This week’s Twitter column is about a very intriguing survey by Neicole Crepeau. She surveyed 336 Internet users asking them several questions about their Twitter usage and perception. The most note-worthy finding is that most of those who have quit Twitter did it out of boredom.

At the same time these people didn’t use Twitter in a way that made Twitter interesting in the first place. So in a way it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: You use Twitter in a boring way and you quickly get bored of it. Continue Reading »

Twitter and nofollow is the topic of this week’s Twitter column: While even Google who has introduced, along with other search engines, the nofollow attribute to combat spam a few years ago does not propagate the use of it anymore, Twitter went nofollow big time just recently. What does this mean?

Twitter distrusts everything you say.

Not only outgoing links get the so called link condom so that search engines ignore them. No, now also internal links from your tweets on Twitter get wasted. This means that even when you address us with @seoptimise we don’t get the Google juice due. Continue Reading »

Welcome back to our weekly Twitter column. Last week I hailed Twitter crowdsourcing and suggested some ideas on how to motivate your peers to participate in your blog postings.

It worked very well in my case, the SEO FAQ I asked you to steal. Many readers and Twitter followers have taken part in the whole process. I credited those who added their questions and answers already in the FAQ itself.

This time I want to show off the contributions done after the SEO FAQ was finished, the stolen SEO FAQs.

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Crowd by victoriapeckham.

Welcome back to the weekly Twitter column. Ever since I’m on Twitter I’ve tried to get as many people to participate spontaneously in writing my posts or rather compiling my lists. I always seek contributions for my “30 something” flagship posts. The appropriate term for these kind of participation is crowdsourcing.
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In this week’s Twitter Friday column I want to dissect the news that Twitter traffic is dropping for a few months in a row. Is it true?
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Biz Stone by Joi

In case you don’t read my Twitter Friday column regularly let me say it again: I’m always quite enthusiastic about the way Twitter embraces business users. There is no other social media site that makes me as comfortable while using it.

This week Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced paid premium accounts for businesses.
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Two years ago when I started using twitter I wasn’t impressed. The people came in dozens from there, even when the actual post was about Twitter itself. Later on I realized that many Twitter users do not send a proper referrer due to using some web apps or other tools instead of browsing the actual Twitter.com website.

Fast forward to the end of 2009 and I notice the opposite: Some posts or even blogs altogether get more traffic from Twitter than from any other source. What about Google, Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious you might ask?
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Today I almost forgot to write my Twitter Friday column. Why? I was so preoccupied with the new relaunched StumbleUpon version. To make it short: SU attempts to compete directly with Twitter and Google. This might sound ridiculous but they really do. Theoretically it would be possible: SU exists for several years and has collected tens of millions of web pages in its “index” together with millions of reviews with new sites being added very quickly. Isn’t this the ideal social search engine? Isn’t this the perfect way to determine which websites really do matter in real time? Sadly, no.

Now this is the Twitter column so I won’t compare the new StumbleUpon to Google. Let me explain though why

StumbleUpon is not Twitter and can’t compete with Twitter.

StumbleUpon does not allow business usage of its site. Yes, you can get banned solely for submitting your SEO company website to SU. Continue Reading »

While I have written several times already that Twitter or any other social site might ban you out of the blue it just happened to Rishi Lakhani aka @rishil, a well known SEO figure on social media. I even recommended following him on my SEO Twitter users list. Another SEO, @louisventer got banned alias suspended on Twitter due to “strange activity” for the same reason, he has retweeted the tweet that kills your account:

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