We couldn’t have timed the launch of our Wikipedia monitoring service WikiAlarm better. This week the mainstream media has been embarrassed after quotes they published in an obituary were revealed as a hoax. Read more →
We are pleased to announce that a new free service called WikiAlarm.com launches today!
Journalists and bloggers are sourcing information from Wikipedia every day and yet the information on pages about companies is often added by somebody totally unconnected with the brand.
Digg has released a toolbar called the Diggbar and in the process has pretty much killed any reason for website owners to try and promote their sites on Digg.
The toolbar works by capturing the target page in an iframe and shortening the URL, you can see it in action here.
The Diggbar is going to be fantastic for Digg but no so much for content producers. Basically Digg has turned into a Tweetmeme style service with millions of users already.
The main issue with the new Diggbar is that Digg no longer links directly to stories – they are linking to the shortened Diggbar URL instead. This means that not only do you lose any links from digg.com but you also lose the links you get from lazy bloggers who will just link to the shortened Diggbar URL.
To add insult to injury the Diggbar source code has lots of extra content such as comments and related stories as well as an SEO friendly title so will outrank the original post in a lot of cases.
Finally you will notice that the Diggbar links both to the Digg story page and the page on the source website. Guess which one gets the optimised anchor text?
We stopped using Digg for linkbait 9 months ago, I suggest you do the same.
Many people are saying that Twitter is corrosive to online marketing and that the sudden upsurge in Twitter use is reducing the number of links being given to quality content.
Certainly Twitter has been game changing but is it really having an effect on link building?
There are two goals that bloggers or website owners have when they carry out social media marketing:
What most bloggers forget is that these two goals require totally different strategies to achieve them.
If I wanted to build the RSS readership on Blogstorm then getting on the front page of Digg or releasing a viral widget isn’t going to help me very much. These strategies are likely to give me a lot of links though.
Likewise if I wanted to release some linkbait which people would read, enjoy and hopefully link to from their blogs then the last thing I should do is promote it via Twitter. Anything decent you send via Twitter is just going to be re-tweeted which is fine if you want traffic but useless if you want links.
Twitter is great for slowly but surely building relationships and growing your readership one by one. Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s a link-building tool.
If you want to get a link from a blogger just send them an email. Because they receive the email outside of Twitter they are more likely to blog about it and less likely to post it on Twitter.
Data has emerged from Hitwise showing the sites that receive the most traffic from Digg.
Despite Digg users being mainly US based, UK websites take up 3 of the top 5 places.
The Telegraph is in second place with a 1.39% share, way ahead of the Daily Mail in 3rd. Hitwise argue that the reason for the Telegraphs rise is a Digg widget but to me the answer is simple.
The top sites are catering for Digg users, publishing the news earlier and doing everything better than the rest.
Perhaps I’m very late in noticing this(?) but Digg seems to be using AdSense rather than Microsoft ads these days. Since Microsoft paid a lot of money for an advertising deal with Digg I wonder how much Google had to pay to have their ads displayed instead?
The targeting seems pretty good, as you would expect from Google.
While some UK newspapers are going from strength to strength others are suffering falls in traffic.
The Sun Online and Mirror.co.uk saw a drop in traffic numbers throughout September, according to the latest ABCEs.
Mirror.co.uk saw a 5.65% decrease in traffic, dropping from 5.575m visitors to 5.259m visitors, while The Sun Online declined by 1.26% from 15.985m to 15.783m.
Found out today that there is a town in Scotland called Digg. I wonder how many people there use Digg?
A friend of mine visited and apparently the whole place is falling apart with even the most important people being forced to leave. Soon Digg will be like a ghost town.
According to Hitwise ezinearticles.com is bigger than a lot of mainstream social sites in the UK.
Read more →
Here in the UK most people in the marketing industry read publications such as NMA, Campaign, Media Week, e-consultancy, Marketing Week and Mad on a daily or weekly basis.
Something that has always surprised me about these sites is how little they have been able to penetrate the major social media websites such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Sphinn. These social sites are full of exactly the same technology and marketing news and opinion that the UK marketing websites are writing about every day and yet stories from these UK marketing sites are being ignored.
Why do these sites get so much less social media traffic than most amateur blogs? Read more →
RT @randfish: Correlation between link metrics and higher rankings quantified: http://t.co/OMtSmh6B via the @openalgorithms project
@patrickaltoft / about 3 hours agoCheck out this presentation : SMX London - Tools for Pulling Rank http://t.co/yHKGoCE6 via @ipullrank
@patrickaltoft / about 9 hours ago@AnthonyHaniff DMCA directly from your lawyers to their host
@patrickaltoft / about 15 hours agoAlso they spend $30m on Facebook marketing outside ads !
@patrickaltoft / about 1 days ago