iWebEarth

As real-time search and Twitter’s growing importance in producing valuable information is getting into the mainstream, Bing is joining the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter in bringing real-time search feature in their respective search algorithms. Starting today, Bing will be integrating more real-time data into its search results, beginning first with tweets of famous people – bloggers or celebrities.

While this may be a welcome development, this new feature is somewhat limiting though. To get the tweets of this “prominent” people, you will have to construct your search terms like – “Name Twitter” or “Name Tweets” or “@Name”, where name is the Twitter account of the person. The thing is how many famous people use their full name as their Twitter username? Or how many users do their search on web search engine just to get these people’s latest Tweets?

It would have been great if Bing (or the other search engines for that matter) will start indexing the Twitter stream and display Tweets along with the other web data that they crawl and display as search results. That’s more like a “real-time” search, right?

Anyway, this could be a good start though. As the Bing community blog explained via a post:

We’re not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search. We’d love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Bing Starts Indexing Twitter Updates, Sort Of

Yesterday Twitter sneakily unveiled a new user interface for both the “followers” and “following”.  While I personally believe that their efforts could have been better spent on stabilizing their servers and working out those infamous “overcapacity” issues, the change is a good one. 

First of all, let’s go over the changes that they made.  On your list of “Followers” and those that you are “Following”, Twitter used to display the person’s avatar and username, and the option to follow.  Little other identifiable information was presented, so if you wanted to find out more about the person you’d have to click on their name and check out their page. 

Now, when you view “Followers” or “Following”, you’re presented with a lot more information, almost eliminating the need to click over to the person’s page to get the full scoop on them.  Now you’ll see not only their avatar and username, but also their real name, latest tweet and location.  On the righthand side where the “Follow” button used to be, there’s now a new button.  Click on it and you’re presented with several action options:  @ Mention xxxx, Direct Message xxxx,  Follow xxxx, and Unfollow xxxx.  So it’s nice in that there’s a lot more information available in one place and there’s less clicking involved.

Here’s a quick peek at my “Followers” page so you can see the changes (click to view full size):

What’s this mean for search engine optimization?  Well, we all know by now that SEO is far more than just link building.  It’s also a lot of marketing, and if you’re on Twitter it’s an excellent way to market your website.  I was a little late in the game getting my site involved with Twitter, but not too late, and it is definitely paying off in terms of gaining new traffic, new loyal readers, new readers, and even some advertisers.  It also helps us to connect with our readers in a way that’s just not possible through comment forms on our site alone.  This UI update really helps to save time in checking out potential followers, or people you want to follow, especially if you’re constantly bombarded with new followers or manually hunt for new ones to follow yourself.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Twitter Unveils New UI; What This Means for SEO

On Tuesday Digg announced that they were finally rolling out some major updates to their duplicate detection technology, and let’s be honest – it’s about time!  The technology they had in place before was hardly reliable.

The way that it used to work is that you’d go ahead and insert your URL and all the details for the story you were submitting, and then after you had done all that, Digg would ask you if you were sure it wasn’t a duplicate.  Along with that it would show you a list of stories that it thought could be similar to yours.  Many were not the slightest bit related, and some were submitted days, weeks, or even months ago.  Nevertheless, if you assured Digg that your link was in fact NOT a duplicate (even if it was), you could proceed and submit your link.

According to Digg, and Brent Csutoras, they’ve updated the way that their software looks for duplicates.  They said that most commonly the types of duplicate stories being submitted were the same stories from the same site, but with different URLs.  So solve this problem, they devised a solution that will identify these duplicates using a document similarity algorithm.  In other words, it is now capable of identifying identical content from the same source.

Another issue is the same or similar story covered on different sites.  Here’s where things get a little trickier.  Digg claims that they’ve worked on doing a better job at detecting duplicates with similar descriptive information.  Their software will not match stories with similar titles and descriptions with a higher level of accuracy.  This doesn’t sound like it’s the perfect solution, but any improvement is better than what  they had before. 

The order of submitting information has also been altered.  Before Digg would not check for duplicates until you had entered your URL and all the descriptive information, so if there were duplicates you wouldn’t find out until you’d wasted several minutes of your time. Now it will check for duplicates immediately after your URL entry, but before you enter descriptive information.

These changes are still being perfected, so during the pilot period now Digg will continue to only block submissions of the exact same URLs within a 30 day period.  They will also monitor when Digg users bypass high-confidence duplicates.

If helps fight the never-ending barage of spam, progress is a good thing.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Digg Rolls Out Revamped Content Duplication Detection Technology

SEOquake addon developers continue to impress us with always new awesome tools. This time they are launching a new one called SEOpivot.

This tool finds your site most promising keywords by looking at your site current Google rankings and identifying most powerful words that your site already ranks high enough. In a way, the tool works the way I described in a previous article on doing keyword research for an established site.

Our report will show you all keywords, for which any URL of your domain ranks high enough to get into TOP100 Google Search results, as well as how much traffic you’ll get if you improve the position of the URL we found on interesting keyword.

Each report looks exactly like this:

where:

• Potential stands for the amount of traffic you are going to get after reaching the top position (potential = traffic the first position brings – traffic you are getting now);
• Position stands for your current Google ranking;
• Average search volume (monthly traffic).

The index is limited but it is large enough to give you very useful data:

We studied TOP100 Google Search results for 500 thousands of most high-frequent keywords and received information on more than 3 400 000 domains.

The tool was reviewed under SEJ policy.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

SEOpivot: Find Your Site Most Promising Keywords

When the news about Michael Jackson’s death broke out, it was TMZ who scooped it beating other news outlets and was quoted as a source throughout Twitter, Facebook, traditional media and various online properties.

As a result, Hitwise numbers are showing that TMZ’s site traffic on that day was able to achieve a 3 year all-time high. The news created a spike and brought a 5x increase in volume as compared to the previous day’s site traffic.The incident even surpassed the 18% market share of TMZ site visits when it featured photos of controversial singer Rihanna badly beaten and bruised. Overall, TMZ became the 60th most visited site on the day of Michael Jackson’s death. A day before that event, TMZ’s site visit was ranked 305th in terms of market share.

But perhaps the best result that came out from this incident was the fact that it gave TMZ around 61% new unique visitors.

From an SEO perspective, the blog post that broke the news has over 12,000 incoming links. I wonder how TMZ will be taking advantage of that link equity?

Right after other “established” news sources beat TMZ in page visits. Yahoo! News, CNN, MSNBC, and Google all received some good spike in terms of site visits from fans and onlookers wanting to find the latest development in the cause of death of MJ. Both MSNBC and CNN got the highest page visits on Thursday, registering 67% and 64% increase respectively.

And that goes to show our dear readers the importance of being the first to report any controversial item on the Internet – be it in the form of news or blog posts.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Michael Jackson Death : TMZ Traffic Surge Numbers

Expect more of these kinds of post in the next couple of days as search analysts will be on the lookout for statistics on Bing’s first month of operation. The latest of these data is coming from StatCounter which is reporting that Microsoft’s search market share went up to 8.5% one month after Bing’s launch.

Although Bing’s  market share is still miles away from Google’s , Microsoft would be glad to know that part of  the increase from previous month’s 7.81% to this month’s 8.5% seemed to have been taken from Google’s market share.

Google’s market share drop a few notch from 78.72% to 78.48. While Yahoo’s market share increased from 10.99% to 11.04%.

Interestingly, during its first month of operation, Bing’s market share was not steadily increasing. It had its peak during the first week after launch before dropping during the middle two weeks of June and then finally rising again during the last week.

While this may seem good news for Microsoft, it’s still too early to tell whether Bing could sustain its momentum and continue to get some more market share.  Let’s wait until other Internet analytics reports come out in the coming days and compare this report to see whether Bing is really registering positive numbers.

In the meantime, let us allow Microsoft and the whole Bing team to rejoice for the fruits of their hard labor.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Bing Gets a Slight Increase in Market Share

Flickr has just introduced a new feature that it should have done long ago – Flickr2Twitter. If you use Flickr, this new feature would allow you to post uploaded photos directly from your Flickr to your Twitter account. Flickr2Twitter will create a shortened URL for your photo and post this as Tweet to your Twitter account.

To use this feature, you would need to authorize Flickr to access your Twitter account. You will only need to do this once. After you’ve allowed Flickr to use your Twitter credential, a new option in Twitter’s “Blog This” option will now include your Twitter account. Flickr would also give you the chance to compose the 140 character Tweet then append the URL of your photo.

The Flick team also announced that mobile posting of photos from Flickr to Twitter is now also possible. All you need to do is to enable your Upload by Email settings in Flickr. Once this is enabled, you can post photos from your Flickr account to your Twitter account by sending the photo or video to the unique Flickr email upload address plus “2Twitter”.

Flickr2Twitter  is a nice feature that  will surely benefit both Twitter and Flickr but more so for Flickr as Twitter’s popularity will ricochet to Yahoo’s photo uploading service. And yes, this in a way adds a new lease of life to Flickr.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Flickr Rolls Out Twitter Integration Feature

With Google Chrome threatening its dominance in the browser arena, Firefox certainly has got many things to consider to prevent Google’s browser from inching in closer in terms of popularity and user base. At the rate things, it seems like the Firefox folks have done their job as they are releasing Firefox 3.5.

But you’ve probably downloaded Firefox 3.5 and have used it since its first RC… So, while we await for the next stable release of Firefox 3.5, like the Firefox team, we might as well ponder on what could be in store for Firefox 3.6. aka Firefox.net, codenamed Namoroka.

Mashable’s Josh Catone enumerated some of the top priority changes that we might see in Firefox 3.6 which is scheduled for release sometime in 2010.

• Better Performance
• More Personalization and Customization Feature
• New Navigation feature
• Improved Web App Support
• Taskfox
• Enhanced Session Management
• Customizable Browser
• Better Identity Management
• New Tab Page

The Firefox Team must no rest on their laurels. There are certainly many work that needs to be done. The browser war is getting hotter now as rival browsers are gearing up to outsmart each other in features, performance and speed.

Hopefully Firefox 3.6 will answer these issue and put a mark on Firefox dominance in the browser market.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Firefox 3.6 in 2010? Namoroka!

Sharing stories on social voting and bookmarking sites both grows your social media profile power and enables you to reach your audience. Surprisingly enough, being one of the most important element of the story success, proper tagging is very often overlooked.

Let me first make it clear why you should do at least some research on relevant tagging before sharing the story:

• Relevant tags ensure your story is seen (found) by people interested in the topic;
• Proper targeting ensures your story is voted for, hence you have more chances to get it hot;
• Relevant tags make it less probable you will be attacked by social community trolls (yes, most popular communities do have them).

StumbleUpon has one of the most intricate network of tags and categories – so let me share how to use correct ones: make sure to use tags popular within the community (using relevant keywords isn’t enough).

1. Identify a few main keywords associated with the story;

2. Run Google search for [site:stumbleupon.com keyword];

3. Find SU submissions of the stories on similar topic:

4. Open a couple of them and check if they were popular (StumbleUpon stars are good indicators of popularity):

5. See what tags it was shared in:

You are done! Use these (add yours too!) tags when submitting the story.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

StumbleUpon Tip: Use Google to Choose the Best Category and Tags

The overwhelming winner in my 30 day poll was “Bike to work” so that’s what I’m doing during the month of July. In the third week of July I’ll be out in Boston to speak at SIGIR, but any time I’m heading into the Googleplex during July, I’m planning to bike there.

Is there something good for yourself that you’ve been meaning to do? Why not try it for 30 days this month? The month will end whether you try something new or not, so why not tackle something new?