Family relationships have been very popular on Facebook. Not only are its family-oriented applications such the “We’re Related” application one of the most used. Families also constitute the majority of the Facebook population. But recently, these numbers have gone down.

With this, the social network decided to give families a tribute through its new family group feature. This allows users to create groups of their families so that they can easily interact with each other. It is not really entirely different only that a group can be created that is exclusive only to family members.

This is done all because of the recent drop in users from 1.2 million to only 770,000. Facebook is losing numbers and it has to do something to counteract what is happening. Our guess is that people are using Facebook less because of the recent news about selling information to advertisers. Because information have become less private and the trust of users have gone down, people are less likely to disclose personal information about themselves especially that of their families. This new feature is for the goal of encouraging families to participate in the said social network.

However, this is bothering. It is evident that there are a lots of applications for families and having a separate feature for them is just nonsense. Or is it?

It seems that Facebook have found family networks valuable. In fact, family advertising is one of the most powerful viral advertising out there. It is also a nice tool for referral. A lot of people who just joined a particular social network will quickly inform their family members and ask them to join as well. So with this feature, it will not only be a couple of members. Now it can be the entire family.

Although the idea is somewhat hopeful, family oriented individuals have started registering just to avail the new feature. it had really triggered the interests on mothers. However, the young people are not really as enthusiastic.

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As the number of new users exploded on Twitter, the Suggested User list is also born. It was not until about a month ago when Twitter released a list of people whom people can follow on Twitter. Their reason is because new users have no one to follow and Twitter is useless if you do not follow anyone. After all, how can you tweet if no one is following you right? No one will read it rendering the website useless.

But then, the release of the suggested users list have raised some eyebrows. As said in the Twitter blog, a particular journalist of PBS named Mark Glaser have questioned the criteria Twitter is considering in choosing this people. In reply to this, Twitter has released an official post on its blog regarding the matter.

Some people may think that Twitter had just randomly chosen the people who are on the list. It may also trigger some questions when it comes to favorites or those who are popular in the industry. But Twitter do have a way of determining which profiles should be included in the list.

Well first, they look at the profile’s appearance. If it looks good and the user is active in the website then there is a higher chance that the staff will pick it. The number of followers along with the conversations are also considered. This will let them determine which accounts will be able to help a new user in Twittering along with providing an interesting profile that people will like to follow.

Other questions they consider are “is the account a good introduction to Twittering for a new user?”, “Does the person or organization running the account have a fairly wide or mainstream appeal?” and” If they are a celebrity or business, have we confirmed it’s really them?”

But one does not need to worry about the accounts posted. They are chosen based on interest and they have not paid Twitter to put them up there. It is just for Twitter’s goal of making their website useful to everyone even to newbies. As all Twitter users can relate to, Twitter really does take some time before you can figure out its power.

The good news is that you can ask Twitter to include your account if you qualified. So it is not really reserved to a few people. However, I think the tool will be more useful if users are categorized according to niches. That way, the following of people who are from a different niche can be prevented.

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There was this interesting post in YouMoz yesterday entitled “LinkBuilding:Mislead to Believe” where the author Tripti debunked 6 linkbuilding myths that has been an area for debate in the SEO world for the last few years.

Myth #1: Outbound Links can kill your rankings

There is this belief that outbound links can diminish your PR or rankings but this is not true according to Tripti. Linking to other websites will not kill your rankings if you do it to provide value to your readers. Just imagine if you become a good resource and link people to the places they like to go in the internet. Wouldn’t your website have more value? Even if some people think that the search engine algorithms is robotic, it is not. It still looks for quality websites who care for their visitors.

Myth #2: Reciprocal links won’t work

The issue here is not the act of reciprocal linking but how the reciprocal linking is done. When some people hear about reciprocal linking, they immediately assume that they should search for people with link pages. This is wrong. Search engines do penalized people who are engaging in this link focused activity. However, if one person saw his link on your website and decided to link back then there’s nothing wrong with that. Yes it is a reciprocal link but it is done all because the sites are related and they compliment each other. As you can see, search engines do not like it when you try to game their system. So it is best to do linking in the most natural way.

Myth #3: Link with a Higher Page Rank

People have always fussed about pagerank when in reality, they should be looking on the combination of page rank and outbound links. Tripti showed this in his example:

Who says backlinks from PR 5 is better than PR 1? Look at this PR calculation formula:

PR (A) = 1 – d + d ( PR(B) / L(B) + PR(C) / L(C) + PR(D) / L(D) + ….. )

d = 0.85 (damping factor derived statistically)

The final Page Rank of your web page equals to 1-0.85 + 0.85 x (PR/ number of outbound link).

Now, for instance, you have web page A. You are getting links from two pages: one is B and other is C.

Page B (page rank- 5, number of outbound links – 100)

Page C (page rank- 1, number of outbound links – 10)

According to the formula above, if web page A gets link from page B, the final PR will be 0.15 + 0.85 x 5/100= 0.193.

And if A gets a link from C, the final PR will be approximately 0.24.

So you see, the final PR value of Page A will be better if linking with C has PR 1 than linking with a page B that has PageRank 5.

Myth #4: Link with a high PR website

Linking with a high PR website is worthless if your link is not located on a high PR page. You must learn to search high PR pages. This goes for the traditional linking methods of commenting and link building as well.

Myth #5: Permanent Link Building

Links are never permanent. You have to build it on a continuous basis and some webmasters tend to remove some links as time passes. It is therefore important to make your link building process continuous.

Myth #6: Paid Links are Unethical

In reality, there is really no difference between free and paid links except that the paid links are put in particular pages they like and it is paid. There is nothing unethical about it for they are not stepping over those who are securing free links.

It is a rather interesting read. For the whole article, visit YouMoz.

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A lot of people used to believe that the use of negative terms such as “cheap” will have a negative impact on a company’s products and services. However, with the post by Tom Crandall in iMedia Connection showed how this term is actually beneficial to SEO.

There are lots of instances. In an article in the same website published last year by Craig Macdonald cited how the phrase “cheap airfare” is worth around $8 in comScore. Another phrase is “cheap insurance” which gets around 673,000 queries per month according to Google Adwords. The phrase “cheap car” will also not lag behind with 1 million queries per month.

The good thing with incorporating the word “cheap” into your website is that it gets almost instant returns when integrated wisely with products and services. Tom Crandall provided an example.

As with hotels, competition for the keyword set “cheap rental car” is thick. As you can see on the below screenshot, the first ad displayed for this term, by aggregator CarRentals.com, offers daily rentals for seven major car rental brands as low as $8.98 a day. When I searched the company’s database for the cheapest advertised rates on its homepage, the touted deal turned out to be a sham.

For example, the company’s homepage boasts a daily rate of $7.43 at LAX from Feb. 28 to March 14. When I searched for the cheapest rate within the dates advertised, the lowest rate offered was $26 per day on a weekly rental through Deluxe Rent A Car. The same held true for every special offer I searched. Regardless, this bait-and-switch tactic may convert a fair amount of business for CarRentals.com because the customer is already on its website and just wants to book a reservation without further delay or frustration.

One brand that has no qualms about positioning itself for the “cheap car rental” niche is Fox Car Rental. Fox Car Rental uses its title tags, description tags, keyword tags, and homepage marketing copy to optimize for “cheap car rental,” “cheap car rentals,” and “cheap car rental rates.”

Here’s the Google search results page for “cheap car rental.”

Adjectives such as “affordable” and “low-cost” may be good for sales copies but nothing really beats “cheap”. Think about it. Will you go out of your way and use words such as “inexpensive” in your search for products and services. Definitely not. You will use the ordinary word “cheap”. Just take note of this user search behavior in mind and you will never go wrong.

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A lot of people think that YouTube is free promotion. If you want to show the world about your talent in singing, playing an instrument or acting, you can simply shoot a video of yourself and advertise it on YouTube. Soon you will be a star right? Well, with the recent removal of amateur musician videos in YouTube, that dream will remain impossible to be achieved.

We all know that YouTube is owned by Google. It seems like musicians have a lot of unlucky strikes with Google lately. It was only last month when music bloggers were banned from Blogger because of copyright issues. Now, amateur musicians are also not as welcomed in YouTube for the same reason. Just this weekend, news from the New York Times showed a girl named Juliet Weybret who got her amateur music video of Winter Wonderland removed from YouTube.

It is not that we can blame YouTube for this. They are knowledgeable on the free community they like to create and they do not want to suppress the creativity of their users. After all, their revenue comes not only from the people viewing their videos but also from those creating them. This is the reason why YouTube have decided to negotiate with the major music companies so that they may allow their users to air their content. However, one company do not want to bulge and that is the Warner Music Group.

It was just this December when Warner and Youtube did not agree on their licensing deal. YouTube offered Warner a cut in advertising costs for permission on using the company’s music. Since the disagreement, Warner has always been on the lookout for music videos or even segments of videos that uses their music in the background. YouTube is left no choice but to remove the videos or mute the audio.

As the staff lawyer of Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fred Von Lohmann, said “Thousands of videos disappeared…Either they turned off the audio, or they pulled the video.”

But Will Tanous, the spokesman for Warner, explained their side. “We and our artists share the user community’s frustration when content is unavailable. YouTube generates revenues from content posted by fans, which typically requires licenses from rights holders. Under the current process, we make YouTube aware of WMG content. Their content ID tool then takes down all unlicensed tracks, regardless of how they are used,”

This is just an example of a continuous conflict between public video communities and copyright.

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Yahoo Answers has been a very powerful marketing tool. What one needs to do to establish his expertise in a particular field is to simply find related questions and answer the questions while linking them to valuable areas of your website or blog. With this, one can expect that the person clicking through the link has an interest on the topic. He will not have asked the question or searched for it if he does not have an interest in it in the first place. This makes Yahoo answers not only effective but targeted as well.

Also, Yahoo Answers posts have a high tendency of showing up in the Google rankings. If one types a question in Google search, the results are almost always from Yahoo Answers. With Google, your link is not only getting a visit from the one who asked the question. You are also getting visits from dozens of people searching the same question in Google.

However, as one uses Yahoo Answers, he will find out that one of the hardest things to do is to find the questions to answer. You may have a lot of expertise in a particular field but you always have to sift through the results to find open questions which you can benefit from.

There are some old ways of getting some questions. One can browse through the categories in Yahoo Answers to find some related questions. Another way is to set up an RSS feed and sift the results. However, both can be a but painstaking. It also takes time which takes the fun away from using Yahoo Answers for easy marketing.

This is the reason why Yahoo Answers now implements the Suggested Questions feature. This means one does not need to go through the painstaking way of searching for related questions. He can now see related questions as they are suggested for him.

However, Yahoo noted that these questions will only pop up for people who have a decent amount of activity around a particular topic. It takes some time for the system to understand your interest so one has to tell it that “Hey! I’m an expert on this field so please give me some suggested questions.”

The key to using this feature is targeted answering. So Yahoo Answers services need to at least set up different accounts for different niches or only answer on a particular topic.

For those who don’t like the feature. Yahoo Answers allow you to turn it off. But what for when it helps you find the questions you need to establish your expertise?

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It had been a while since we last heard on updates on Gmail. But today, they seem to have a lot under their sleeve. They released two new features that are not only valuable but also helpful to Gmail users. These are the YouTube, Flickr and Picasa preview feature and the undo send.

The first feature, the YouTube, Flickr and Picasa preview feature, saves the users lots of time by showing the preview of the video or picture even before the user click the link in their email. This will also help users determine which of the links are more trustworthy than others. Now they can quickly decide if they want to visit the link in their email or to simply ignore it. They do not need to go through all the trouble of visiting the site they do not like in the first place. Now they can preview the image or video before visiting.

Activating this feature is simple. All you need to do is to click on the Labs tab in the Settings section and choose this feature so it will be enabled.

A suggestion by Arnold Zafra in the future is for Gmail preview to include elements outside images and videos. A preview of websites will prove to be valuable especially for those people who are constantly spammed with advertising links. This will help them discern which links should they trust and which should they ignore.

Another feature that Gmail recently released is the Undo Send feature. Utilizing a previous bug which is the slow sending of messages on Gmail, one can now undo the process given this waiting time. With this, there will be no more wrongly sent messages that just brings you more embarrassment. You can now take back your messages as you cancel it in the waiting time. The downside of this news, however, is that the sending delay in Gmail will remain which is much to the dismay of other users.

On the bright side, it is nice to see Gmail developing to help its users. I think this is something that we must look forward to especially in these times of recession.

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The world of SEO have always been a competition. It is a competition to get the most and best backlinks while it is also a race to the top of the search engine rankings. As time goes by, search engines get smarter and with this the competition gets fiercer. And with all this comes the most unfriendly competitors of all, the content scrapers.

A content scraper is simply a person who gets his content from another website. This can be done with RSS feeds, direct copy and pasting and even automated macros. The usual victims of these scrapers are those new websites with unique content. They simply copy the content and never link back leaving the poor low-ranked blog behind to suffer lower rankings.

Why does this happen? Well, we all know how smart our search engines have become right? They can now tell which is the more trustworthy source right? Wrong! Search engines are mere robots and they can only judge authority through different variables such as age and the number of pages indexed. So if someone copies the content of a lower ranked blog who hardly have visitors, then the other website will be indexed while the other one will be penalized. It is a sad reality but it happens and we have to accept it.

Some people have tried to counter these scrapers through different means. One way is to set the feeds to ’summary’ which will give the scraper less motivation to get the content because it will only be an excerpt. This will limit RSS scraping to some extent. However, some people who copy and paste content directly either manually or automatically can still get away with content scraping even with summary feeds.

Luckily, Ann Smarty of SEOtips have posted a very useful article entitled “Track and Get Links From Those Who Copy Your Content“. In here she discussed about a useful tool called Tracer which immediately puts a link back to the website whether the scraper likes it or not. Let us face it. No scraper would give attention to an email begging him to provide a link back to the original content. The only solution is to force him to link back. As Ann said, try Tracer on your content and once you copied it and paste it on Microsoft Word, you will see the link on where it comes from. Neat. On top of that Tracer is free. So anyone can avail it.

It is nice that tools such as these come up every once in a while. It may seem little but it is good news especially to all the new website publishers out there.

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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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Kevin Rose is at it again. Some people have claimed that Twitter have beaten Digg to the ground. It was just this January when Matt Churchill said in his post “Twitter vs. Digg: Measuring Success” that Twitter has equaled Digg in popularity because of a whopping 974% surge in its users thiss year. This was further exemplified with Joe Wallace’s post “Twitter vs. Digg: Social Media Wars” that indicated Twitter had really topped Digg. But what did Kevin Rose do? Whine? Complain? Create another website that will beat Twitter? Hell no. But he did create a website that will help Twitter.

A common error among internet marketers is the search to break new grounds. If you are as lucky as the founder of Twitter or Google, then you may find yourself successful. But then, helping or contributing to what is already out there is a rather wise option to make. That is why we have to commend Kevin Rose for his efforts on this new targeted Twitter directory called WeFollow.

Unlike other directories, WeFollow has this unique feature of getting updated easily. Each entry along with categories are ranked based on the number of followers. All one needs to do is reply to WeFollow on Twitter with the following format:

@wefollow #category1 #category2 #category3

WeFollow have also limited the number of categories you can sign yourself into. I think this is to make sure that the people in each category are somehow targeted. Because anyone can sign themselves to a particular category, there is the danger of irrelevant sign-ups that only solicits followers. If you want to try signing to more than three categories like what @mattcutts did, you will find that only the last three categories were credited.

I think WeFollow is a nice directory especially for those who are starting out on Twitter. Let us face it. All of us want to follow people who are relevant in our field. For example, if you are a designer, wouldn’t you find it more interesting to carry a conversation with a fellow designer than a programmer? Of course, there will still be a connection but not as intense as that of the same niche. Also, this will also be useful for customer targetting. If people are sorted into categories of interests, then targeting them for marketing would be more worthwhile because of better conversions.

In the end, we have to thank Kevin Rose for WeFollow. As Danny Sullivan said in his discussion of WeFollow,

It’s not perfect, but it’s a great start and well worth visiting.

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