Apparently there are some new features coming, but you might be better off looking at Raven Tools or RankSense (though Ranksense seems to be going through a revamp/refocus).

So this is not about Scribe SEO, but I had to mention it because Google have this nasty habit of stamping all over other people’s trademarks. They did it with one I helped establish many moons ago, to a project I am rather fond of, Chrome 3d Engine which I helped launch when it was a very early beta.

Google Scribe

Google have just launched in their “labs” what is currently just a writing/autocompletion aid which they have called Scribe.
Google Operating System has a writeup.

Earlier today I suggested to friends that today is LDA Day, but I suppose it can be semantics day, or related content day or information retrieval day just as easily.

This is what it looks like on the Google site.

So it is quite an intelligent auto completion interface.

So far… so good

But it is also a bookmarklet that can be used with (virtually) any text area. I found it currently unusable in the WordPress editor because of all the funky javascript, but I am sure that is something that will be fixed.

Being a bookmarklet that also means that there is an API used by the bookmarklet. APIs can be used to extract data though I am sure Google will be keen to restrict that.

Whether the data could be looked on as Google suggesting words that have meaning in a particular situation, or whether they are providing some alternatives for you to provide them with the correct choice is yet to be determined. I would think that would be a little of both. Google would do something similar to what is done with recaptcha… one word they are sure about, one they need confirmation on. So with scribe you might get 5 good choices, and 5 maybes.

Can Google Scribe be used for SEO? The phrase completions suggested seem to be human – what is suggested appears to be fairly accurate, but doesn’t necessarily allow for priority in certain situaitons.
It also doesn’t currently take into account personalization or search history – if I type in “Andy B” then the first suggestion is currently Andy Beal.
That result does have a correlation with the search engine results.

I found that interesting… maybe more interesting than the SEOmoz LDA tool.

It is not the same as search suggestions.

It could turn out to be a useful tool, or the API could be used to get a “wonderwheel” type effect, or something the same but different. That is useful for keyword research.
(via Techmeme)

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Dana last week wrote about the new SEOmoz experimental tools for LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation).

Rand has now followed up with a clearer description of what their tool is.

I played around with the tool a little and there was some discussion on Sphinn in relation to another post about it.

At that time I expressed some concern over the randomness to friends, but let that slide. I was a little more concerned that this was announced as being available, and at the same time in my email box I was receiving notifications that now was the last chance to upgrade to a SEOmoz Pro subscription.
Rand in the Sphinn conversation was asking for people not to review the LDA tool based on information currently available, and to wait until Tuesday when he would have a more detailed post available.

So on one hand we have price scarcity… a viable marketing strategy but a request/suggestion not to review the new fangled 3rd generation keyword density, latent semantic indexing (LSI), LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) tool that was causing a lot of positive buzz.

I love the passion in the article, but I’d ask that we have until our public release on Tuesday to explain what it does, how it calculates, the models, math, etc. I won’t try to address criticism until then.

So that is point 1 – suppressing objective reviews based upon available information whilst using price scarcity sucks.
I did delay this post and wait, but only because I wanted to see the official claims before this next point.

So now we look at the tool itself and see if it has some kind of useful application. I mentioned random results.
I thought about using lots of screenshots of every test, but then I decided the exact test I performed doesn’t really matter.

55%, 49%, 59%, 52%, 56%, 57%, 55%, 57%, 67%, 57% = correlation?

Dana mentioned in her post the “random Monte Carlo algorithm”

Rand was a little more specific:-

Scores Change Slightly with Each Run
This is because, like a pollster interviewing 100 voters in a city to get a sense of the local electorate, we check a sample of the topics a content+query combo could fit with (checking every possibility would take an exceptionally long time). You can, therefore, expect the percentage output to flux 1-5% each time you check a page/content block against a query.

I would need to run a lot more tests, but on my “swingometer” I have a variation of 18% just from that small sample. If I could define a mid point of that small sample, it would be in the mid 50s, which might suggest I hadn’t seen the worst of it and that at least 20% variation is possible.

Rand seems to be claiming some kind of correlation in his blog post title.

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Google’s Rankings are Remarkably Well Correlated

To claim correlation he would have had to have run each page through his LDA tool maybe 100 times to get some kind of reasonable average.

So point 2 is that the results currently being portrayed as some kind of correlation could well be bullshit based on the extremely unreliable results from the LDA tool.

The final point is a little about data.

SEOmoz have a history, possibly a little unfounded of making huge claims about things and then being picked apart. An interesting situation for instance were claims about the source of their data for Linkscape. Sebastian covered it and did Michael (actually quite a bit)

Linkscape data is used by services like Open Site Explorer and many 3rd parties via their API. It is useful… the point is that data has to come from somewhere.

“The Rising Tide Lifts All Boats” – as long as it lifts you higher than your competitors

In the case of using the SEOmoz LDA tool effectively, one option is to enter a website address (that is what I was testing) – then you might run 10, 50, maybe 100 views of that page to get reliable data.
Then you would do the same with 10 of your competitors.

All the time you are showing the keywoord that a particular page should rank for, possibly one of your own, and also comparing it to the pages you feel it should compete against.

As far as business data is concerned, that is pretty useful. I know that SEOmoz will certainly claim that any data collected is only used for improvements in the tool.
In fact SEOmoz do include a statement on their main website regarding tools data.

What Tool Usage Information Does SEOmoz Collect?

SEOmoz offers a variety of online tools and software. These include, but are not limited to, our free SEO tools, our paid SEO tools, our API, and our tools on OpenSiteExplorer.org. These tools require you to enter a variety of information, such as URLs, domains, keywords, or other items relevant to Internet marketing and link research. We associate this information with your account in order to provide useful features, identify and terminate accounts that violate our Terms of Service, to improve our products, and to provide customer service. We never use this information for the provision of SEO consulting services so you do not need to worry that entering your information will be used against you or your clients by SEOmoz.

We take appropriate physical, electronic, and other security measures to help safeguard personal information from unauthorized access, alteration, or disclosure.

Some people however have tin foil hats. The ones with the biggest tin foil hats are not the blackhats, but those who work with major corporations who have signed contracts that prevent them using tools that might in any way share data with 3rd parties.

Small update:-

When I wrote this part I was actually thinking about whether someone like Steve Plunkett would use a 3rd party tool like this, and he conveniently tweeted.

Steve works in the corporate SEO world – data security is sacrosanct for his INC500 clients

So the 3rd point is be aware of who you are sharing data with about your own sites or that of clients

Ultimately a real LDA Google information retrieval geek (my mate Dave) is fairly positive that the conversation and experimentation is taking place.

That doesn’t mean Google are actually using LDA, or suggest any correlation with the current SERPs.

One thing I am sure off though, if you have paid for some kind of SEO miracle plugin/software/service for bloggers based upon keyword density you really need to read and try to understand Rand’s post, as it highlights how much junk you have been fed by your Tribe.
LDA > LSI > Keyword Density but that doesn’t mean they are used by Google for search engine results.

Update

You know how once you release technology people either copy it very quickly or release their own competing product.. “showing their cards” so to speak?

Well it looks like Matthew has an Advanced LDA tool with a very simple interface that seems to give very similar correlation data to what I discovered with the SEOmoz LDA tool.

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I have covered disclosure in blog posts extensively but fake testimonials just irks me.

There is a story in the New York Times over a settlement just reached for some fake testimonials on iTunes (via Techmeme)

The story reminded me of something I saw earlier on one of the new “job” sites, Fiverr earlier in the day. Some of the stuff posted there is quite legitimate, but all these offers for testimonials for whatever you want are just wrong.

Now I have been a supporter of paid reviews in the past

For me they are legit when as an author you get to review something, even if just the website and if you offer some kind of opinion, then it has to be your honest opinion without any restrictions, and preferably without any oversight – free to publish honst criticism if justified. I have also supported clear disclosure.
You could also have advertorials written by a 3rd party as long as they are clearly marked.
You would also be wise to nofollow or otherwise block search engines from counting the links or they might get upset.

I can see video reviews being totally legitimate if they use the same criteria though how you tell Google that a video is a paid review I have no idea, especially if it is posted to Youtube.

What I can’t sanction, and to be honest it makes me feel all creepy and dirty is flat out paying for a positive video testimonial.

This is high risk not only for the person doing the review, but also for any business owner using the testimonial. I have no idea how this would also affect Fiverr who probably profit from any transaction.

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I have been trying to come up with a suitable name for this since Tuesday night when I first spotted it in some queries I was using to find some old posts I had written.

The first name I came up with was “HyperPersonal” because I was seeing it in more personal search results and I mentioned it in Dojo chat to get some feedback.
Then the chat switched to the evils of hosting WordPress on windows servers and the death of Search Monkey and other Yahoo APIs.

24 hours later I came up with another name “Hyper Exact Match” though that is terrible English but by this time I had decided that the matching was very specific to domain queries as some purely name or brand associations just didn’t work the way I expected them to.

I came up with this explanation for this:-

If a query can be determined to be specific to a particular domain, and the domain has multiple results for the query, Google instead of showing a link “More from this domain” will show up to 6 results.

Actually it can be more than 6, but that is as many as I had seen at the time for the limited queries I was testing on.

Dave later suggeted the following

@Andy, brand task search? Not really a ‘site search’
[2010-08-18 23:28:20] David Harry: Domain query search?
[2010-08-18 23:28:43] David Harry: the lack of a ‘site’ command kinda takes it out of a ‘site search’ imo

But I am going to stick to calling this Pseudo Site Search.

As far as I am concerned this is a site search for mortals who haven’t fully mastered Google query syntax but are showing intent to retreive information from a particular resource.

Meanwhile Malcolm got the jump on me and posted something before me.

Google treating brand names in search terms as site: searches?

Bill Slawski chimed in in Malcolm’s comments with this

This looks like the process described in Google’s patent “Query rewriting with entity detection” (US Patent 7,536,382). which was granted in May of last year.

For example, the process might identify Apple as a specific entity that is associated with a specific web site, and rewrite the original query to provide results from the Apple site. From the patent:

Some entity names are unambiguous and uniquely identify particular entities. A large number of names, however, are somewhat ambiguous or generic, making it more difficult to identify the entities to which they are intended to correspond when included in users’ search queries.

Systems and methods consistent with the principles of the invention provide mechanisms for determining the entities to which entity names correspond and selectively rewriting users’ search queries based on the entity names. Accordingly, a user’s search query may be restricted to a search of document(s) associated with the entity that the user intended in the search.

Bill has now followed up with a blog post of his own based around a number of Google (and Yahoo) patents on Entities.

Not Brands but Entities: The Influence of Named Entities on Google and Yahoo Search Results

So I spent 36 hours working out what to call it and whilst I have been pipped at the post (literally) I thought I would still write something and include some of the examples I dug up.

More From this Domain

This is how things used to be

Some domains you would get more than one additional link – I have seen 4… maybe 5 links in the past for huge sites, plus a suggestion for more content from the same domain.

Hyperpersonal

This is what made me call this hyperpersonal – the search I performed as I was just deciding what to respond to a review request (that I turned down).

Sidenote: I am close to deleting my profile on all the paid review sites – the requests are most often a waste of time, and those that are interesting are on sites that now by default state you have to give followed links – if they think the links are more valuable than the feedback they know where to shove it.

This also shows how useful this is… [site:andybeard.eu pagerank] is a much more complicated query that you could get wrong
There are lots of popular sites that are .net (Slideshare, Problogger) or .org (SEOmoz)

How many times have you used a site query for the wrong domain due to this?

Michael Arrington

Michael as one of the biggest brands in blogging would be an obvious choice, especially as he tends to write only for his own blog Techcrunch.

It didn’t work for Michael…

It does work with Techcrunch… hmm

So this is what got me thinking that it isn’t so much “personal”… the “entity” needs a strong association with the domain name possibly, and not just with the website and contents.

If you have read Bill’s post then just try [bill slawski patent] and [seo by the sea patent]

Whilst Bill has written in other places frequently, I only associate him with one domain for patents.

News Query Space

[Chicago Tribune Obama] didn’t bring up the new results, so I stuck a .com on it to bring up something interesting

Shopping Space

Nine results for Amazon in the UK for this query, but look at the subdomain switching between www and astore.

I thought I would grab a pretty one from the US

Entities, People & Exact Match Domains

There is nothing clear cut with this…

For instance you would expect Aaron Wall of SEObook to be a strong enough brand associated to a single domain for this to work.

[aaron wall pagerank]
[seobook pagerank]
[aaron wall google] (Google knol does exist still!)
[seobook google]

If you slap a .com on, it works
[seobook.com google]

Interestingly searches for a domain like that in the past would bring up references to the domain, not lots of results from the domain itself.

Google’s job is to provide relevant search results for a query (and make money doing it) – this does not mean that you will necessarily gain search traffic by having a strong brand associated to an exact match search query.

I have lots of weird and wacky things regarding search that I have discussed in various places (mainly private communities) that I still haven’t discussed here on the blog that I refer to as “Pinocchio SEO” that freaks highly competent SEOs out a bit, and I have no idea how this will relate to that.

I prefer “Pseudo Site Search” over “Query rewriting with entity detection” as I think that is the kind of query that is being returned… maybe a combination “Entity Search” would be better, but that doesn’t quite make the domain relevance/reliance strong enough.

Update

Matt has an update on this as well with a quote from Google

Postscript: A Google spokesperson has confirmed that the search results discussed above are part of a ranking/user interface change related to domain-based intent:

“We periodically reassess our ranking and UI choices, and today we made a change to allow a larger number of pages from the same site to appear for a given query. This happens for searches that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain.”

Hmm “related to domain based intent” just means that is the catchment for this… but I am sticking with my pseudo site search.

Update 2

Google now have an official update (via SEL) (more Techmeme)

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My hosting problems were dragging me down… they had an acute effect on the quality of my life.

I was with a very popular VPS provider for most of it. You would know them, I have even mentioned them in the past on this blog, and I am not going to drag them through the coals because ultimately I am not a server jockey.
I know people who are server jockeys, or who are programmers but extremely competent server admins that would no doubt do very well with them.. and that includes some friends who do use them.

I also strongly believe that most people who succumb to their advertising, or that of their affiliates are not server jockeys either, and will end up being hacked because of it. I have even seen some of their very prominent supporters hacked recently.

I was running 5 nodes, had set the server up myself with a nice Nginx reverse proxy with Apache, memcached, APC etc.
Whilst I had done it before, I didn’t go the “whole hog” with full Nginx, PHP recompiled with php-fpm etc.

I was also using a great WordPress caching plugin which allowed for fragment caching though it doesn’t seem to be updated as often as it was.

For a guy who wasn’t a server jockey I had a fast server – tinkering consumed hours of my time, but I am a geek and at that time I was enjoying it.

It was great – page loads were reported by Pingdom sometimes below 1 second (though I have been told than Nginx doesn’t handle disk fragmentation very well, and Pingdom doesn’t tell the whole truth)

Then I was hacked.

But whilst I could clean up the damage fairly well, I had to roll back more than 1 day because the backup wasn’t available for some reason. I think they rolled back 3 days.

Then I decided to also pay a fee for one of their techs to migrate me to my own server and fix the security if they could see any holes. There were also a few things that just weren’t working how they should be.
They were meant to fix the email server but didn’t – they somehow broke PHPMyAdmin and the server was locking up every 1.5 to 3 days.

If I was a server jockey I could probably have fixed it, but I am not, and never intend to be one.

It got to the stage that even friends stopped informing me that my server was down – it became a normal situation. Sad…

Then my server was hacked again.

So I payed someone a fair amount of money for server maintenance, that then became a drain on their resources such that they just couldn’t handle the response, and it turned out that they were already moving their clients away from my host.

I then had a whole week offline… well that is what I remember of it. There were probably times when my server was online, but though my memory is hazy from confusion I think my hosting was DDOSed 3 times in a week.

And when everyone else was back up and running, I wasn’t… and the support was saying to wait.. be patient… so I was for 24 hrs with a dead server in the middle of an affiliate product launch.

It turned out I had been null routed upstream.

So it was decided that I would need to migrate along with other clients to an alternate VPS. There were a couple of choices that could be supported immediately with pre-built optimized secure images… but the migration dragged on.. and on.

Ultimately whilst the server maintenance guy was a real expert, the level of support I needed so that I could just get on with making money was too much for what I was paying.

So along comes January 2010 and I have had enough.

I woke up one morning and decided to bite the bullet and migrated everything to a Liquid Web Shared hosting account. Well… not everything, they had some strange limitations on domains, and some lack of flexibility I was used to on other shared hosting, but I wanted a shared hosting plan that wasn’t over sold, as this site can occasionally get some traffic, and at times I can get adventurous with my plugins.

Liquidweb had already announced the beta of their new Storm On Demand service – my plan was to migrate to Storm as soon as I was accepted into their beta.

Within a week or so that happened – migration from one server to another took me just a couple of hours, and Liquidweb even offered me a nice deal fairly similar to the coupon you are receiving now.

In some ways it seems to be more expensive than other VPS services, but this is how my costs break down.

$50 is the basic service for a whole month
$20 covers Cpanel and support – the same level of support they provide their dedicated hosting clients

On top of that I generally pay about $10 for backups and $10 for bandwidth.

Storm On Demand – Downtime

I don’t have any downtime as far as I am concerned – I sleep at night

When I first started I did reboot the server once, while trying to work out why I couldn’t log into my WHM or reach my own blog – it turned out my variable IP address here in Poland had been flagged in IPTables.

Storm On Demand – Performance

I have seen complaints that a Storm on Demand server

• Can’t take high load
• Isn’t a cloud server as there is downtime when you resize

Lets address those points

High Performance

I am running a standard installation with the addition of APC which hasn’t been modified from default settings. I have opcode caching using APC and page caching set to use disk within W3 Total Cache.
I haven’t got W3 Total Cache fully configured, and currently only video is being served from a CDN.

For things like minify I am still occasionally using Autooptimize.

There is lots of room for improvement, but this server even now could probably take some reasonable hammering.

Cpanel is a system hog, but it comes with the full support package – the full support package is what allows me to sleep at night so it is a necessary evil.
As you will see later I am nowhere near capacity, everything runs in RAM.

You always have the option to go bare metal, clustered, hardware load balanced etc.

Vertical Scaling

I have seen complaints that if you want to resize your server there is downtime, and that somehow Rackspace is better.
With Rackspace you have exactly the same downtime for resizing, because it is handled in roughtly the same way. Reprovision on another server, move data which in my case is 10 GB+
That takes time.

If you want to be able to scale vertically, you have to really scale horizontally first. Have at least 3 servers, maybe 4 if you also need to be able to scale MYSQL servers to a higher capacity with no downtime.
But once you have that setup, you might as well just add a 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th server on the front end.

Storm have an API, but it is in beta and you need to request access.

Storm On Demand Speed

Your server has to be online to be fast.

I have no idea whether Storm is faster than competitors, but I haven’t been hacked in 6 months that I know of (touch wood) and I know of incidents with every other popular VPS service.

The best I can offer is some stats

If you click the image then you will get the full daily and weekly stats.

The funny thing is within those stats you probably won’t spot on which day I decied to switch to using wp total cache, or the days I had 1500 visitors instead of the usual 700.
There is hardly a difference – the server is never under any real load.

If some day I have a really busy day I will post some updates.

Storm On Demand Support

I have used Storm on Demand support for some really silly stuff such as fixing my IPTables or making small exceptions in mod_security (I had a blog post that used the word “select” too many times – seriously).

They have never expected me to do anything, always polite, alway there when I needed them

I haven’t tested them when something big happens because there hasn’t been anything catastrophic – when they wanted to migrate my server to new hardware they gave plenty of notice, and even asked when it would be most convenient.

I love their support system – they don’t automatically close tickets as soon as they have given an answer like some services… a reminder notification is sent through asking if everything is resolved, and whether the ticket can be closed, stating it will be closed in 24 hrs if no response.

I realise that tickets can always be reopened, but the difference from a “feel good” caring perspective is psychologically different.

My Biggest Complaint About Storm On Demand?

They don’t currently have an affiliate program – this review currently has no affiliate links though it may do in the future, but only if it would allow you to have the same deal as is currently available.
If I had to make a chice between offering a coupon, or making some money – I would offer the coupon.

This review was prompted by Liquidweb sending a coupon that could be shared with friends, so I decided to share it with my friends, my readers. In a number of places I have already written about how happy I am with Liquidweb & Storm on Demand, I suppose posting it on my blog makes it official.

Knowing my luck everything will go downhill from now… it has happened without fail the previous times I have suggested to friends that I like a particular hosting company. Maybe this will be 3rd time lucky.

Storm On Demand $75 Coupon

Have $75 Free On Me!

From: Andrew Beard

Expiration Date: 9/15/2010

https://www.stormondemand.com/cloud-hosting/campaign/YRT6zwyKF-up8RhkhrDKE8DtQhI
(This is not an affiliate link)

You do need to provide them with a credit card to cover overages and continued use. My choice would be to go for their Cpanel with support offering, so you would expect some overage from bandwidth and backups even the first month.
If you went with their bare metal offering, the coupon might cover bandwidth but no guarantees.

Why Not Shared Hosting

Just look at the number of files I have on my server, and I am hardly pushing it – that comes from all the caching plugins, additional backups etc.
I really should use this server for a lot more sites.

Shared hosting just can’t cope effectively with it – 10+GB of small files, an it is best to have space to make a full backup.

If I had a traffic surge either one I created from a launch or a popular article, the server would just blow up.

Why Not Dedicated or XYZ VPS or ABC Cloud

You won’t get a similar performing dedicated server with this level of support for anywhere near the same price point.

I think you would be really hard pushed to do it with any VPS plan as well. It might be different if I was using a lot more bandwidth, but then I would offload static content to a CDN, so I seriously doubt bandwidth cost would ever become a major factor.

If I have a server problem I know I can just submit a support ticket to get it fixed – most places even with “good” support the best you would get is suggestions about how you should fix it yourself.

So there you go, that is why I am currently using Storm on Demand, and as far as I know the $75 coupon is the best deal currently available.

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Thus I am glad to see Twitter will switch off access to their API using standard authentication of username and password, and providing access only by OAuth.

For that I applaud the Twitter team for taking a positive step for online security.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do?

Twitter are still scraping friend information from email accounts.

It doesn’t matter what they claim they scrape, or that they claim to not store the information

• Not using OAuth is now totally hypocritical
• Twitter have been hacked in the past
• A few hundred million people giving up their email passwords is quite a valuable target

I realise Facebook only fixed their Friend Finding / Tell-A-Friend system after they purchased Octazen (and shut it down to new customers), but if Twitter expect their developers to use OAuth, the least they should do is use it themselves.

Update

Just saw this in Facebook – I know that Skype contacts are hardly the key to your online business like a Gmail account, but I thought they were finally past all this account scraping crap.

Facebook sucks for privacy again… well even more… well you know.

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The Twitter retweet code places a link to Twitter on every page you include it, and they didn’t add a nofollow to the link. It is quite possible Google will decide to ignore all these links in the future, especially as it is effectively hidden and not a “vote” for a particular page. The destination of the link doesn’t show similar information to what is in the button.

2. History

The button has no historical count of tweets as is clearly evident if you search for tweets on something “historical” such as an individual domain. If I added a Tweet button to my home page the link through to search for Tweets would be something like this.

http://twitter.com/#search?q=http://andybeard.eu

3. Count Accuracy

If I glance back at Shaun’s post, the tweet button currently says 23 Tweets – clicking the button to see those tweets results in only 17 tweets showing.

Here are just the influential Tweets counted by Topsy, half of which Twitter hasn’t found even though they actually use the button to submit their Tweet.

Here is a link for the Twitter search results to see if they ever catch up with Topsy.

4. Longevity

Lets look at those links for a second

http://topsy.com/www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/index.php/new-twitter-button-conveniently-without-nofollow-attribute/?infonly=1&sort_method=influence

http://twitter.com/#search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hobo-web.co.uk%2Fseo-blog%2Findex.php%2Fnew-twitter-button-conveniently-without-nofollow-attribute%2F

Topsy uses a permalink – there will be a permanent record of all of those Tweets, and their history goes back a long way, and even copes with 301 redirects to some extent if you change your permalink structure. I haven’t experimented with this extensively, but that has some useful potential for marketers adding parameters to links.

For Twitter the link is one of their funky search URLs which uses a # named ancor that is ignored by search engines – Twitter search is totally unreliable, and only has a 7 day history – do you think you are going to have a record 1 month, or 1 year down the line?

5. Broken Retweets

The new “expanded” links on the web interface get truncated – if you retweet using copy/paste links will quite often end up being broken.
This is a subtle way of enforcing retweets using their “new” official retweet method which still isn’t as popular as Twitter would like people to believe.
It also defeats the purpose… you can’t see the whole URL, sneaky redirects or affiliate tracking parameters, and for many URLs might even hide what the URL is actually about, or where you might end up.

6. Validation

Shaun is pretty hot on W3C validation of websites though maintaining it on content that is being published in response to news is a challenge.
One of the problems with the original Tweetmeme button was validation so I am hardly being a validation nazi here.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hobo-web.co.uk%2Fse o-blog%2Findex.php%2Fnew-twitter-button-conveniently-without-nofollow- attribute%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

Twitter decided to invent their own link attribute – that sucks – they will never manage to get that accepted as valid code, as it is proprietary to them and doesn’t serve any purpose. This was one of the major complaints against rel=”nofollow” which took 4 years to get any kind of official acceptance.

7. Data

He who has most data in online marketing often has a huge advantage. By adding the official Twitter button they suddenly gain a whole load more information about who visits which sites, which can be tied into their member profiles.
I can’t currently see a reciprocal benefit in Twitter having access to that data.

I gave Twitter a 7 day Ultimatium – now 6 months ago
I strongly criticized their search and the ability to find my own content
I ripped apart their SEO efforts

I left Twitter 6 months ago because I felt they were holding my own content hostage and demanding a ransom from other search engines to access the data.

As a concrete example, when Matt Cutts first mentioned evaporating PageRank and the “reset vector”, there was a fair amount of chatter on Twitter, including some tweets from me. You won’t find those conversations now.

So why would I give them more data directly?

They have no respect over your content, my content… anyone’s content

Conclusion

Use Topsy – they have much more accurate tracking of tweets, handle 301 redirects pretty well and even give you some really useful historical Twitter data for a whole domain.
Here is Andy Beard on Topsy – that is a vote.

I am not saying everything is perfect with Topsy – they are not doing silly stuff with Robots.txt but their nofollow of links is inconsistent and might benefit from a threshold based on authority and an understanding of first link priority.

There is only one significant benefit of the new official retweet button, you can now define retweet text, which is something I wanted Tweetmeme to include a year ago.
Combined with custom URLs in theory you can use that for split testing – in practice I don’t think it is going to work as there is no way to define a canonical URL, plus a URL that gets tweeted with a URL decorated with tracking parameters.

Thus the new Tweet button sucks for marketers even 1 year on.

More on Mediagazer… this seems to have rolled off of Techmeme in less than 24 hours.

Update

Just adding a test new button that has been modified manually

You should Tweet This Post

As text link: You should Tweet This Post

Test without defining the title

You should Tweet This Post

As text link: You should Tweet This Post

With Nothing Defined

You should Tweet This Post

As text link: You should Tweet This Post

A Shortcode Test

You should Tweet This Post

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Pending “reputation management disaster”

Here is what I received:-

This is the first page of the cease & desist.

3 potential jurisdictions though the primary business location of the lawyer’s client is almost certainly the UK & my blog is not set to target any particular regional audience within Google webmaster tools, and in fact hardly ranks in the UK as there is far more negative press from blogs & forums that do target the UK.
The lawyer has trouble distinguishing blogging terminology and differentiating between a “blog post” and the blog itself.

The issue seems to be:-

• Use of trademarks
• Infringing on intellectual property
• Use of copyright material

The name in question certainly wasn’t any kind of registered trademark at the time I wrote my post back in December 2009 – applications happened in March 2010. Trademarks exist from use rather than registration but their primary function is to prevent confusion in trade, not to prevent free speech.

I have searched United States Patent and Trademark Office TESS system, and it appears the US Trademark hasn’t been awarded yet as there is a bunch of information that wasn’t supplied in the original application, thus why a serial number was included (at least that is my understanding)

I have also searched the the UK Intellectual Property Office and a trademark was awarded 2nd July 2010 – that is a few days after this letter was drafted… but the postmark in the Fedex paperwork was 4th July… so the trademark was something they were obviously waiting for…

But trademark has absolutely nothing to do with the content I wrote. It was very clearly a thoroughly researched review & personal opinion. The letter was cleverly (sneakily?) worded suggesting a registered trademark in both territories, when at the time it was drafted their was neither.

Intellectual property becomes complicated…

I included a picture of a full beermat which was being used for marketing purposes. The beer mat included a photo of the gentleman/business who the lawyers represent. Why anyone would include their photo on a beer mat amazes me, because people use them to stub out cigarettes, as makeshift dart boards, to clear up vomit etc. They also get drawn on, just imagine how many times someone has added devils horns to the face on that very same beer mat.

As my review covered the advertising methods used by the person who has set the legal dogs on me, and the source was achnowledged with a followed link, I think I am covered under the UK concept of “Fair Dealing“.

But there were 2 photos I included:-

The first was the same photograph as used on the beermat, and used very frequently within marketing materials. I have similar mug shots out all over the internet – people pick them up, include them on blog posts etc. Lots of people use a similar photo for their avatar on social networking sites and they get syndicated all over the internet.
Plus I have never known a marketer who would require permission to use such a photo, especially on a post which was fairly neutral in tone (it wasn’t totally negative, in fact I have some respect for the guy).
In many ways in this current social media climate, such a photo is more a trademark in many cases than their actual name.
It is like a log… part of a brand, and when referring to that person/brand, especially on a social blotform such as a blog, use of such would be looked on as normal.

Can you seriously imagine not being ridiculed if you sent out a cease and desist because someone included your social media avatar within a blog post that links through to lots of your sites?

I also included a photo from the sales page of a conference held in the UK in 2009. It was being used in a marketing context thus wasn’t a private photo and I did link through to the sales page in question. It was a good photo and showed the subject of the review in a very positive light. My commentary about the conference in my mind was neutral. There are 2 types of internet marketing conferences… Solid content & pitch fests. I couldn’t comment on what kind of conference he held, but I have heard mixed reviews.

My use of these 2 photos is the only part of my original post that might be looked on as copyright infringement under “fair dealing” in the UK. I am not a lawyer, I think the claim is a little tenuous, and it would be interesting to contest that, but those photos have been removed from my post & I don’t intend to ever republish them.

Lets deal with the linking claims after this next cease & desist screenshot.

This lawyer is really struggling with web terminology – no wonder – cookie cutter legal website with 8 links pointing to it. Just the kind of firm I would love to be advising me on online reputation management. Mr Olin, a specialist would have told you this was going to backfire.
In fact most people involved with reputation management especially after the ePerks incident will probably be shocked by my tempered reaction.

“Furthermore you have linked your forums and blogs to other websites, forums & blogs that contain notably patently false statements that [name withheld] and his business practices are a scam and that hi marketing materials are fake and/or fraudulent, or insinuations of the same.”

It is quite possible that the lawyer didn’t actually read every word I wrote, or follow the links.

Most of the links were to [name withheld] owned web properties, his media on sites such as YouTube, and one very complimentary review.
I also linked to 2 other reviews from readers whose opinion I trust, which I believe were fair and balanced.

Absolutely none of the sites I linked to claimed [name removed] was in any way a scam. At times some of the comments weren’t very complimentary, people struggling to get refunds as how to get a refund wasn’t a simple process at the time, and thus people were thanking the writer for providing the information.

As such I dispute this claim 100%, but to be honest I should have updated my post in April 2010 when certain newsworthy events took place that did warrent further commentary.

7th April 2010 ASA Adjudication on [name withheld]

2 of 3 counts upheld

The ASA isn’t “The Law” in the UK – they manage the regulations and advertisers generally listen to them, because whilst they can’t impose fines or stick you in jail, some of the sanctions that can be imposed could make some forms of doing business, especially direct mail or buying ads in newspapers pretty uncomfortable, or unprofitable.

For a direct marketer to ignore the ASA ruling would be business seppuku.

The law that their regulations are based around is The Business Protection from Misleading Marketing Regulations 2008 – SI (Statuary Instrument) 1276 of 2008 – that is the stick used by the Office of Fair Trading.

But I didn’t write anything even though I saw the news, and had already been provided copies of the adverts that were being mailed in November/December.

I can’t imagine that [name withheld] was unaware of the complaints well before the final decision date.

But it was just an ad, ads come before the ASA all the time, it is no big deal.. slap wrist, learn from this mistake.

But then the advert continued appearing in people’s mail boxes.

Someone mailing a misleading advert that the ASA have upheld a decision on is newsworthy.

So there were a number of blog posts complaining about it, and in my personal opinion that was well justified.

SPAM = Sites Positioned Above Me

So these blog posts seem to be disrupting the sales & conversion machine. Wise business people were searching for information about [name withheld] and discovering blog posts of people complaining about advertising practice.

That must have been a big stick stuck in the gears of an otherwise well oiled marketing machine.

What to do about it?

• Ignore it – everyone gets a bit of bad press once in a while and even I tend to admire people who push the limits and test things which might be thought acceptable in other markets
• Make it a learning experience – admit it, even make it a marketing point & lesson freely available. There is a lot to be learnt from the whole process and it can even help open up new traffic sources.
• Build links to positive articles – this is the classic reputation management option – find some positive articles about you and drive lots of links to them. Based upon the marketing materials of [name withheld] he has mentions in all kinds of national press, “As seen in” blah blah blah… the only problem is so far from all the claimed appearances I have only been able to find 2 very dated mentions. Not a lot for a reputation management specialist to work with. To be quite honest even my article might have been a suitable candidate assuming action had been taken to rectify a few of the isues I had found (however no action had been taken that I can find evidence of)
• Build lots of brand domains – this is a fairly poor option unless they really have a purpose in being in the SERPs – if they are obviously just properties owned by the same person full of duplicate marketing articles the average surfer looking for information to base a decision on is just going to dig deeper.
  This was one of the actions taken by [name withheld] – either his own initiative or someone he hired – idiots
• Build a social media presense – this is something different than just a brand domain because it could show a more human site to interested customers.. it helps if you update your Facebook once in a while, actually own your own name on Twitter etc.
  In this case facebook hasn’t been updated in ages, the Twitter account may have been run by an imposter, at the time of my post back in December it seemed it might be legitimate… though some of the content didn’t seem very typical of the overall marketing message. The Twitter account is now devoid of content.
• Create content – press releases, authority interviews, even some article marketing… do whatever you can to build content that can then have links pointed at them.
• Release a book – even a short one, even a ghost written one based upon a couple of your existing videos – tons of press even if it isn’t very original

So what does a leading authority on marketing who also teaches SEO do?

Yup – he hires a lawyer to send cease & desist notices to a bunch of bloggers who complained about his direct marketing tactics and the upheld decision by the ASA, and his continued mailing.

Someone involved in this is a marketing ignoramus – I don’t know who that is specifically as it is quite possibly [name withheld] isn’t the one pulling the strings on this.

Of course the saga isn’t over yet… whilst it seems lots of people have taken down their content, I think all of them are British and aren’t overly fond of unwarranted litigious tendancies, especially with the letters originating from the US.

Bad News Fills Vaccums

Bad news / Negative press tends to fill the gap in the SERPs a bit like a hydra. It can’t be killed with legal threats easily, especially when some of the coverage is probably justified.

My actions? I have removed the blog post in question, and deleted it from the one place I believe it was syndicated (automatically) – my facebook account.

As far as I am concerned just before my post I hadn’t heard of the guy, and I am quite prepared to impose permanent obscurity (which is what his lawyers seem to want) as far as my own web properties are concerned, assuming no legal action is taken against my readers… then it would be a case of taking legal consultation.

My reasons are fairly simple

I am in the middle of some marketing experiments, and I certainly wouldn’t want to upset my test data with a whole load of untargeted traffic, plus I wouldn’t want it looked on as trying to profit from a poor reputation management decision.

I don’t want the name of the person mentioned in the comments however there is something my readers can help me decide.

You see I haven’t redirected the old post to a new one yet so any potential visitors currently receive a 404 error.

I have narrowed it down to 3 options for the redirect

• To this post (name isn’t mentioned anywhere)
• To the ASA decision on advertising practice (stuffed with the guy’s name/trademark)
• To a popular Rick Astley video

Nothing preculdes any of those to rank on Google, even #1 in the UK for this guy’s name/trademark in the future, without any further action on my part.

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Poland is in a week of mourning until midnight 18th April 2010.

Major Search Engines

Google

Bing

Major Polish Internet Portals

Onet

Wirtualna Polska

Gazeta.pl

Interia.pl

Major TV Stations

TVP

Polsat

(a Polsat founder died in the crash)

TVN

Social Networks

Just changes in header/backgrounds to a more subdued tone

Nasza Klasa

Blip.pl

Sadly social networking sites that pretend to have a Polish presence such as Facebook and Linkedin didn’t follow suit.

All thumbnails link to larger versions on these screenshots of Polish Internet sites in mourning with subdued grey tones to pay respect to their lost leader and countrymen.

I have switched off comments but trackbacks and pingbacks are open

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But I am giving Twitter a chance… 7 days

Last time I decided to leave a community where I was highly active was actually 2 years ago when I left Sphinn over moderation issues – at the time I was in the top 3 users. I haven’t been actively involved there since.
(note: I will be releasing the premium content I was discussing for free sometime in the next few weeks as those I told have had a nice 2 year window to exploit it – I never charged for the info)

2 years ago Sphinn was pretty much my default “misc” feed reader – in some ways Twitter has replaced it – you know… that place you go to read cool stuff you wouldn’t have otherwise seen because you can’t cope with reading everything.

The Final Straw For Twitter

Twitter have been progressively screwing up their SEO for a few years, but sometime early this morning they took it one stage too far.
It was first noted by Jeff Bentley
who is a dodgy search marketer so obviously I trust linking to him a lot more than linking to Twitter where you can’t trust the links.

It was also spotted by Malcolm before I published a few other tweeters – he wasn’t going mad, but I probably am.

What Twitter are saying in this most recent change is that the people I associate with and have regular conversations with on Twitter are not to be trusted, and that all juice should go to their blogroll icons in the sidebar which are the people I most recently followed – really funny with accounts that autofollow people back is that most of the blogroll links on their accounts are to spammers.

There are people I follow purely for competitive intelligence or communication – some of them I would never link to from this blog or would nofollow, but on Twitter it is just too inconvenient to use other methods.

I realise Twitter content when syndicated can result in followed links, after all I have been pimping my Tweetglide blog (which has 6x as many tweets indexed in Google as my Twitter account) and if I was to feed tweets to my account on Google Buzz, they would be clean links there as well (though maybe they don’t pass juice)

I also realise now content is being piped directly to Google from Twitter, that whether it has nofollows in public might not have any negative effect on the ranking benefit of any links to content, because Google is gaining clean data.

However I find Twitter favouring the links in the sidebar over the links to people I talk to insulting.

The thing is now Twitter are giving data to Google, Google have no interest at all in crawling Twitter in a traditional manner.

A cache date of over 10 days ago for a PR6 site is quite frankly laughable.
You can see very clearly that in that screenshot the links between people I am talking to don’t have a nofollow.

Every time I look at the Twitter website all the nofollow links make me want to vomit.

Deletion?

I have thought about it for the last 8 hours and it is the only viable solution – if I maintain the account then people will use it to contact me, it is prominently in the SERPs and I have close to 8000 organic followers (I never autofollowed, offered incentives etc)
I will probably leave the account live, but I will delete all the people I am following and all the tweets and then post something generic pointing people to appropriate pages such as my contact page.

All Or Nothing Twitter

If Twitter want to nofollow, it should be all the links or none of them – yes all those “blogroll” links and links to lists need to be nofollowed as well. They could go all the way and nofollow everything with nofollow in the header, but that would be extreme.

The alternative is to remove nofollow completely and let Google sort it out by themselves… they are good at that.

2 very simple acceptable options

Most likely you may want to follow me on Google Buzz, as I expect my Twtter account to become an empty corpse in 7 days

Twitter Nofollow conversation on Buzz

Testing

Here is a link to a public Buzz indexing test I am running – I have others running in private

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