Robots.txt as you may know, lets Googlebot know whether you want it to crawl your site or not. Google’s Matt Cutts spoke about a few options for these files in the latest Webmaster Help video, in response to a user-submitted …

For all of you webmasters still lamenting over Google’s infamous Panda update, it’s important that you don’t take it personally. You were simply a casualty–correctly or no–in Google’s never-ending war against spam content in its search results. Google has long …

Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts, has been answering webmaster questions in short videos for quite some time now. The videos have often been quite informative, and have tackled numerous issues that common webmasters face on a day-to-day basis. …

Google announced this morning that it’s releasing a new new web performance tool for webmeisters called Page Speed Service. This follows several other offerings from the company in the page speed realm, including a browser extension, the Page Speed Online …

Google has introduced some changes to Webmaster Tools – in particular, handling of URLs with parameters. “URL Parameters helps you control which URLs on your site should be crawled by Googlebot, depending on the parameters that appear in these URLs,” …

Social media analytics firm awe.sm has a very interesting post explaining why webmasters might be getting a lot more traffic from Twitter than they realize. This has sparked some interesting discussion around the tech blogosophere, and quite frankly, it might …

As you may know, Google’s Matt Cutts often posts videos on the company’s Webmaster Help YouTube channel, answering user questions. He linked to one today about duplicate content concerns and having blog posts on your home page. The question was, …

Google is now supporting link rel=”canonical” relationships specified in HTTP headers. Evidently this was heavily requested, as the feature is in response to webmaster feedback. The syntax can be found in this document. Google Webmaster Trends analyst Pierre Far outlines …

A Google Webmaster video released today aims to answer the burning question surrounding porn sites’ lower PageRank. The question asked of Google’s Matt Cutts was as follows: What are the technical reasons porn sites have such low PageRank? None go …

This week, Google’s Matt Cutts has been discussing rel=canonical, providing some info that webmasters might find pretty helpful. “A user submitted a question to Matt, which said, “It takes longer for Google to find the rel=canonical pages but 301 redirects …

Over at the Google Webmaster Central blog, they’ve announced “Page Speed Online,” which allows users to check out the performance of any page on the internet, at any time.  Users will receive a page performance score calculated out of 100 …

Did you know you can publish content directly to people that click the "like" button on any piece of content on your site?

A recent post on the Facebook Developer blog discusses just that. "As part of Operation Developer Love, we are are continuing to update our documentation," said Facebook’s Ankur Pansari. "Recently, I was talking with some developers in New York, and they were surprised to learn that they could publish updates to people who have liked their Open Graph Pages."

On Friday, Google aded a new notification to search results for letting people know when a site may have been hacked. As hacking is running rampant these days, it’s probably not a bad idea. However, not all webmasters are thrilled about it. 

Facebook is launching a new registration tool for site owners, which utilizes a single line of code. "For users it means quicker ways to sign up for new sites with Facebook, while seeing what information they’re sharing, and which friends have already connected," a representative for Facebook tells WebProNews.

Coverage of SES Chicago will continue.  Stay with WebProNews for more notes from the event this week.

Google is now indexing SVG files. SVG, which stands for scalable vector graphics, is a widely-deployed, royalty-free,  XML-based format for vector graphics and support for interactivity. The format was developed and is maintained by the W3C SVG Working Group.

Facebook announced today that it is releasing some new features for the Like button social plug-in. There is now commenting for the iFrame version, publishing to connected users via the Graph API, and "more robust" analytics.

"Now, when a user adds a comment to the iFrame version of the Like button, a larger, more prominent story will be shared with the user’s friends. In the past, we’ve seen comments result in increased distribution and referral traffic," says Facebook Platform product manager Austin Haugen.

It’s very rare that a major website launches any kind of redesign without any complaints from users. Google is no stranger to this itself, and it should come as no surprise that this week’s launch of the new Google Image Search has come with its own share of complaints (although I’d be surprised if the complaints outweighed the positive opinions).

At SMX Advanced last month, Microsoft announced that Bing would redesign its Webmaster Tools this summer. The new version is now available.

Bing Webmaster Tools Senior Product Manager Anthony M. Garcia summarizes the changes:

Google now lets you submit various content types in one sitemap. For example, if you want to submit videos, images, mobile URLs, etc. in the same sitemap, you can do so.

A lot of people had something to say about Google’s Mayday algorithm update from the beginning of May. A lot of people felt that it was costing them rankings and revenue.