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.

Google is looking to improve upon its own internal SEO efforts. The company has created what it calls an "SEO Report Card," designed to improve the user experience and visibility of some of its own properties. The company says it aims to identify potential areas for improvement in Google’s product pages, which could help users find them more easily in search engines, and fix bugs that annoy visitors and hurt the pages’ performance in search engines.

RDFa, which stands for Resource Description Framework in attributes, is a W3C recommendation, which adds a set of attribute level extensions to XHTML for embedding rich metadata within web documents. While not everyone believes that W3C standards are incredibly necessary to operate a successful site, some see a great deal of potential for search engine optimization in RDFa.

Google has at some point quietly increased its sitemaps limit from 1,000 to 50,000. In a discussion on a Google Webmasters forum thread back in April of last year, Google employee Jonathan Simon said that each sitemap index file can include 1,000 sitemaps.

Just recently, however, David Harkness posted to that same thread, pointing to official Google documentation for sitemap errors, which says under the "Too many Sitemaps" error:

Last summer it was discovered that Google was testing breadcrumbs in search results (breadcrumbs being the hierarchical display commonly used in site navigation. For example: Home Page>Product Page>Product A Page). Then in mid-November, Google announced that it was rolling out the use of breadcrumbs in search results on a global basis. What this means for webmasters is that if you can get your breadcrumbs into Google’s results, you essentially have more links on the results page. You have a separate link for each page in the breadcrumb trail.