As I have mentioned before, I could understand and even encourage Google to somehow decide to pull in my most recent blog posts as part of their real time search. Most people searching for me it is most likely a regular reader doing a navigational query looking for my latest blog posts, not my latest tweets.

I see this with both a UK and US search, personalization switched off in the query, and logged out

http://www.google.com/search?q=andy+beard&pws=0&gl=US
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=andy+beard&pws=0&gl=UK

This is an “Anytime” search – no need to select “latest”

Update – Chris Brogan Too

I wonder where Chris would prefer the traffic to go, blog or Twitter?

I can’t track search traffic to Twitter

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When they decided to close all loopholes in creating an active link within the bio area, it prevented me linking to my disclosure policy – that annoyed me as well, especially with all the terrible attempts of providing adequate disclosure within paid tweets that are currently being used/proposed.
There was a huge outcry from the SEO community.

Rae ripped both @MattCutts & @ev apart
Andy Beal asked “Was this Twitter bending over for Google?”

Matt Cutts came back with a decent response on how his interchange with @ev went that might have influenced Twitter’s decision to nofollow bio links.

But that really didn’t satisfy anyone, for instance there was this comment by Danny Sullivan.

Here is an excerpt

Forget the bio link, I think the web site link should be regular. Actually, I think all the links should carry weight. Twitter is my microblog. Why can’t I point at what I want to with authority, just like I do with a regular blog. If my twitter home page has earned a good PR score because people point at me, then I’ve done what Google wants — provided good content that earned that value, just like with a real blog.

Then of course there are the Twitter “blogrolls” which used to link unfairly to the early Twitter adopters by default, and now list the most recent people someone is following.
That PageRank score for many was because they were early adopters followed by other early adopter. In many cases people didn’t truely “earn” the PageRank passing links they were receiving.
The new system to be quite honest isn’t very good either, though I suppose Twitter could claim they optimize the system for those who follow 30 others.

Even so Twitter ranks highly for vanity searches due to the internal linking, but the content you create just disappears into a black hole of terrible navigational structure.

Apparently I have tweeted 4656 times over the last few years, and whilst I had an account very early, it probably took a year before I was tweeting on a regular basis.

I haven’t gamed followers, just handled things quite naturally following people who I found interesting and engaged me in conversation.

Despite ranking highly for vanity searches like [Andy Beard], Twitter SEO really sucks.

Google has only picked up 1320 of my historical tweets

Even worse only 8 or 9 pages depending on whether you use /* or AOL are likely to be in Google’s primary index.

You also can’t rely on Twitter’s own internal search to find your historical tweets.

One option taken by many is to use a WordPress blog to archive their tweets, which is a fairly good solution. There are also tons of other microblogging platforms which can be used for syndication of Tweets, or even the origination point, but many have various problems similar to Twitter, or have limited financial resources to stay alive unless they heavily monetize your content.

The option I have taken is to use Tweetglide as I wrote about recently in my initial Tweetglide review

My interest with Tweetglide isn’t the AIR application, though I did pay for an upgrade and I will be doing a lot of testing of the advertising potential in the future – my initial testing was interesting but a little biased due to the topics and Tweetglide was a “new shiny object” thus had tons of new users, and very few had worked out how to use the advertising yet.
I was seeing unrealistic traffic, effectively $0.015 per visitor.

Not that the AIR application isn’t pretty good – it is, and also has some geeky aspects that are quite exciting for developers with an upcoming API that allows you to create addon features.
However on a day-to-day basis I am more inclined to just open a web browser. I have never run any Twitter AIR application extensively.

Tweetglide SEO – Pumper Or Index Engine

Anyone who is in Stompernet will know about pumper sites, but I am sure it will be covered extensively in Link Liberation / SEO Brain Trust, and Howie Schwartz covers this kind of thing with interlinking of Web 2.0 sites and other content in Link Wheels.
Lots of courses cover similar topics though often with slightly different strategies, levels of automation etc.

Whilst not everything I have suggested to the Tweetglide development team has been implemented yet, they have done a huge amount of work in quite a short amount of time.

I am not going to go into all of the details of what has been done and the reasons why, or elaborate too much on what will hopefully be done in the future.

The most important things for SEO, especially for any Google engineers listening in

• Isolation – each Tweetglide blog is on a subdomain now rather than a page on the parent domain. This for me was important from a trust perspective. Any link on a Tweetglide blog is effectively there because the author added it editorially.
  Maybe you will get situations where some people are selling sponsored tweets and there may need to be some detection of known hashtags to add nofollows, but give the devs a chance – no one else syndicating tweets would even think about the need to do that.
  My Tweetglide blog is isolated from other Tweetglide blogs unless I am interlinking through conversation, citation etc.

  This is something that was vital to have Tweetglide behave like Blogspot or wordpress.com – Twitter stupidly didn’t use subdomains from the start, I suppose they could switch and do tons of 301 redirects.

• Pancake – I love pancakes here in Poland, normally with cottage cream cheese and a sauce made from blended frozen strawberries – I also SEO websites to have a flat linking structure to encourage crawling of as much content as possible.
  Tweetglide is pretty flat – flatter than most blogs and it shows in the way it is already being indexed.

What difference does this make?

Tweetglide has only been running for just over a month, and they haven’t pulled in backdated tweets, so the total number of pages on my Tweetglide Blog is 252 – actually that indexation has only really happened in the last 2-3 weeks due to the switch to subdomains.

The number of pages in the primary index varies a lot more between /* (50) and AOL (21-22) but is still already significantly more than achieved on Twitter, and it is early days yet.

My results are probably not typical at this stage, because I wanted to compare with my Twitter account I poured a lot of juice from my sidebar into my Tweetglide blog for the last few weeks.

Search traffic at this stage has been almost zero, but that is what I expected – there are some things that will improve that for the long-term, but a Tweetglide blog needs to be treated as any other index driver / pumper and given some love.

The important part is that pages are being indexed and hopefully that will continue.

There are bugs – I actually just noticed one more with the RSS feeds – the title for each item in the feed needs to be taken from the tweet, otherwise when syndicated the anchor text will always be Item #1 for the newest tweet.
Other stuff the team are already aware of such as the need for feed discovery.

When you sign up, if you say you are an online marketer you will be offered various advertising options – if you take up the offer I get an affiliate commission. If you say you are not interested in marketing, you won’t get the offers on signup and just get to use both the AIR application and Tweetglide blog for free.

But that isn’t why I am promoting Tweetglide

Currently when a blog post gets tweeted, there is a ton of link activity, but most of it is pointless – sure there is some link equity passed between Twitter profiles, but I have already demonstrated how worthless that is.

Most sites syndicating Twitter content have messed up SEO from an author’s perspective – there isn’t a strong symbiotic relationship.

With Tweetglide the links have value… every single damn one of them. You have links between profiles that actually help with Tweetglide blog indexation, links directly to content from multiple subdomains that are real editorial votes, and once that minor bug with the RSS feeds gets fixed those RSS feeds will be great for further syndication.
The RSS feeds have the links in as well. Perfect for your link wheels, juicers, pumpers or however else you are mixing your content.

Google is free to take every Tweetglide blog based upon it’s own merit, just like a subdomain of blogspot.com or wordpress.com

My primary motivation promoting Tweetglide (and helping them with some SEO tips) is to help people but in so doing help myself as it sure doesn’t hurt having a few hundred readers signed up to Tweetglide who subsequently tweet the occasional one of my posts, or just strike up a conversation with me, as all those links count.

Disclaimer: Only Google decide which links count and even if they appear in webmaster tools that doesn’t really mean anything – I haven’t done statistical testing of the links – my personal understanding and intention is that they will be solid “whitehat” editorial links and nothing I suggested as far as SEO tweaks, or that Tweetglide are doing to my knowledge could be looked on as “naughty”

Marketers:- If you do upgrade, it is best to drive traffic to pages that contain some kind of specific desired action/goal, and it isn’t hard to tag any links from Tweetglide advertising with a tracking code.

SEOs:- Tweetglide Blogs just like other pages won’t be indexed by Google if you don’t link to them

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To add to that I was previously using memcached, eAccelerator, various WordPress cache plugins, Nginx + Apache reverse proxy, and now most of that is switched off.

Guess when Envygeeks first played around with my server…

But they haven’t done a full rebuild yet, so the current tweeks are limited, and hampered by frequent network outages burning up support time.

Google have just introduced some site speed reporting – great! It was announced on the webmaster central blog.

When I look at the results for this blog they are pretty dire

But just a second…

My about page has almost nothing on it and probably needs updating
My contact page is just a form
My comments policy has a fair bit of text but no images

All of those open pretty much instantly even on my decripid internet connection deep in the countryside of Poland, though the server is in the UK which helps a little (for me)

So where is the slowdown?

Google Friend Connect seems to add 8 seconds to my page load time

I really hope if Google are going to factor page load into their ranking algos that they will not penalize me for including one of their own widgets on my pages.

I have been testing Google Friend Connect for various benefits, but it is close to being ripped off my site.

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I suppose it makes things simpler for people who weren’t already doing something similar for feeds, and at least they are segregating clicks between email and RSS, something their competitors for RSS > Email such as Aweber, Feedblitz, Mailchimp etc have been able to do for a long time.

What they can’t do is track RSS signups as a goal, and until they can do that from a marketing perspective RSS is fairly useless.

Google Reader is also still misbehaving – even if you use a 307 temporary redirect to your Feedburner URL, Feedburner evaluates the URL before offering the feed for subscription. You end up with split URLs in Google Reader depending on the signup method.

Http://andybeard.eu/feed

Http://andybeard.eu/feed/

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Exploring-Niche-Websites

I have read of ways using iframes to spoof the signup process a little, but from a marketing perspective it isn’t really acceptable and no substitute for a real thank you page process that can also be defined as a goal.

Google still is driving the assumption that RSS should be free to share, and not measured, but they are losing that battle to Twitter – they have no support for authenticated RSS feeds, and you can’t prevent people sharing RSS content that might be personal, either sensitive data or paid subscription.

This severely limits the utility of RSS for paid subscription content, RSS use to monitor collaboration services, etc.

It is also a financial risk – ever licensed an image from IstockPhoto? I am not a lawyer but…

What happens if that image, which is licensed for 500,000 impressions ends up on the Digg home page and is spread virally accross the internet? At $1 per hundred additional viewers, an image that is seen by an additional 500,000 could set you back $5000 – Istockphoto are owned by Getty, hardly known for being generous to accidental image plagiarism.

Feedburner team… what happened to that open directory of Pingshot ping locations? Hell even just a current list of where you update would be better than nothing.

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Allow Twitter to Scrape Your Personal Information In Gmail

I have written extensively about the problems associated with Viral Tell-A-Friend systems. People are becoming careless with personal and business security, and soon adding an email and password to a box will be as common as handing over an email address… but with dire consequences.

My opinion, Techcrunch shouldn’t publish what they found in Twitter’s undie drawer… but only with the provision that they remove the hypocritical viral tell-a-friend, and encourage other startups to do the same… until they learn to use APIs correctly.

Dopplr manage  to use APIs for TAF without the massive funding, and Gigya seem to have some API support.

Let something good come of this, and get all major social sites to stop scraping 3rd party accounts as well.

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Friendfeed Now Counted In Feedburner

It can make quite a striking difference with Feedburner if you have a few followers there.

But even this doesn’t really account for the shifting sands in online attention.

The latter half of this post was originally published Mar 21, 2008 @ 20:38

Since then Twitter has for many people emerged as the primary way they read RSS feeds, combined with various forms of lifestreaming.

The first time I see tweets and blog posts often is also on services such as Blogcatalog’s dashboard or even Mybloglog (though that can sometimes lag a little on updates these days)

Current Calculation Problems

• Blogcatalog & Mybloglog numbers are just as relevant as Friendfeed
• Twitter numbers are probably more relevant than any Lifestreaming service
• Facebook subscribers are still not counted
• Aweber & Feedblitz, along with Feedburners own RSS to Email service are included, but they are the only ones I know about. Where is the Getresponse support Simon? Infusionsoft should really offer something as well, though they don’t offer RSS to email – I am not sure about Mailchimp

The onus really is on the developers of these other platforms to report numbers to Feedburner, but I have no idea how that can be managed with Facebook and Twitter.

With both Facebook and Twitter there are 2 significant problems

• The data doesn’t always come from an RSS feed – individual Facebook apps programmers use various methods to pull data, and often Facebook items come from other sources. The source on Twitter could be any one of the many RSS to Twitter services, but equally could be a WordPress plugin.
• Items get shared – shared items in Google reader have often affected Feedburner data in the past, how does this work with retweets?

It is good to see services like Postrank now feature within Feedburner stats, as they provide various ways to filter RSS content on multiple topics, and then include only the best items for you to read.
(Niche marketers will probably find a way to make best use of that)

Note: I do have specific strategic reasons why I don’t currently display any RSS subscription options, or even an email subscription box.
This post used to have lots of comments, but Disqus hasn’t managed to sync them after 2 days.

It is amazing how long it takes for things to catch up, the following was written over 15 months ago, and the numbers are really still totally inaccurate

Originally published Mar 21, 2008 @ 20:38

I have been digging around in my Feedburner stats to see how various social streaming and life streaming applications I use are reporting data to Feedburner.

Friendfeed

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Feedreader & Aggregator
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; FriendFeedBot/0.1; +http://friendfeed.com/about/bot)

5 subscribers

Blogcatalog

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Bot
Blogcatalog bot

1 hit

MyBlogLog

I am not sure which Yahoo service they are reporting as, so I am listing a few possibilities

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Feed Readers and Aggregators
My Yahoo
A web-based newsreader that allows you to select and manage RSS headlines within a My Yahoo! account.
42 subscribers

There is also Yahoo! Slurp and Yahoo Test Bot – both listed as bots

Is Lifestreaming Subscribing?

Here are some reasons Lifestreaming should count as a subscription

• Personal – with most applications views can be attributed to individual users
• Selected – unlike meme trackers, someone has made a specific choice to read your content
• Trackable – if necessary it would be possible to identify only active users
• Traffic – traffic from lifestreaming is quite visible, though it is hard to determine if it comes from a RSS subscription link, or when someone tweets about you, or maybe from being Stumbled or dugg
• Email – Friendfeed sends subscriptions by email too – does that make it 2 subscriptions?
• Active – people are actually using these services more and more, and subscription data would thus be a useful representation

There are some aspects I am not sure should be counted, but are probably more valuable data than from many feedreaders

• Profile views – MyBlogLog, Blogcatalog and Friendfeed all allow visitors to view content before deciding to subscribe to it in some way – whist no long term commitment is made, a lot of this activity can be attributed to individual unique users, thus could be counted as a subscriber in some way.
• Shared Social Media Links – as mentioned before, when links to your site appear having been dugg, stumbled or shared in Google Reader – whilst this can result in traffic, it might not be something that can be counted as it is not necessarily related to the RSS feed, but to the permalink.
• MyBlogLog Topics – this is based upon their tagging system (I have wanted it to link to content for ages – make sure you update and cleanup your tags) – I don’t think it would be appropriate for this data to end up in RSS subscription stats
• BlogCatalog Social Search – also recently introduced and whilst it doesn’t have RSS yet (nudge Daniel) I can see this happening in the future – again this is a search much like you would have on Technorati or Google Blogsearch

RSS Bankruptcy

Depending on how you use these sites, they can add or subtract to the total information overload you are subjecting yourself to. I am not sure whether my own usage patterns are typical, but I find I am using Social and lifestreaming more than RSS Readers.

I have 1000s of unread items in my RSS readers, though on a lifestreaming service I am not reading every item either.

If the conversation is moving away from blogs there needs to be a way to measure it, track it and possibly respond to it.

I still am not sure how to react to the new item sharing feature introduced today on Blogcatalog, where someone can share items to people following them on the Dashboard, and to their Shared widget, and leave a comment.
When I first heard that this was going to be coming just a few days ago, I immediately thought that I would be vocally against it, but it is like a Stumbleupon review or a Delicious bookmark – it is not trying to start a new conversation, just tell someone why you are sharing the link.

The problem is that people will only share content using a certain number of different methods. Isn’t it best to use the one that is most likely to be seen across multiple networks?

Disclaimer: I consult a little with Blogcatalog

Update

After a little exploring it appears Friendfeed posted about this earlier on their blog and there is further coverage on Louis Gray

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Firstly I like linking to people who link to me, whether on the post they first wrote, or on the syndicated copy that now appears on SEOmoz, even when the name referenced is “Andy Beal”.

Google is going to have a hard time deciding which is duplicate content, and will probably pick the SEOmoz article because it is the domain with the most authority.

If you syndicate articles or blog posts, make sure they link back to the original version, whichever you consider original. I am not going to help Google, as I have linked to both.

Android vs Blackberry Smartphones

I probably know as much about smartphones as Matt Cutts does about… poodles (he is a cat lover)

I have a SIMM card with a 7 mbps connection, but purely as a backup or for when I am travelling around Poland and am somewhere I can’t get good wifi. The SIMM works in one of my wife’s cast off mobile phones in an emergency.

As detailed in the linked posts, Google gave away lots of Android mobile phones to developers. That is something I am very familiar with – I used to work in the games industry and among other things handled relationships with all the PC Manufacturers. AMD, Intel, Creative Labs, Nvidia, Matrox,  etc etc.

Even though NDAs have now expired (I think the longest was Intel’s at 5 years) I am not going to go into specific details but here are the challenges.

• Developers had to create custom code to support specific features – this could take days, weeks even months.
• The testing teams would have to text code in a matrix, combining various processors with graphics and sound cards
• The support teams would have to create documentation for each possible platform and potential conflicts

In those days we were working with multiple standards, processors had lots of proprietary 3D functions, graphics cards not only had different features, but also different graphics libraries to access them, 3DFX, OpenGL and DirectX, and even sound cards had different features and sound libraries.

Some might look on it as a lot of back scratching, but it was a symbiotic relationship – it probably still is.

Developers had early access to hardware, sometimes months, even a whole year in advance. Different terms were subject to negotiation, status etc.

In exchange there were lots of cross-marketing possibilities, certainly linking happened, but also branding on boxes, adverts, possible lucrative OEM deals etc.

Whilst this might seem to favor the larger development studios, and it did in some ways, ultimately small development studios, if they got on board could certainly gain a “leg up” from the hardware guys, and this is something I was very active to encourage.

Thus Google giving away a few hundred, even a few 1000 mobile phones is barely a grain of sand compared to what is given out behind the scenes.

Google I/O Was Press

From what I can see, there were tons of press representitives at Google I/O, they received tons of coverage from notable tech blogs.

Press have always received free samples of hardware, or at least most have, though many publications have rules about keeping the “gear”, auction it off for charity, give it away as prizes etc.

In doing so that can help them remain impartial because they are not keeping the item.

Paid Links

The paid links saga of 2007 didn’t really clear anything up and effectively swept issues under the table, with the untouchables remaining untouchable. Michael Gray is forced to nofollow advertiser links.

Payola or Blogola, whatever you wish to call it still exists, and is practiced by Google.

Affect on Search Results?

When Matt Cutts defends Google’s actions because Google doesn’t need links, that isn’t quite the whole truth.

It is quite true that Google doesn’t need to rank for “search engine” in Google

Here in Poland, a search for “Android” which used to be a very generic term, the first 4 results point to sites about Google’s Android operating system.

But Google doesn’t rank for Mobile Phone, and even their partner, HTC who made both the G1 and G2 handsets only rank 3rd for smartphone, using US Geolocation and personalized search off (not that I search for this topic… ever), with Blackberry in 2nd.
Actually that was yesterday, looks like HTC now rank 2nd, and Blackberry has been pushed down the results.

Here are the current results for various terms:-

Smartphone

http://www.google.com/search?q=smartphone&pws=0&gl=US

Smartphones

http://www.google.com/search?q=smartphones&pws=0&gl=US

Smart Phone

http://www.google.com/search?q=smart+phone&pws=0&gl=US

Smart Phones

http://www.google.com/search?q=smart+phones&pws=0&gl=US

HTC Cloaking

Just try accessing this link which is the one that appears in search results – certainly from Poland I end up on different pages, based upon IP.

http://www.htc.com/ (I nofollowed the link – I am not going to link to a Blackhat site that is cloaking)

It is cloaking – users see different pages compared to search engines, though I am sure their SEO team hate the flash.

I see an English language snippet, and land on their Polish language site /pl/

The only way to see the root domain is in the Google cache.

With Google buying them links all over the blogosphere, they don’t need to worry, they don’t even need to buy PPC advertising, unlike Blackberry.

In a battle where HTC have only 180K links and Blackberry have 300K+, visitor data suggests Blackberry is still killing HTC, and other factors, the notion that Google’s partner doesn’t need more links is harder to excuse.

Btw Blackberry sell Smartphones -and don’t cloak their Smartphone website

Palm also sell Smartphones, but aren’t going to get links such as Smartphone or Smartphones unless they fix their funny redirects as well.

Then of course there is the IPhone – it would make a great TV gadget using Boxee, but all the plans in Poland offer at most 5GB of data – not interested. At least when I seach for Apple or Iphone in Google, I get given a link in the search results which is the page I end up on (in Polish). When I search with US geolocation, I get the US result for Iphone, which I click on and get the appropriate landing page.

p.s. Google no longer remembering my search preferences such as &pws=0&gl=US in both Firefox and Chrome is annoying me severely, and almost seems to be a deliberate change in implimentation.

p.p.s. This post does not contain any links for which I have received financial compensation. I haven’t received any compensation for this post from HTC (for the SEO review), Palm and Blackberry (for the nice rich anchor text) – if any of them decide to send me a free phone that won’t influence me to write about them again, and the test period due to infrequent usage might last a few years… but I am a “software developer” and “technology blogger”.
SEOmoz, Michael Gray and Fantomaster have linked to me and tweeted about my posts from time to time.

p.p.p.s Disclaimer:- I don’t class myself as an SEO consultant, this post is my personal opinion, and Google is the final decision maker over whether their commercial partner (HTC) is cloaking or not, and defines what is or isn’t a paid link. Maybe a expert on search engine cloaking could offer some advice.

Update

Just so we are totally clear over what is or isn’t allowed under the Google Webmaster guidelines, here is what Google stated in their official blogpost on the webmaster blog.

Geolocation: Serving targeted/different content to users based on their location. As a webmaster, you may be able to determine a user’s location from preferences you’ve stored in their cookie, information pertaining to their login, or their IP address. For example, if your site is about baseball, you may use geolocation techniques to highlight the Yankees to your users in New York.

The key is to treat Googlebot as you would a typical user from a similar location, IP range, etc. (i.e. don’t treat Googlebot as if it came from its own separate country—that’s cloaking).

Here is the video they also included:-

The only way I could get to the page Googlebot sees was looking at a cache on Google

UK Smartphone SERPS

Lots of SEOs seem to think brands have been pushed to the front of the SERPs, but that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case in the UK with the #1 manufacterer of Smartphones pushed to the 4th page of the SERPs potentially because they use “legitimate” SEO practices (there are a few things that need to be cleared up, hope their SEO team are working on it)

IP delivery can have significant benefits – if a UK user is forced to visit the UK site, even when clicking through from a US search result, the default link they will use will be to the page for the UK.

It is something that can be done without breaking Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Update 2

More from Michael on Google Being Biased, plus a followup from Lisa on Google Profiling SEOs As Criminals

Silly me, I should have also linked to Rae’s Blackberry News site

Seems both of them overlooked HTC’s cloaking

With SmartPhones now being looked on as a necessity (at least in the US among Tech bloggers) there is obviously a huge competitive market, thus any search spam should be heavily monitored by Google.

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Anyone can make a mistake, release a product without considering all the possible ramifications, but to release Opt-in Accelerator again without major changes is irresponsible.

The Irresponsible Viral Tell-A-Friend Trio

So far there have been 3 such scripts I have written about, and there is a 4th “coming soon”

• My first coverage of Opt-in Accelerator
• Then there was Viral Optin Generator which may well have been a private label or resale rights product
• Viral Inviter is launching soon – last I saw of this script installed “out in the wild” it was a security risk
• There is another one I know about, TrafficXplode 2.0 which also features the same security risks

Relook @ Opt-In Accelerator

You see that big red circle I added?

That is the key to unlocking:-

• Your Email
• Your Google Adsense Account
• Your Google Adwords Account
• Google Analytics
• Google Website Optimizer
• Your PayPal Account
• Affiliate program passwords
• Access Your Blogger account
• Access any scripts that allow you to resend or reset passwords
• Open any social media profile that used that email address
• Did you use that address for domain records? Wave goodbye to your domains

I am not claiming that anyone creating such as script is dishonest, or even the people who might use them, but it takes a huge investment of manpower and financial muscle to keep personal data secure, and those are things most internet marketers don’t have.

All it takes is a script kiddie to come along and compromise the script running on your server, and then rather than acting as an “innocent” tell-a-friend script to boost your email subscribers, it would collect login and password information and forward it to an anonymous server.

All it would take is 2 lines of additional code

We will ignore many of the other potential problems with scraping the email services against their terms of service, potentially breaking the terms of the autoresponder service you use, or totally trashing your email deliverability as 100s of people flag your messages as spam.

I think Robert Plank covered that aspect of Opt-in Accelerator quite adequately.

Solutions

Password data should never be entered in an insecure form hosted by someone without exceptional security in place.

Very Simple Mail To:

This example from Plurk (they also use the insecure method, and have been accused of spam with their Facebook implementation)

http://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&cmid=0&fs=1&su=Invitation+to+Plurk.com&body=I+have+been+using+Plurk+and+I+think+you+should+check+it+out%21%0A%0AAccept+my+invitation+by+going+to%3A%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fplurk.com%2FredeemByURL%3Ffrom_uid%3D15547%26check%3D-1998160234%26s%3D2%0A%0ACheck+out+my+profile+at%3A%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.plurk.com%2Fuser%2Fandybeard%0A%0APlurk.com+-+Your+life%2C+on+the+line&tearoff=1&shva=1&ui=1

http://compose.mail.yahoo.com/?Subj=Invitation+to+Plurk.com&Body=I+have+been+using+Plurk+and+I+think+you+should+check+it+out%21+Accept+my+invitation+by+going+to%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fplurk.com%2FredeemByURL%3Ffrom_uid%3D15547%26check%3D-1998160234%26s%3D2.+Check+out+my+profile+by+going+to%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fwww.plurk.com%2Fuser%2Fandybeard

http://www.hotmail.msn.com/secure/start?action=compose&subject=Invitation+to+Plurk.com&body=I+have+been+using+Plurk+and+I+think+you+should+check+it+out%21%0A%0AAccept+my+invitation+by+going+to%3A%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fplurk.com%2FredeemByURL%3Ffrom_uid%3D15547%26check%3D-1998160234%26s%3D2%0A%0ACheck+out+my+profile+at%3A%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.plurk.com%2Fuser%2Fandybeard%0A%0APlurk.com+-+Your+life%2C+on+the+line

This code is wonderful because people use their own email server to send the emails, no strain on your servers, so it could be used on any server, even a shared account which has limitations on how many emails you can send per hour.

Existing APIs

Google Yahoo and Microsoft also have APIs for this kind of stuff which can also be used for finding friends.

Google Contacts API
Yahoo! Contact API
Windows Live Contact API

I should also mention the ongoing Oath efforts being made to create a unified interface for retrieving contact and other personal information with permission.

To be fair, I am going to give Jason a link with some partial counter arguments. He seems to think it is worth the risk.

The problem with that argument is that there is no need for this to be a security risk. It is just junk programming.

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My immediate though was to take a look at Lorelle’s sitemap.xml

• Homepage daily priority
• Every other page updated on a weekly basis?

That seems like a good way to tell the spiders to index your site less often than they currently do.

With Lorelle you would certainly want spiders checking the home page hourly as she is sometimes the source of breaking news.

Then I looked at the sitemap with a little more detail, and in particular the entry for her most recent post, the Cyclical Nature of Blog Stats – a post worthy of a link anyway so this is a 2-in-1.

This entry was written by Lorelle VanFossen and posted on June 16, 2008 at 4:57 am

Ah but I know Lorelle writes posts sometimes in batches and schedules them for publishing. Lets look at the XML

<loc>http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2008/06/16/the-cyclical-nature-of-blog-stats/</loc>
		<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
		<priority>0.6</priority>

		<lastmod>2008-06-11T18:59:24+00:00</lastmod>

Last modified 5 days before it was published.

Just for good measure, lets look at the home page

<loc>http://lorelle.wordpress.com/</loc>
		<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
		<priority>1.0</priority>
		<lastmod>2008-06-12T02:05:56+00:00</lastmod>

Wrong again – today is the 17th, Lorelle published a post on 16th June, which updated the home page, but it is not reflected in the sitemap.

Sometimes you might be better off with no sitemap at all…

5/10 for finally fulfilling a user request
1/10 for implementation (so far)

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Both might be correct in their connections.

Just like you couldn’t see the dark side of the force, and you can’t see the dark side of the moon, you can’t actually see all of your traffic that originates from search on the internet.

This is something that Tim O’Reily seems to be forgetting.

Search is only one way to find things. It’s the most easily monetizable, so it gets the lion’s share of the attention. But take a look at (and report on) what percentage of techcrunch’s traffic comes from search. For the O’Reilly Radar blog, it’s about 35%. Significant, sure, but hardly a sign of lack of competition. If Google absorbed both Yahoo! and Microsoft, the share of our visits coming from search would still be below 40%. (That tells you what a small share of our search traffic comes from the other guys today.) And that’s just the web traffic. Count in RSS (which is much bigger than web for most blogs, including ours) and the Search share of traffic goes down to a much smaller amount. So there’s not much worry about people not being able to find information.

Flour Water or Yeast

Based upon photo by Gene Hunt

Which is the most important ingredient in a loaf of bread?

Search is a vital ingredient in the online ecosystem. It might be possible to get by without it, before the Yahoo directory in the early 90s people did get by without any significant method of searching for information on the internet, but it wasn’t until “meta crawlers” were introduced, indexing individual pages that search really came of age.

Whilst it is easy at this stage of internet development to discount the value of search as only a small percentage of the whole, the source of traffic to your landing pages doesn’t necessarily mean that that was the starting point even for that single internet session, and when you factor in how a visitor entered preceding traffic funnels, you find multiple occasions where search may have “touched” a visitor before they visited your site.

How did a visitor to your site first become acquainted with Facebook, Digg, Stumbleupon, a subscriber to a blog which linked to you, subscribed to a mailing list, or even come to use Google.

Certainly a percentage of “original origin” comes from offline referrals, but how did the referring offline agent come into contact with the service they recommend?

This is very much like the six degrees of seperation

If you take that diagram, and make 40% of the dots represent a search engine, the path from A to B will very rarely be devoid of direct search engine involvement, amd on a macro scale the chances are infinitely less.

It is great to look on social media sites as a better filter of information, but that isn’t effective unless you again implement some method of searching.

If you removed all forms of search from the internet, finding information when you need it would be highly inefficient.

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