Moving Your Blog to WordPress

So you’ve installed WordPress in a subdirectory of your primary domain. However, you already have an established blog on an external service such as Blogger or WordPress.com, with many posts and many images. What is the easiest way to move that blog to your new self-hosted WordPress blog? Both of the aforementioned services offer the ability to export your blog posts and comments, and your installed copy of WordPress has a “tool” for importing an external blog.

Can You Export / Import Images with the Tools Provided?

The bad news is that whether you use the “tool” in your local WordPress installation to import your external blog or use the export tool in Blogger or WordPress.com to export your blog, it seems you can’t import or export the images. Blogger offers no way to do this, and even though WordPress has an option, when importing a blog, to include images (“Download and import file attachments”), for me this has thrown an error regarding the images and the images in your new blog are still pointing to the WordPress.com URLs (username.files.wordpress.com/…).

Importing Your Blogger Blog to Your WordPress Blog

You can either export your Blogger blog from within the application (See these instructions for exporting your Blogger blog), or do it within WordPress which makes it very easy to import your Blogger posts, comments and users. Here’s the drill:

• Log in as admin to your installed WordPress account
• In the left column, click on “Tools”
  
• Select “Blogger” — the system from which to import:
  
• Click “Blogger” and, on the next screen, click the “Authorize” button and you’ll be asked to provide the login credentials in order to import the blog posts, comments.
• After providing your credentials, your blog will be imported.

Importing your WordPress.com blog into WordPress

In order to import your WordPress.com blog into your new WordPress installation, you will first need to log in to your WordPress.com account and export your blog’s posts and comments.

Exporting from WordPress.com

You will be exporting all your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags as an xml file. WordPress refers to this file as a “WXR” (“WordPress eXtended RSS”) file.

• Log in to your WordPress.com account
• In the left column, click “Tools”
  
  and then click “Export.”
• Click “Download Export File”

Once you have downloaded the .xml file, you then need to import this file into your WordPress installation.

• Log in as Admin to your WordPress installation
• In the left column, click “Tools”
• Click “Import”
• Click “WordPress” (last option in list)
• Click the “Browse” button to locate the .xml file you exported from your WordPress.com account, double-click the file or select it and click “Open”
• Click “Upload file and import”
• Select the user options and make sure you tick the “Download and import file attachments” option which should result in the images in your WordPress.com blog being imported along with the posts and comments. But I’ve seen many reports of errors “Remote file error: Remote file is incorrect size” and I’m not sure what the fix is for this. Your mileage may vary.
• Click the “Submit” button, and you’ll be redirected to a “success” page. Hopefully, your images will be imported along with everything else.

Exporting and/or Importing the Blog Images

My own testing resulted in the “Remote file error: Remote file is incorrect size” message when trying to get the images along with the posts and comments. Hopefully this is something WordPress will address and fix.

If you get the above error, you may have to just grab the images from your blog one at a time, right-clicking them and saving them to your computer and then importing them to your new blog. If anyone has found a workaround for this issue, please let me know via the Comments here.

Other Resources

• WordPress.com Instructions for moving a blog
• Blogger’s instructions for importing and exporting your blog

Increasingly, I’ve come to believe that the best backlinking strategy is a 100% authentic strategy, creating content that is of value to users — build it and they will come — and engaging with the community to share your knowledge and expertise and increase awareness of what you have to offer. To supplement this, there are a handful of directories where site submissions are human-reviewed and the directories themselves have a high PageRankGoogle's metric for how popular a site is on the Web, on a scale of 1-10 (higher is better). The biggest factor is how many external sites link to yours, and the authority, popularity and relevance of those sites..

What Google is Looking For — Listen Up!

As we all know, a website can have solid on-page SEO, but if there are few or no on-topic and authoritative sites linking back to it, the on-page work is pretty much for naught. As Google’s Webmaster Guide says,

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

Because of its efforts to continually improve the quality and relevance of search results, Google is always getting better at recognizing quality sites and, at the end of the day, those sites that focus their efforts on creating keyword-rich quality content and “natural” backlinking strategies will be sitting on top of the SERPsSearch Engine Results Page.

It’s No Secret: Google Is Clear on What It Wants

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines state that “Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such as excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank.”

Google’s 2004 patent application,  Information Retrieval Based On Historical Data, reinforced  Google engineer Matt Cutts’ frequent advice that to encourage backlinking to your site, your focus should be on creating content for human traffic, not search engines. The big takeaway for SEOs was – and is – that Google looks for and rewards backlink growth that appears natural, without big spikes or dips in numbers, i.e., a steady increase over time. It also looks for a diversity of IP addresses and name servers in those backlinks, as well as links to pages other than your home page (called “deep links”).

Google’s Matt Cutts, on March 4, 2010, was asked on Google’s Webmaster Central YouTube Channel what he recommended for getting quality backlinks. It was all about great content. Some of his responses:

• Participate in the Community: “I’m not talking about signing up and spamming a bunch of blogs or forums. A good example is answering questions. If you have some value you can add … somebody appreciates that … and they’ll be more willing and receptive to linking.”
• Original Research: “If somebody does even a little bit of work to dig into a subject, they’re more likely to get links. Original research can really make a big difference.”
• Newsletters: “If you have people already coming to your blog, make it a little bit easier for that information to show up in their inbox.” (I think he means making easy for users to subscribe to your blog RSS feed via email.)
• Social Media: Participating on Twitter, Friendfeed or Facebook can be another great way [to build links]. Think about where people spend their time. Getting to know those people can pay off, and not just in getting links.
• Lists: “They tend to get a little tiresome after a while. But writing a few every so often is not such a bad thing.”
• Blogging: “Establish yourself as an authority. There’s no excuse for a company these days not to have a blog. Just building that up as a resource of good articles … another good example is how-tos and tutorials.”
• Good Site Architecture: “Make sure that your site has good site architecture. Can my site be crawled? Can my pages be bookmarked? Make it easy to link to individual pieces of content.”

Getting Listed in Directories: Think like a Search Engine

If you’re a search engine assessing the value and relevance of a site’s content, how much importance would you ascribe to the fact that the site is included in numerous directories, the majority of which have no editorial oversight?

When you’re searching for information, you’re looking for information from someone who’s actively engaged in the conversations around the subject matter, someone whose site content is highly relevant to your search, contains useful information, and is generally regarded on the Web as a great resource? Does the fact that the resource has gotten itself listed in a zillion directories, relevant and irrelevant, relate in any way whatsoever to the quality of content?

Answer: No! And I’d bet Google is of the same opinion.

Don’t Expect Much from Directory Inclusions…

Although some PageRank is likely passed by the myriad directories out there, I doubt that a site’s inclusion in the many free and paid directories is telling Google much about the value of the site’s content. Getting your site listed in directories, paid or free, is just you voting for yourself. I don’t see how Google can assess value from that.

Without any human/editorial mediation involved, your inclusion has no relationship to the quality of your site’s content.

Which Directories Should You Be Listed In?

When considering directories in which to list your site, check to see if 1) they’re reviewed by humans; 2) have a PageRank of at least 3 or 4. If they’re not human-mediated or the PageRank is low, I really wouldn’t bother.

The general consensus among SEOs is that the following directories are the most beneficial to your SEO. Submissions are reviewed by humans, and the PageRank and authority of these sites is high. This is the creme de la creme!:

• DMOZ – The Open Directory Project
  The best and it’s free! Edited and run by volunteers; PageRank: 8; Alexa Rank: 684. ODP data powers the core directory services for many of the Web’s largest search engines and portals, including AOL Search, Google, and Alexa.
• Yahoo! Directory
  PageRank: 8; Alexa Rank: 3. There is a $299 Non Refundable Submission Fee and a $299 Annual Fe,e if accepted.
• Business.com Directory
  PageRank: 6; Alexa Rank: 1,939; The cost is $299 to submit, and $299 annually, if accepted.
• Best of the Web
  PageRank: 7; Alexa Rank: 4,108; $149 to submit and $149 annual if accepted.
• GoGuides.org
  PageRank: 5; Alexa Rank: 22,425. The cost is a one-time $69.9 submission fee.
• AboutUs.org ProFollow
  PageRank: 6; Alexa Rank: 1,000. A new service from AboutUs.org. It’s free and it promises to allow links without the “nofollow” attribute. Worth checking out.
• whatUseek Web Search
  PageRank: 6; Alexa Rank: 28,901. You’ll want to submit to the whatUseek Collection which is human-reviewed. The “Velocity Submit” (w/in 2 business days) is $49.99, with an annual fee of $16.99. The “Standard Submit” (w/in 8 weeks) is $24.99 and $16.99 annual fee.

Creating High-Quality Content: Build It and They Will Come!

Google’s Webmaster Guide:

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest.

Soliciting Backlinks: If you must…

If your client or your boss insists on getting as many backlinks as possible, at least avoid:

Link Farms / Bad Neighborhoods: Spammy sites that offer no value to users but are just repositories of URLs. Your site can be penalized for being included in too many bad neighborhoods.

Irrelevant Sites: Sites that are outside the subject matter of your website. Although these won’t incur a penalty, they are of little value in increasing your PageRank.

Link Exchanges: Google advises against excessive link exchanges and “link schemes” such as:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank;
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web;
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”);
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank.

Most Importantly – Size Doesn’t Matter…

As Google states:, “It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links.”

Additional Resources

• Link Building Strategies: Checklist
• Google’s Webmaster Help YouTube Channel
• SEOmoz.org: Advanced Link-Building Strategies
  NOTE: I believe most of the strategies suggested in this link are old-school and likely not that effective, but there is some useful info. Let the reader beware…

Online Directory Resources

• SearchEngineWatch.com / Mark Jackson’s list
• A good list of “specialty”/niche directories
• The “Ultimate Directory List”
• Directory of Directories
• Your Web Gurus

In promoting your blog, the most important thing you must remember is don’t overdo it!. In the community of bloggers and social media, patience is the key. Make sure your primary objective is adding value to the Web. Be sincere, relevant and informative.

Three Things You Should Know About Blogging

• Check your facts, your grammar and your spelling!
  Remember, you are your brand. Your posts represent who you and your brand are to the world. Your reputation — your expertise and your attention to detail — is on the line with every post. Poor writing, erroneous facts, and spelling errors scream “Amateur!” First and foremost, take that extra bit of time to get it right before publishing.
• Make Sure Your Blog is Properly SEO’d!
  These SEO steps are essential in maximizing your search engine rankings for each post:
  • Your posts should be search-engine-friendly, and this is more than just incorporating keywords into your content. Your posts’ URLs should be natural-language, keyword-rich: “/your-blog-directory/the-title-of-this-post-keywords/”, not “/your-blog-directory/?p=123″ (in WordPress, use “Permalinks” to accomplish this).
  • Your category “taxonomy” should be well organized with keyword-aware category names.
  • Each post should have a unique, descriptive and keyword-rich title tag and “description” meta tag (Read my post on SEO Best Practices for your WordPress blog).
• Again … Don’t Overdo It!
  Remember, you’re entering an established community. Take time to introduce yourself, get to know the conventions and etiquette of the blog space, and be patient. If you make contributions of value to the conversations, you will get value in return. Here is an excellent list of suggestions of what NOT TO DO to promote your blog!

Initial Steps to Promote your Blog

• Set Up a Feedburner Account
  Feedburner (purchased by Google in 2007) allows you to manage your blog’s RSS feeds, provides tracking data, and enables you to allow email subscriptions to your feeds which can significantly increase the number of subscribers to your blog.
• Make Sure It’s Easy to Subscribe to Your Blog via RSS
  A link to your RSS feed as well as a widget to allow users to subscribe to your feeds via email should be prominently displayed on your blog, above the fold. Here are examples from the HyperArts blog:

  RSS Feed Icon: Clicking on this icon either takes the user to your feed or to the user’s feed reader.

  The code provided by Feedburner when you enable Email Subscriptions will create this box which can be added as a text widget and styled with CSS.

• Register Your Blog with Blog Search Engines
  Register your blog with Technorati, Google Blog Search, Bloglines, and other Blog search engines. Check out this excellent list of blog search engines.
• Submit your Blog to Blog Directories
  Submit your blog to the top blog directories. Be careful not to submit to directories that might be considered “link farms” by Google. Here’s a list of reputable blog directories.
• Announce your Blog
  Post an announcement of your blog to subject-matter-related forums. Most forums have an “Announce” section where you can do this. You can also announce your blog via a news release, using one of the many online new release sites.
• Add a blog feed to your Facebook page
  Create a feed of your blog into your Facebook Fan (aka Business) Page. This is easily done and creates another channel where your Facebook fans can read your blog posts and comment on your posts inside Facebook. Here’s a tutorial on adding your blog feed to Facebook.

Ongoing Blog Promotion

• Post Regularly, on a Schedule, and Set Expectations
  The Web is littered with abandoned blogs, the artifacts of good intentions not followed through. In order to build a dedicated roster of subscribers, it’s essential that you post on a schedule that is at least somewhat predicable. Whether it’s three times a day or twice a month, you need to set expectations. Obviously, the more frequently you post quality content, the more your blog will attract attention and subscribers.
• Inform Blog Search Engines and Directories of New Posts
  Once you’ve submitted your blog to the blog search engines and directories, you will need to let them know when you’ve published new content, by “pinging” them. In WordPress, you can copy and paste into “Settings > Writing > Update Services” this list of sites to notify/ping when you publish a new post, and they will be pinged automatically when you publish a new post.
• Comment on Other Blogs
  Visit other blogs and add comments — useful comments that contribute to the conversation, not just link-dropping comments such as “Great post! Thanks!” You want to find the sites and communities where conversations around your topic are already happening, familiarize yourself with the space, then establish a presence via useful comments. (Watch Darren Rowse’s video on how to do this.) Remember, as Kevin Geary says on a ProBlogger.net post, comments should be “sincere, relevant, and valuable.”
• Use Twitter
  Use Twitter to announce new posts. However, make sure your tweeting is as much about your industry as it is about you! Shameless self-promotion on social media is a doomed strategy. People follow those who provide news and information pertaining to subjects in which they’re interested, not those who are just promoting themselves. If you over-promote, your efforts will fail. A good engagement strategy is to ask a question that your blog post addresses. As Chris Brogan suggests, “Instead of telling your Twitter audience that you’ve published a new post, ask them their opinion on the core topic you’ve covered.” Finally, remember: It’s not about how many Twitter followers you have; it’s about the importance of your followers and their relevance to what you’re tweeting about. You want to follow relevant people in whose tweets you’re interested.

The above should help get your blog successfully launched. I’d like to hear what others think about this.

Cited Resources for Blog Promotion

• Aviva Directory – 21 Surefire Tips for Successful Blog Promotion
• 20 Essential Directories to Submit Your Blog To
• Sites to Ping When Publishing a New Post
• List of Blog Search Engines
• How Not to Promote Your Blog: Top 10 Broken Blog Promotion Strategies
• How I Use Twitter to Promote My Blog (Chris Brogan)
• How to Use Twitter – Tips for Bloggers (Darren Rowse)

However, just checking here at 5:38PM PST, it appears that real-time search doesn’t show by default but is revealed by clicking the “Show options” link beneath Google’s logo:

and then selecting “Latest” to see the streaming real-time results.

So it appears they’re still fine tuning….

ORIGINAL POST: Dec 8, 2009: Today Google announced the rollout over the next couple of days of real-time search, blending content from their index with real-time feeds from Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace, Facebook, as well as blogs. This comes right on the heels of Microsoft Bing’s rollout of a similar but more limited feature last week, which they originally announced on October 29. Although Google’s real-time search is not “officially” live yet, you can check it out here. Below is what Google’s real-time feed looks like.

To test it out for myself, I first tweeted about the Univ of MD Medical Center, then immediately did a real-time search on “Univ of MD Medical Center” and, after about a minute, my tweet rolled out on the results page:

Notice on the left the various options for vertical searches targeting specific sources. Below those are options for the time period you wish to limit your results to (Latest, Past hour, Past 24 hours, Past week, etc.).

Google’s Real-time Search Compared to Bing’s Twitter Search

A head-to-head comparison of Google’s real-time offering to Bing’s has Google on top. Bing only has real-time results from Twitter, and there are no vertical search or time-period options. Also, whereas on Google’s results page the real-time results are blended with the indexed results, Bing has a different page where you can search the Twitter stream.

Google’s Matt Cutts, in a post on his blog today, gave an overview of a number of new Google products and features, and said the following about the real-time search:

To get to real-time search, you’ll click the “Show options” link above the search results. Then you’ll see a “Latest” option. Looks like there’s also an “Updates” link to restrict it to updates from sites like Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. Real-time search works on mobile (iPhone, Android) too. Google will add really-hot topics to the Hot Trends page to see these real-time updates.

Fears of Real-time Spam Abuse

Almost immediately there were rumblings about the potential for spam abuse in real-time search. In his post entitled “Google launches a new spam industry” blogger Michael Martinez says:

You’ll soon be seeing artificially managed TweetNetworks that offer to put anything into real-time search results. The spam technologies have already been developed. The text databases have already been constructed. Once again, the search spam industry has anticipated where the search engines will go and laid the foundations for a new war of wills.

And he’s probably right. But Google has been pretty good at heading off spammers and search-engine scammers thus far, although, as Michael implies, it’s a never-ending battle. However, Google Fellow Amit Singhal, “master of Google’s algorithm” is confident that they can outsmart those trying to scam Google’s results. When asked today about how Google will filter results, he responded, “PageRank is one of over 200 signals that we use in ranking. Lots of new technologies (e.g. language modelling) also developed for real-time search.” To which Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Product and User Experience, added “PageRank is about authoritativeness. There are similar signals (retweets, replies) in the update space.”

I think this is a pretty exciting development, and it’ll be interesting to see how the Bing / Google competition heats up in this new search space. So far, it appears Google is in the lead, but the race has just begun….

Other Resources

• Google Launches Real-Time Search (Mashable)
• Google launches a new spam industry (SEO Theory)
• Google’s YouTube Video Promoting Real-time Search
• Blogging the Google Search event, December 2009 (Matt Cutts Blog)
• Relevance meets the real-time web (Official Google Blog)
• Google v. Bing – Study finds Google returns more relevant results (ineedhits blog)
• Why Google is Vulnerable to the Feds, not Microsoft Bing (eWeek)
• Google’s real-time search ready to challenge Bing (PC World)
• Microsoft Bing says it won’t chase Google’s real-time search (USA Today)
• What Google’s Launch of Real-time Search Means for Marketers (HubSpot)

I won’t go into the separate-domain issue, but you can read Mark Jackson’s Search Engine Watch post about this option. Needless to say, the benefits to your primary domain in this case would be nil, except for backlinking from the new, blog domain to your primary domain. But because this blog domain will have likely been recently activated, you will have to wait at least a year before Google assigns it any meaningful TrustRank to the new domain.

As all SEOs know, a business should almost always host their blog under their own domain, rather than the other options mentioned above. When other websites link back to your posts or other pages of your blog, you want the backlinking credit to go to your domain, not to Blogger.com or Typepad.com.

Recently, a client asked us about setting up a blog for them and we told them what we tell all our clients:

• Use WordPress as the blogging platform: We love the incredible number of plugins and themes that are developed by the very large and active WordPress community. And we really like WordPress as a blogging platform (and Dan Cederholm agrees!);
• Install WordPress in a subdirectory: Install the blog under your own domain, in a subdirectory that has a keyword-rich name, eg /widget-sales-usa/) rather than “blog” (we actually use “blog”, but there’s a reason…) or “wordpress.”

HubSpot Business Blogging?

Not long after this conversation, our client informed us that they had purchased the HubSpot “Business Blogging” package, and they asked if this would be as beneficial to their SEO as having a WordPress blog. I decided to do some research.

I called HubSpot to have them explain how they integrate a customer’s blog into the customer’s domain (the examples on their site are all customers who opted for the full website+blog hosting, not just the blog package). They explained that they have the customer create a subdomain for their domain (eg hubspotblog.mydomain.com) and, via a CNAME record, the subdomain points to a HubSpot URL. The subdomain is where the blog is installed.

Because my client was going to use HubSpot only for their blog and not their entire website (another tier of service HubSpot offers), having the blog on a subdomain is the only way to have the blog’s URL under the primary domain in any sense.

Blog Hosting: Subdomain or Subdirectory

But is using a subdomain for your blog the most effective hosting solution, from an SEO standpoint? For their customers who opt for the entire package (website & blog hosting), HubSpot installs the blog in a keyword-rich subdirectory — which tells me that even HubSpot believes this to be the preferable choice between subdomain and subdirectory.

So what is the consensus among respected SEOs around this issue of subdomain v. subdirectory?

Google’s Subdomain/Primary Domain Algorithm

In the past, Google viewed subdomains as completely separate entities from the primary domain. Because Google uses what it calls “host crowding” to return up to two results from a single domain on a search engine results page (SERP) (with the second one indented), with subdomains treated as totally separate, a single domain could get more than two listings on a Google SERP, through its subdomains. Because Google prefers to offer their users a varied selection of search results rather than multiple results from a single entity, they made a change in December 2007, announcing that subdomains would be more closely associated with the primary domain — not to the point of being viewed as a subdirectory, but not so completely separate — and Matt Cutts wrote about this on his blog.

Although Google now more closely associates subdomains and primary domains, it still views them as separate entities. Thus, when another site links to your blog or individual posts, that “link love” flows back to the subdomain rather than to your primary domain.

If your blog tends to have content similar to that on your main website — and content relevant to your core offering — then having your blog in subdirectory of your primary domain creates a larger website with more related content. And any external linking credits to your blog flow back to your primary domain. The content of your primary domain is associated by Google with the content of your blog. If the blog is in a subdomain, although there apparently is some association, it appears that it’s not nearly as strong as having the blog content in your primary domain.

This post entitled “21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic” from Rand Fishkin (aka randfish), CEO and founder of SEOmoz, a very authoritative and respected SEO blog, addresses this topic:

Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings — by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are — Hosted (on a solution like Blogspot or WordpPress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301 it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page – this is the best solution).

and in a separate post, Root Domains, Subdomains vs. Subfolders and The Microsite Debate, Rand states:

Starting a blog? I almost always recommend yoursite.com/blog over blog.yoursite.com. Want to launch a new section of content? Use yoursite.com/newstuff rather than newstuff.yoursite.com.

Mark Jackson, of Search Engine Watch, writes in his post about how to host your blog:

Many of my company’s clients need to add content to the root of their domain to build up the authority necessary to compete for keywords. So, more often than not, we recommend that our clients add their blog to a subdirectory.

[...]

Adding the blog to the subdirectory shows the search engines that you regularly add fresh content to the root of the Web site, and you can feed (via RSS) the most recent posts to the home page and then promote this content through StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, Propeller, etc., and get folks to link (deep link) to the content, so long as you created linkable (i.e., quality) content.

Mark observes that most of the reasons you would want your blog under a subdomain of your website would be technical, eg your primary domain’s hosting environment isn’t friendly to the blogging platform you’d like to use (and Mark prefers WordPress, BTW…).

Conclusion

It appears that the overwhelming consensus among the experts in SEO is that to achieve the optimal SEO benefits from your blog, you should host it in a subdirectory rather than a subdomain.

So how did I advise my client? I told them that the HubSpot solution was a one-size-fits-all solution that wouldn’t provide them the bang for their SEO buck that hosting a WordPress blog in a subdirectory would. And I explained to them that HubSpot is a product that you pay for, like Microsoft Office. So you can’t add any features you hear about, or really much change the look and feel of it. All HubSpot customer blogs look pretty much the same, and rather plain and, um, “unbloglike.” WordPress is open-source and there are literally thousands of developers creating new plugins that expand the features and functionality of WordPress, and there are literally thousands of themes, free and commercial, available to give your blog a distinct appearance.

I’d be interested to hear what others have to say about this.

Other conversations around this topic:
ChrisG Blog

Google has taken a number of precautions to assuage the above-mentioned worries:

1. If you have a Google account and profile, your comments have a better chance of being published. And the longer you’ve had the account, the better;
2. Your comments will be scanned for inappropriate language;
3. Your commenting history will be taken into account, in terms of the priority given your comment or if it’s displayed at all.

Google says:

So instead of displaying the most recent entries first, we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed.

And Google provides much more detail here. And Google’s Sidewiki “Program Policies” lay out the guidelines.

In order to comment via Sidewiki and to view others’ comments, you need to upgrade to the latest version of the Google Toolbar (compatible with Internet Explorer 6+ and Firefox 2+ … sorry Google Chrome users!), and set it to “enhanced.” As mentioned above, you also need a Google account and a Google profile. Your Sidewiki comments will appear under a tab on your Google profile.

Once you have enabled Sidewiki, any Web pages you visit that have comments will display like this:

You expand the sidebar by clicking on the arrows or the talk bubble.

If you are the comment’s owner, you can edit or delete the comment at any time after it’s published.

If you have a Google profile, your profile picture will show up next to your comment and your name will link to your Google profile.

You can comment on specific content on a Web page by highlighting the text you want to comment on. You’ll see an “edit” pencil appear to the left of that content, as a small sidebar. Clicking it will open the commenting screen. After you have published your comment, anyone visiting that page with Sidewiki enabled will see a talk balloon next to the content you commented on, and clicking that balloon will open the Sidewiki sidebar. If the content is subsequently deleted, the comment balloon will disappear. If the content is restored, it will show up again.

If the comment is below the fold, you’ll see a number in the bottom left of the screen with a down-arrow below it. Clicking on that takes you to the commented content.

Users can “vote” for comments:

I did some testing with Sidewiki and have concluded that it’s pretty cool. It’s too early to tell how much the comments will be hit by spammers or competitors, but it does allow the posting of URLs. Whether there are SEO implications or not is not clear at this point.

In my initial commenting efforts, I have added comments to my various Web properties that point users to various other related points of interest. If there’s a site whose visitors you believe would be interested in something your site offers, Sidewiki offers an opportunity.

Early Adopters
Of course, it’s easy to see how this could quickly get out of hand or at least very interesting. But it’s surprising how many large sites have no comments. Heck, it’s been almost a week! After you’ve installed Sidewiki, check out how some early adopters are taking advantage of Sidewiki:

Bing: Discussion

Microsoft: Outrage

Center for Disease Control: Expanded information

Google: Discussion

SearchEngineWatch.com: Enhanced marketing

HyperArts: Enhanced marketing

HubSpot: Enhanced marketing

Yahoo!: Announcements

Google has some examples of other usesful ways that Sidewiki can be used.

On the Microsoft website, as of this writing there is just one comment, but it’s a doozy:

Has Google Started a War?
It seems inconceivable to me that I can place a comment against Microsoft’s website and exploit all of its marketing dollars and user base. Not only that I can say whatever I want about them. The ramifications of this defy logic. Competitors will snipe each others web sites. Fundamentalists will be damning each others web sites. Jilted lovers will be making their notes on the senior partners profile, The list goes on and on. Oh and do you think voting this down will help? We will just all head to the last sidewiki to see where the dirt is. I am sorry Google but you are on a course of self destruct on this one.

I would say that if Sidewiki can somehow avoid getting hijacked by spammers, pranksters, and the mutually sabotaging corporate competitors — becoming more of a graffiti area than a resource for useful information — it stands to be a great additional to the Social Web.

Some recommended resources:

Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy Blog. Jeremiah recognizes the implications for corporations with the Sidewiki service and offers these tips:

1. Shift your thinking: recognize that you don’t own your corporate website –your customers do. Accept the mindshift that your job is to not only serve up product and corporate content but to also be a platform and enabler for customers to discuss, share, and make suggestions to how you should improve what you offer.
2. Develop a social strategy with dedicated resources. With every webpage now potentially social, you’ll need to develop a process, roles, and policy to ensure you’re monitoring the conversation, participating as you would in blog discussions, and influencing the discussion.  80% of success is developing an internal strategy, providing education before a free-for-all happens with customers and employees.
3. Don’t be reactive to negative content –embrace social content now. Give users the ability to leave social feedback directly on your corporate webpages, or aggregate existing social content.  CMS vendors are developing features to enable this, as well as community platform vendors like Kickapps, Pluck, Liveworld’s Livebar offer rapid deployment options.

Google’s Sidewiki Announcement on its Official Blog

ReadWriteWeb’s Sidewiki Article

With this increased and growing market share, the fact that Yahoo! search will be taken over by Bing, and because Bing’s search algorithms differ from Google’s, SEOs will have to factor Microsoft/Bing into their approach to optimizing Web pages. The question is, How?

Early reporting on this indicates the following differences:

• Unlike Google, Bing doesn’t place as much weight on links — specifically backlinks;
• Bing gives higher weighting to the domain name, so that websites with keywords in the domain name will fare better in Bing;
• Bing ascribes more importance to keyword density in the title tag, and in content. Whereas Google seems to prefer a 2%-4% density, Bing will tolerate 6%-8% density as long as it doesn’t detect keyword spamming.

Like Google, Bing does strongly factor in a domain’s age, as well as keywords in the anchor text of links.

A very helpful resource in sussing out Bing’s approach to indexing websites, as regards links, is Rick DeJarnette’s article Links: the good, the bad, and the ugly (Part 1) on the webmaster blog of the Bing website. Here’s what he says about backlink “relevance”:

Instead of making the mistake of focusing on quantity, you’ll be far more successful if you focus instead on quality. A small number of highly relevant, inbound links from sites with solid reputations can do more for you than a ton of junk links. Attempting to boost the quantity of inbound links by artificial means, such as link exchanges, is old-school thinking. That’s bad.

In Part 2 of this post, the DeJarnette lays out Bing’s preferences for optimizing your internal links:

• Canonicalize your home page URL: specifying the single URL form you want to be used for your website’s home page when there are several choices (eg mysite.com, www.mysite.com, www.mysite.com/index.html etc.). Google’s Matt Cutts has also written about URL canonicalization.
• Always use absolute URLs for your internal links: Although this may seem counterintuitive and unnecessary, the Bing blog makes a good point: minimizing the effects of theft, when another site “scrapes” your site’s content and puts it on their site. “If you use absolute links for your inline links, your stolen content will most often take the reader of the plagiarized content back to the source—your site!” Makes sense.
• Use the title attribute in anchor tags for internal links: The title attribute can expand the keywords used in the anchor text, particularly when trying to get all your relevant keywords into the anchor text results in clumsy syntax/readability.
• Avoid pages with nothing but a long list of non-contextual links: It’s best to provide some context with links rather than just have a list of links with no context. Obviously, in the case of a site map page, this may be unavoidable, although they add “at least try to organize the sitemap list of links so they are easier for the user to consume.”
• Prevent the bot from following a link: Use the rel=”nofollow” parameter in your anchor tags to identify pages you don’t want followed, such as those to untrusted sources (in the case of blogs or forums).

It appears that although there is definitely a difference in emphasis between Google and Bing (as evidenced by the same searches in both search engines returning different but relevant results), SEO best practices are still in place, and Bing’s advice about linking is basically the same as Google’s linking preferences.

In the case of using absolute URLs for your internal links, it may be best to do this, as it won’t hurt you in Google and it apparently may help with Bing.

Resources & References for Bing v. Google & Optimizing for Bing

• SEOWizz.net: A Further Bing SEO Update
• Mashable: Yahoo-Microsoft Search Deal: The Key Facts
• KPMRS Blog: How Does Bing Yahoo Deal Affect your Website Rankings
• Bing Community Webmaster Blog: Making links work for you (SEM 101)
• Webconfs.com: Bing Optimization
• Bing Webmaster Central
• SearchEngineNews.com: SEO Update for Bing
• Matt Cutts on Canonicalization
• Google Webmaster Help: Link Schemes
• Google Webmaster Help: Search Engine Optimization

The name of the game is Semantic Search, which is often described as the most salient characteristic of the not-quite-here-yet Web 3.0. Semantic searches support “natural language” queries, as opposed to keyword queries. It is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing, and combining information on the Web.

This is certainly a viable strategy, as long as the novelty creates a useful and user-friendly service that somehow enhances or augments what is offered by Google’s search.

Two of the following three recent entries into the search field — Microsoft’s Bing and Wolfram|Alpha — are positioning themselves as natural-language search engines, although Wolfram|Alpha is much more the real deal than is Bing which basically bolted on some features of Powerset to provide a bit of semantic search although it really just pulls from Wikipedia.

Billed as a “decision engine,” Bing, which became available to the public on May 28, 2009, presents search results in a visually organized manner that has garnered it some positive reviews. Its graphics-dominated home page –  the very antithesis of Google’s clean no-BS look — is to my taste a bit, um, overcooked and visually unappealing (very 1990s –  hard to imagine how it got approved!), but the search results are organized well and, thankfully, the SERPs are much cleaner in presentation. However, in terms of relevant search results, the consensus seems to be that Google still rules. However, Bing did quickly double Microsoft’s search marketshare in its first couple weeks, so it’ll be interesting to see how it fairs as its results and features improve and evolve and after its novelty fades.

Another recent search engine is Wolfram|Alpha which bills itself as a “computational knowledge engine” and was rolled out to the public on May 15, 2009. Based on the work of Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram|Alpha is not, as a ReadWriteWeb Blog posts warns, a general purpose search engine. As the Wikipedia entry describes it

It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might.

And this article describes it:

Search engines still matter, but Wolfram Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com) hopes to shift us toward a “finding engine” that uses Web 3.0 principles to deliver information from natural language queries. Wolfram Alpha is the latest big project from Wolfram Research, Inc. Marketed as a computational knowledge engine, it boils down to being a really smart way to access most of the best reference shelves on the planet. Think about it as a library minus the disdain for skateboarders plus Wolfram’s Mathematica program powering the world’s biggest online scientific calculator.

Wolfram|Alpha’s strength is in the computation area — excelling in information that can be packed into data snippets (height of a mountain, chemical formulas, population stats, stars, planets, etc.): math problems, word puzzles, statistics. But a “Google Killer” it’s not, and really doesn’t purport to be.

Spezify is a new search engine with a unique graphical interface, and driven by Flash, that has just come out of beta, as of June 15, 2009.

I did some searches on Spezify and I have to admit that the presentation of “hits” is quite unique, with different sources (MSN Live search, Yahoo, Amazon, Twitter and Ebay, Facebook, Linkedin, etc.) aggregated and each source represented by a different graphic.  For instance, Twitter results are represented by a speech bubble, and other sources are branded in the top left with their logo/icon.

Here’s how Spezify characterizes their search engine:

We take web search further, away from endless lists of blue text links and towards a more intuitive experience.
We want you to get a good overview of a subject,
find useful information and be inspired with Spezify.

We mix all media types and make no difference
between blogs, videos, microblogs and images.
Everything communicates and helps building the bigger picture.

We collect websites and are aiming to use as many relevant, free and open API’s as possible to generate extensive and diverse search results.

Spezify was developed by Felix af Ekenstam and Per Persson, of Stockholm Sweden.

They don’t identify from which search engines they pull their results.

Unfortunately, Spezify is a bit counter-intuitive, because each box when moused over pops the “link finger” the only clicking that works is on the visible URLs. This sort of makes sense, but I think it might be confusing to users. Also, it takes a very long time for all their results to load, minutes in some cases.

It will be interesting to watch this Swedish search engine evolve.

First I sent out a tweet asking if anyone else had experienced the same problem, but that was really unnecessary. My second step should have been my first, which was simply searching “facebook” in the Twitter search (that now sits conveniently in the right hand-side toolbar). In the results I saw that the most recent tweets that contained my keyword ALL related to the scam! My question was answered immediately, by complete strangers. Some tweets looked like this:

Just got one of those facebook phishing emails. didn’t click the link because it was from someone I hardly contact

This tweet confirmed that I was not the only one, but was not informative enough to really locate the source of the issue. The next type of tweet was much more helpful:

Areps.at, The New Facebook Phishing Scam! http://bit.ly/CsE62 #facebook #scam #phishing

Obviously this person was tweeting information to help others by a) linking to a reliable article about the scam b) using hashtags and relevant keywords so that their tweet could be found and easily recognized and c) including all pertinent information in a succinct and clear message.

Would I have found a similar degree of rapid and accurate information had I used Google search? Searching right now (about 3 hours later) with the term “facebook scam” gives me results that include a Mashable article about the scam, and a Washington Post article written 2 hours ago with warnings about the scam as well. But the feelings of camaraderie, commiseration and collaboration were missing…as well as the real-time updates. As I searched via Twitter there were up to 17 new updates every 5-10 seconds or so, proof that many other people were doing the exact same thing I was.

Google still serves a very important function and I use it everyday, much more than Twitter. But more and more often I find myself turning to Twitter for updates from communities. And even though Google claims to value relevance and current content, Twitter is the best source for data and trends happening “right now.”

Just do a Google search on, say, Thomas Pynchon. You will see the results displayed. Click on the “show options” link just beneath the Google logo.

You will be presented with the initial hub and spokes:

Clicking on any of the other links spawns a new wheel of associated links:

Notice in the right column a list of links relevant to whichever link you clicked on. Where Google detects a product search, it displays a list of e-commerce sites where the product is available. For the Thomas Pynchon search, however, it displays links related to the last link you clicked, Pynchon being an American novelist and not a product.

The links displayed in the right column are ranked in the same order as a regular search on the phrase you clicked on would show up. What is interesting is: Where are the Adwords ads? A search on Hawaiian vacations, with Wonder Wheel activated, displays no ads, just the right column of sites as they would be ordered in a regular search. Interesting.

Also interesting is that sometimes when you click on a keyword, the new wheel is spawned but instead of spokes, you just see the perimeter of the circle, dashed outline, rotating. I’m not sure if this is an error, or what.

I wouldn’t think this would shake up SEOs much, as the same sites are displayed as would come up in a regular search; however, these results are pushed to the side to display the wheels.

It will be interesting to see how this feature evolves.