You may well have noticed over the past few days that Twitter now appends the majority of URL’s with http://t.co/ followed by a generated shortlink.

You can understand the reasoning behind it, twitter has applied the rel=”nofollow” markup to their links for quite a while now to horde the link juice, not all of it but enough of it.

But third party sites would pull our streams from their API and regenerate them with nofollow gone so there was a small advantage if you were to include the full URL to sites http://www.seobegin.com would resolve as a full link across all of those other sites that you had added a stream for.

Now the emergence of the http://t.co short links have appeared that is no longer the case, or is it?

Mouseover the new shortlinks and the title attribute (title=”") shows the original URL, this is all that is left of your link sharing, this is the benefit left to search marketers.

Away from marketing itself Edward Lewis (@Pageoneresults) raised a very valid point, what if the mouseover did not resolve the original URL?

Well, do YOU trust me?

Do we trust each other that much to click on these shared links when we have no idea where they go to?

Twitter t.co Trust Factor?

I for one choose who I follow very carefully but even I can not be 100% confident that the link you are sharing with me is going to be safe.

One hacked account can spread like wildfire, we have seen it many many times, from DM spam through to completely compromised timelines, this has just handed back the initiative to these spammers, well done twitter.

So where does Google+ come in?

Google+ is still finding its feet figuratively speaking, the long awaited brand pages for business are here and I am already seeing a benefit for client sites through updating their brand page, although the vanity URL’s and naming conventions are not exactly the way we would want them to be, I am already seeing huge benefits in engagement for the brand a definite positive and an increased leaning towards the brand pages for business over sharing a link via 140.

How to increase the brand exposure on Google+ Business pages

Firstly the blog is the usual mechanism and trigger behind it all and I have found a huge leaning towards regularly updated brand blogs along with the correct author markup. (Thanks hugely to AJ Kohn for the help with that).

Once you have your author pages marked up correctly and if they are not already have your contributors signed up with their own personal Google+ accounts. Following that set up your Google+ business page and add all of your +authors to your “About” within your brand, this along with connecting to other relevant business pages within your niche sends all of the right signals and within a couple of weeks (if not sooner) your Google+ Brand Page updates are their for your potential customers to see.

Google Plus update in the SERP

It is still the very beginning for Google+ and I am not sounding the death nell for twitter by any means, but when it comes to trust and sharing I want to know where your links are coming from and when it comes to search marketing I believe twitter has just handed Google+ the edge.

One final thing I would like to share is that it will be the first anniversary of the tragic passing of Jaamit Durrani and his close friend Rishi has shared details of his memorial service;

Memorial Fri 25th 1pm Gunnersbury Cemetery then Abadan Restaurant on Northfields Avenue

Get in touch with Rishi to let him know if you are attending

It has been stewing in my head for quite a while but I could never quite put my finger on it metaphorically speaking, but SEO certification is never going to happen, sure you could probably run a course in the fundementals but a full blown course covering everything from learning HTML through to distinguishing link patterns and separating the shite and chaff from the shine is not going to stand still while you figure out your methods.

The true learning of how to implement SEO along with best practices for SEM is learned over a period of years… I am still learning more than a decade later, don’t get me wrong I know what I am doing and I achieve the desired results for my clients, probably not at the scale I and they would like, but I get there.

This all did not come about by fluking it, it took a lot of learning in the field, building my own sites, testing them, fucking them up and testing new ones while learning from my experiences. It has me at a stage right now where you get a “Feel” for a new site the first time you visit it, that “feel” comes from experience, time served experience in both learning from the mistakes you have made, learning from the mistakes of others (after testing them) and all the while staying on top of developments and keeping your clients sites moving in the right direction.

It is a very hard metaphor to translate into the written word, but you do come to a point where your first instinct when visiting a site whether you have anything to do with it or not is to get a look at the source code, navigate your way to the robots.txt critique the navigation while inwardly thinking “I would have done that differently”.

And that is precisely my point, time served SEO’s will have a “feel” for a site long before they even get to the code, they just “know”. They know this because they have spent loooong nights looking at code, writing code, watching the effects both good and bad.

So how are we to distinguish between those new to SEO that have not had the time in the field and those that bang the drum?

Candidates walking into an interview would not get far by proclaiming “I Feel SEO”, they would receive a kind of look with head tilted to one side that would suggest “this guy is crackers”. Personally I would sit them in front of a machine and ask them to create 3 simple pages coding HTML using Notepad from a short list of topics the candidate could choose from.

Sounds simple right? It can’t be that simple, but as a potential employer looking to train a new search marketer in my team, that’s how I would approach it. From there I would scale a series of the fundamentals.

This is to me not a clearer indication of what an SEO is or even does because my methods are not the same as other freelancers, agencies and consultants. For all I may have been around a while even I would find it difficult to walk into an agency and fit right in, I would have to adapt and learn their processes and ways of approach, our fundamentals are essentially the same but in many ways a world apart. But we both could approach a new site and objectively have a “feel” for it pretty much instantly, within seconds. You can’t teach that. It’s learned with time.

We all know sharing is caring, who I follow and who follows me really is a large concentration of people within the internet marketing industry. Every day we see fresh content in our streams and since we are all at different stages within our careers what may be old news to you is a fresh new avenue to discover for others. I decided I would gauge what kind of engagement I would receive by feeding SEO news directly into my twitter stream.

How did I do it?

Firstly I needed a reliable source of steady fresh news, I do have my own decks for this but on this occasion I used the RSS feed for the slashtag /seoblogs within Blekko. I know this to be a healthy and monitored slashtag because I am an associate editor along with 6 others including Tad Chef.

Next I would need a way to feed the RSS into Twitter, there are quite a few tools out there to do this but after playing with it previously on other projects I settled on Dlvr.it (free), this has an array of features like scheduling, adding content pre & post message, hashtagging, tweet stats etc. All the usual suspects. I opted for the clean and simple “Just post the latest message with the shorty URL”.

What Was My Aim?

If I am honest I did not have an overall aim beyond seeing how engaged my following was with the content I was sharing from resources they may have never come across before, I knew the content I was sharing was actually relevant to those that followed.

How Did it Turn Out?

In the week of testing the most popular posts clicked via my sharing from my first tweet to my last were;

• Google Biggest Ever Update – Greenlight (34 Clicks)
• Live from #SMX East – Google Survivor Tips – Search Marketing Sage (19 Clicks)
• What’s that tweet worth – Analytwics have arrived – Tamar (15 Clicks)
• Best Free Broken Link Checker Tools – Check Web Site for Broken Links (14 Clicks)
• Hot At Sphinn – Quitting Your SEO Career, SEOs Still Buy Links & More (13 Clicks)

More Numbers

Beyond those 80 clicks to posts there were a total of 314 clicks from 197 tweets.

I did see an increase in followers.

Increased followers (via Crowdbooster)

While not a huge fan of Klout there was an increase in “Influence score”. How much stock you put into Klout is up to you, but I know some of you take an interest.

Increase in Klout score (via Klout)

Conclusions
Along the way I did manage to bookmark a few of the articles that I was auto-tweeting and some will go in the end of year round up, I would never have discovered some of the great content being posted and have found new reading resources that I may also be adding to SEO Bloggers.

Funnily enough along the way I also noticed @Graywolf making reference to sharing content from other sources beyond your own self promotion (from SMX) and something along the lines of sharing 15-20% of others content, I may have over egged the pudding a little but I can see exactly where he is coming from and with a modicum of control you too can share the content by setting up your sources to a similar percentage from your trusted sources of SEO info and share it with me!

How did you find my sharing along the way? Useful?

Where do I stay updated on all of the latest SEO information doing the rounds or the juicy golden nuggets that go on to be a part of my SEO best practices?

If I am not conducting research of my own into seeing what works and what what doesn’t via my vanity domain or on here I would ordinarily have kept up to date via Google Reader. Great at what it is Google reader is a few more clicks and a login and yet a few more clicks away from where I want to get at the info. Like most SEO’s a good chunk of time is staying up to date in our industry and so it made perfect sense to create (& curate) a site full of my regular SEO haunts and resources and so SEO Bloggers was born.

I am not expecting to turn this into a site to grab SERP’s, it’s a one page site after all and just full of links fed via RSS. It is what it is a resource nothing more or less. It’s you lot behind it anyway, I just have you all in one place and can skin read the latest posts. In all honesty I am as guilty as most & don’t update too often when it comes to blogging & even when I venture outside of the domains I control to guest blog for the occasional site, it is a rare outing.

I don’t intend to build the site into a monster directory even I don’t have the time to read that much. So in short it will be a curated list of sites, nothing fancy.

Go and have a look: http://seobloggers.co.uk

SEO Company Directory

A short and sweet post but, you may have noticed me tweeting about a new SEO Company Directory that myself and Doc Sheldon have put together. It does not get much simpler. Go and add your SEO services!

You delve into Google Analytics on occasion and you marvel at how visitors are finding your website with words you would never have dreamed of using yourself and you may think how?

This could lead you into investigating further which will eventually lead you on to the right path to turning your online presence into an even more competitive proposition.

All of a sudden you notice a dramatic drop in visitors to your site, you understand the basics of how search works and you know that those visitors to your site have taken a dive, dramatic enough to have you scratching your head and thinking why?

You have done nothing with your site since it was launched, you have added content day after day or whenever time allowed. From what is already a stressful situation in managing every other aspect of your business, you don`t have time to go looking for the whys, to begin with if you have never even delved into SEO, so how are you supposed to know you have some kind of duplicate content or paid link penalty? Do you even know what they are? Who would tell you if you had?

You are not alone, and in all probability that number is growing, there are an estimated;

• 6.9 Billion people on the planet
• 2.1 Billion of those have internet access

Of those 2.1 Billion internet users there are an estimated 129 Million+ domains. That number would increase furthermore if you also consider that there are currently 306 TLD`s. So a conservative estimate of 200 million+ commercial websites if we take into account country specific TLD`s.

So the potential of 2.1 Billion consumers worldwide with a rough estimate of 9 Million active site owners serving content across 100 Million active websites.

Those numbers fall down fairly quickly because there is currently no published data on how many active site owners there are on the planet. It would be a very hard number to accomplish or conclude, hence an estimate.

Now consider that of those commercial websites there will be quite a few of those estimated 9 million site owners competing in the same search spaces of travel, financial, gaming etc at any level of SEO. Does that leave more than 191 Million websites left untouched by any kind of SEO? or from another angle less than 1 in 20 websites are even aware of what SEO is?

There is a point to this post, hang in there.

I suggested that not every business owner online has either time nor inclanation that SEO exists. So what happens when a major search engine tweaks their algorithm, which results in re-ranking of sites based on factors to counter act spam efforts. Yes there will always be collateral damage to sites.

My main concern though is that of the collateral damage, what of the site owners that had no clue that they were supposed to use a “nofollow” on a paid link, or that they have canonical issues because they have 40 product pages that look the same to the spiders crawling there site.

How many site owners go beyond the use of their free Google Analytics package and even enable Webmaster Tools?
What of the sites that do not even use an analytics package at all? As a business owner you may want to look into integrating Google Analytics or any number of other paid or free analytics packages.

How about a simple message from within GA to notify site owners that there has been a change to the guidelines or an update to the algorithm that may effect how they could be found in organic search. Again this would be helpful to the reported 12 million sites that are using GA.

Thoughts?