When I have been surfing the internet for the latest SEO news, I came across this unique list on how to rank in Twitter for a keyword entitled “5 Steps to Ranking #1 on Twitter“. But I’m wondering what does the author mean for ranking #1. Rank where? The Twitter directory? The search engine? or the top Twitter user list?

The author of the said article indicated five ways on how to ‘increase the ranking’ of a person. He cited the name, username, bio, account activity and number of followers. I agree with him that to be able to achieve maximum potential in Twitter, one must optimize a keyword in all these areas. But what he failed to point out is the different forms of search on Twitter.

Search on Twitter is not one-dimensional. It is not as direct as search engines. Twitter can be searched in various areas such as trends, hash tags, and directories. I think the author failed to point out in the area on which his tips will be more useful.

I also tried the effectiveness of Twitter in ranking in search engines. I have found out how personalities such as Britney Spears, TechCrunch and Kevin Rose have their Twitter profiles in the top 10 rankings when their name is searched.

I have also tried it on myself and yielded the same rankings.

With this, we can say that Twitter can contribute to ranking for certain brands. But how about keywords? I think this can be effective if you put keywords in your username or bio. With hashtag search, you will be associated with a particular term and you may build your credibility on a certain topic based on Twitter conversations. However, I have only tested the search engines on brand search and not on direct keyword search. As for directories, people can control the niche they are associated with because they can freely choose which categories should they belong to.

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Well we came across this today and I had to post it. It literally made me laugh for 10 minutes non stop. This is what happens when you combine a .edu blog + PR4 post + dofollow + no moderation whatsoever!!! 874 spammy links and growing!

http://mrzhou.cms.si.umich.edu/deplo…lock-drupalorg 

Its absolutely crazy I mean some of them are not even comments just spamming there URLs and we all know Google only counts the first link to one destination page, but still they put loads of links with similar anchor text to the same place

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A lot of noise emerged when Google News have decided to serve ads on its search results. Back in 2002, a lot of people think that Google have finally made something that does not have monetary value – that is Google News. However, with the recent changes in the news industry – lower sales and readership – Google News is now serving ads on its pages.

At first, this may seem like an inevitable thing to do. With the boom of readers to 12.5 million according to ComScore, it may seem like Google is just reaping the benefits of their labor. As Google business product manager Josh Cohen said, this is just a transition so they can introduce paid listings in their news.

However, what Google don’t know is that this may do them more harm than good. First, they have forgotten that their sources are major media companies. There is a chance of being sued if they try to put advertisements on someone else’s content. Google used to be strict on copyright infringement but now they may be taking their own pill.

Some may argue that Google is not really infringing on copyrights because they just compile headlines and summaries. However, as Sandra Baron, executive director at the Media Law Resource Center says, there will be tension when Google News has become a substitute for going to the provider’s website. She also adds

“When that tension becomes too great, people seek legal solutions to it.”

Another problem is the relevance of advertisements to the Google News results. As Edelman tackled in his post “Ads in Google News turn it into a PR Playground”, some sponsored links may promote fake news. This will then provide confusion and mistrust on the Google News results.

The problem may also lie on how easy the advertisements can be acquired. As Walter Isaacson said

“Also, what Google does is it allows ads to be spread all over the Web. You can go to Google ad servers and put ads on any site there is.”

A legal case has been filed before in Belgium. A group of content owners forced Google to remove their content from Google News and Google.be. This is just an indication that Google can be sued for monetizing its news website.

In the end, Google, in general, should learn to provide more quality than quantity. As Wall Street Journal Managing Editor, Robert Thomson said.

“Google doesn’t distinguish between the quality of the content around which it serves up ads, it is concerned with quantity rather than quality”.

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The recent news as TechCrunch shows that online advertising may drop 5% in revenue. This is in accordance to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and a researcher st IDC. A lot of people may not believe this but it is already happening. Before the year starts, there have been lots of prediction increase happening around the internet. Even Emily Riley of Forrester said that online advertising revenue may increase 12%.

But we can’t blame them for making these claims. After all the trend in the past years have always been increasing. With this, it is inevitable to predict the revenue to take the same path in the upcoming years.

But with this alarming news, it seems that money will not easily come by even in the online world. But what’s surprising about that? The online revenues comes from offline businesses. It’s the sad reality. We must face that internet marketers may also feel the horrors of recession.

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The latest post on SEOmoz blog entitled “Nofollow is Dying: The Impact of Microblogging and Nofollow on SEO” touched on a very important issue in the the SEO world – that is the importance of nofollow links. SEOs have always believed that links should always be done on dofollow sites because nofollow does not provide link juice. However, SEOmoz have this theory that nofollow does not matter anymore.

SEOmoz provided good basis for this claim. The author referred to microblogging platforms such as Twitter that only have nofollow links. However, the conversion of these links are phenomenal since links are shown to concerned followers. If this idea is going to be applied to SEO, this can somehow change the search engines’ algorithm. With their goal of providing the most relevant search results to their users, it is not surprising if they will consider nofollow microblogging links in the future.

Another basis SEOmoz have presented is the explosion of 3rd party program users. Like social media sites such as Twitter, 3rd party websites such as blogger, wordpress.com and others usually have nofollow links. However, with the increase in users, search engines can’t always say that the links to these blogs must be ignored. Some of them are relevant and ignoring them are not practical.

Third, nofollow links have been proven to be more trusted. This can be attributed to the announcement that nofollow links are not counted by search engines. It is with this reason that spam is not present in most of the nofollow websites. Spammers usually flood the dofollow sites with their links expecting link juice. Ironically, the people who try to game the system only make the dofollow links look worse than the nofollow links. This is an aspect that search engines may consider as they weigh which link is worth more.

I have personal experience with this as well. I have found that the search engines managed to crawl my site even if I commented on related nofollow sites. I tried searching the links and the nofollow comment came out in the listings. This means that the search engines are still counting that link even if it comes from a nofollow blog.

However, this is just a theory. I think it is still best for Google to have this rule because it limits comment spam as well as build relevant content to a particular page. But it is still an interesting thing to know that nofollow may also be valued by search engines.

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It was a surprise when we caught Google advertising on Craigslist. Apparently, they are looking for testers to try out their new application. Google is looking for Beta testers to try out their new software application called GSink. The advertisement go as follows:

“GSink is a software application designed to help share contacts between Google, Gmail Google applications users.

We are presently seeking beta testers to help us test this new software from home or work. If you’re interested in participating in our beta test, please send us an e-mail and we will share with you more details about the program.

Thank you for your interest in helping us make this a better software program” (Source: Craigslist Ad PostingID: 1036171786)

As indicated, you may simply contact Google if you want to help them out.

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Yahoo have decided to shut down MyWeb starting March 18, 2009. Known as a social bookmarking site, MyWeb has allowed its users to save, share and discover bookmarks. However, the existence of other applications such as Yahoo Bookmarks and Delicious have rendered MyWeb useless.

It is with this reason that Yahoo decided to shut down the application. After all, why keep an application if it does the same service. It is true that it may be a significant social bookmarking area. It may even contribute an extra backlink for SEOs. But MyWeb is not really a popular bookmarking site to begin with. Yahoo took this into consideration as they track the traffic from the three applications: MyWeb, Yahoo Bookmarks and Delicious.

On the bright side, a lot of improvements can be expected from Yahoo who promises to devote their time to Delicious this 2009. There will also be a clear distinction between Delicious and Yahoo Bookmarks from now on because Delicious will be taking care of public bookmarks while Yahoo Bookmarks will be taking care of the private. There will also be an export option available so users can quickly ship their bookmarks to different sites in a snap.

There are also some good news for the current MyWeb users. First, they do not need to worry about their bookmarks being lost. Yahoo decided to stash them away in Yahoo Bookmarks. So the links will still be intact. Second, their bookmark button and badge can be easily substituted by Delicious. And third, Yahoo have provided a feedback page for MyWeb users who will encounter problem during the move.

Yahoo MyWeb was launched back in 2005 with the goal of helping its users discover new links. With no significant increase in users, the application will be shut down even if it is just on Beta stage.

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With the creation of the canonical tag, the existence of a particular content in multiple links is not considered as duplicate. Finally, content can now be freely archived and searched. SEOs do not need to worry anymore about their rankings because of the new link structure.

The use of the canonical tag is better understood with an example. We all know that a blog post can exist in multiple links: a regular blog post page (http://www.sitename.com/blog/?p=12), a blog post page with permalink structure (http://www.sitename.com/blog/2009/02/blog-post-name/), a search results page (http://www.sitename.com/blog/?search=SEO) or the home page (http://www.sitename.com/blog). With this in mind, we risk the uniqueness of the content because it exists in multiple links. We may also face some problems with search engines since they only allot a particular amount of bandwidth for each website. If they manage to crawl all the pages you have that contains the same content, this may hurt your rankings.

This is where the canonical tag comes in. It simply ‘hints’ the search engine on which link to index. To do this, one has to simply put <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.sitename.com/blog/2009/02/blog-post-name /” /> within the <head> tags. The search engines will simply read this and take the hint that all other links must be ignored and only the link indicated in the canonical tag must be indexed.

Of course, this is good news for a lot of SEOs. They can now tell the search engines which part of the site to index and which to ignore. It gives both the writer and search engine an easier job.

However, this raises the question on whether or not the canonical tag will be abused. What if a website who copies its content from another site proclaims itself as canonical? Will the search engine index the other site? It is not pointed out if the tag is only applicable in one domain. The only thing one can count on is the human element in Google’s ranking system. They are the only people who can determine which is the real website to rank.

Although the search engines guaranteed that they will only use the tag 99% of the time, it still raises a lot of issues such as the abuse of sploggers and scrapers. Having the human element only 1% of the time will automate processes and please SEOs. However, it will also provide lots of venues for abuse and less security for honest web developers.

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Twitter users have been facing the problem related to following a discussion. When the Twitter users had to refer the answers to any Twitter message, they will have to put a @ sign to the Twitter. This is the only way of routing it back to the Twitter message. The communication with Twitter is hence much distorted.

On December 28th, Twitter came up with a solution using a service called Tweetree. This is used to thread the discussions in Twitter. The solution is not completely error free, because there are situations where, mismatches are found when relating to the original message quite often. This method has not been proved to be useful for more than a single response. The service has not yet been proved to be successful.

Before the introduction of Tweetree, a method called Quotably was used. This was also not free from errors. Still, this was far better when compared to Tweetree. Twitter has a hassle free nature and in an attempt to manage this, this service has overlooked the efficiency in communication. If twitter could efficiently keep track of the comments, users will find this really helpful and beneficial. This is expected to increase the number of Twitter users as well.

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For those webmasters who are trying to make their website social, will now get Google Friend Connect in a beta version. The recent post regarding this reveals that, this service will help webmasters to include social features in their websites. This will be possible with some simple copy of code, without having to perform advanced coding or other technical knowledge.

Many people want to socialize with the help of internet. For them, Friend Connect will provide the facility to simply sign in, create a customized profile after which look for those individuals who have the same interests. People will not have to go for creating a new account, since this service is built in a fashion that, users will be able to use the username and password provided in Google, Yahoo and AOL. Users could otherwise create a new profile or import one if they have set up one in social networks like Plaxo or Orkut.

The main goal of Friend Connect is to help in an open and social web. People will get an instant chance to interact with one another on the websites which they wished to visit for long. The developers of this community expect other webmasters to use this in their websites, thereby encouraging more and more user interaction in the web.

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