Nick Wilsdon» Twitter

Twitter Debutes In Dilbert

Nick Wilsdon — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 11:31:54 +0000

AFAIK this is a first time Twitter has appeared in the world of Dilbert. Goes to show how far the service is progressing into the mainstream. A recent report by eMarketer suggests that Twitter user numbers could exceed 26m in the US alone. Global estimates have been put at 35-45m current users. Even with the hype, the platform has gone from a niche social site to a global player.

Coming back down to earth though, Dilbert is probably closer to the reality for most bosses who jump on the Twitter bandwagon. If you’re not already getting Scott Adam’s masterpiece through your email each morning, then sign up here.

Technorati Tags: Twitter

John Mueller Answering Webmaster Questions on Twitter

Nick Wilsdon — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:00:48 +0000

John Mueller is a well known face in Google’s Webmaster Help Group and works as a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Zürich. He’s also a regular on Twitter under his familiar username JohnMu. Seeing as it’s Friday, he’s allowing people to send him Webmaster questions through the service.

I don’t know if this is official Google policy but it seems an excellent idea to me and a novel way to reach out to webmasters and SEO/SEMs who follow John’s updates. If nothing else, it’s a notable use of Twitter as a company brand building tool and an interesting experiment in 140 character Q&A sessions.

Questions & Answers

I’ll be updating this post as more questions and answers appear. John’s offer is open to everyone so grab the opportunity and head over to Twitter

Pierre Far: What’s the value of a nofollowed link in the eyes of Google’s algorithm? (status link)

JohnMu: Nofollow is for “ignorable” links. Recent ex: site with many URLs blocked with meta robots, nofollows help us to crawl better. (status link)

NickWilsdon: What is an acceptable number of IBLs to get from the “wrong” geographic area or language? i.e. UK/English site + Chinese links? (status link)

JohnMu: An old site of mine got many Chinese links – no problem. Within reason, they’re just links. Perhaps put a translation up? (status link)

PatrickAltoft: Will you be removing these urls, people are concerned their feeds are being indexed (I know robots.txt blocks) http://bit.ly/1b6Dyu (status link)

JohnMu: I’ll pass that on, thanks for bringing it up! (status link)

AndyBeard: Can an old, out of date XML sitemap prevent a site from being fully indexed? (status link)

JohnMu: If you know that the XML Sitemap is outdated, then fix it :). We use the Sitemap for hints, but we still crawl normally. (status link)

NickWilsdon: Beyond the user experience issue, can having broken links and 404’s negatively impact a site’s overall ranking in Google? (status link)

JohnMu: Having 404s should not affect ranking, but it can affect crawling (wasted crawls trying to reach 404s instead of good content) (status link)

mvandemar: Not too long ago Matt announced that a bunch of penalties had expired in Google… do all penalties expire? (status link)

JohnMu: For some penalties it makes sense to expire (eg when the things really have no impact anymore). Fixing issues is faster though:) (status link)

Not that many questions this week but John seems happy to do this again next Friday. Make sure you’re following his account here before then.

John’s welcome to clarify in the comments but I’d assume he’s looking for more practical questions on sites and indexing issues. I’m not sure how fair it is to throw Google policy questions at him, especially in a rapid-fire environment like Twitter. This is a useful opportunity to question a Google employee who answers literally hundreds of webmaster questions each week.

I look forward to seeing how this develops.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Webmaster Help, John Mueller, JohnMu, Twitter

Twitter Define Rules on Spam and Commercial Usage

Nick Wilsdon — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:22:15 +0000

Twitter has released their most detailed guidelines yet on what they consider spam within their system. Commercial users take note. Although they emphasise that commercial or promotional use of Twitter is allowed the following activities may be considered spam and result in account suspension.

1. Following other accounts in order to gain attention to your account or links

2. Creating a series of accounts in order to promote the same thing

3. Sending large numbers of @reply messages that are not genuine replies

4. Creating updates in order to show up in search results

5. Disguising links (i.e. writing about one thing but linking to another)

6. If a large number of users have blocked you (relative to those following you)

These guidelines are in addition to their standard TOS clauses.

I don’t think these will impact too many ‘real’ users but there maybe some implications. Point 3 would seem to kill off any automated response scripts for example. Some of these new guidelines do seem a little vague from my perspective, for example #4 would seem hard to prove and most Twitter users have probably been guilty of #1 at some time. What do you think?

Considering that people/companies invest a large amount of time and therefore cost into establishing their Twitter accounts, you would hope the moderators apply these rules with account history and context in mind.

Update 01.09.08: Is this the End of Keyword Marketing on Twitter?

A tweet by Scottclark just got me thinking that #3 maybe the one to watch here. This guideline could potentially apply to keyword marketing on Twitter. Companies have caught onto using Twitter as a source of potential customers, with operators using free tools such as search.twitter.com or http://tweetbeep.com/ to alert them when certain keywords are mentioned. They then @reply the user with their marketing message or offer of support.

For example, you mention you are looking for an image and a certain image search engine will send you a note. Or less helpfully, as Scott points out, there are now Indian outsourcing companies jumping on mentions of programming languages.

You also have companies replying ORM style to mentions of their name or products. If you comment about Firefox you can expect a fairly instant response from their support team.

This adds a new dimension to the earlier comments in the Twitter announcement about companies creating “opt-in relationships”. Where do they draw the line here?

Hat tip Paul Silver

Technorati Tags: Microblogging, Twitter

Jaiku Moves To Google Servers: Open To All

Nick Wilsdon — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 10:51:59 +0000

Jaiku have finally completed their much anticipated move to the Google App Engine. They have also moved the platform out of its closed status and given existing users an unlimited number of invitations. This email was sent out a few minutes ago:

We’ve been working on the Jaiku service over the weekend after
finding an issue with one of our servers on Friday. As part of the
solution, we’re moving Jaiku to a Google data center.

This is something that we’d planned to do anyway, as part of our
future transition to Google App Engine. Now that we’ve moved, we’ll
need to ask you to review and accept a new terms of service and
privacy policy.

As a special thank you for your patience, we’d like to throw a
little nest-warming party and open unlimited invitations for Jaiku.

Twitter must be feeling rather nervous right now. The Google App Engine promises to solve the infrastructure promises to solve the problems of reliability that have plagued Twitter over recent months. As Google themselves say, “Google App Engine makes it easy to build scalable applications that grow from one user to millions of users without infrastructure headaches”. This will be a very public demonstration of that statement and the validity of the platform.

There have also been suggestions that Python, the language used in the Google Engine will be a better choice for this kind of application. Most agree it is is faster than Ruby on Rails (RoR). However RoR fans point the finger at the framework behind the project, a key advantage Google holds over Twitter.

It’s likely there will be a migration to Jaiku, even just to check out the relaunch so ensure you have your branding/username secured. If you need an invite, then leave a comment below. As @seocopyandstrat just tweeted to me:

I wonder if we’ll all migrate to Jaiku next time the Fail Whale appears, and then stay there?

Technorati Tags: Google, Jaiku, Twitter

SocialMedian Review: First Impressions Of The Next Big Thing

Nick Wilsdon — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:10:01 +0000

What is SocialMedian.com?

From Mashable.com:

You can follow different topical news groups – which are a collection of activities from people interested in the same topic (called News Networks) – or subscribe to updates from other users (called Newsmakers). On your homepage, you can then filter between the activities in your News Networks and the activities among the Newsmakers you’re tracking. Activities tracked include “Clipping” a story (akin to Digg with bookmarklet and all) or commenting on something on Socialmedian.

Looking beyond those features – which on the surface seem like a hybrid of Digg and Friendfeed – is where Socialmedian potentially gets very interesting for news junkies, and it comes in the form of providing feedback to the service. You can vote on each story’s relevance, rank topics in the order of importance to you, and upgrade the frequency at which you’d like to see stories from specific sources.

So SocialMedian has got a bit of everything in there; social submission, voting, news aggregation, sharing and groups. I’d also mention that it delivers a handy email summary of articles every few hours or daily. KillerStartup suggested these notifications would be via Twitter but they either got this wrong or this feature will be coming in the future. I hope it’s the latter. On the face of it this mashup is doing nothing new but the way they have combined the features works.

Who’s Using SocialMedian.com?

SocialMedian.com was launched publicly on the 31st July but already reports 5537 users. More importantly, the site has attracted some well known early adopters, such as Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble and Louis Gray. The owner Jason Goldberg is also very active on the site and doing a heroic job at drumming up the activity. To start you off, here’s a list of 25 SEO/SEMs on the system. Feel free to add your SocialMedian URL in the comments.

SocialMedian themselves encourage new sign-ups to follow the most active users on the site, so early adopters can use this to their advantage in building their network.

Articles are delivered via newsgroups. These are some of the most active SEO/SEM and Social Media groups I found with user numbers in brackets. Follow the links to sign-up.

http://www.socialmedian.com/network/seo (79)
http://www.socialmedian.com/network/search-engine-marketing (60)
http://www.socialmedian.com/network/seo-2-0 (39 – well done Tad!)
http://www.socialmedian.com/network/social-networking (859)
http://www.socialmedian.com/network/social-media-watch (909)

Enough Good, What About the Ugly?

I’ve experienced some strange activity on the site. Once where a news item was sent to the wrong newsgroup and another time where I was unable to edit a comment. Also SocialMedian.com is having some obvious issues with the current load, this reduces the site to a crawl at times and is probably the underlying cause for these other issues. More than once I’ve been left staring at the default Ruby on Rails error page. Hopefully the fact they have not chosen to customise this with a Fail Whale indicates this problem to be temporary.

Another issue which bugs me is connected to the sharing story functions. If you choose to tweet or email links from SocialMedian, the recipient is required to sign-up to follow the link to the source story. This is true for any non-members casually browsing the site. As Paul Silver twittered back to me, “that smacks of link hoarding/user grabbing”. I think he’s right. I won’t be using that function again to send links to my Twitter feed.*

On the subject of nofollow, the site is sea of pink using the Search Status Plugin for FireFox. However links to the source article are left followed. With so much nofollow plastered about I’m not sure how much linkjuice will flow down to the article pages but hopefully this is a show of respect to the original content producers rather than an oversight.

Conclusion – Should I Sign Up?

I was impressed with the site. As I wrote before, it brings something new to the table in an already overpopulated niche. I really like the level of maturity and number of professionals in this community. These are articles on venture capital rather than LOLcats or iPod rave reviews (although there is already an Apple group). I haven’t read their policy on submitting your own material but the audience looks receptive to commercial sites or marketing related posts.

SocialMedian also encourages you to explore topics through their grouping system. After you read an interesting article you can subscribe to that group feed. It maybe the early adopters but I found myself reading posts on marketing, investment and blogging that wouldn’t be in my usual news sources.

While SEO/SEM/Marketing communities are always going to be my passion, I enjoyed the way SocialMedian pushed me in other directions. With all the banal blogging recently this was a breath of fresh air and an exciting opportunity to meet people outside my immediate SEO/SEM circles.

In my opinion, SocialMedian is a serious contender.

Update: Jason has just twittered me to say they are working on removing the signup requirements. He’s also acknowledged the speed issue. Thanks Jason. You can follow the SocialMedian twitter account here.

Technorati Tags: Beta Launches, Jason Goldberg, News Aggregators, Social Media, SocialMedian, SocialMedian.com, Twitter