If you have a look at this post called Twitter Smarter with Greasemonkey you can read how you can remove all the pain and effort by using a Greasemonkey script that they have developed to automate your Twitter posting.

The author states that ”

After you’ve followed a bunch of people, just sit back and watch the follow backs roll in. We’ve found that about 12% of the people with an interest in SEM have an automatic follow back set up. More will follow you as the day goes on. Give it a few days, then go to your followers page and drop the ones that aren’t mutual. If they’re not in to you, then it’s time to just move on.

I started the week with around 50 followers.  After a few days of testing this script and really not working very hard at it I’m coming up on 500 followers. Sure, I’m no rock star, but having a conversation with 500 people that share my interests is, well, interesting!  ”

I haven’t tried this yet but it looks well worth a shot.

For those that do not know Squidoo is a communal website which allows you to

• develop your own web page on any topic
• incorporate affiliate and Ebay / Amazon links
• keep the profits or share them with a Squidoo charity

Perhaps the greatest opportunity flows from the excellent search engine rankings enjoyed by the Squidoo site and some of the main pages. Whilst Page Rank is not everything, the home page of the Squidoo site is a PR6. Where else can you put your own web pages into a PR6 site?

Many fast moving Internet Marketers have been claiming their land in the web real estate rush. The land grab is really a url grab … as the pages you develop are on the Squidoo main domain and hence a page url can only be used once and will have one ‘owner’.

Some examples we have seen of developing Squidoo lenses as they are termed are: -

1. A lens focusing on boilers and explaining the different types of boiler available, combi boilers, regular and system types and links to the best selling boilers currently

2. A full coverage of the British Gas Homecare product range covering boiler maintenance and repair, central heating system maintenance, plumbing, drains and electrical care.

If you have any aspirations to become an Internet Marketer you need to develop your online real estate and Squidoo is a free first step you should consider. The site is easy to use and has guides to help the first timer together with a friendly, growing community.

Tags: squidoo, internet, marketer

Pagerank was defined in the original Google article as

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))  where d is a dampening factor commonly believed to be 0.85.

So pagerank of page A is 0.15 plus a little bit of the pagerank of each page that links to it ( this share relates to the pagerank of the linking page divided by the number of outbound links on the page).

Thinking of this it can be seen that:-

• adding pages increases the total potential pagerank of a site
• inbound links increase the total pagerank within a site
• pagerank can be distributed around the site by changing the linking structure to funnel it to important pages
• poor linking structures can prevent a site achieving its maximum potential aggregated pagerank as some links are not established
• the allocation of pagerank can leak out of a site when it links outwards (unless using the rel=nofollow tag )

Accordingly it is important to consider the structure of a site and ensure that pagerank is shepherded to the important pages in the site.  In this way they will have higher pagerank and a better ranking in the search engine index.

Some other points to note are

• Pagerank goes from 1 to 10
• the increase is probably logarithmic
• pages with no links to them are classed as orphans by Google and excluded from the pagerank calculations which are iterative

There is an excellent, but complicated, article on this at http://webworkshop.net/pagerank.html

Tags: link popularity, pagerank, google

Matt Cutts, a senior Google search engineer, has now clarified all in an article on his blog.  It is very long and has resulted in a great deal of response comment. To save you reading it I can summarise the main points here.

The Big Daddy update is complete.

Google is intentionally crawling more pages from a site than they will index.

Make your site functionally correct before emphasising link building. Check – are all of my pages reachable with a text browser from a root page without going through exotic code. Try having a site map on your site. After you’re site is crawlable, then work on the HOOK (content) that makes your site interesting/useful and attracts links.

Make sure that your site is using your PageRank well. A tree structure with a certain fanout at each level is usually a good way of doing it.

Links are now very, very important.

Reciprocal links are declining in value.  The quality and relevance of inbound links is more important.

Affiliate Out Bound Links are not helping crawling and indexing. There is some speculation that an abundance of affiliate OBLs is now having a negative effect on rankings.

The best way to gather links is to offer services or information that attract visitors and links on your own. Things like blogs are a great way to attract links.

The supplemental index is a back fill for the main index, used when insufficient relevant entries exist in the main index.

The supplemental results are typically refreshed less often than the main results

If your site does not have many inbound links it may not make it into the main index, it certainly will be crawled less and could exist only in the supplemental index.

The message is very clear.  Sites must try harder to develop quality inbound links.

Prepare for the future and develop an effective and targeted link building program now or face the prospect of living without Google search traffic.

Tags: link popularity, google, big daddy, matt cutts, seo

The parent site has a page rank of 9 although the blog sites it spawns have lower rank with pages starting at 0 like every other site.

I wondered whether this was a valuable Search Engine Optimisation tactic or an opportunity that could not be followed through. Whilst it is easy to open a blogger blog all the usual site M.I. is missing. You do not know when googlebot visits and what pages are being crawled.

The only way to answer the question is to experiment and observe so the account was opened last week.

The site is up and running and called Selected internet sites to give some element of respectability.

If you were wondering what the purpose of this article was I will tell you. This site gets crawled regularly by googlebot so this article contains a link to the Selected internet sites to send it to the blogger account and force it to index the site.

After that I will start experimenting with links from the blogger account to other sites I own to check the value of the link popularity.

Tags: link popularity, page rank, blogger

Insertion of your url in comments and trackback is regularly suggested for link popularity improvement in the blog world but I fear that this is out of date advice.

Following previous abuse of this opportunity the default configuration of most blog software is to put a rel=nofollow tag in any comments and trackbacks. This tag prevents any page rank or status flowing from the original site to the linked site in the search engine calculations.

Accordingly you could be wasting valuable time if you trawl the web to insert comments in high rank sites and expect to improve your link popularity.

There is nothing wrong with reading blog articles and commenting on the authors thoughts, that is one of the underlying purposes of a blog. Engaging in the topic community will increase your knowledge and visibility. Whilst the search engines will not allocate link popularity from the url it will be visible to readers and you may attract visitors to your site.

Happy commenting.

Tags: popularity, anchor keywords, comments, trackback, regularly

So the question is how can you encourage other sites to link to you?

If you have a site with rich functionality and excellent content this may happen naturally but when you start out you have no online status and hence no queue of sites wanting to link to you.

One method is to write content for other sites, an article, and offer it to them. Nice thought as it solves the problem many web masters have, where to get good content.

How does it help you? Insert a contextual link back to your site and make this a condition of the other sites using your copyrighted material.

Now that sounds easy and the problem is over …. but one question remains. How can you make the article interesting so the webmasters want to post it?

Tags: popularity, measure, positively, influences, engine, ranking, natural

In addition to developing links it is important to demonstrate a gradual increase in links over time. Launching a site with hundreds of links or suddenly increasing the link volume can count against you when detected by search engines.

Accordingly this requires a steady investment by you each week to build a solid ranking status over time.

There are four main types of linking you can undertake and all are important being Single Direction Links, Reciprocal Links, Network Site Links & Directory Listings.

Single Direction Links (value index = 5 )

These are valuable links in that the site is seen to ‘vote’ for your site without requiring a link back in exchange. To kick start this approach you can write articles on your specialist area and submit them to article directories with an embedded link to your website. Website editors are always on the lookout for content for their sites, and Article Directories are an easy way for them to acquire appropriate content with out having to it themselves.

Reciprocal Linking (value index = 1)

This is a link from your site to another website with an agreement that they also link back to your website. This can have some value if the website is in a similar content area to you. Reciprocal links to dissimilar sites are probably worthless. Also the value of the link can be influenced by the text that surrounds the link and places a context on it. Pages of raw links are definitely worthless and could lead to you being penalised.

Network Site Links (value index = 5 and upwards)

To participate in this you need a network of 3 or four sites at least. To avoid the reciprocal link problem the sites should link to each other in a ring, a to b, b to c, c to d and d to a.

Directory Listings (20 and upwards)

This is a single link as most directories don’t need you to link to them. Whilst this should be easy, as directories are set up to link to you, you need to invest time to achieve meaningful results. As previously stated this should be a gradual activity over time to build status.

The final point to note is the status of the linking site. If it has no traffic and no links it will not materially improve the status of your sites with the search engines.

Tags: ranking, position, website