I verified my site in Google Webmaster Tools and tried to submit a sitemap. In the webmaster tools panel, it informed me that my robots.txt file was blocking Google from grabbing my sitemap.

This confused me, as I know I would never knowingly make a robots.txt file to block search engines.

Read on to find out what the problem was, how to fix it, and how it happened in the first place…

The Problem

I checked out my robots.txt file and saw the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

As if disallowing all bots wasn’t enough, I saw all the pages of my site had the following meta tag in it.

Okay, so now my SEO was killed on two different levels – search engines can’t index or follow links, if they could somehow first get past the robots.txt.
The Fix

How did I remedy this crucial mistake? It’s a simple fix.

WordPress SEO Visible

I navigated to my privacy settings in the WordPress administration panel and selected I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers.
Prevention

When installing WordPress, make sure you don’t deselect the checkbox that reads: Allow my blog to appear in search engines like Google and Technorati.
Conclusion

You should always verify your site(s) in Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any problems with indexing. I hope you found this quick WordPress tip informative, because although this is a simple mistake, it’s something to be aware of when SEO’ing WordPress sites.

[via Themelab]

Share on Facebook

2. What is HTML?
Another HTML primer? No, there are lots of those – This is even more basic than a primer. This is for folks who want to know exactly what HTML is in the first place, what it’s used for, and where to go to start learning.

3. The Domain Name Game
Finding a particular Web site is like finding someone’s telephone number. Every Web server in the Universe has a unique number that identifies it, called an IP address. For obvious reasons, nobody wants to have to remember numbers like this, so early in the development of the Web, the system of domain names was devised.

4. How do I add pictures to my Web site?
It’s really not that tough. If you’ve got the picture, I’ll show you how to put it on your page. The right way, so that it looks good, loads in a reasonable time, and doesn’t reveal your inexperience to anyone.

5. Amateur Web Sites – the Top Ten Signs
So you’re a beginning Webmaster. You don’t have to advertise the fact. If you’re a dog, nobody will know, but if you’re an amateur, everyone will know – at least if you pull any of the boners listed here. If your experience of the Web is limited, you may not realize that something that looks neat to you may strike more experienced Net denizens as passé, trite, amateurish, annoying, or worst of all – deprecated!

6. Promoting Your Web Site
Here are the basics of search engines, link exchanges, mailing lists and other traffic-building tools.

Share on Facebook

1) URL

2) Title Tag

3) Header Tag

Thats right, make sure the main keyword assigned to a target page is assigned to the URL, the title tag, and the pages H! (header) tag. for example:

Page URL: AuntMayCollections.com/Collectables/Spider-Man

TItle: The Aunt MAy Collection Presents Spider Man Collectibles

Header: Spider Man Collectibles.

In the good ol days when meta tags rained supreme, the SEO Trifecta meant matching the keyword within the title, description, and keyword tag. Now, years later, the magical SEO Trifecta has changed. In my opinion, changed for the better.

Implantation of the SEO Trifecta can be very basic on a simple (small 5 page) site. Or it could mean advanced SEO site architecture for a larger, more content rich site.

Share on Facebook

But it’s not that simple. In the golden days of recruiting we would hunt for days to find a candidate with a degree from a top university who worked for a top notch company who of course was considered priceless and absolutely worth contacting. Today however, we run a simple search on LinkedIn and find hundreds that match that exact profile. Or we run a quick search on Twitter for anybody discussing a specific keyword and we now have hundreds more to contact. But with only a set number of hours in a day, we just don’t have the bandwidth to contact everybody.

The problem of today completely flipped from the one of yesterday where we went from candidate scarcity and limited information to an overabundance of candidates and even more information available on each one.

So in today’s world of information overload where talent is literally available by the truckloads, I thought it would be relevant to write a post about how we evaluate a candidate’s social media footprint to determine (when all else is equal) which candidates we would contact and which ones get left by the wayside. I posed the following question to make it simple:

If all else were equal, like education, work history and general skill set, and I had to evaluate the social media footprints of two candidates to determine which one of them I would contact, which one would I contact and why? In my experience, I would contact the one who

Share on Facebook

As someone who fills the role of heavy duty tin foil hat wearing google critic, it often comes as a bit of a surprise to many exactly how many google services I use. Google mail for domains, google voice, google docs, google analytics and webmaster central. This intimate integration has lead some to call me a hypocrite, but I feel it’s hard to be critical unless you know how things work, but that’s a discussion for another post.

Today what I’d like to talk about is, does google know what websites you own, and what methods do they use to gather that information. One of the biggest questions is, since google is a registrar do they have access to private registry information. They have never answered the question (which I think works to their advantage), the best answer I’ve ever seen comes from a guest post by Nick Wilsdon on Jim Boykin’s blog. In 2009 IMHO having a private registry works against you in the eyes of google. There are definite benefits to having a public registry address that matches your on site info and you need to take steps to make that happen.

Next let’s look at your google profile (here’s a link to mine). When you set it up they ask you what websites you own so they can link to them. I linked to my company profile. Now on the inside google thinks I might be associated with some of the sites listed below (sorry for the redactions)

So how is google making these associations?

Comparing notes with a few people, the two biggest discovery methods are webmaster central and Google analytics. So anything that’s in either of those two areas is likely to  to be shown. That includes actual client sites, potential client sites or anyone else who shared/granted you access along the way. Makes you wonder about that crazy guy who gave you access and you blew off because he had a shady backlink profile. Does google count that against you?

Next we need to talk about your social graph and XFN links. XFN links are a way of tagging links in a way that establishes a relationship. This video does a better job of explaining it than I could.

So if google comes across an XFN link to a website in your profile they will associate with you in your google profile. Some of the redacted links above are XFN links. Now what if that questionable site in your profile gets associated with something on a third party site via an XFN link … scary stuff.

What happens if you try to submit a legitimate re-inclusion request, will google count any of the bad sites associated with your profile against you … google isn’t saying anything about that situation. or how far and how much data they are willing to use against you. My best advice is to be really really careful.

With the proliferation of social websites, and the publicizing of social graphs. keeping your clean sites separated from your dirty sites is now more important than it ever was. Google is willing to use any scrap of data it can find and associate it with you. Whether it will use that against you remains largely untested. For a humorous look at how bad this can actually get I suggest watching the video below.

[via Wolf-Howl]

Share on Facebook

Google bought Grand Central and rebranded it Google Voice, now Apple has rejected Google Voice for the iPhone and the FCC is looking into it. Based on the responses Apple had given the FCC, it looks like they might be afraid Google is taking over the iPhone and Google Voice is a big piece of that. So what if Apple had bought Grand Central instead? Or what if that new world-class data center Apple is building will be home to a Google Voice competitor? (Tip of the theoretical hat to Derek in our comments, who delightfully calls such a thing iVoice).

GrandCentral (not to be confused with Apple’s upcoming multicore processor handler, Grand Central Dispatch) was an innovative service that gave users a new phone number that could replace any number of other and assorted numbers (one line to ring them all), along with SMS, transcribed voice mail, conference calling, call switching, call screening, etc. It was purchased by Google in 2007 for $95 million, and relaunched in 2009 as Google Voice.

If Apple had bought it instead, they would of course now be spared the headaches surrounding the above mentioned rejection and investigation. But they’d also have a fairly compelling set of services to roll up into the iPhone…

The original iPhone 2G saw Apple neatly remove carriers from a large portion of the smartphone experience by handling the selling and activation themselves, and not allowing any so-called carrier crapware (or even physical branding) onto the iPhone.

iPhone 3G and iPhone 2.0 saw the removal of carrier application portals with the introduction of an Apple-controlled App Store (though that inarguably has crapware all it’s own, users don’t have to fight with it being pre-installed and/or baked in).

At the same time, the original iPod touch went from being a crippled, no external speaker, no external volume control iPhone, to a fairly good non-phone iPhone. In a couple of weeks, Apple is widely expected to ship an iPod touch with a camera and perhaps microphone as well.

That makes it a potential VoIP monster.

Of course, GrandCentral/Google Voice doesn’t use VoIP (despite Apple’s weak-tea response that they’re still investigating it). That doesn’t mean it couldn’t (as in never will).

An iPhone — or iPod touch — with “iVoice” phone, sms, voice mail, etc. behind it…? That removes the carrier further still (dumb pipe chants, if you will), and the iPod touch as a VoIP monster? Heh. It becomes the Balrog.

[via TiPB]

Share on Facebook

This is the “What’s New” text that will appear on the App Store.

- See your upcoming Events and RSVP
- See your friends’ birthdays
- See Pages and post updates and photos to Pages you administer
- Write Notes and read your friends’ Notes
- Upload videos from an iPhone 3GS
- Upload photos to any album
- Complete photo management (create albums, delete albums, delete photos, delete photo tags)
- Change your Profile Picture
- Zoom into photos
- Like posts and photos
- See the same News Feed as the Facebook website
- Visit links in a built-in web browser
- See all of your friends’ friends and Pages
- See mutual friends
- Easily search for people and Pages
- Make friend requests
- Become a fan of Pages
- Quickly call or text your friends
- Create shortcuts to your favorite friends and Pages
- Friends sorted by first or last name according to your settings
- Chat friends sorted alphabeticaly

Share on Facebook

Apple introduced the original iPhone 2G and 1.0 software in 2007. In 2008 that same hardware received the iPhone 2.0 update. This year, that same hardware again received the iPhone 3.0 update. A few quibbles about hardware specific lapses aside (video, MMS, A2DP), Apple has provided an unprecedented level of free updates to previous generation devices.

In a post-iPhone smartphone landscape, we’ve pretty much come to take these free updates for granted, and it’s hard to remember the old days when other manufacturers basically treated their older models as abandonware. We’ve even come to take them for granted on other platforms like Android’s 1.5 Cupcake and Palm’s webOS 1.1 update.

Our sibling sites remind us, however, that maybe we’ll all face a rude awakening one day.

First up, Android Central reports on the ongoing “will they or won’t they” confusion over whether the first Android device, the less than one year old T-Mobile G1, has enough storage to even be able to load future updates like Donut or Eclair (best. codenames. ever.).

Meanwhile, WMExperts takes us down the long and winding path of whether or not yet-to-be-released Windows Mobile 6.5 devices will be upgradable to yetter-to-be-released Windows Mobile 7 at some point (which will be built on a newer version of the WinCE platform).

Again, iPhone 2G owners — we at TiPb included — have enjoyed 2.0 and 3.0 updates over 2 years, maybe 4.0 will work to some degree or another in 2010, but we have to think at some point Apple will break compatibility with the original iPhone and when that happens — how will users react? “Thanks for all the updates” or “you @$$#0!3$!”?

[via TiPB]

Share on Facebook

It was just over a year ago that the iPhone became the undisputed champion of cell phone cameras on Flickr. Without a doubt, the modern day cell phone camera has become a serious photographic tool and thanks to the release of iPhone 3GS, the iPhone has stepped into 1st place in upload popularity of all cameras just ahead of Cannon’s Digital Rebel XTi.

Now we all are aware that the three megapixel camera on the iPhone 3GS is not the best out there but it does it’s job fairly well. The main reason for it’s popularity on Flickr is convenience. Not only do you carry your iPhone everywhere you go, unlike a regular camera, you also have the ability to upload directly from the device. Convenience reigns supreme.

It was only a matter of time before iPhone was crowned the undisputed overall champion of the Flickr world.

[Via Electronista]

Share on Facebook

It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that RIM is doing pretty well even in the face of an economic downturn, but it looks like it’s been doing really well — at least according to Fortune, which has just named the Canadian company the fastest growing firm in the world. That’s apparently based on a combination of profits, turnover, and investment return over three years which, in RIM’s case, translates an 84% growth in profits in the past three years, a 77% growth in revenue, and a total return of 45%. It’s also actually the first time RIM has made the list, although that’s at least partly due to the fact that Fortune didn’t include non-US firms last time around.

[via Engadget]

Share on Facebook