Alex Dumitru / Sandossu

I am a relatively active Twitter user and my native language is Romanian, because I live in Romania, but I also have a lot of foreing followers. The problem is that I talk to my romanian followers in Romanian and with the other in English. I’m not sure if the Romanian ones are very disturbed, because most of them can speak English, but I’m sure the others are when I’m Twitting in Romanian.

So the idea is Twitter should allow me to group my followers, so I can Twit in english to a public group, that everyone can see and in Romanian for my followers from Romanian.

I’m sure this would be useful for a lot of users and not only for language, but for example a singer would like to Twit his fans about his upcoming concerts and his friends about the club or party he’s going to go tonight. There can be a lot of examples, just use your imagination.

I would really love this feature to be added. What do you think ?

Google has just made public it’s voting-based SearchWiki so now you can upvote, comment,  or remove any result from the SERP. For the moment it only seems to affect the voting user’s rankings and not the whole SERP, so you don’t have to worry.

In the future there are many chances Google will use this voting system in it’s algorithm to rank websites, but it surely won’t base on this too much, because it’s much easier to game than using older techniques.

We shall see in the future what they have in mind, it might be a totally mess and take it out, but nothing’s sure.

Here’s a snapshot:

Technology News

Today me and almost everyone I asked noticed changes in SERPs on a lot of keywords and the strange thing is that the positions have changed for almost all websites in the query and the quality, trusted ones went down with up to hundreds of positions, while new websites, with no inbound links jumped to the first positions.

I talked a lot about this today with a lot of people and we didn’t manage to get to a conclusion, because if the SERP remains like this, Google’s relevancy ends today. There are many querys where all quality websites went down and new, spam, and irrelevant websites took their place.

Considering the conditions and ways Google updated it’s SERPs today, I will have to call this the “Google Shaker”, because it seems like Google introduced the SERP in a shaker and shaked it.

“Google Shaker” seems to happen much more in local searches more than on Google.com. Until now I have seen many people complaining that Google.ro, Google.ru, and Google.co.uk is totally screwed up.

I thought all day at this and researched especially on Google.ro, being the country I live in and it might be a mistake, a Halloween joke or a test, because the SERPs definitely can’t remain this way. Other way, Google’s relevancy is gone, at least in those countries and a lot of CEOs will run mad, along with us, the SEOs, because our clients will be more than angry.

I would love to get your feedback on this and maybe we can find an explanation and a solution. Did Google really changed the algorithm in such a drastic way ?

A new version of wordpress, the script this blog is running on, is preparing to be released. The 2.7 Wireframes version comes with a lot of new features, that allow you to change your admin interface structure, fixes some bugs, but I’m sure that like any new version that comes out, it has many other new bugs.

I will not install it yet, but wait for 2.7.1 or so, that should be more bugg-free.

Read more

Google has just started testing ads in the Image Search, but this was an expected movement, because the image search is very expensive to upkeep, for sure. Currently, it must be in a beta phase, because the ads rarely appear and I don’t see a menu in my Adwords that allows me to place that ads.

I’m sure affiliate marketers can’t wait to try them, even if the image ads conversion is lower than the text ads. Though, the advantage is that the ad also includes text, below an image. Fortunately, the image has an yellow background and above it is the text “sponsored image” so the users won’t click them by mistake. But I’m not that sure they won’t, especially they didn’t expect them to be there.

Once launched, we shall see the advertisers experiences on conversions, but I’m confident they won’t be combarable with the text ads in search.

Take a look at the ads

StumbleUpon has just released a new toolbar-free version, but until now it’s only available to certain users, including me. So, if you don’t see it, don’t panic, probably they are currently testing it and it will soon be available for everyone.

The new version features a star rating for websites and a button you can place on your website where users can vote you directly. The button also shows how many votes the page has. Take a look at it:

Finally, they seem to have understood that people don’t like to spend time and are lazy, so they lost a lot by requiering them to install the toolbar. Now the toolbar is in a web version and it makes things easier, even if it’s not so feature-full as the install version. Check it out here, it might work for you too.

The website layout has also changed a lot and it offers everyone to vote a website directly from the review page, also it shows websites relevant to it.

The profile page has also changed, but not very much.

In conclusion, they seem to have done a great thing with it and the membership will definitely grow at a much faster rate that it was until now.

What do you think about it ? Do you see it already ?

It has been a busy summer for me. Firstly I had the exams after I finished highschool, then I had to go to apply to the universities in Bucharest, the capital. Then I was living in Pitesti.

Fortunately everything went excellent and I passed them all and got admitted to the university. After that I though I deserve a vacation and went to Greece ( Thassos ) for a week. After that, I had another problem: to rent an apartment in Bucharest, it was really hard to find the one I liked.

When everything seemed alright, I figured out that my very low internet activity inflicted in my profits and I ws almost broke, so I had to work a lot to get the traffic back and take care of the websites.

Now I’m back in business and I have more free time, so fortunately I will be able to update this blog more often. If you want to get noticed of my future articles, don’t hesitate to subscribe via RSS or email.

Two ex Google engineers, Tom Costello and Anna Patterson, along with a third person, Russel Power, have released a new search engine. Cuil started with 120 billion indexed pages and they stated that their new search engine has the biggest index of them all. Probably they haven’t read Google’s last post, where they say to have indexed more than 1 trillion pages, which is almost 8 times more than that.
From the tests I was able to make until it got down, it doesn’t seem very relevant and there are a lot of searches it returns no results, while other search engines do.
Cuil is a wannabe semantic search engine, understanding the meaning of words, but it’s not very good at it. Until now, I didn’t find anything I could like at it, better than Google. What I am satisfied of is the simple design.

We all know that Digg’s algorithm is very complex and they are changing it frequently, so that spammers cannot get their stories popular. Digg states that all the content is only promoted by users and they have nobody implied in the process, but this doesn’t seem to be true.

I have been an active Digg user for a while and I know a lot of other users, including power users and others. Also I read a lot of blog posts about Digg and other’s thoughts. I will try to share with you what I’ve learned until now and try to make you understand the algorithm, at least a part of it, because only they know it exactly.

Along with the algorithm, I will try to share with you some tips that will get the story dugg and to prevent it from being burried.

1. Headline
   It’s very important to write a headline that will attract the users to click on the story and visit the link. Try to make it attractive, but offer the users an idea of what the story is about. The headline depends on what category you submit the story in ( e.g If you submit it in comedy, then make it funny ).
2. Description
   Try to write an excerpt of the article in the description, so if the user isn’t convinced from the headline to click the link, to make him do it.
3. Thumbnail
   Digg now offers you the possibility to attach a thumbnail to the story. If you submit your own website, try to edit the photo to fit well in the thumb size.
4. Category
   If you submit the story in a wrong category, it’s doomed, so think well before submitting.
5. Time
   Don’t submit your story at 3AM, because nobody is using Digg at that hour and won’t be using it in the next 12 hours at least. Your story has to be up and fresh when Digg is most used and that’s starting at 5PM. There is an advantage if submitting at an hour Digg is less used, because you have lower competition, but also less votes. Before submitting it, check what part of the world it’s headed too and make sure they are awake and aren’t at work at that time.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of factors that prevent a story to get popular and I’ve figured a part of them. There are some you can deal with, while others don’t depend on you.

1. Flamers
   There are a lot of users that don’t do anything but burying all stories and posting flaming comments. Unfortunately you can do nothing about it, except submitting something that will seem perfect for them.
2. Headline, Description, Image, Category
   If you write a wrong headline or description, users might not be interested in your story and don’t even check it. Or worse, your story might get buried. Also if you submit in the wrong category, fans of that category won’t find what they were looking for and will probably bury your story.
3. Time
   If your story doesn’t get popular in the first 24 hours after submission, chances to get popular are almost null.
4. Website
   If the website is poorly designed or full of ads, it might disturb some users and leave without voting. If it’s really disturbing, it might even get buried or marked as spam.
5. Content
   The story has to be very well written, with no mistakes or typos and to say clearly what it has to say. Also pictures are very important and attract the users.
6. Moderators
   Even if Digg states that there’s nobody implied in the process, there are stories that have lots of votes and comments, being really interesting, that don’t get popular. What else could keep them from hitting the front page ?

From my experience, a story doesn’t have to be only voted positively and some buries might also help. Many votes, comments, buries and positive/negative votes on comments make a story controversial and this seems to help it a lot get popular.

Still there are stories with a lot of votes and comments that stay in the upcoming page for hours and don’t get popular – some get after many hours, some don’t at all -, in my opinion, that’s where moderators are implied. Let’s take an example: The story in the screenshot below was first in upcoming for many hours and has 332 votes with 97 comments, being submitted 23 hours earlier the sreenshot was made. This example is a lucky one, because the story got popular finally. The strange thing is that while it was just staying there, upcoming, about 20 stories got popular, some with three times less votes than this one and lesser comments.

Maybe you noticed that power users need more votes to get their stories popular. That’s because Digg’s algorithm tries to keep users away from exchanging votes and tries to offer everyone equal chances.

Now it doesn’t only count on the number of votes, but it also depends who’s the voter. If someone is voting your stories frequently and doesn’t vote many others, their vote counts less or doesn’t count at all. So you need to get your story voted by a variety of users.

Power users need more votes from two reasons. Having many fans and many stories submitted, there is a high chance that the same users vote some of their stories and this reduces the votes’ value. Also having more fans it means more chances to get their stories popular and Digg requires them more votes for this, while users with less popular stories, fans and friends need less votes.

One more thing that might keep power users from getting their stories popular with less votes is because fans’ votes might also count less.

Though this is no brainier and I didn’t offer you any secret way to suck Digg’s traffic, I hope it will help you better understand Digg and avoid making mistakes.

Please share your thoughts and opinions !

A simple SEO guideline says that you should end your urls in .htm, .html or make them as mine. Some do not follow this and end them in .php, .asp and other programming languages. It might not be as good as the ones ended in .html, but Matt Cutts say they are and there’s no problem.

Yet he stated clearly that URLs ended in .exe or .0 were not indexed at all until a few days ago. Now it seems Google does index them but we can’t be sure it gives them full trust and doesn’t penalize them.

SEOmoz has faced this problem with their Web 2.0 Awards, that had the url “http://www.seomoz.org/web.2.0″, which finished in .0 .

So take care how you format your URL to be search engine friendly and don’t get penalized.

Have you ever faced an issue with an improper formatted URL not to be indexed by Google ?