Myspace News released | is it a digg killer?

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Today I read on the daily times that myspace has released a news portion called myspace news that is a lot like digg.com. Members of the social networking site myspace will be able to vote on stories to help make them popular so more members can find them. (more…)

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Stumble Upon Releases StumbleThru | Social Media News

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On april 19th SU announces the new release of a very interesting feature called stumble thru. The new service is designed to allow you to stumble randomly through a site. For instance if you want to stumble wikipedia you can now do so.

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Stumble Upon Removes Audience Rank

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I have been missing my audience rank for about 3 days now. I started to get very suspicious of this so I started asking around. It looks like Stumble Upon has taken a page out of the book of digg and started removing factors that allow you to gauge your rank and profile power within stumble upon.

See profile picture update:

We currently still have the top stumblers page at least but I feel that may be sure to follow the audience rank and be removed. The power behind each profile seems to have stayed which is no big suprise.

I hope they bring it back because I got it up to around 6500 and I was really happy to see this number keep growing with all of the quality stumbling I have been doing. Its a nice way to be inspired to keep stumbling as petty as that sounds.

See my interview over at Web Pro News regarding the audience rank removal.

Pronet Advertising picked up the story as well. Thanks CAM!

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Looking for a list of social media sites? I have them all here.

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Over the last year a cornucopia of social media sites have sprung up. Its been hard to keep track of all of these but something that is so great about these social sites is that they encourage forward thinking, sharing information and networking all at the same time. In my mind this is one of the ways we as a society show our growth and our progressiveness. I have scoured the Internet to find a quality list of sites that incorporate a sense of socialness to them. I use a lot of these sites and will start using some that I just found. (more…)

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Mybloglog community positioning tactics

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Despite the Mybloglog Boycott I still love the idea and the widgets created by mybloglog. Its a great way for bloggers to get to know each other and to promote and FIND new and interesting blogs. Being an active member at mybloglog can help drive traffic to your site over and over again. Similarly, if you view many blogs a day like I do that also happen to have the mybloglog widget on them you are opening yourself to more exposure.

Here are some tips and tricks I have used and seen people using to gain traction and community positioning on mybloglog.com: (more…)

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Utilizing YOUMoz to gain traction and authority for your SEO company

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Around the time that I developed Rockyfied Rand had created and developed a system called YOUmoz. Youmoz is a hybrid version of the seomoz.org blog. Over the last 2 years Rand Fishkin and his blogtastic cohorts have been laying down highly informative and education posts on SEO, SEM, Internet Marketing and much more.
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I made it to the front of the technology page on Newsvine.com

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Newsvine puts me on top of their technology page within hours of my article release on the newsvine algorithm.
Well utilizing SMO to leverage traffic is a huge advantage to any campaign and knowing HOW to do this is key. I recently created a post on the possible ranking factors on newsvine.com. I examined what could possibly make a article or seed appear on the home page or sub home page for a given tag. Well I just wanted to say “I did IT!!!”.

See the image below showing where I showed up on newsvine.

So what did it take? Let me tell you the state of my profile before making it to the first page.

1) I had about 10 friends
2) I had about 2 articles submitted with 1-3 votes each and NO comments on them
3) I was a member for less then a month and a half
4) 1 person had added me to their watch list
5) Never made a story popular before

What was special about this article that got me on the home page of technology?

1) One of the most popular and well respected people on newsvine made the first comment and that created my first popular comment.
2) In a short period of time I was over 10 votes.
3) I had a large number of comments. About 10 which is pretty decent for newsvine.
4) The article was interesting and inspired controversy.

Any SMO can take this idea and apply it to other social media sites but its all about determining possible ranking factors for each social media site and doing testing, testing and doing more testing.

Somthing I would like to add is the power of seeds Vs. Articles on newsvine. Doing self promotion is against their code of honor but they do provide an area where you can upload full articles of your content. The difference between both is a seed is more like a “digg” and an article is going to be more like uploading content to article distribution sites BUT with more targeted traffic which could bleed over to other forms of traffic redirection.

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Newsvine Algorithm and potential ranking factors for exposure.

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As I do more and more social media optimization I can see that there is a pattern to most of these sites. Just like there is a pattern to SEO and Marketing (a formula … if you will). The exciting thing about all of these types of jobs is that every keyword, every site and every social media is different and gives us the opportunity to stay on our toes.

I was recently working on newsvine.com looking into how to draw traffic and how to get articles onto the first page of a given catagory. While I was looking this site over I jotted a list together of potential ranking factors for newsvine.com.

• Reputation of Profile
  • How many friends does a profile have
  • How many people have you on their watchlist
  • How long your profile has been around
  • How well your articles and or seeds have been received
  • Are a majority of users story or articles from ONE url
  • How many times a article or seed has become popular
  • Your vineacity rank
  • How many articles you have submitted and how well they have done
  • How many popular comments you have received
• Reputation of friends profile
  • How reputable a friends profile is gives weight on votes on your own post
• Comments
  • How many comments does a certain story get
  • How many positive votes do the comments get
• Submit a like story related to what has been submitted by newsvine for your specific targeted catagory.
  • A majority of links that are submitted that are related to a newsvine story tend to appear under the top seeds section
• What domain name a story is submitted from
  • A majority of “wires” come from newspaper sites and writers and do not have many comments or votes but are on the top page because of where they are submitted from.
• Groups
  • How many groups you are a member of
  • How active you are in the groups
  • how long you have been in a group
• Number of views
  • A high number of views with no votes could mean no one likes the story and subsequently your entry will never make it to a top page.
  • Length of views
• Hand Jobs
  • Just like some of the major search engines and social media sites there is a good chance they do hand jobs thanks to people like me
• Source of votes
  • Tracking IP addresses
  • Tracking browser id’s
  • Tracking login account ID’s could help newsvine keep track of vote groups who’s sole purpose is to vote, comment and help rank articles on the home page or sub page
• Follow the Code of Honor!
• The “Freshness Factor”
  • How new the article is. Older content will get pushed down eventually.

Something that I found pretty interesting is that newsvine actually gives you some sort of insight into there ranking algorithm by showing you a chart they call “vineacity”. I have posted the image below. Special thanks to Aine MacDermot for some extra insight into how newsvines ranking is determined.

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Optimizing your social media | Digg, Reddit, Netscape and MYspace

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In the last 6-12 months social media optimization has been a very highly talked about and discussed venue for traffic. Although social media sites like myspace have been around much longer then a year over the last year many internet marketers and SEO’s have been focusing their attention on marketing and gaming these sites. With the emergence of proper SMO the need to have top rankings in the SERP’s has decreased and the need to optimze content for sites like digg, myspace, redditt, newsvine etc. has become a very indemand skill.

Anyone who is an SEO/SEM should definitly know about SMO and if they are serious SEO’s they should learn how to be a SMO.

Lets take a quick look at SMO results over at shoemoney.com. Jeremy released a blog post about 10 reasons why Microsoft will aquire Yahoo! in 2007 and soon after that released his traffic stats which shows almost a 100% boost in his traffic from reaching the first page of digg. These results are being seen all over the web but the problem I see is that the boost of immediate traffic is extremely fast BUT the drop in traffic is also fast. Darren Rowse posted a pretty interesting article on how to cultivate your digg traffic into long term traffic which is a great resource for anyone looking to become successful as an SMO.

Here is a quick break down of what Darren mentioned.
-Style of Writing
-Topic of Writing
-Become a Digg User
-Comment on other key sites and blogs
-Drive Traffic to Diggable posts
-Make it easy to digg your work
-Titles and first lines are important
-Digg own stories with caution
-Celebrate Digging subtly
-Quality Content

I think this is a great list but I would like to add onto it if I may and since its my own blog I MAY!!!

-Utilize your My #1
-Notify people of a diggable story (do this with caution as to not spam people but if you have a report with some diggers it is perfectly ok to let them know of a diggable digg)
-DO NOT ask top diggers to digg for you in exchange for cash
-Becoming a member is not enough you need to become VERY active within digg.
-Comment First before you digg an article
-Get involved in community forums NOT JUST blog sites and leave comments and informative posts regarding your posts (do not spam)
-Comment back on people who leave you comments from digg.
-Comment back on comments left on your dugg articles ON DIGG.
-Be concious of the digg community as they are VERY fickle.

There are tons of social media sites out there and the first thing an SMO should do is figure out a sites algorithm. Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz.org put together a great list of ranking factors that Digg, Reddit, Netscape, and Shoutwire might use. Todd malicoat came out with a great post about how DIGG will be the next google and gave some great suggestions about how to improve digg. He also did a really great interview with web pro news with neil patel and I will post that now. Its kinda long but I loved this interview as todd and neil really gives us a play by play on how to become a SMO.

WARNING: DO NOT WATCH THIS VIDEO IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO LEARN!!!

By the way if you are looking to create a site like this you can use PLIGG which is a content management system for digg like sites. I put together a test one over at youhypeit.com.

Myspace marketing - everyone is doing it but is the traffic really there?
If you have been on myspace recently you have noticed a HUGE increase on how many profiles have been created that are 100% marketing profiles like the boost mobile profile or the personal marketing profiles like the Tera Patrick Profile.These profiles are pure marekting tools that have been created with the sole purpose of marketing a product or a person. I am sure you get the email and bulletins that are complete spam and you just over look them. This is pretty much the attitude of your myspace community. Here is a list of some things that myspace members are pretty aware of and usually look over and why it seems like the marketer is marketing to other marketers.

-Bulletin spam: the same bulletin over and over again or bulletin’s that are specifically selling a product or service.
-Email spam: Myspace spam emails can get pretty out of hand and since myspace has not truely implemented any kind of spam protection these emails are easily spotted and overlooked.
-Comment spam: comment spam is usally the same message over and over again and not specific to a person or their life so sometimes these comments are actually posted but a click through is usually far from ever happening.
-The myspace community is there for friends, family and networking NOT purchasing a product through your profile. The digg community is kinda like the myspace community.
-Over the last 6 months I have seen real people’s profiles with thousands of friends get knocked down to just there immediate friends and new networking aquantances. The myspace community is pushing away from fake profiles and more towards real people.
-The myspace community finds these spam profiles misleading, bothersome upsetting.

How to tell if you are marketing to other marketers?
-When you mass friend request usualy the people who add you back are other marketers.
-You find a large amount of comments on your site are from other marketers
-Most of your emails are from marketers and not real people inquiring about your product/service
-Your bulletin’s are complete spam

How can you make myspace marketing work?
-Make your profile an attractive womens profile.
-Right your page copy as a real person.
-Do not oversell or over push a product or service. If you are going to mention something be subtle.
-When doing timed bulletins vary the text and make them hours apart.
-Interact with people on myspace so you do not come off spammy.
-DO NOT email market but subtly talk to people and see if you can get them to advertise for you and promote you or your service for you.
-Purchase banner ads on myspace
-Purchase new sponsored links
-Remove spam comments from your profile
-Use a template and spice up your site with music and photos
-Make your profile seem like its a real person
-Make your profile seem like its a real person
-Make your profile seem like its a real person
-Make your profile seem like its a real person

NOTE: Somthing I think most social media marketers will agree on is that people need to trust your profile in order for you to be successful.

Todd Malicoat listed some great other resources for myspace marketing and I will repost them here.

• Myspace: Good for more than just hanging out
• Getting to know Myspace
• MySpace gold at MarketingVOX
• Myspace marketing
• My Social Marketing
• Much more on “myspace marketing”

I would like to add a few resources as well

• badder adder
  
• Whore Trains
• Myspace Layouts

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15 types of links and how to get them

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I was currently thinking of how to setup an appropriate linking structure for a site I was working on. I had to sit down and really think of all the different ways and types of links I could go after and how effective they are and where to get them. So instead of just keeping this to myself I decided to post it on my blog and share it with everyone. It was a pretty quick post because it was kinda late and I’m tired but I hope this is enough.

Authority Links
How to get them: Google search, Google and Yahoo directory http://directory.google.com/ , Arelis,
what to look for: Sites that rank for top level keywords, Notability, alexa rank and age of domain name
Examples: motortrend.com, lunarpages.com,
Notes: Most likely you will be able to purchase links from these sites or you can utilize linkbait, or content bait to get them to link back to you. Authority links are an absolutly must have in order to build a websites trust rank!

Directory Links
How to get them: Aaron walls has a great list of powerful directories, Strongest directory links
what to look for: You should submit slowly to directories. About 3-5 a month per website. Keep it slow and natural. The best directories will be relevant/related content directories or niche directories.
Examples: www.real-estate-ims-directory.com or site-sift.com, dmoz.org, botw, yahoo directory etc.
Notes: Directory links are not as strong as some SEO’s might think. Keep these to a minimum and stick with relevant one way links.

Reciprocal Links
How to get them: Probably one of the easiest to get but not the most effective. You can try link metro, link market, webmaster forums and Arelis.
what to look for: Its always hard trying to negotiate a reciprocal link that will be in your favor but the majority of link exchanges will be pretty equal to what you are offering yourself. Make sure the page is cached, indexed and no black hat techniques are being used.
Examples: Link market, link metro.
Notes: Reciprocal links are out dated and old seo technology. They can serve a purpose though. Lets say you just need a few links to start getting your site crawled then reciprocals are great. Maybe you have a black hat campaign then reciprocal links could work well.

SiteWide Links
How to get them: Usually you can purchase these through sites like textlinkbrokers.com or text-link-ads.com. Asking around in forums like digital point and sitepoint are great ways to do this as well.
what to look for: You are going to want to find sites that have a large number of indexed pages with quality content, relevant and have PR.
Notes: Site wide links are not something you want or need a lot of. If a few sites out of hundreds do this for you then you are looking at a good inbound linking structure. To many sitewide links will raise a red flag with google and could penelize you in the serps. Usually having to many inbound links from one IP and domain can hurt you so make sure you do not go over board with these types of links but they absolutly have there place and google does like these in regards to PR.

One way links
How to get them: Contextual advertising, forums,
what to look for: Look for relevant sites that have a low amount of outbound links with decent rankings. Stay away from area’s that say “sponsored links, friends, advertisements”. The higher on the page you are placed the better.
Notes: One way links are going to be one of the more effective ways to gain rankings in the SERP’s. Many quality sites have MORE one way links then any other type of links because of link bait and quality content.
Examples: Blogrolls

3-way Links
How to get them: three-way-links.com, forums, arelis
what to look for: You will always want relevant links with quality content but 3-way links can be considered a little grey hat so be careful on how many you do. Depending on the type of site you have you may want more or less or none of these.
Examples: site 1 links to site b and site b links to site c
Notes: Considered more of a grey hat technique so use with caution.

4-way links (coined by joe whyte)
How to get them: forums, arelis
what to look for: a new way to fool the search engines but you need enough sites to do this. Its the same idea as a 3 way link but 2 out of the 4 sites are getting a one way and the other to are giving a link. Stay with relevant sites with quality content.
Examples: Site 1 links to site 2 and site 3 links to site 4
Notes: This is a good idea for people who are used to reciprocal linking. If a webmaster has more then one site then they can start building there one way links much more effectively instead of doing reciprocals.

.Edu and .Gov Links
How to get them: Use yahoo query inurl:.edu or .gov search query, Arelis.
what to look for: There are a ton of ways to get these. Look for resource .edu libraries, email students directly who have a webspace through there educational institution and offer them something in return for there webspace or a link on there webspace.
Notes: TLD’s like .edu’s and .gov’s are not neccesarily BETTER then a .com but usually have much more trust rank as they have been around a lot longer and they have quality content which is updated frequently. Basically the trust rank on these sites is very high and will help your sites tremendously.

Radio station, Television, Magazine or Newspaper links
How to get them: Usually contextual advertising.
what to look for: duh look for radio, television, magazine or newspaper links duh!
Examples: http://www.50states.com/news/, http://dir.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/Radio/ etc
Notes: These are most likely not going to be relevant to your sites content but usually these site have good trust rank, are trafficked heavily and are good resource links for your site.

Press Release Links
How to get them: Search for press release submission services and or sites that allow press releases which are normally your newspaper sites.. HINT HINT.
what to look for: Look for industry leaders and stay away from the mom and pop press release sites.
Examples: PR.com and PRWeb.com are some great press release sites
Notes: Press releases are usually not a GREAT way to get inbound links but can be a good source of traffic and any little bit helps when building a white hat inbound link campaign.

Article Bio Links
How to get them: Creating an article and then syndicating it amoung hundreds of article submission sites.
what to look for: Look for any sites that are article syndication sites.
Examples: Ezine.com, articledashboard.com, etc.
Tools: If you can you might want to pick up a article syndication spammer. I use them and it works pretty well. This is a faster way to submit an article to many sites which is not black hat related unless you go to fast and to many.
Notes: Article syndication has not really improved a large sites rankings dramatically but works pretty well for lower competitive keywords. The more sites that have content pointing back to you or refrencing your site will overall increase how many pages are indexed for a given term. In my experience I have seen rankings for lower competitive terms when doing article syndication. Works great for SEV (search engine vanity).

RSS/Blog syndicated links
How to get them: This is so easy. Start a blog and put some quality content up and most importantly offer RSS, Atom or xml so your reader’s can syndicate your feed.
What to look for: Look for blog directories, blog syndication sites etc
Tools: http://www.sphere.com/, feedburner.com, technorati,
Notes: Highly debated in the industry but syndication can help in many ways in my opinion. From traffic to inbound links and branding. Syndication is syndication in my opinion and from my experience blog syndication works well.

Comments and Profile Links
How to get them: Find related popular blogs and comment on them and provide a link back to your site.
what to look for: popular blogs in your industry that allow tags
Notes: Since most blogs utilize a rel=nofollow tag these are not going to count towrads your seo efforts as mush as you would hope but they still show up in your backlinks and can help increase branding, traffic and could help in crawling, indexing and ranking.

Presell Page Links
How to get them: Presall pages are pretty hard to find. You can do google searches, arelis, forums and webmasters
what to look for: You want to find a reputable site that is a quality relevant site with high PR and traffic.
Notes:If you just contact webmasters and ask to purchase a full page on there site they will give you a price if you provide the content. Usually this is something that can be done with ease but you might have to do some digging. These type’s of links are great for seo as the whole page is going to be content you provide which will be relevant content and inbound links.

Social Media Links
How to get them: Submit to them, search for them, create accounts and pimp them OUUUUT
what to look for: any sites that have to do with people getting together for a common goal
Examples: myspace, tickme.com, digg, stumbleupon
Tools:This is a great opportunity to create spam programs unless you want to go white hat then you can optimize this with tact like me
Notes:Links on social media do help. Not only is digg submissions actually ranking for results much like wikipedia does not but it also draw’s a ton of traffic to your site. Leverage social media to your favore and you seo efforts will come full circle!

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