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?

A Google search for personalized search SEO throws up around 275,000 results

There’s around 2,500 mentions of personalized search on twitter

SEO’s are clearly concerned about the phenomenon, they’re blogging and tweeting about it in spades.

But is it something that, as SEO’s, we should be worried about.

According to Search Engine Watch, Google’s personalized search reorders search results based on your history of past searches, giving more weight to topics that interest you.

Whilst my personal opinion is that this is all a bit of a toss (I know what I want to search for, I don’t need Google bastardizing my search results based on what it THINKS I was looking for), it seems that a lot of SEO’s have thrown their skirts over their heads and are running around in circles screeching about the end of SEO as we know it.

But is it something we should be worried about?

For personalized search to be active, a user needs to:

1) Have a google account (gmail, WMT, Analytics, Docs etc)

2) Be logged in to that Google account

And therein lies the rub.

Over the last week, I’ve been asking everyone I know whether they have a Google account. This is a pretty broad spectrum of internet connected people, ranging from the ages of early teens, through to people in their 70’s. (I didn’t ask online friends, as I move in SEO circles online, and all of these people use Analytics / WMT etc)

The result?

Out of around 30 people, four of them had a google account of any kind, and only one of them actually regularly used it (Gmail acount), and that person logs out of their account when they’re finished using Gmail.

So not one of the thirty-odd people I queried is being served personalized search results.

I wonder whether as SEO’s, Internet Marketers etc, we assume that everyone else is like us, using online tools that most average punters have never even heard of.

So do I think that as SEO’s, we should be worried about personalized search?

Not by any stretch of the imagination…..

Think again!

Do you ever drop links to your twitter profile? I personally have never bothered (as you can see by my follower count - the size of my e-penis isn’t proportionately relational to my twitter follower count. I don’t need lots of followers, and I only follow people that I’m actually interested in)

If you do build links to your profile, you’re probably only doing it to promote the profile itself and gain followers.

But what if I told you you could build links to your twitter profile, and thus juice up the linking power of the DOFOLLOWED outbound links from your profile and tweets?

Well you can.

I was playing around testing some stuff recently, and discovered that the mobile version of twitter actually passes link juice!

It doesn’t nofollow the links you place in tweets (although twitter replaces in-tweet links with tinyurl links, tinyurl actually uses a 301 redirect to get you to your destination, keeping all that lovely link juice intact.)

Also, twitter doesn’t nofollow the link to your website in your profile, so you get all that lovely link juice straight to your website.

So if you link to your twitter profile, don’t link to the main page, link to the mobile version. You’ll still pick up followers the same way, but you’ll be juicing up your links as well.

To link to your mobile twitter profile, just use the”m” subdomain

By the way, if you want to follow me on twitter, see m.twitter.com/dapimp

(To see the mobile version of your profile, you’ll probably need to disable cookies in your browser)

Most people believe that it’s the dofollowed link on a high page rank page, with your chosen anchor text. And they’re right.

But does that mean that that’s the only kind of link we should be chasing?

Absotively not.

Read any blog about link building and you’ll get all the usual dribble about searching out the ultimate link, taking advantage of top commentators widgets on wordpress blogs, securing blogroll links, getting links on high pagerank sites, and not bothering to get links which have the nofollow attribute.

Bollocks.

In my last post about the decline of anchor text as a ranking factor (I didn’t say it was dead yet! ), I talked about the footprints that are left by even those that are trying to mix up their anchor text in their link-building campaigns. The same applies for the type and quality of links you chase.

Websites don’t just naturally acquire dofollowed, high pagerank links. If you have good content, which people want to link to, you’re going to be getting links from a wide variety of sources - dofollowed and nofollowed blogs, social bookmarking sites, social media sites etc.

This is where your search engine spammer has an advantage - let’s say for arguments sake, he’s comment spamming wordpress blogs - he’s more than likely spamming indiscriminately, picking up all types of links, from low quality sites as well as high, leaving less of a footprint to expose his link-building efforts.

Do you think that search engines won’t notice that your link profile contains only dofollowed links, or only links on pages with a pagerank of 2 or higher?

I didn’t think so.

So mix your links up, OK?