Also, as the father of young children who are just finding their way online, I resent the fact that the Government (who I voted for), doesn’t think I’m up to the task of supervising my children’s internet use. As Jonathon Crossfield said about the Conroy internet filter so much more eloquently than I could have:

Bloody hell! My daughter and I must have been incredibly lucky not to stumble across any of these sites up to now, especially if they are so commonly accessed by the average home user - as they must be for you to invest so much time, effort and money in this no doubt wonderful safeguard.

So we’re clear here that I resent the potential intrusion into my living room of the Conroy filter. I resent the fact that the Government that I helped vote into office have so readily bent over and taken it in the arse from both Stephen Fielding and the Australian Christian Lobby.

This is not a bitch at the Christian Lobby, they have a job to do, and a constituency to keep happy, they’re just doing what their members want them to do. But for a Government to bend over and offer up the lube so happily to a special interest group which represents an ever smaller, less relevant and increasingly marginalised group is pathetic.

I also understand that given the current political climate, and the balance of power in both houses of our parliament, it’s becoming crucial for the Government to form alliances with independents and the Greens. As we know, the Greens march to the beat of their own drum, and are reasonably unpredictable, but Fielding, of the “Family First” part, and Nick Xenophon are becoming more and more crucial for the Government to prosecute their legislative agenda.

Having said that, I want to talk about the political ramifications of the move.

In 1999, Australians voted in a referendum to decide whether they wanted Australia to officially cut ties with England and become a Republic. Polling at the time indicated that the vast majority of Australians supported the move, but were ultimately defeated in the vote. Understanding why this vote was lost helps to put the debate over mandatory net filtering into perspective.

The reason that the Republicans were defeated was because the Howard Government of the day, vehemently opposed to the Republic, worded the question is such a way that most Australians simply couldn’t vote for it:

To alter the Constitution to establish the Commonwealth of Australia as a republic with the Queen and Governor-General being replaced by a President appointed by a two-thirds majority of the members of the Commonwealth Parliament.

So we were going to have a President, but he was to be chosen by the Parliament. Understandably, Australians voted this down, with the Australian Capital Territory being the only state to actually record a higher than 50% yes vote.

The kind of logic applied to the question above is being applied to the mandatory internet filtering debate. By using the spurious argument that if you are against internet filtering, you are pro-child porn, the government is not addressing the issue as it should be addressed, but rather leaving Australians with the choice of being in one of two camps.

Agree with our shit idea, or you are a filth-peddling child molesterer.

Understandably, this upsets people. A lot of them. But the argument from the other side, those anti-censorship, appear to be not a whole lot better in some cases.

All over twitter today, we’re seeing references to the fake Stephen Conroy site (really dude, if you’re in public life, you’ve gotta register your name with the TLD of the country you live in, at the very least. Oh, and get on twitter too, you luddite, when our broadband minister is not on twitter, but our Gov’t keeps banging on about Govt2.0, you look pathetic). The interesting thing about the fake Stephen Conroy site is the poll in the right hand sidebar.

Will you punish Labor at the next Federal Election if they persist with mandatory internet filtering?

With nearly 3,000 votes at the time of writing, over 96% of people responded to the affirmative to the question.

What?

Firstly, let me address the question, then the answers.

That question is poorly worded. One of the most important things in accurrately polling public opinion is to not lead the respondant, or use emotive wording. The way that this poll is worded is similar to the child porn analogy used by Conroy.

Now the crux of this post, the high rate of respondants who said that they will “punish Labor”. By punish, I assume that they mean that they will vote for another party.

Well, I have bad news for those people (the ones who voted Labor at the last election and are now going to change their vote at the next election if the mandatory filtering proposal gets up). You vote out the Labor Government, you get a Liberal one.

Yes, you can vote Greens, Democrats, Independent, or the Kalathumpian party for that matter, but you’re still going to get a Labor or Liberal Government.

And remember, if you get a Liberal Government, you’re getting a Government that:

• Had twelve years to do something about the woeful state of broadband in this country, and did nothing
• Sold off Telstra to private investors, so that our dominant telco, the one who owns all the infrastructure, is now solely answerable to shareholders
• Sold off Telstra before structurally separating it. Meaning that the privately owned company who owns the pipes in Australia, is also competing in the market as a retailer. This allows them to strangle competition by delaying competing ISP’s access to infrastructure.
• Has a leader who makes Sen. Fielding look like a Progressive Leftie. You really want the “Mad Monk” in charge of your country?
• Has a front bench made up largely of the people who led the Howard Gov’t to obliteration at the last electon.
• Has appointed Barnaby Joyce as Shadow Finance Minister. I mean, come on! We all love Barnaby, but do you really want him running the Finances of this country?

…I could go on.

Whilst the issue of mandatory internet censorship is a serious one, is it really up there with climate change, the creation of jobs, and our foreign trade status?

Yes, I’m fucking furious about the idea that Conroy wants to decide what I can and can’t look at online, but, for me at least, it’s certainly not a vote changer.

Further investigationizing seems to indicate that I actually rank in the top ten (currently around #6) for the single term seolinkpro on its own. Pretty surprising really, seeing as they have an affiliate program, and most of the people pushing the affiliate program are probably using the product itself to push their rankings for that term up the SERPS.

Some of the more interesting terms I seem to rank for include:

• seolinkpro discount (cheap bastards)
• seolinkpro manual (good luck with that one!)
• seolinkpro matt cutts (he loves it, he tells me he’s using it daily)
• seolink pro anyone (wtf?)
• seolinkpro download (pay your money like everyone else!)
• seolink how to video (search youtube, dickhead)
• seolinkpro 2.0
• seolinkpro how to install (um, click the button? It’s not that hard)
• does seolinkpro leave anchor text?
• seolinkpro plugin download
• seolinkpro release date (this one was in late october, well after the product was released!)

No real point to this post, just sayin is all….

This is important. Google provides webmaster tool to see how fast your site is: http://bit.ly/6ctm6U

Yeah? Important to who?

My guess is that it’s important to google. Faster loading websites mean decreased crawl times, which means that they use less bandwidth and can keep their index more up to date.

My first question is this: When are google going to speed up the way their Adsense ads load? I couldn’t count the times I’ve sat waiting for a page to load, looked down at the activity bar in my browser, and seen that it’s the google ads that are slowing down the page (Especially if they’re in the header, where they have to load before the content loads).

Secondly, google analytics. Although google says to place your analytics code in the footer of your page, there are times where this is just not possible. For example, on some sites which have a particularly high bounce rate, people are bouncing back to google BEFORE the analytics code has a chance to activate (Particularly in database intensive sites which make a lot calls while building the page). In these instances, we need to load our analytics code BEFORE the rest of the page loads, so we can see where visitors are landing before they bounce. This is crucial as far as landing page optimization goes. Without this information, we don’t have clear and accurate data as to what’s actually happening. This slows down load time.

Thirdly, is how google are getting their page speed data.

The load time data is derived from aggregated information sent by users of your site who have installed the Google Toolbar and opted-in to its enhanced features.

OK, this is a pretty small data-set, the user has to have the toolbar installed, and have enabled the enhanced features. Am I the only person who sees a problem with this?

Load time in these instances is overwhelmingly determined by a) The users connection speed, and b) where they are located in relation to where the site is hosted. I know google can access both of these data points, but how are they filtering them to provide usable results?

Finally, google says they use “over 200 indicators” when deciding on the relevance of a particular page to a search query. I’d suggest that you can safely ignore about 195 of them and concentrate on the following:

1. Is the keyword (in some form) in the page (and in the title tag)?
2. Is the page crawlable by spiders?
3. Do you have lots of links (some with your anchor text)?
4. Do you have your geo-targeting factors right (if required)?
5. Will your content stand up to a human review (not cloaked / keyword stuffed / markoved etc)

I’d suggest that site speed would sit somewhere around 180 in the list of factors that determine where you will rank for your keywords. So unless you’re taking 30 seconds or more to load your page, rather than worrying about shaving half a second off your load times, go get some more links or create some more content.

SEOLINKPRO, hot on the heels of AutoPligg, bane of every pligg site onwner on the planet, promises to spam more links in more places than any other tool on the planet.

SEOLINKPRO Demonstration Video

As is always the case with the tossers at the Syndk8, details on the functions of SEOLINKPRO are vague at best, and if you ask about a release date you’ll probably get the answer “mango” but rest assured, it’ll be totally ghey, comes with free beer, will almost certainly get you laid, and is more powerful even than Teguh’s super pinger.

So join the queue for SEOLINKPRO, if that’s your sort of thing, check out the shit-ugly sales page.

But don’t tell anyone I told you…

Basically Cutts used pretty pictures to make the point that if you had ten links on a page, and 10 “points” of link juice to give, if you nofollowed five of the links, the ten points wouldn’t get split between the remaining dofollowed links, but the link juice that WOULD have gone out via those nofollowed links if they weren’t actually nofollowed, simply evaporated, and the remaining dofollowed links would still only pass one point of link juice, not two.

Did you get that?

Irrespective of the fact that Google implemented this change around a year ago, and apparently no-one noticed, any self respecting SEO will be making a note of this change as they look to optimize their, or their client’s sites moving forward. So now instead of sculpting pagerank (which Cutts calls an “Advanced SEO tactic which not many SEOs would be using - wrong! I know where I work, its just a standard part of the initial SEO overview/setup for ALL new clients - analysing where pagerank will best be utilized, and funelling it to those pages), SEOs are simply going to limit the number of outbound links on the page.

Which is where I come to Joost de Valk. Many of you will know Joost as the all round top bloke and super dooper Wordpress plugin developer of gems such as the Sociable plugin.

In a nutshell, the Sociable plugin places a bunch on social bookmarking icons at the bottom of every post in your blog. The idea is that someone likes your post, clicks the icon at the bottom of the post, and easily bookmarks the post to sites such as Sphinn, Stubmleupon etc.

The problem is, that this plugin, depending on how you choose to use it, can drop up to 20 or so outbound links at the bottom of every post. If you choose to have it display on your home page as well, and show ten posts on your home page, that could be 200 outbound links on the page.

Now in the days where we thought that those nofollowed links didn’t affect our ability to keep link juice on our site, this wouldn’t have mattered. Now - not so much.

I know I’ve regrettably uninstalled the plugin, I assume any other bloggers with SEO at the forefront of their minds will be considering doing the same thing. It’s a case of trading off the ability for readers to easily bookmark your posts, and the benefits that may bring, against throwing away a huge chunk of your link equity.

Probably not:

Listen up idiots, This is not a dofollow blog, for god’s sake, you can’t even leave fucking comments here. Most of the blogs listed on those lists are now nofollow, or have had the comments turned off altogether. (I turned them off because even after making outbound comment links nofollowed, the spam kept rolling in, clearly by idiots too stupid to install a nofollow link checker such as Search Status, or spammers who aren’t smart enough to write scripts that actually check the validity of a link they’re about to drop.)

Have a look down the bottom left menu, that list is a list of recent referrers, see how many of them are from supposed Dofollow lists of blogs? Yeah, this blog had dofollowed comments, once, before I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle (Yeah, I know, Oh the Irony!)

So clearly people are just republishing old lists, some of them over a year old, to try to drag in some traffic from people looking for dofollow blogs to comment on.

But feel free to keep linking to me in your Dofollow Blogs lists.

(…..yeah, I know )

WTF???

Whilst I’ll say nothing of the non standards compliant steaming pile of crap that is IE8, surely this is taking things to the extreme, no?

The new “Show Options” link in the top left corner of the SERPS opens up a whole new bag of tricks google has obviously been working on for some time.

I’m seeing it in google.ca results at the moment, but not in my local google.com.au yet.

The options allow you to filter your SERPS in a number of ways: Videos, Forums, and Reviews.

The interesting thing is that you can now determine the time frame of the results you want to see:

• Recent Results
• Past 24 Hours
• Past Week, and
• Past Year
  

  w00t! New Google SERPS options

All of these results allow you to sort by date, which is clearly an attack on Twitter’s efforts to implement real time search.

Another option is the (pretty cool) “Wonder Wheel”. I’m not sure at the usefulness of this, but it looks like it could be a bit of fun.

You can now also choose to expand the text snippet of each result, clearly the result of Google’s experimenting with longer snippets over the last few months.

So what does this mean for SEO’s?

Well clearly for link builders, it offers a completely new arsenal of tools to find places to get links.

As far as rankings and getting clicks from the SERPS, I’ll reserve my judgement, but if one thing is obvious, freshness of content is becoming more and more important.

I see my own twitter stream chock-full of tweets to links where I can buy stuff to “explode my follower count” and all the related crap. What a lot of twaddle - stick around and read this very blog, and I’ll show you how you can acheive the same, if not better, results for the one off charge of buggerall. That’s right, nix, nada, zilch!

There’s no spamming involved, just the slightly grey (more off-white really) practice of automatically following people. And hey, nobody is forcing them to follow you back!

Part one (this post) is about setting up a twitter account to automatically populate with content that people will actually want to read

Part two will be about getting followers for your account, and will include, free of charge, a PHP script which will automatically follow people who tweet your keywords (I’m having about 80% success rate with people following me back, so this is a crucial part of the equation)

Part three will be about monetizing your new massively followed twitter stream, and it’s easier than you might think. We’re going to talk about automatically injecting affiliate links into your twitter stream at set intervals, using products that the people following your feed actually need and want.

And on to post 1:

I can take or leave twitter (as can be seen by how often I actually update my status), but I do see the possibility of (ab?)using it as a marketing tool.

A lot of people talk about engaging people to garner a loyal following. Clearly this is bullshit, we really know that it’s a pure numbers game.

Yes, you have to provide people with content that they actually want to read, but there are ways to do that without all that grubby conversing and @messaging people you wouldn’t normally cross the street to spit on.

What we’re going to talk about here today is providing quality reading for your followers. (In my next post, I’m going to provide you with a FREE PHP script which will allow you to auto-follow twitter users who tweet certain keywords, so you’re going to want to subscribe to the feed to make sure you don’t miss that post!)

A quick word about niches - think micro-niche for this effort - forget about having a twitter feed talking about affiliate marketing, or making money online, think of niches where there is a need for information, and a buying market.

The point of this post is to make sure you’ve got a good catalogue of posts before we start auto-following people. There’s no point following others if you’ve got nothing for them to read when they follow you back!

So, how do I automatically feed my twitter account with solid, relevant content, which will have people falling over themselves to follow me, Pimp? I hear you ask….

Ok, Firstly, head on over to twitterfeed, and open yourself up an account. You’ll need your twitter username and password to do this, but it’s a pretty painless task.

Once you’ve got your twitterfeed account, you need to go find some RSS feeds to feed to your twitter account with. Personally, I use a combination of Yahoo News and google’s blogsearch, but you can pretty much get feeds from anywhere that allows you to generate your feeds from keyword searches.

So go set up some feeds based on the keywords you are going to target. you probably want at least half a dozen feeds, which you will now enter into your twitterfeed account.

Next, feed all your nice new RSS feeds into twitterfeed.

Set your feeds to update every half an hour, and to post up to five new updates each time, (you might want to play with these numbers a bit to make sure you don’t overload your readers) and leave all the other settings at their defaults.

Now go make yourself a cup of coffee, have a smoke if that’s your thing, and wait a while (sometimes up to a couple of hours), and check your twitter account to see that your updates are flowing through.

Once you see that content is streaming into your twitter account, wait a few days for my next post on how to get followers. During this time, you might want to keep an eye on the content that is actually being posted to your twitter account, and fine-tune your RSS feeds to make sure you’re getting the absolute best, most relevant content to your nice.

We’ve had well known attention whoring tossers try to buy suggested users spots for quarter of a mill, we’ve had numerous posts speculating which direction the twitter will go, and generally, they’re all wrong.

Here’s the simplest, most effective, most idiot-proof way for Twitter to cash in on the traffic they’re generating.

First, a couple of points about the twitter model, and why traditional advertising just won’t work:

One of the cool things twitter did was to open up their API to developers. This has led to myriad desktop / mobile applications, allowing users to avail themselves of the service, without ever having to actually go to the twitter website.

What this means is that in the long term, ads on the actual twitter website will be next to worthless, so there’s only really one way that advertisers can reach twitter users:

Tweets.

Yeah that’s right, I said it; it makes sense for twitter to actually post advertising tweets into your twitter stream.

You think Facebook has a lot of user data? Twitter could be sitting on just as much data about you, if not more.

Think about this for a minute…. imagine the kind of contextual in-tweet ads twitter could serve you, based on the stuff you tweet, the stuff people you follow are tweeting, and the things you link to in your tweets.

Now of course we’re going to get all sorts of pissing and moaning by the “give me my shit for free with no ads” tossers threatening to dump twitter if they started to get ads in their twitter stream. Bollocks. The service is free, you use it, somebody’s gotta pay the freaking bills.

This is where I think Google could actually step in and form the partnership with twitter that everybody keeps espousing, but nobody can actually see working.

Google has the technology to serve these contextual ads right now. But the bigger deal is that they have the ad inventory. All it would take is for google to add a service in the AdWords setup alongside Ads for Search and Ads for Content: Ads for Twitter.

The advertiser writes their ad copy, chooses the Twitter option, sets their budget, and CPC, hits “GO”, and their ad starts appearing in twitter streams.

“But what if I really don’t want to see ads in my twitter stream?” I hear you moan…

Well, you opt out, paying a nominal monthly fee to twitter (say $3 - $5 a month). You can’t bitch that twitter is charging for the service, they’re just giving you two choices: an ad-supported, free version, or a paid, ad-free version. Like so many other online services.

I really can’t see this as being too much of a problem, I mean really, would you  have too much to complain about if every tenth tweet you saw was an ad?