Today we are going to face an avalanche of Technology bloggers who can't help blogging about every intricate detail of Twitter in one way or another claiming that Google has devalued Twitter profiles in the search engine results pages (SERPs) or reduced the PageRank of profiles. Whilst this is theoretically possible, it is also unlikely. To understand why the change has happened

• You have to understand SEO, external and internal linking, and have an advanced knowledge of how PageRank works. This gives me another change to drop a very blatant affiliate link to Stomping The Search Engines 2 which is probably the best value (just a measly $1) high quality SEO training online. (https://stompernet.infusionsoft.com/go/S2SL/SN347)
• You need to study Twitter Linking structure over a period of time - snapshot SEO is for cowboys - even what I am writing here isn't going to be highly accurate, because I don't have access to analytics, server logs etc, and telling a script to analyse every page of Twitter just isn't viable

I am not writing this just for another opportunity to pimp an affiliate link, but I am sick of poor SEO information out there among bloggers. I have suggested SEOs need to clean up old information, but to be honest, this is about as fundamental as it gets I do have a fair understanding of SEO and linking structures, and I do monitor changes, not just the pretty toolbar PageRank Google updates every 3 months or so, or the ranking of my Twitter profile in the SERPs. Here are a few of my more recent tweets on the topic:-

Stompernet are in the middle of a relaunch of their SEO Training product as an online course you can get access to immediately for $1 - when I first looked at the course it was a 2 DVD set last October. Here is a blatant affiliate link - https://stompernet.infusionsoft.com/go/S2SL/SN347 I listen to the "undercurrent" in SEO circles, and Stompernet is often criticized, though typically just by inferrence. This post is to address some of the things I see repeatedly online, especially among SEO bloggers, and hopefully it will offer some additional benefit to bloggers in other niches.

Google does not penalize for paid or sponsored reviews but can penalize for paid or sponsored links that pass PageRank - Brian Solis & Techcrunch are blatantly wrong. As Techcrunch now has 2 million readers, many of them corporate, you would think they would be a little more careful publishing statements that are false, misleading or could seriously damage not just a single company, but a whole growing business sector, even if they clearly hate it. Opinion is one thing - stating facts that are wrong is in a totally different territory Here is an excerpt for the recent fluff piece for Brian Solis on Techcrunch

Seems simple enough, except two things are going to prevent this from effectively promoting the sponsoring brand over time â€" 1) disclosures read like warning signs; 2) Google is downgrading any blog or site that actively publishes paid content.

Sarah Lacey's recent piece was fluff as well Google has no stated problem with paid or sponsored reviews - with Google it has always been about machine readable disclosure of paid links i.e. use some way to block the links from counting such as rel="nofollow", javascript, block with redirect + robots.txt etc I stated that Brian's article was a fluff piece, because it is very easy to research, but here are a few choice articles.

This is a post I am sure the "Andy Beard Haters Club" will gloat over, but as I haven't been able to find a resource anywhere on the effect extended use of 503 Service Unavailable can potentially have on a site, and in particular the effect on search traffic, I thought I should write about it. [caption id="attachment_1794" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Using 503 Server Unavailable For Extended Periods Can Kill Your Search Traffic"][/caption] This isn't your typical scenario - 503 errors are frequently sent when a server becomes overloaded, or there are some backend problems. A search of the Google Webmaster Help forums doesn't bring up a huge amount of cases, and mostly it is enquiring about what someone should do when they want to do some maintenance on a live server, probably for a short time. In my case I didn't plan to be in "Maintenance Mode" for an extended period. Here is the complete timeline: