The Google Inside Search blog post from April 3rd turned the SEO world upside-down. Although Google has been telling us about changes they’ve made to the algorithm for a few months now, this one was particularly interesting. Many have already speculated about how the Google algorithm might have changed regarding anchor text, I haven’t heard much discussion about another significant change they mentioned: page freshness.

Here’s what this post mentioned about page freshness and the search algorithm:

High-quality sites algorithm data update and freshness improvements. Like many of the changes we make, aspects of our high-quality sites algorithm depend on processing that’s done offline and pushed on a periodic cycle. In the past month, we’ve pushed updated data for “Panda,” as we mentioned in a recent tweet. We’ve also made improvements to keep our database fresher overall.

Improvements to freshness. We launched an improvement to freshness late last year that was very helpful, but it cost significant machine resources. At the time we decided to roll out the change only for news-related traffic. This month we rolled it out for all queries.

More precise detection of old pages. This change improves detection of stale pages in our index by relying on more relevant signals. As a result, fewer stale pages are shown to users.

Clearly page freshness is becoming more and more of an important ranking factor.

So, how can we keep our pages fresh?

You could login to your website or CMS and simply make a couple changes on your webpage. That might make your site appear fresh but would it really be enough for Google to consider your entire page fresh and a better website than your competitors? I’m not convinced (you might be- if so, leave me a comment below)- I think we need a little more effort.

Luckily most of us are already producing frequently updating information on a regular basis. You might be posting things to your Twitter or Facebook page or even updating a blog? It would be great to be able to take this stream of content you are creating and somehow turn it around to make your stale, old pages a little more fresh.

The typical way of including your social media assets (such as Twitter’s embed widget) won’t give you any SEO advantage since these are generated on the fly with javascript. This makes the page look a little more up-to-date, but Google cannot read the javascript on these widgets and therefore cannot give you credit for keeping your content fresh. The same is true for other ways of including your social media or recent posts from your blog (such as through AJAX). We need to find another solution.

Presuming you have a PHP server, you can use almost any RSS feed, an XSL stylesheet and the XsltProcessor() object to keep your page’s content fresh by rendering the content as part of the HTML of your web page.

First, you’ll need a simple XSL stylesheet (save as: ‘rss2html.xsl’):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

</xsl:stylesheet>

This takes the XML encoding of an RSS feed and converts this into a series of <li> items. As written above this takes the last 5 items from the feed, links to each item in the RSS feed, and adds a description (with any HTML formatting) afterwards. You can edit the HTML above to change how or how many items are displayed- if you don’t want the items displayed in an list, for example, or if you have an aversion to linking to other websites.

Next you will need an XSLT processing script (save this file with whatever name you want, I called it ‘fresh.php’):

<ul>
<?
$xsltProcessor = new XsltProcessor();

?>
</ul>
<a href="http://www.dizzysoft.com/">script by dizzysoft</a>

This code above

1. loads the rss2html.xsl file we first created
2. loads an RSS feed we desire (in this case I loaded a feed from Mashable)
3. Reads the RSS feed into XML and writes it according to the XSL stylesheet we created. Since we rendered each item as an <li>, we have to precede the processing with an <ul> tag.
4. links to my site in gratitude for this awesome script- take this out if you want, that’s fine.

Done!

Just include this XSLT processing script on your web page to keep your page fresh.

Now you need to decide which RSS feed to include on your page. Here’s some things I would consider when choosing an RSS feed:

• Is the content relevant to the page? You can share part of a Mashable feed, like in my example, or any feed for that matter. As far as SEO goes, however, I would include an RSS feed from something that is relevant to the topic of the page in which you include this feed. After all, the real benefit here is not only to produce fresh content but fresh and relevant content.
• Are you in control of the content of this page? This prevents problems and helps control your content. For example, how bad would it be if you shared a third-party RSS feed and found that one of your competitors was mentioned on your own page! Also, if you share your own content you can be sure the content is relevant to the topic of the page.
• Will this RSS feed be updated enough to keep this page fresh? If the RSS feed you select isn’t updated frequently enough, including this script on your page won’t be enough to help.
• Will this produce any problems with “duplicate content”? Technically you could use these two simple scripts to create a whole website that just scrapes the content from another website but what good is that, ultimately? The best use of this script is as a small portion of a page’s content. For this reason the best RSS feed to include is a feed that truncates the content that is being shared over RSS- which is probably a best-practice for RSS feeds anyway.

What do you think? Will this be enough to trigger the “freshness” part of the algorithm? Will Google be able to filter-out this content as duplicate from somewhere else? Do you have any suggestions to improve these scripts? I’d love to hear your comments, below.

Are you looking to find Charlotte, SC? Keep looking because Charlotte is actually in North Carolina.

I understand the confusion- many people haven’t been to this part of the country and might make this mistake. Even those who might have been here could get confused because Charlotte sits right north of the border with South Carolina. Besides- aren’t both those red-neck states the same anyway? (I dare you to say that to anyone from either of these states!)

Don’t worry- you’re not the only one who makes this mistake. A lot of people mistakenly search for Charlotte, South Carolina. We know this because Google tells us so.

Google is more than a search engine- it is in the business of selling advertising. The primary way Google makes money is through selling ads to people who want to be found for a particular product or service they offer. Now, it is important to make the distinction between these, paid searches (also known as “Pay Per Click” or PPC) and the natural searches (also known as “organic search”). Google makes money as people bid for the PPC ads they offer, but doesn’t make money from the natural search results (the ten other websites) they list after the paid ads (which are designated by a colored block that says “Ads”.

In order for people to which search terms to bid on, Google helps provide an estimate of how many people search for a particular term. This tells someone which terms have the most searches (and are potentially worth a higher bid) and which ones have a lower search volume (and might not be worth so much). The practice of looking at considering which keywords you want to bid on (or attempt to rank for, in the case of natural search) is called keyword research. You can find this information for free in Google’s own AdWords Keyword Tool. Since the potential keywords a business might be interested in bidding on is really limitless, Google provides search volume for almost every phrase you could consider- including Charlotte, SC (even if Charlotte is not really in South Carolina).

Now there are different ways to get the information from Google, using this tool. You can ask for a broad match, phrase match, or exact match.

“Broad match” means, “Tell me how many people search per month for any of these words.” If we were to enter “Charlotte, South Carolina” (without the quotes- this is important) into the keyword tool under “broad match” this means we are asking for how many people search for any search phrase that contains either the words “Charlotte”, “South” and “Carolina”. This would tell include “South Charlotte North Carolina” or “How far is Charlotte from South Carolina?” and many more.

“Phrase match” means, “Tell me how many people search per month for a string that includes this phrase.” For example, if we were to enter “Charlotte, SC” (again, without the quotes)” asking for a “phrase match” this wold tell us how many times people search for phrases like “hotels in Charlotte, SC” or “Is the DNC in Charlotte, SC”- notice in each of these cases, the potential phrases returned include the exact “phrase” “Charlotte, SC”.

“Exact match” means, “Tell me how many people search per month for only the exact phrase with no words before or after it or any variations.” As you can imagine, when you request an exact match, you will have a lot less searches per month than a broad phrase match- because the exact phrase match is only that specific phrase, and the broad can include any of the words you mention. The number of searches for phrase matches will fall somewhere in between the two.

When you provide a phrase and choose the type of match to Google’s keyword too, Google will return some numbers to you. These include “competition,” “global monthly searches,” and “local monthly searches.” The “competition number is between 0 and 1 and is a rough estimate of how many people are bidding on the keyword- the closer to 1 the number, the more people are competing for it and the more you might expect to spend if you were to bid on the term. The last two numbers represent an estimate (extremely rounded) of how many people are searching for this phrase throughout the world (“global”) or within your own country (“local”).

If we enter the phrase “Charlotte, South Carolina” and “Charlotte, SC” (under a phrase match) this is what we will see:

As you can see, you aren’t the only person who is looking for “Charlotte, SC”- about 4,400 other people (from the United States) are right there with you (as compared to the more than 3 million people who paid attention during their geography lessons).

A few weeks ago, Twitter removed the RSS/Atom feeds from their search pages. Annoying.

That doesn’t mean you can get the RSS feeds any longer- it’s just a little more manual.

It’s simple, really:

For an Atom feed:

Notice that I’ve replaced spaces with pluses (+).
See the Atom Feed yourself (and edit it accordingly)

If you’d rather have an RSS feed:

You can even request a search dedicated to a particular hashtag:

Just precede your desired hashtag with the URL-encoded # sign: %23

Hope that helps you out, @GenevieveJooste.

As a professional SEO I know how important links are to achieving rankings from Google. As such, I know the temptation to find a link in any place you can in order to achieve your desired SEO results. For some people, this means trying to build links through blog commenting. For others it means using automated software to build a massive quantity of blog comments with the hopes that some of them will give their webpage authority in Google’s eyes.

Because of this, a couple years ago, Google rolled-out the nofollow tag. When you add this parameter to your link, you are telling Google that you are not vouching for the site at the receiving end of the link. Although some say the nofollowed link still passes value, most agree they nolonger do.

This created a demand for dofollow blogs- blogs that do not automatically add the nofollow attribute to links- so the blog comments can pass authority to a website they are linking to. This created a demand for websites that list dofollow blogs. Some developers even created WordPress plugins (since it is one of the most popular blogging platforms) that specifically offers blog commenters dofollow links, such as Link Love or CommentLuv.

Of course, the goldmine for any SEO doing blog comments for links is an auto-approve, dofollow blog. This not only gives the authority for the link but bypasses the pesky and slow process of manual approval.

All this is done in the hopes of building some links, to pass authority to a website, with the hopes of improving the receiving site’s rankings in Google. The blog commenting for link building is a risky SEO tactic, but many still do it- whether manually or using specialized blog commenting software.

Since so many people still think this is valuable enough to keep doing, I’m going to make this blog post a repository for blog comments. I will approve every blog comment for this post- whether automated or manually submitted. Some of them will be funny. Some will be sad. All will be an interesting look into the measures some SEOs will take to improve their rankings.

Update: I think this post attracted a swarm of spambots- which have overwhelmed me with hundreds of comments. I understand that I was asking for it but nothing I did seemed to solve this problem. Then I installed the GrowMap Anti-Spambot Plugin. It was solved almost immediately!

I recently read a couple articles about this Twitter app that the Taliban, and presumably other organizations, are using to support their terrorist agendas. Apparently this app allows people to bypass the publicly facing Twitter content and send content over the more private DM system. In turn these terrorists get their DMs sent to them by text message to the front lines in rural Afghanistan.

Horrible!

Unfortunately the app in question is one I wrote and continue to manage- FeedTwit.

First of all, Twitter recently rendered my app obsolete- something I wrote about in my recent blog post about how Twitter is stealing ideas from independent developers. At this point very few people are using it.

Second of all, with the few people finding my app useful (and it is still useful for things besides communication between terrorists) it is easy for me to monitor. While I cannot see the exact content of every DM my app sends to its users, I can assure you that the RSS feeds people are having sent to their Twitter accounts by DM are all benign. (By the way, if the FBI, NSA, or any other law enforcement entity would like to look at the data people are sharing through my Twitter app, I’d be happy to share it with them. All they have to do is ask- no warrant or subpena necessary.)

Thirdly, you don’t have to take my word for it. In order to use my app you’d have to follow @FeedTwit- basically I couldn’t send an account a DM without them following the account. If these allegedly Taliban twitter accounts are using my app, they would be following @FeedTwit- and the list of accounts following @FeedTwit are publicly available.

Fourth, I think it is laughable that someone would accuse me of supporting terrorism. I am a native citizen of the United States and even an Eagle Scout. I’m not exactly the type who supports the Taliban.

The thing that cheezes me off about this is that these blog posts give nefarious people an idea of how they might use Twitter to avoid detection and communicate malevolently. Right now someone is getting a “good” idea on how to use Twitter for evil.

The new delicious is finally up. Not all that much different but I am excited because I use it every day.

One of the features I use every day is the RSS. When I heard delicious had enabled RSS feeds today, I went to the site right-away to set them up. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find them anywhere.

After going through my archives I have been able to reconstruct them. Here’s the format they are currently using:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/username/tag
http://www.delicious.com/v2/rss/username/tag

username – your delicious username, without the brackets

/tag – This is optional but if you want to limit the RSS feed to a particular tag you will need to insert a / and then the tag.

For example, if you wanted to keep track of all the bookmarks I’ve tagged “SEO” you would use:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/davidzimm/seo
http://www.delicious.com/v2/rss/davidzimm/seo

If you just wanted all my wonderful delicious bookmarks, including all things Star Wars, Gardening, and recipes, you would use:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/davidzimm
http://www.delicious.com/v2/rss/davidzimm

In case delicious changes this URL format, I’ll keep you up to date in this post. I would also love to see the new “Stacks” feature have an RSS feed. This would be a great way to share content about a topic (like the SEO stack I’ve created).

The reason delicious RSS feeds are so important to me, is because I use them to populate and archive useful links I share through my Twitter account (@dizzySEO). Here’s how I do it.

1. When I find a great SEO article (that I want to reference later or don’t have time to read at this moment) I bookmark it in delicious.
2. I take the RSS feed from my delicious bookmarks (tagged “SEO”) and give it to TwitterFeed.
3. TwitterFeed is set up to send the links to my Twitter account automatically, trickling them in the stream throughout the day.

This way I have the following advantages:

1. I have an archive of helpful SEO articles in my delicious account
2. I have a useful Twitter account about SEO- sharing useful information about SEO (at least I hope so).
3. Because I have shared them through Twitter, I consequently have a helpful paper.li account about SEO with a summary of the content I’ve shared every day.

If you come to the SEMCLT meeting next Thursday, September 1st, you can hear me opine verbosely about social media and search.

My goal is to try to bring some rationality to this discussion. I’ll talk about good methodology to determine whether or not social affects search and what we definitely know about the relationship between the two. I want to bring some clarity to this discussion so we don’t jump to conclusions but instead work with what we really know.

You might also learn why on earth I would title this blog post with such unusual verbage.

The other day Twitter killed my Twitter app.

This isn’t a post written by someone who is bitter and angry. It is from someone who loves Twitter and really enjoys developing with the Twitter API. As a Twitter fan-boy I also want to see Twitter continue to grow and advance. The problem is that I have notice a trend- Twitter taking ideas from independent developers and integrating them into their own service, rendering our apps obsolete.

Now you might argue, perhaps rightly, that Twitter should have been fulfilling the same service my app provided from the beginning. In fact, my app really only was a work-around for Twitter’s own limitations- and didn’t effectively do much. Still, one site ranked it among the top-ten Twitter apps of 2010 and at least one of my users thinks that FeedTwit was better than Twitter’s current solution. If I was more cynical, on the other hand, I would think that Twitter sold someone the exclusive rights to do what my app already did.

At the same time, my app wasn’t the only pirated independent Twitter app recently. I used to love http://tweetree.com/ – but Twitter integrated so many of their ideas into New Twitter that there is no advantage to using them any longer.

My point: it is not in Twitter’s interest to keep pirating ideas from its developers.

Why Twitter should encourage independent developers

1. Encourages creative thinking and innovation- this is perhaps the biggest advantages for Twitter in rolling out the API to independent developers, like me. However, when Twitter takes our ideas and integrates them into their service, they take away the reason for us to innovate. Why should I put a year and a half into developing my Twitter app when I can be afraid that suddenly Twitter will make my app obsolete?
2. Independent data- my app provided valuable, independent data from my users. In my case I could tell you what time of day or what day of week people were most active on Twitter. This was useful not only to marketers- to know when to share their message to receive the most eyes, but also to other developers- to know when to shut down their apps for service. I can’t provide this valuable information any longer.
3. Less for them to support- my Twitter app was far from perfect. It seems there was always something going wrong or breaking. One time, while testing, I even accidentally sent 10,000 DM’s (and accompanying text messages) to my personal cell phone. But if I spend my time on working through these issues, Twitter can instead focus on providing a stable network which benefits everyone.

What should Twitter do instead?

1. Keep it simple- I personally think the Twitter website should be very simple (like before New Twitter). Let independent developers customize its use based upon the laws of supply and demand: if an idea is good it will survive, if not, it will die. I understand why Twitter would want to innovate on their own website: fewer and fewer people are using Twitter.com and they will (eventually) need eyes on their website if they ever want to make money from advertising on their web page. Let me propose another means of generating revenue- charge developers for white-listing their app. This would allow people to develop apps to a certain point and then force us to monetize it in order to pay for the white-listing.
2. Keep it broad- recently Twitter has said its going to discontinue supporting XML. Previously it has threatened to devalue RSS. With limitations like this it not only requires developers to limit the ways they can interact with the API but it limits which developers can participate (without learning a different way of interfacing with the API). Why would Twitter want to put all their eggs into one coding basket?
3. Keep it consistent- recently Twitter identified that it was going to run out of numbers to represent each particular status. The fix to this was called “snowflake” and it was a real fiasco. Many apps broke (including my own) despite Twitter’s warnings to make sure “snowflake” wouldn’t affect it- I didn’t think it would, but I ended up being wrong. A lot of heartbreak could be solved if they simply used the versioning system they have already built into their API. This would have kept an API consistent through the transition to larger status IDs.

What is my next step?

Back to square one. I initially called my app FeedTwit because it was designed to convert RSS feeds into Twitter direct messages. Only after I rolled this out did I realize most people were using it to convert their Twitter mentions into DMs  (and then text messages). Now I am back to only supporting RSS feeds. Even if there isn’t nearly as much interest as before, you could still use FeedTwit to:

• Get notifications of mentions for other Twitter accounts you manage.
• Keep up with a Twitter list
• Keep up with other social networks, for instance LinkedIn, through your Twitter account.
• Get news, weather, and even traffic reports to your cell phone by Text message, from your Twitter account.
• Track a keyword or hashtag discussions on Twitter.
• Take any RSS/Atom feed and send it to your Twitter account as a direct message.

UPDATE: Apparently the FTC is now investigating: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-01/ftc-said-to-have-begun-antitrust-inquiry-into-twitter-s-developer-policies.html

UPDATE: Yet another idea Twitter “borrowed” from third-party developers: http://support.twitter.com/articles/20075772

How have you seen Twitter take over ideas from independent developers? Am I being too harsh on the Twitter API team? Add your comments below.

Help me out with a couple comments (or even a Re-Tweet) and you might just get a little reward!

Recently FeedTwit, my Twitter app that sends users Twitter RSS feeds by direct messages has started offering Groupon deals to my users. Why?

1. Groupon offers great deals in many cities throughout the United States and Canada. These deals can save you anywhere from 50% to 90% off the regular price.
2. Groupon is a fun way to explore your own town. Groupon deals range from restaurants to services to local events.
3. Groupon is perfect for people participating in a social network, such as Twitter, because we only get the deal if enough people take advantage of the deal. If we were to use our Twitter accounts to promote the deal we can insure that we all get the benefits. Please share these deals to your heart’s content!
   • Share over Twitter using the Twitter button on the page
   • Share over Facebook with the “Like” button on the page. If you add a comment your friends will be able to see it and participate as well
4. I gotta pay the bills. Let’s face it, it costs me money to provide FeedTwit to my users. I’ve really struggled on how to fund this service in a way that is unobtrusive or obnoxious. Groupon is fun and offers my users a good opportunity. It’s a win-win situation.

So- help support FeedTwit while you get great deals in your home town by signing up and participating in a Groupon deal. You can even use FeedTwit to notify you of each day’s Groupon deal for your city. Which cities have Groupon deals? See for yourself and be sure to share them with your friends!

Have you taken advantage of a Groupon deal yet? What was your experience? Is this a fair way for me to cover my FeedTwit expenses? Add your thoughts, below, in the comments