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Good to know, thank you. I had actually picked up that advice on seomoz 6-7 months ago.

When I have needed to do this. I usually got a virtual office address in the locations I wanted to rank. I haven't used these guys and am in no way affiliated with them, but here is an example:

http://www.davincivirtual.com/

Then just created Google Places with your new address and optimize for that.

When you deleted the old sitemap and created a new one, did you use the same sitemap xml filename? They will still try to crawl old URLs that were in your previous sitemap (even if they aren't listed in the new one) until they receive a 404 response from the original sitemap.

Google is actually addressing private blog networks as we speak. I was shocked this hasn't been discussed at all (on here at least). But in the past week or two, they had an algo update to penalize this PBNs, and the people that purchase links on them. Matt Cutts even tweeted about it last week.

https://twitter.com/#!/mattcutts/status/180392083427823616

I haven't redirected users by country, but I am doing it by US state for certain services on a site.

1. When a user visits the page from a state we offer the service in, they are 302 redirected to the state specific page

2. When a crawler visits the page, they are NOT redirected anywhere

3. On that same page, we have links pointing to the state specific page so they can be discovered by the crawler

Yeah, that looks like the one I saw. It would be nice to know their methodology. I could whip up a python script fairly quickly for public use to try against accounts you don't control.

It was an overview, percentage of followers that were likely to be spammers.  Based on who they followed, how much they wrote, etc. Maybe I did imagine it. ha.

I seem to remember seeing an online app mentioned here that allows you to enter a twitter username, and it reports back metrics on the likelihood of each follower being a real person or not. Does anyone have the link, or did I imagine it?

I am working on a website that all of its primary contents are videos. They have an assortment of free videos, but the majority or viewable only with a subscription to the site. If you don't have a subscription, you can see a 2 min video clip of the contents of the video. But all the videos can be anywhere from 10min to 1.5 hours. When I am auto-generating the sitemap.xml, can I put the full length of the videos for paying members in the XML in the video:duration property?

Or because publicly only 2 minutes is available (unless you pay for a membership) is that frowned upon?