We all know social media is a hugely valuable element of online marketing when it comes to building a customer base, search engine rankings, and brand recognition. As a major player, Twitter is one of the most important and popular social media networks frequented by users around the globe.

Obtaining a high number of followers is a landmark goal of many Twitter users. Getting those followers isn’t always easy though, which leads some innocent businesses to wander down the shady path towards the ominous castle black-hat, wherein lies the dark tactic of buying Twitter followers.

With a simple swipe of a credit card, you can obtain legions of your own mindless Twitter drones! To buy or not to buy? Let’s review the reasons for and against buying Twitter followers.

In this post, we'll be looking at:

• Why You Should Buy Twitter

As part of our coverage of the ten Google algorithm changes coming this summer, I wanted to make sure you all saw that Google was coming up with a technique to determine which sites are authorities in specific topics. Now, if Google determined you a subject specific authority, your rankings will improve.

Google's Matt Cutts said they will improve the rankings of subject specific authorities for queries that they should rank well for. I covered this in detail at Search Engine Land but just in case you missed it.

Here is the transcript of this portion, which starts 4 minutes and 37 seconds in:

We have also been working on a lot of ways to help regular webmasters.

We are doing a doing a better job of detecting when someone is sort of an authority in a

About a month ago, we asked our readers if they are or plan on blocking Google Images after they noticed a huge drop in traffic since the new image search design launched.

The results are now in and while 37% said they will not block Google from indexing and ranking their images, 35% said they will or have blocked Google Images. Currently 28% are not sure what they should do in this situation, which likely means they will just keep the status queue. Here are the poll results:

• 11% already blocked Google Images
• 24% will soon block Google Images
• 27% will not block Google images
• 28% are not sure if they will or will not block Google Images

Here is the pie chart:

Forum discussion continued at

A couple of weeks ago I polled you guys on the question of if you proactively disavow links or not. The question came up in that many are fearing the Penguin updates as well as manual link penalties and thus want to be good boys and girls by being proactive about this.

That being said, many are not a fan of proactively using the disavow link tool because it might end up resulting in a downgrade in ranking. Because if Google didn't devalue the links and you disavow them, then your rankings may drop if you use the tool. It is a now verus later decision.

So how about the results? We asked "Do You Proactively Disavow Links?"

• 47% said never have, never plan on it
• 39% said they have but only very rarely
• 14% said

There is a saying that Tim Mayer, formerly from Yahoo, brought to the SEO conferences that has been used for probably ten years now. He said, "don't bring a sword to a gun fight," when someone was talking about how some search results for very shady business areas were spamming but he was doing white hat SEO techniques and was getting no where.

Truth is, that is how it works. In most of the very shady business areas, like payday loans, some classifications of drugs, pornography - the SEO space is much more competitive and honestly ruthless. But Google is planning on changing the game there by focusing a bit more on making the search results for spammy queries, less spammy.

Matt Cutts said in his video at about 2 minutes and 30 seconds in about these

Posted by Zach Corleissen

Greetings, Mozfolk! My name is Zach, and I'm a technical writer here at SEOmoz.

We've consistently heard from you that Mozscape needs better documentation. I'm pleased to tell you: your requests have been granted! The Mozscape wiki just underwent a thorough update and review by developers, help teamsters, and testers. We incorporated your feedback from help tickets and forums to make Mozscape easier for new users to learn, and more functional for experienced users to reference.

Hopefully this documentation update helps you get the most value from Mozscape. If you haven't taken a look through our documentation yet, we hope it encourages you to see how Mozscape data can help your business grow.

Legacy documentation: a (very) brief history

Like documentation at most startups, the legacy documentation for Mozscape was inconsistent. Not all features were documented; for example, metadata supports a command called index_stats, which returns information about the contents of