Imagine having access to all your social networking data on other social networking sites. Facebook started doing this earlier this year by allowing developers access to publish social networking applications on their platform.

One of the complaints people have about Facebook, however, is that there is no way to get information from your profile and applications out of Facebook. Google is seeking to change that with the launch of a new set of APIs call OpenSocial. Today Google sent out a press release on Friday that is rocking the web 2.0 world.

It is titled “Google Launches OpenSocial to Spread Social Applications Across the Web.” OpenSocial is a set of APIs for building social applications for websites that want to add social features. Depending on how this is implemented, this could really impact social networking in a good way.

Soon you will have access to your information across multiple websites. This will also help developers, in that they can just write one application instead of an application for every platform. Here is a list of partners that Google has already announced are supporting OpenSocial.

• Bebo
• Engage.com
• Friendster
• hi5
• Hyves
• imeem
• LinkedIn
• mixi
• MySpace
• Ning
• Oracle
• orkut
• Plaxo
• Salesforce.com
• Six Apart
• Tianji
• Viadeo
• XING

Several developers, including Flixster, FotoFlexer, iLike, RockYou, Slide, Theikos, and VirtualTourist have already built applications that use the OpenSocial APIs. I am hoping that other services that I use a lot like Flickr, Twitter and Wordpress join in soon.

So far, Facebook has not announced any support for OpenSocial. In my opinion, Facebook would be making a big mistake not to. They need to announce this and quickly, or they will risk losing their credibility with developers and users.

Shoemoney posted yesterday about how Aaron Wall gave him advice on how to get his blog out of the supplemental results in Google. According to Shoemoney, after one month, his blog is out of supplemental results, and his traffic from Google increased 1400%. He also said that most of it was done in the robots.txt file.

In the comments, a user posted the content of Shoemoney’s robots.txt file. Here is what he posted at that time.

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /link.php
Disallow: /gallery
Disallow: /gallery2
Disallow: /gallery2/
Disallow: /gallery/
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /pages/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /feed

It looks like Shoemoney is avoiding supplementals by getting rid of duplicate content issues. That is why he disallowed the gallery, category, pages and feed directories.

Shoemoney then responded that the robots.txt was only 50% of the problem. The rest was overcome by adding dynamic title and description tags plus more on page internal linking.

There you go. SEO advice straight from Shoemoney. He claims he sucks at SEO, but it looks like he is getting some good advice from the right people.

It turns out I was quoted for an article that ran in the Knoxville News-Sentinel on August 31, 2006. One of the main functions of my job as an SEO deals with getting web sites listed in Google. A writer with the Sentinel called our offices a few weeks back and asked if someone could talk to him for a story he was writing on Google.

Google released a tool in May 2006 called Google Trends. The writer, Andrew Eder, was writing a story on Google Trends and how to determine what Knoxvillians were searching for using the tool. He called because he wanted to know what I thought about the service.

My quote ended up as a “call out” on the back page of the section C, the business section, which I thought was pretty cool. The only thing is that he paraphrased what I said, and I felt I didn’t quite come off looking like the expert I was portrayed as. Here is the quote.

“As a marketer, I would look at that and build out my marketing calendar based on that information,” Kemp said.

Impressive, huh? My point was that Google Trends could be useful to marketers because it can show seasonal patterns in searches. Marketers could use this data to determine when to begin marketing for seasonal events.

It can also show what cities outside Knoxville are searching for Knoxville related terms. If I were in tourism, I would try to make use of that information to see what areas outside Tennessee to market to.

All in all, I felt lucky to be quoted in the paper, and to get exposure for myself and Mediapulse. Hopefully, I was impressive enough that they will call back when they need a quote on the next story.

Click here to read the story, “Seek and Knox shall find.”

I just read this post on the Google blog, Attention all Pearl Jam fans, and man was I surprised. It essentially says that Pearl Jam has a new video for “Life Wasted” up on Google Video. To me, this is very exciting, and it says a lot about Pearl Jam and their philosophy when it comes to putting their fans first.

I love Pearl Jam. I have been a fan since their first CD, “Ten,” came out back in 1991. It seems wierd to think that was 15 years ago. I even got to see them in concert back in 1998. Anyway, I got their new CD the week it came out, and it rules. It is so great, and it puts what is accepted as music today to shame. It looks to be a good year for this, as the Chili Peppers also released a new CD that totally rocks.

Well, this may not be very related to SEO, but I had to mention it and throw some links in as well. You can find the “Life Wasted” video here and the Official Pearl Jam site here.

Google’s Matt Cutts: The Big Interview by Mike Grehan over at ClickZ has 2 interviews with Matt Cutts. Mike Grehan asks some great questions here for Google’s resident chief spam warrior. Mike published some of what Matt had to say in the article, but I recommend downloading and listening to the full audio of both. There is some great information in there.

One of the things that Matt said in the interview that I have not heard anyone talk about is Google’s policy on IP delivery. In the interview, Matt essentially says that cloaking is against Google’s webmaster guidelines but IP delivery is not. This is something that I personally have not heard before from Google. What does all this mean exactly? Well, let’s look at what Matt is talking about.

Cloaking is defined as having a script on your web site that can differentiate between a user and a search engine bot. When the script detects a search engine bot visiting the site, it will serve content that is different than the content it would normally deliver to a user. Search engine spammers have used this technique in the past to serve pages stuffed with keywords and links created specifically for search engines, but that users would not approve of, in order to gain undeserved rankings in the search engines. This practice has long been known to seo’s as something that can get you banned from most search engines.

IP delivery is different, however. IP delivery is serving different content to the user based on the IP address of the user. Many web sites engage in this practice including Google, according to Matt. Google is saying that this practice is acceptable under their webmaster guidelines. I think this is a good thing for webmasters who may have been afraid to do this for fear of being banned in the search engines.

Update: I just found a post about this on SEO Roundtable talking about this issue last month. It turns out Matt posted a comment on his blog saying the same thing he says in his interview. Here is a quote.

IP delivery: delivering results to users based on IP address.
Cloaking: showing different pages to users than to search engines.

IP delivery includes things like “users from Britain get sent to the co.uk, users from France get sent to the .fr”. This is fine–even Google does this.

It’s when you do something *special* or out-of-the-ordinary for Googlebot that you start to get in trouble, because that’s cloaking. In the example above, cloaking would be “if a user is from Googlelandia, they get sent to our Google-only optimized text pages.”

So IP delivery is fine, but don’t do anything special for Googlebot. Just treat it like a typical user visiting the site.

What does this mean for webmasters? Well, I’m not sure how you could use this to benefit your users. But, I may post about this in the future on how you can use IP delivery to help you improve your overall user experience for your web site.

I received this message while trying to access Google from work all day.

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.
To continue searching, please type the characters you see below:

Did anyone else experience this or was it just me? It happend on Mac and PC across every browser I tried. As you can see from the message, it required me to type in random characters from an image to access the page. Every time I did it would let me in, then after a while I would try again and get the same message. Weird.

One thing though, I usually accessed the Google personalized homepage when I received the error, but when I went to Google.com the error persisted.

Help People Subscribe to Your Content in the Google Help pages tells you how to promote your feed by placing an “Add to Google” button to your website.

The page contains a simple form. All you have to do is put your feed url in the form, and it gives you the code to use which includes a cool Google button. Try it today! I recommend this as it makes it easy for your readers to quickly add your feed right to their Google homepage or Google Reader.

I received an invitation tonight from Google to sign up for a Google Analytics account.

Hello,

We are ready for you to create your Google Analytics account! Please follow the instructions below to redeem your invitation code.

The funny thing is I already have a Google Analytics account, two actually. I don’t know why I got an invitation, but it looks like Google is freeing up some space to be able to start adding new accounts again.

Did anybody else receive one?

If you are interested, Google has an FAQ on Googlebot, Google’s Web Crawler, in the Information for Webmasters section on their site.

Find out everything you ever wanted to know about Googlebot including:

• What is Feedfetcher?
• How often will Googlebot access my web pages?
• How do I request that Google not crawl parts or all of my site?
• Why isn’t Googlebot obeying my robots.txt file?
• How do I tell Googlebot not to crawl a single outgoing link on a page?
• How do I add my feed to the search results for Google’s personalized homepage and Google Reader?

Feedback on Bigdaddy data center was posted on Matt Cutts blog yesterday. This is the first info I am hearing on this so called “Bigdaddy.” But, I will post the critical parts of Matt’s post here.

Google has a new data center they are previewing called Bigdaddy. Google is currently asking for feedback on the Bigdaddy data center. Bigdaddy is now visible at two data centers: 66.249.93.104 and 64.233.179.104. Matt says he expects Bigdaddy to become the default source of web results within 1-2 months.

What’s new and different in Bigdaddy? It has some new infrastructure, not just better algorithms or different data. Most of the changes are under the hood, enough so that an average user might not even notice any difference in this iteration.

The best place to report webspam you see in Bigdaddy is http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. In the “Additional details:” section, use the keyword “bigdaddy” in your report.

For reporting other quality issues in Bigdaddy, do the search that you’re interested in on 66.249.93.104 or 64.233.179.104, then click the “Dissatisfied? Help us improve” link at the bottom right of the page. Again, fill in details and use the keyword “bigdaddy” so that folks at Google can separate out feedback specifically about this data center.