Not to mention that the visits came more often than visits from internal links, resulting in less than an hour on average while visits through internal links often took up to 14 hours to send the bots.  The study went on to double check that the Twitter Googlebot visits were indexing pages, and they were. 
 
While some results were off, possibly due to variables used in the study, the end conclusion was that it was possible to index websites using Twitter accounts, and it may be a good way to speed up the indexing of newer pages as well as index links that cannot be found internally. 

Whether Google or Twitter catches wind of these sitemapping tricks in the future and makes moves to get rid of them or make them obsolete, for now it seems to be working.  Not to mention this is another interesting addition to recent speculations about nofollow links and their role in search engine optimization. Read about the study for yourself and check out data graphs at SEOmoz Article.

The question is, though, how do you improve your content?

Innovation is the Key

If your site simply regurgitates information, it will not generate the amount of back links you want. You have to find a way to report information in a way others have not managed to do in the past. This will take more time than just copying information from another source, but it will pay off very well. Spend the time to really examine the subject matter and then offer a new take on it. It will pay off in dividends.

Act Quickly

You need to have some speed in your content updating. If others scoop you on information, you will not generate as many back links as you would if you were the first to report on an event. If you have a niche, stay in tune with that niche. Tap into the information pipeline so you can report first. You will receive lots of hits, as well as back links, by being the first to report. You will need to dedicate the time necessary to find the information quickly, but it will be well worth it.

User Participation

Invite your users to participate in your articles. Have a place for comments so they can chime in and give their opinion. This will go a long way in solidifying your customer base, and thus, creating back links. If you have a hot site users can get involved with, you will increase your visibility and back links.

Write Lists

The internet community likes to have lots of information in small chunks. Use lists to deliver this to them. Lists are a great way to give readers exactly what they want. Create top ten lists and give readers valuable information.

When you improve your content, you will see your back links increase. Back links will help your site a great deal, so make sure you have the best content possible.

While there is no denying that being on the front page of a large site, such as MSN, Slashdot, etc., can bring you a lot of traffic – the chances of that happening often and for an extended period of time are rare. The bigger the site, the quicker the stories rotate in and out. However, for smaller sites many people find that the links stay around longer and in the long run they can have a far greater impact on the type of visitor as well as the strength of the link when it comes to rankings.

Think about it like this: When an advertiser purchases time for a commercial they often try to locate a show that not only attracts the type of person they are looking to market to, but also will give them the most exposure for their buck. Sure, they could blow their entire advertising budget on the Super Bowl and have one 30-second commercial that blankets everybody, or they could buy time on a lesser known shown that targets their demographic for far less. Which makes more sense?

It’s the same way in the SEO business as well. Though we can’t control who links to us, often time we waste a lot of time trying to get the big guys to link to us when our efforts could be better spent building relationships with the smaller sites. We are spending our SEO energy in the wrong place.

Let’s say we have a website devoted to vegetable gardening. Links to us from smaller sites that are in the same niche as us can have far stronger link juice than a link from a page buried deep down inside a large site. The added benefit is that being on the front page of that smaller site we are more apt to be recognized by the search engines much faster as front pages get indexed far more often than pages buried deep within a site.

Of course, nobody would ever say no to a link from a large site, but you should consider that a “bonus” instead of your main objective. You will be far better off in the long run devoting your time and skills to building those relationships with the little guys than you will be trying to convince the big guys to link to you from within.

For example, let’s say we have a page with 5 links on it and a PageRank of 5. One of those links we have a NoFollow directive on. In the past the remaining 4 links would have received 1.25 “PageRank points” each. In other words, the PageRank was distributed out over all the links that were followed. Under the new rules, however, the remaining links would only get 1 point as even though the NoFollow link isn’t taken into account, the fact that it exists still takes away one of the PageRank points.

Of course, lost in this whole technical explanation is the user experience. Often times SEO folks forget that there are end users who are trying to view and use these pages, and they have to design them so the end user gets some benefit out of them. It’s quite possible to over-SEO a page to the point where it may make perfect sense to Google and the other ranking algorithms, but it is totally unusable by an end user!

One of the ways to make sure you don’t lose your link juice and PageRank is by consolidating your content onto a single page and using hash tags. For example, say you have a section on your site that talks about your company. You may have a contact page, an about page and a trademark page. In the past these were three separate pages, but using a consolidation strategy you can put them all onto a single page and then refer to the content sections using section markers (hash tags). So for example, the URL [http://www.yourcompany/about/trademark.html] becomes [http://www.yourcompany/about.html#trademark]

The benefits of doing this is the search engines instead of seeing 6 links off your main page now only see one link, so that link gets all of the link juice. That is on top of the fact that to the end user they are not able to navigate the content better! It’s a win-win scenario for many situations – but remember, only related content should be considered for consolidation. You wouldn’t want to consolidate your about page and your ordering page, for example.

Using this “new” technique (which has in reality been around for years) is a way to get back the classic benefits of the NoFollow before Google changed the rules on us. When used properly it can help you keep your paged well ranked as well as help improve your end user experience – two wins in one!

Many people fail to understand exactly how the search engines process blocking requests, and the various methods to do so. There are two methods, used in the most of seo services, that can be employed to block the search engines from accessing and crawling particular pages:

• Blocking with robots.txt – Tells the search engine not to visit the URL, but to go ahead and keep it in its index of pages. So the search engine knows it exists, but has no idea what is on the page.
• Blocking with the meta tag NoIndex – Tells the search engine to go ahead and visit, but not to remember anything it sees there.

When you use robots.txt to block access to a page, the links will appear in most of the search engines as just that – a link. It will have no title, description or anything else.

The problem is that your blocked pages – chances are they have accumulated links and “juice” from the search engines, but they cannot pass it on. So if you have content downstream being linked from these blocked pages that isn’t blocked then guess what – you lose all your link juice. You are in effect hurting yourself!

If you insist of hiding pages behind robots.txt regarding your search engine optimization strategies, then there are two important things to remember:

• If you are going to link from anything off the page, use the nofollow directive to help conserve link juice.
• If you know you have a page that is being blocked by robots.txt that has link juice, either consider removing it from being “hidden” or use the meta tag “noindex, follow” so they can pass their link juice on to other pages on your site that could benefit from it.

Nofollow is a pretty advanced SEO tactic, and should always be used with guidelines and standards for your site. If you let people go crazy using it you can cause a lot of rank harm to your site that can take a long time to undo.

The short and sweet of nofollow is that when you link to content with nofollow in the anchor tag you are telling the search engines to not give the content “points” (as it were) for being linked too, and to not index the content. Now, for internal links on sites this can be very important – after all, you probably don’t need (or want) your terms of service, legal notices, etc. indexed – they do no good and can actually distract from your main site depending on the query people are performing.

Where people often fall down with nofollow is that they begin to use it for pages that they think is of little importance, but may actually be providing a lot of traffic for pages downstream. Many people think they should nofollow their About Us or Contact Us page, but when searching for information about a company or product these two pages can provide a wealth of information for the search engines.

So where should you not be using nofollow? Generally speaking, I recommend don´t use nofollow for:

• Product pages
• Contact Us
• About Us
• Paginated Content (Page 1 of 3, etc.)
• Category or Topic Structures

Places where it is OK to use nofollow with little risk include:

• Privacy Policy
• Legal Policy
• Any dynamic page based on user login (like a shopping cart)
• Any product or service page that may be adult-only in nature

Through proper use of nofollow you can make sure that the content that matters the most on your site is the content that gets ranked and indexed high. By employing standards of what you use nofollow for upfront you can help prevent costly ranking mistakes from improper use.

First, I found out that the links were all coming from people who had seen a recent episode of the Daily Show with John Stewart where he was interviewing Jim Cramer. They all seem to be coming from people who posted in their blogs and such video clips of the interview itself. Yet the funny part was when I actually went to the blogs these links were supposedly coming from I couldn’t find them! I looked at several of the top blogs (quality blogs too, no link spam or junk blogs) that supposedly had this link and it was the same thing – zilch, nada, nothing!

Determined to find out what was going on I went back to one of the top ranked pages and started going over every line, every ad and every picture until I found it – right below the linked video in dark grey text on a light grey background!

It turned out it was some old-fashioned link campaigning going on, but with a twist. It wasn’t the blog owners doing it – it was the hosted video from Comedy Central! Sneaky move on their part (that actually worked!) to get rankings and views on the search term of “Jim Cramer” through anchor text and links.

So let’s start at the bottom and work our way up. First, what makes the worst type of incoming link – ones that the search engines are sure to label as spam and penalize you for? The answer is easy – if you know its spam and it links to you then the search engines know as well. You never want to have links to your site showing up in comment spam on blogs, guestbooks (what quality site nowadays uses a guestbook anyway?) that are known spam holes and link farms. If it’s considered spam stay away from it – plain and simple!

The next type, and unfortunately the one where so many of us have most of our links coming from, is low quality sites. This includes other sites you own (don’t fool yourself, the search engines know what domains you own), reciprocal links (you might fool the search engines for a while, but they will eventually catch on to this one), message board signatures (by all means, mention your site in forums you participate in, but if a majority of your links are coming from forum signatures then you are missing your SEO mark), and junk directories – you know the kind that anyone and their brother can get listed in. Again, it’s not bad to have links in a few of these categories – such as the forums – but if the majority of your links are coming from this category you are going to suffer in the rankings.

Before we move onto the moderate category let’s talk a minute about social media sites. Social media is growing by leaps and bounds; it is the next generation of marketing. So what about links to your site from social media users and profiles? It really depends – it can be a moderate value link or a low quality link. A lot of the major search engines are still trying to nail down an algorithm for handling social media sites, but the general rule is if people are talking about and linking to your site naturally that is a good thing.

Moderate quality links are where most of us would like to get to for the majority of our links. These provide the best value in proportion to the effort it takes to get. Links coming from trusted directories (Yahoo Directory and the Open Source Directory are two good ones), blogrolls and partner sites all fit into this category.

Of course, in an ideal world, you want your links coming from the highest quality sites available out there. Sites such as news sites and trusted editorial sites fall into this category. Just think about it – if a site such as MSNBC or CNN links to you that says a lot about your site, and search engines treat it accordingly. Badges and widgets also fall into this category – which is why it is so important to make them available for your readers; if people are willing to re-syndicate your content through a widget that also says a lot about the site.

So remember that the quality your links plays a critical role in how your site ranks. SEO techniques alone can’t carry you to the top of the listings without investing time and a little bit of legwork into making sure your incoming links are based on quality and not just quantity.

The nofollow directive in links has always been a safety net of sorts. You could use it to link to contact outside your pages that might come from an unknown source, and it was the accepted standard to linking to your own content so that the search engines didn’t believe you were link stuffing. Search engines pretty much adhered to nofollow directives and all was well.

Today, we face a much different environment. It all started with Wikipedia in some ways. By default, Wikipedia nofollows all outbound links on its site – in other words, the site isolates itself from the rest of the Internet. Plenty of people are linking in, but from the search engines point of view they aren’t linking out. Yet SEO professionals noticed something rather interesting about this arrangement. Wikipedia consistently ranks near the top for a lot of search queries. Was this “black hole” actually being rewarded by the search engines? Or could it be that the search engines were ignoring the nofollow tags altogether?

Before an answer was found for that question another wave of links without the nofollow directive hit through the micro-blogging sites. Since almost all of the micro-blogging sites require users to “host” their micro-blogs on their sites the #1 rule of blogging was broken – host your content on your own domain. Because of this the links to that content started pouring in. People were linking up to Twitter feeds and Tumblr posts left and right, and almost nobody was using the nofollow directive. It didn’t matter to the average user if they trusted the person or not, they were just interested in linking to the content for their own purposes.

A third scenario popped up as well, led by the Wikipedia example above – people started to nofollow all links from their sites to replicate the success Wikipedia had. So now we had three situations where nofollow was coming into play:

• To isolate sites entirely from outbound links.
• Ignoring it completely because of the popularity of sites like Twitter and Tumblr.
• Search engines choosing to ignore nofollow and following anyway.

Have you kept up? It’s a nightmare for anyone engaged in SEO to try and figure some of this out!

To throw another twist into the mix, recent tests have shown that sites that have nothing but nofollow links pointing to them are actually ranking. This gives credibility to the theory that search engines are choosing to ignore the directives.

So how can you use all these findings to make your sites better and to increase your rank? Simply put, it’s something where right now there is no clear answer. You should continue to use the nofollow directive as you have in the past for paid links and such, but when it comes to social networking sites you may want to drop it altogether. You may want to try several different versions of pages to see which ones ranks better trying a combination of nofollow directives. Questions like this make the perfect scenario for A/B testing.

If you want to get more information about Search Engine Optimization, we invite you to visit our SEO FAQ and subscribe our feed in our SEO Blog.

You don’t know it all.

I know this concept may be hard for some of you SEO wizards to believe, but it’s true – none of us are the experts in everything. Sometimes it just makes sense to link externally. It’s what makes the web so great – we can all be subject matter experts in our niche and then point towards other subject matter experts when we find ourselves outside our niche.

Don’t be afraid to give a shout out (or a link out) to respected websites that you trust with content you think your visitors might find valuable. It helps build your sites reputation and position yourself better as a leader for your niche.

Linking Out Encourages People to Participate (Social Networking)

Some companies still don’t get it that Social Media is the new era of marketing. By linking out you are encouraging participation by the community at large. Nothing feels better (and you know this yourself) then getting a link from a highly trafficked source pointing to your works. Linking out to other bloggers and sites helps build cred with the rest of the community and will help your site grow more than you could imagine. By linking out in a consistent matter you are engaging other sites to be a part of your community – and that is where SEO and marketing both are heading.

Linking Out Encourages Links In

When you link out it encourages other sites to link back in to you and to the rest of the web. The web is not about isolation and sadly there are some sites (see the first point above) that think the web was built for them and them alone. You’ll never get links in (which is crucial for effective SEO) if you don’t link out to others.

Search Engines Like It

For years it was thought that search engines really didn’t pay attention to outbound links unless you were linking to spammy sites or content that didn’t exist. In those cases your reward as actually a punishment, especially if you were linking to spammy web properties. While that is still the case today, there is also evidence to suggest that the search engines are rewarding link out behavior to good sites now as well.

It Tells the World You Exist

Finally, it helps let other sites know that you exist and send them to investigate who you are and what you provide. hey notice your inbound links in their web logs and curiosity always sends people tracking back where the traffic is coming from. This could lead to them exploring your services more or linking back to you when they are covering your particular niche. It’s a win-win situation when you link to other high quality sites and blogs.