Google’s Matt Cutts recently posted a video on the search giant’s GoogleWebmasterHelp channel on Youtube answering an irate question from a Google user.

Ed, from the Caribbean wrote:

How can linking remain a major part of a search algorithm when the majority of Internet users are unable to post a ‘followed’ link on the World Wide Web? For example Twitter, Facebook, wiki etc. are all ‘nofollow’. It seems only a very small percentage of links count.

I was very pleased about Matt’s response.

(more…)

These are my links for January 9th through January 11th:

• 3 Ways Educators Are Embracing Social Technology –
• Is This KFC Ad Racist? [YOUTUBE VIDEO] –
• Facebook Founder on Privacy: Public is the New “Social Norm” –
• Twitter Argument Leads to Alleged Murder [REPORT] –
• 38 ways to optimize and speed up your WordPress blog | WP Garage –
• iPhone Beats Droid, Nexus One And Droid Eris In Touchscreen Performance –
• Can the Skiff save the magazine industry? – There has been quite a bit of talk about Hearst’s Skiff ereader and we got a hands-on last night before the show closed. The device is about as big as a Kindle DX (11.5-inch display and a very thin bezel) but quite thin (.25-inches). They use a metal board spun-coated with e-ink instead of a glass sheet for the screen, which will definitely prevent the heartbreak of shattered ereaders for the next generation of readers. It uses Sprint’s 3G network.

Rand Fishkin over at SEOMoz, posted the latest Whiteboard Friday today and made a very great point about Long Tail keywords. He states that many SEO experts and companies ignore the long tail keywords in favor of the more competitive and broader keywords. Rand says that this isn’t the right approach and that targeting the Long Tail keywords in the long run will actually benefit your site and business much more in the search engine rankings than going after the more competitive terms. Now you shouldn’t stop targeting the broader keywords, just look beyond them and look at the whole picture.

You do all kinds of keyword research trying to find the highest-volume terms around your niche. You work and work to move one place at a time up the rankings for those competitive terms, and you still don’t see the traffic increase you’re hoping for. Why?

You’re ignoring the long tail! All of those strange and unique searches people do when looking for your specific products or content! While each of these terms may only have 1-10 searches per month, add them all together and they could represent up to 75% of your search traffic. Watch this video and learn why the long tail deserves your attention and can make a huge impact in your traffic.

This is the Daily Link Report for August 18th

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• SEOmoz | Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization – How Do I Build the Perfectly Optimized Page? Rand over at SEOMoz tell you how.
• What Women Want from Social Sites – eMarketer – Unsurprisingly, Facebook was the most popular social network among these users, with 83% belonging to the site. Nearly three-quarters (73%) were members of LinkedIn and 55% were on Twitter, while just 41% belonged to MySpace. Almost one-half of respondents (48%) reported belonging to four or more social networks—the most common response.

  Professional networking and staying up-to-date with friends were the most compelling reasons to visit social networks, according to the respondents. Substantial majorities also considered researching products and services (79%) and finding deals and discounts (64%) important.

• How to Target Users within Social Networks – Use search to find the right people to go after on Social Media
• Google News Now Recrawling & Reindexing Stories For Updates – A Google News Help thread has confirmed reports from Google's Inbal that Google News now reindexes and crawls news sources for the latest version if those updates are posted within a "short period of time." So if you make a mistake in your publication, you now have a short window of opportunity to update the article, in order to make sure Google News updates your mistake in their index.
• Facebook Sued for Privacy Breach – US News Briefs | Newser – A group of Facebook users has sued the social networking company for violating consumer privacy laws by harvesting personal information for commercial purposes and failing to compensate clients, reports CNET.
• Solid-state drives get faster, bigger, (relatively) cheaper | Computing | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle – Solid state… no moving parts and getting bigger both in size and in popularity
• 10 valuable Twitter utilities for business users | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com – One of the biggest reasons for Twitter’s growth and success is that the Twitter team allowed the service to be morphed and re-shaped by the user-base from the very beginning. We saw it happen in the way that the Twitter community instituted replies, retweets, and #hashtags.
• Twitter vs. Facebook: Who Will Win in Real-time Search? – For the last year, Twitter has had no major rival in real-time search. But last week, that all changed when Facebook launched its real-time search engine. Not only can it search status updates, but it also tracks photos, notes, videos, and more. Can Facebook, with its larger userbase and recent talent acquisition, make Twitter Search irrelevant? Or does Twitter’s open platform and first-mover advantage give it the edge?
• HOW TO: See Twitter Like Someone Else – Ever wanted to see Twitter the way someone else does, with all the Tweets from the people they follow? Now you can.
• New Privacy Lawsuit Throws The Kitchen Sink At Facebook – So what are the Plantiffs accusing Facebook of? The suit alleges that that Facebook is at its core a “data mining company.. [that] seeks to open and/or disseminate private information to third parties for commercial purposes and economic benefit” and that “Facebook has created a business model and apparatus designed to harvest as much personal and private information as possible in easiest, quickest, and most innocuous-looking manner possible.” Cue the ominous music. It gets better.

This is the Link Report for August 11th through August 12th:

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• The Top 12 Options for Web Content Management – ReadWriteEnterprise – This annual report identifies the leaders in the industry of Web Content Management.
• Interactive online Google tutorial and references – Google Guide – Google Guide is an online interactive tutorial and reference for experienced users, novices, and everyone in between.
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: New tools for Google Services for Websites – A good way to add Google services to your site
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Optimize your crawling & indexing – Google slideshow and post about how to optimize your url structure for optimal indexing
• Facebook Search vs Twitter Search – Side by Side Comparison | Ignite Social Media – As most fellow geeks are aware of Facebook announced the purchase of real time microblogging platform Friendfeed yesterday. Without any delay they then announced later that night that users will now be able to search across peoples profiles and wall postings, something that has never been possible before. This opens up a whole new can of worms and it remains to be seen how well this search feature is adopted and what changes Facebook continues to make to the underlying platform that they have now integrated from Friendfeed.
• How will your site rank with Google Caffeine? | Blog | Econsultancy – When Google updates, SEOs around the world hold their breath. For websites that rely heavily on their Google SERPs for traffic, an algorithm change can sometimes mean the difference between profitability and the poorhouse.
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Help test some next-generation infrastructure – For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.
• Caffeine: It’s Google On Red Bull, Or Something – washingtonpost.com – But today, the company has begun testing a new engine for its search product that's a big enough change that it felt compelled to let the world know about it. Codenamed "Caffeine", it promises to "push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions."

  The test, available here: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/, really doesn't look any different at first glance. And Google notes as much, saying that these changes are primarily under the hood. When you hear that, most people will probably assume this means speed in showing results.

• Caffeine: Google’s New Search Index – Google has just unveiled a “secret project” of “next-generation architecture for Google’s web search“. This new architecture appears to include crawling, indexing, and ranking changes. For the first time, Google isn’t simply incorporating these changes into their existing infrastructure or replacing it. Instead, they’re providing a developer preview and are asking webmasters and power searchers to try it out and give them feedback. Unlike Google’s now-defunct SearchMash, which was intended for search experiments that wouldn’t necessarily be incorporated into Google’s main web search, the caffeine index seems to be an entirely new search infrastructure that will repace what exists now.
• More info on the Caffeine Update – Google recently opened up a preview of our new Caffeine update, and I wanted to give a little more background on this change. At the Real-Time CrunchUp a few weeks ago, I joked that the half-life of code at Google is about six months. That means that you can write some code and when you circle back around in six months, about half of that code has been replaced with better abstractions or cleaner infrastructure. Six months is an exaggeration, but Google is quite serious about scrutinizing our codebase regularly and rewriting the parts that don’t scale well to make them more robust, more elegant, or faster.