constantly under attack by spammers trying to create fake accounts and generate spam profiles on our sites, and despite all of our efforts some have managed to slip through. Here are some things you can do to make their lives more difficult and keep your site clean and useful:

• Make sure you have standard security features in place, including CAPTCHAs, to make it harder for spammers to create accounts en masse. Watch out for unlikely behavior – thousands of new user accounts created from the same IP address, new users sending out thousands of friend requests, etc. There is no simple solution to this problem, but often some simple checks will catch most of the worst spam.
• Use a blacklist to prevent repetitive spamming attempts. We often see large numbers of fake profiles on one innocent site all linking to the same domain, so once you find one, you should make it simple to remove all of them.
• Watch out for cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities and other security holes that allow spammers to inject questionable code onto their profile pages. We’ve seen techniques such as JavaScript used to redirect users to other sites, iframes that attempt to give users malware, and custom CSS code used to cover over your page with spammy content.
• Consider nofollowing the links on untrusted user profile pages. This makes your site less attractive to anyone trying to pass PageRank from your site to their spammy site. Spammers seem to go after the low-hanging fruit, so even just nofollowing new profiles with few signals of trustworthiness will go a long way toward mitigating the problem. On the flip side, you could also consider manually or automatically lifting the nofollow attribute on links created by community members that are likely more trustworthy, such as those who have contributed substantive content over time.
• Consider noindexing profile pages for new, not yet trustworthy users. You may even want to make initial profile pages completely private, especially if the bulk of the content on your site is in blogs, forums, or other types of pages.
• Add a “report spam” feature to user profiles and friend invitations. Let your users help you solve the problem – they care about your community and are annoyed by spam too.
• Monitor your site for spammy pages. One of the best tools for this is Google Alerts – set up a site: query along with commercial or adult keywords that you wouldn’t expect to see on your site. This is also a great tool to help detect hacked pages. You can also check ‘Keywords’ data in Webmaster Tools for strange, volatile vocabulary.
• Watch for spikes in traffic from suspicious queries. It’s always great to see the line on your pageviews chart head upward, but pay attention to commercial or adult queries that don’t fit your site’s content. In cases like this where a spammer has abused your site, that traffic will provide little if any benefit while introducing users to your site as “the place that redirected me to that virus.”

Has your site ever been hacked? Have you ever fallen for a fake profile? (You can admit it, we won’t tease you.) Share your experience in the comments.

These are my links for June 24th through June 26th:

• SEOmoz | A Bad Day for Search Engines: How News of Michael Jackson's Death Traveled Across the Web – First and foremost, let me extend my best wishes to the family and friends of Michael Jackson. I can only imagine the pain of losing a close friend and then having to watch it play out on a global stage. He made an extraordinary impact on the world and although not perfect, he is a teacher even in death (as evidenced by this post).
• Custom Domain Extensions Coming – Website Magazine – Website Magazine – Internet infrastructure service provider Afilias announced it has been selected by Big Room Inc. as the registry services provider for its application to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for a new .eco domain during the upcoming new top-level domain (new TLD) application process.
• Cross Browser Compatibility Test – Your customers are accessing your Website using different versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome.
• How Twitter Might Send Far More Traffic Than You Think – Twitter might send more traffic to your site than any of us thought originally
• Microformats SEO and the Sumo parser. – WebProWorld – Discussion about benefits of microformats
• Ultimate On-Page SEO Tips (by Webnauts) – WebProWorld – A great resource thread from WebPro World on On-page SEO

Google’s Matt Cutts did a video for the Webmaster Central YouTube channel yesterday answering a question on over-optimization of a Website. In essence he said no, the you can’t over use the NOFOLLOW tag, but often times in the search for better placement on the search engines people tend to spam a bit. They over use their keywords and make their site not user friendly. So in the end there are ways to hurt yourself in the search engines but only if you take a more black-hat approach to optimization.

What are your thoughts? Post them below.

These are my links for June 22nd through June 23rd:

• Link Value Factors | Wiep.net – In the style of SEOmoz' Search Engine Ranking Factors, this page includes the opinions of 17 well respected, international SEO and Link Building professionals on nearly 40 factors that possibly influence the value of a link. My opinion about each factor has been included into every score as well. Although not every possible influencing factor, nor every possible opinion has been included, this page covers the majority of the factors and is pretty accurate. At least, in my opinion.
• LinkedIn Turns Industry White Papers Into Ads – Enter LinkedIn. It knows what industry you work in and your job title, making it easy to guess what kinds of white papers you might actually be interested in. The business networking site is testing a new feature that turns white papers into ads and presents them to the narrow group of professionals most likely to want to read them. LinkedIn members can get white papers for free, and in return sponsors get qualified leads.
• You&A With Matt Cutts – Getting down to business with Matt Cutts and getting some insight
• Adding another user to webmaster tools – Webmaster Help – How to add another user to view your Webmaster tools in Google
• Twitter's First 2009 Revenue to Come from Large U.S. Corporations – According to a recent Bloomberg report, Twitter plans to target a handful of large corporations currently using the service to generate its first revenue this year.
• 100 Tips, Tools, and Resources for Twitter Research | Select Courses – Twitter has exploded into a must-track resource for news, rants, consumer reports, public health, shopping deals and emerging trends. But if you’re looking for something or someone specific, how can you expect to carve out a niche and listen in on just a single thread of conversation? Our list of 100 tips, tools and resources for Twitter research will help you keep it all together.

WebPro News’ Mike McDonald talked with Rebecca Lieb of Econsultancy on the future of Search and how it will evolve in the future. She thinks that there will be a lot more optimization with “digital assets,” video, images etc., as well as an increased synergy with social media.

More WebProNews Videos

Wil Reynolds from Seer Interactive have an interesting view point on the NOFOLLOW attribute on blogs and sites. He says that if the site has large readership you should still try to guest post on that site regardless if there is link-juice-love going to your site or not.

He explains:

Here’s Matt Cutts’ view on NOFOLLOW back in February on the Webmaster Tools YouTube channel:

And finally here is a video done at SMX Advanced in Seattle with Matt Cutts’ on the devaluing of the NOFOLLOW attribute:

What are you thoughts on the NOFOLLOW attribute and its impact? Post your comments below.

There is a great slide show that really sums up the power of Twitter. It does a great  job of pointing out that Twitter is much more than just people saying they’re walking the dog.

Take a look a the slide show. I’d like to hear your thoughts. Post them below.

These are my links for June 22nd from 18:27 to 22:27:

• Google Showing Facebook Friends On Profile URLs – Google Blogoscoped reported that Google seems to be testing showing Facebook friends in the Google search results for some Facebook profile URLs.
• JavaScript Links Now Passing PageRank & Anchor Text – Google is not letting JavaScript Links to Pass Page Rank and Anchor Text. Google did this change a year ago and only decided to tell us webmasters recently. Read more at the link.
• The FTC Should Go After Search Engines & Ad Networks | SEO Book.com – The AP reported that the FTC is planning on going after bloggers that make fake endorsements or get paid in products for coverage without disclosing it:
• BBC NEWS | Technology | The rise of Hate 2.0 – Facebook's refusal to remove hate groups is getting Worldwide attention. Time to rethink things Zuck!
• Submitting To Directories: Yahoo & The Open Directory – Search Engine Watch (SEW) – Directories are search engines powered by human beings. Human editors compile all the listings that directories have. Getting listed with the web's key directories is very important because many people will see these listings. In addition, if you are listed with them, then crawler-based search engines are more likely to find your site and add it to their listings for free.