WebConnoisseur

After attending SMX Advanced (or listening in), then reading Matt’s post about no-following, many SEOs, both beginning and avanced, are running around like chicken’s with their heads cut off, scrambling to decide what to do.

The more we pin Matt down on no-follow, the more confusing things become. If you were to read Matt’s post and overreact, you might remove all your no-follows including on blog comments, turning your site into an over-crawled (spiders visiting areas they shouldn’t) and over-spammed site (users dropping tons of links in comments).

Or, if you are a bit more savvy, you might start blocking comments on your blog, iframing your footer links site-wide, or dissallowing linking on all UGC.

The key with any exposed change is to wait until the dust settles and SEOs test & share their results. If you have been using no-follows appropriately, you shouldn’t have much reason to change them now. Matt says these changes have been in place for a year, but I know for some borderline abusers of pagerank sculpting, the more noticable changes took place the past couple months.

External linking is where the greatest mistakes will be made. I would recommend against assuming Matt’s advice to stop using no-follow applies to external links as he appears to be speaking mostly about internal linking practices. I’ve asked him to clarify his stance on external linking because there are a lot of reasons why Google would prefer to heed your external no-follow instructions.

What should you do? For now, I recommend sitting tight.

Read this piece on Valleywag today about the New York Times hiring their first-ever Social Media Editor.

Here’s the NYT description of their social media editor:

One of the bracing things about this topsy-turvy media landscape is that you can wake up one morning and find yourself actually doing something you never thought you’d even think about. Take Jennifer Preston. In 25 years in the news biz, she’s been plenty of things: Reporter (cop shop, City Hall, Albany, etc.), editor (political editor, section editor, administrative editor, etc.) and even circulation marketing manager (at New York Newsday). But still, did she ever think she’d wake up one morning as “social media editor”?

No, she didn’t but yes, she did. That morning was this one.

Jennifer is our first social media editor. What’s that? It’s someone who concentrates full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers.

…She will help us get comfortable with the techniques, share best practices and guide us on how to more effectively engage a larger share of the audience on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Digg, and beyond.

Knowing the NYT has the 2nd most popular Twitter following and a great number of journalists with accounts on Twitter, I thought it would be interesting to check out who Jennifer Preston is and if I knew her from past social media events I have attended.

Turns out her Twitter account was locked, according to Valleywag. Looks like she opened it up to the public in response to the article, but she had yet to post her first tweet. I looked around for a non-NYT account for her, but didn’t find any. One place I looked was Linked in. I was shocked to see she only had 13 connections (especially for someone who works for a large publisher).

I tweeted my findings, which may have spurred her to post her first tweets (she now has 3). From my perspective, she’s got less experience with twitter, digg, youtube, blogging, etc. than any college intern I’ve ever worked with.

Either the New York Times is trying this as an experiment, or they have effectively set a very low bar for what is considered a social media expert.

As lame and as stale as many of their sites were, I still faintly remember the first GeoCities site I created in ‘96 or ‘97. I wish I could dig it up, but I have no idea what happened to it, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it were one of their better sites

Yahoo announced they’ll be closing it with no buyer, just 10 years after they bought it for $3 billion. It’s really sad Yahoo didn’t improve the service and keep up with the times.

For those who still have Geocities sites they care about, check out the Free Geocities Migration services Wetpaint has offered up.

Can’t believe how many people scratch their heads trying to figure out how to make money using twitter when the formula is so incredibly simple. If you fall into this camp, let me share a little secret with you…

How to Make $$$ Using Twitter:

Follow these simple steps.

1. Open up your twitter account
2. Click on the dialog box to create a post.
3. Hold down your shift button on your keyboard.
4. While holding the shift button, carefully click on the 4 button exactly three times.

Congrats! You’ve successfully made $$$ on Twitter. Now go tell your friends that @webconnoisseur showed you how to make money using this easy tweet this link.

One variable often overlooked that causes fluctuation in Month over Month analysis in Web Analytics data (and I suppose other sets of data) is days in the month. February is a prime example where you go from 31 days in January to only 28 in February (except leap years) resulting in an apparent 9.7% loss in traffic.

Below is a chart of assuming steady traffic, meaning the exact same amount of traffic every day for the entire year. See how wildly it swings purely due to the number of days in the month? This is important to keep in mind if you are using M/M analytics.

Use the below numbers as a reference to better understand the month-by-month day count analytics bias to help you better explain your monthly reports:

• January: 0.00%
• February: 9.68% loss (6.45% loss during leap year)
• March: 10.71% gain (6.90% gain during leap year)
• April: 3.23% loss
• May: 3.33% gain
• June: 3.23% loss
• July: 3.33% gain
• August: 0.00%
• September: 3.23% loss
• October: 3.33% gain
• November: 3.23% loss
• December: 3.33% gain

One other variable that may be overlooked is the line-up of days in the month. For some this may be the number of weekends in the month, for others it may be the number of Mondays.

Sometimes when I use Twitter, I feel like I’m Mel Gibson in the movie What Women Want. Sounds random, but stay with me here…

In What Women Want, Mel Gibson’s character can hear the thoughts of all the women around him. Sometimes the chatter is information overload and it drives Mel crazy, other times he can harness the information he’s gained and put it to good use.

Twitter is much like the voices in Mel’s head in the movie, only the voices come from other Twitter users who are predominantly online marketers, consultants, and pr professionals. If you follow too many people, you will go insane. If you follow or surround yourself with the right people, you will gain valuable insights.

It’s important to know what your goals are with Twitter. Is it tapping into the minds of fellow marketers? Or maybe a particular segment? Are you looking to join a certain conversation? Whatever your goal is, make sure the majority of the people you follow match that goal.

If you’d like to add one more voice in your head, follow me @webconnoisseur.

If you are on Facebook and haven’t had the pleasure of reading a 25 Random Things About Me note about one of your friends yet, you are missing out. Normally not a fan of chain letters or tagging memes, I will admit the 25 Things activity on Facebook is fascinating.

History of Facebook 25 Things Notes
Facebook notes were launched on August 22, 2006, but didn’t receive heavy usage until 2009 thanks to a new viral phenomenon that started off as “25 Random Things About Me.” Memes using notes on Facebook are nothing new, entire websites have been put together to catalog and inspire various memes-most as lame as the emails that have been going around for over a decade.

The Velocity of 25 Things
The earliest entries I can find via various search tools for 25 Things is mid-January. I really saw it taking off in my personal network starting in February. Using Google trends, I compared 25 Things searches to searches for an older site people might be familiar with: 43 Things.

As you can tell from the chart, 25 things searches increased rapidly, easily overshadowing 43 Things despite the fact that users won’t find Facebook notes entries doing this search, nor will they find definitive information about the origins of it.

How to Find 25 Things Notes
If you do want to find all your friends 25 things postings, I suggest you follow these steps:

1. Login to Facebook and make sure you are on the main page (click Home if you are not sure).
2. Click the drop down arrow for more feeds (blue arrow next to live feed button)
3. Choose notes.
4. Scroll down and you will likely see activity around 25 Things postings.
5. Click show more posts at the very bottom if you want to look for more postings.

Facebook 25 Things Learnings
There are things we can all learn from Facebook’s 25 Things success:

• Patience is important in business. Facebook could have easily scrapped notes long ago due to low activity.
• Never underestimate user-generated content.
• Viral successes are often luck
• Providing a platform where UGC viral successes can happen is important

I noticed a lot of people commenting on how Facebook didn’t make sense to them until they started reading other people’s 25 Things posts - this simple meme has created an amazing amount of value for Facebook and their traffic reflects it:

I wrote a guest post over and IndieGoGo, a cool fund raising and awareness tool for filmmakers, on the topic of using SEO (and SEM) to attract an audience for your film.

Here’s a teaser:

Making a film is a big enough challenge in itself, but if you are like most low-budget independent filmmakers, you’ll quickly discover that finding an audience for your film can be even more challenging.

Outside of widely known marketing methods like submitting to festivals, inviting people to special screenings, and attempting to make friends on social networks, most filmmakers fail in allowing their audience find them on their own.

Read the rest of the post: Build Your Film’s Audience Using Search Engines

Caught this today when performing a search for other engines while on Yahoo. First time I’ve seen an engine attempt to keep their users from jumping to another engine, which is very common practice as indicated by my Actual Top 10 Search Terms of 2006 post.

I was performing a search for MSN search (or “Live”) in Yahoo because I didn’t have it in my Firefox search dropdown.

Here’s what I saw:

I wasn’t paying very close attention and started typing in my search into the Yahoo shortcut search box shown above. Notice it says: “You could go to MSN. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers.”

I can’t recall seeing this before, so I decided to see if they were doing the same thing to Google (which has got to be one of the 10 most popular search terms on Yahoo):

Again, notice it says: “You could go to Google. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers.”

Seems strange to have a Yahoo shortcut for something you were already immersed in. What do you think about this? Is it right? Would Yahoo be pissed if Microsoft or Google did the same?

It’s official. Check out the winners and runner-ups for the 2008 Mashable Open Awards:

• People’s Choice Winners
• Bloggers Choice Winners

Note: I was one of the bloggers to help chose the blogger award winners

I suggest you take a look through the list, you might discover some interesting sites or services you may not have discovered before - I know I discovered a few new sites going through the judging process.