Within 4 days the homepage for the domain was showing in Bing and Google as shown below (yahoo just didnt love me enough)Im a big advocate of using sitemaps, and I think this demonstrates their effectiveness. Unless you have a really small site or really good site architecture, chances are some parts of your website arent as exposed, or well linked as others, and this helps you spoon feed the search engines your content insuring better crawling.

Thats not to say you should use sitemaps and not worry about spiders being able to crawl, because internal anchor text can play a huge role in SEO. However use on XML sitemaps as a redundant backup plan to help make sure you fully crawled and indexed.

Need SEO help with your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Quoting official Google statement, Media Decoder reports:

Were always experimenting with ways to make Google News more useful, occasionally, this means we have to re-evaluate our efforts to be sure we focus on features that make the most sense for our users.

What could have gone wrong with this feature? If Google wanted to elicit comments, it should have elicited comments from the users instead of the personalities featured in the news. If you were featured in a news items that runs on Google News, would you even bother commenting on the news item on the site itself?

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As to the search results itself, these are now indented but the most significant change was the removal of the page size indicator. This indicator gives you an idea of how long it will take for the page to load. Google also removed the word pages from the previous similar pages link.

Was there any improvement in the loading speed? We have no way of telling now. But ii could be faster or slower. Perhaps if youre a keen observer whenever you use Google search, maybe you can easily tell whether there was any change in the speed of loading the search results or none at all.

So, any idea on why Google did these changes? Is it for aesthetic purposes? Revenue generation or what? Do you like the new look of Google search results page? Personally, I prefer the old one or maybe perhaps I could learn to like this new look once I get used to it.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

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So, anyway its something that is yet to happen so we might as well talk about the new feature of Google Book Search that we mentioned.

If you would recall, during the early part of May Google introduced searching inside books wherein the context of search results can be viewed, sorted by relevancy as well as flipped through while users are viewing books.

The new feature adds a cool feature via a scrollbar that appears when users search inside a book. Hints will be displayed if you hover on the scrollbar located at the right side of the search results page. These hints will enable you to preview where in the book the search term is located. You can then click on this annotation go to that part of the book.

• On May 27th at the Google I/O developer program Google has what is the press calls an Oprah Moment and gives away FREE cell phones to all attendees.
• Within 1 hour of the giveaway the phone finds its way up on Ebay with a starting price of $200.
• This phone receives 29 bids and has a final selling price of $760
• Within the 24 hours after that phone is given away Android receives approximately 50,000 new links.
• It doesnt require a huge leap of faith to assume that at least 1 and quite possibly many more of those links can be directly attributed to Google giving away a cash in kind gift valued at between $200-$760.

For Matt Cutts feelings on this be sure to read You and A with Matt Cutts from Outspoken Media, Aim Clear, and SEO Gadget.

Why does this matter, I run a website ViralConversations.com the purpose of the website is to put free gifts in the hands of bloggers, the exact same way Google did with the android phone, yet I have had to modify my FAQ to tell all bloggers to use nofollow on all links or risk a google penalty, while Google gets to corrupt cell phone searches with impunity.

How does this show that Google is profiling SEOs and not the rest of the blogging world? How else can you explain high profile A-List bloggers like Robert Scoble and Sarah Lacy accepting free all expense paid trips to Isreal and not getting penalized? How can Guy Kawasaki get loaned one, two, three cars in three years and still be within Googles guidelines . How can lending Guy Kawasaki an Audi Q7 for three months in exchange for him blogging about it be OK but I cant connect bloggers with people who want to give away a pair of sunglasses? Matt Cutts says The closer you get to money for links, the higher risk we consider it. Go to any rental car agency ask how much it is to rent an Audi Q7 for three months, youll have your answer how close it is to the money.

The other cop-out we get is the link wasnt influenced by the money. When Matt asked TechCrunch Editors about this post featuring someone who was recently a paid sponsor on their blog they said it wasnt influenced by the advertising. First off Matt Cutts running around asking everyone on the internet what their intent is, just isnt going to scale. Secondly after getting in trouble a few minutes earlier for selling straight links on the CrunchCam do you think he was going to fess up to running an advertorial? Would You? Dont be fooled Techcrunch knows the value of the link:

Fair Use Vs. Free Speech in the Internet Age: The Lane Hartwell Problem
The currency of the Web, after all, is the link.

What we have is a pattern of behavior that closely mirrors racial profiling. Assuming someone is terrorist because they are of middle eastern decent, assuming someone is guilty because they are black, or assuming all SEOs are guilty of being link brokers just because they know the value of a link, its all profiling and its all wrong.

Dont believe that Google profiles known SEOs read this post on SEOMoz from Mathew Inman where he talks about Google pre-emptively banning sites hes involved with. As Jeremy Lubke said Google is determined to make any scalable link building process blackhat.

Weve been discussing and debating this for years and at this point is pretty obvious Google isnt going to change their policy. However what we can do is band together and continue to point out where google profiles SEOs and educate more people to Googles inconsitant behavior.

My advice to you dont involve anyone with SEO experience in any of your link building tactics, have it run entirely by a public relations person, and you should be fine, Google lets them get away with murder or at least giving away free cars, cell phones, and all expense paid trips in exchange for links.

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Link building is always considered important to gain traffic and rankings on Google search engine’s results page. In order to effectively accomplish this, one must adhere to following guidelines:

• Optimize link building with relevant optimized keywords
• Optimize links with targeted keywords (anchor text – quality traffic keys)
• Target link building relative to geographical locations
• Keep link exchange to a minimal amount
• Ensure that your site is linked to high traffic sites first and then go for PR
• Link structure of the site must be based on Optimized keywords which must match your industry along with the terms you target within that industry (for example: Fragrances – Perfumes – Dolce & Gabana)
• Navigational links must be optimized with Relevant keywords where most of the links get valued
• A strong internal link structure with optimized keywords will gain high traffic from relevant sources such as: blogs, social networks, news sites, marketing sites, local directories, Google Local Maps, Yahoo!, and MSN Local Business Listings which can build up quality links specially for e-commerce sites
• Getting 10 links from relevant sites that generate quality traffic is better than getting 100 links from irrelevant sites simply for the sake of traffic
• Time is of the essence in SEO Link Building; only target the area where your business is located rather than wasting time, effort and thousands on bulk directories

Hope this helps!