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Is it true that links from social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz and the many hundred other ones count as quality backlinks to a website? No, this isn’t true.

The main reason why this is not true is because if it did matter, then each and every user of these social media would spam the heck out of these sites and start to link like crazy back to their hundred’s and thousands of sites a million times!

Yes, crazy as it may sound but it’s true.

Exception. If the backlink on Twitter comes from a very reputable user, then this may have positive effect on rankings!

Link building is one of those activities which is usually frowned upon by Google, to varying degrees. Typically if you are paying for links, Google doesn’t like it much. If you are building links through active means but without payment, then usually that is OK. Google’s own guidelines follow the “if you build it, they will link it” rule – meaning that you should concentrate on making good content, a usable site and inevitably you will see more links coming your way.

All of this is easier than it sounds, though. Making a site linkworthy is an elusive art, but there are a few tips to help you on your way:

1. Don’t fill your site with ads. You may want to make money, but users are no more receptive to being bombarded with ads on the internet than they are in the street. If you’re the kind of person who thinks that at least 50% of the visible portion of a page should be used for adverts, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
2. Post content regularly, or at the least evenly. By this I mean don’t write 10 blog posts and have them all come out over 10 days in sequence. Spread them out for your more busy periods when you won’t be posting content. This will keep people coming back as they will come to expect this regularity from your site. This will help build links, too.
3. Don’t just copy another article and shift a few words around. Write original content for your site even if it is about a topic being talked about across a huge variety of sites. Take the Apple iPad for instance – there will be thousands of blog posts about it by now but the ones which stand out are the original ones, and standing out will get you links.

I will be talking about this more in the future, but I think it is something important for website owners to pay attention to. The days of gaming the system are now starting to fade, meaning you will have to work hard to get your site to the top.

Linkscape, the SEOmoz link spider, has found a new lease of life it would seem. Already an invaluable tool to SEO specialists and link builders worldwide, the announcement of the Open Site Explorer shows their intent to take this vast data resource to the next level.

Essentially, the tool makes it incredibly simple to deal with the data Linkscape offers. Information relating to the key measures most website owners would be interested in is now even easier to access, along with an amazing set of tools to help you filter through the masses of links that Linkscape has spidered relating to your site.

SEOmoz are showing themselves to be very committed to this project, and with the possible lack of Yahoo’s Site Explorer soon due to the Bing deal, they could well end up at the forefront of the analytics market outside of Google (if they aren’t there already!)

So what are you waiting for? Check it out!

I think it is time to go over a simple concept which still seems to be one that a lot of site owners haven’t really got an understanding of – link quality.

Quality of links is a hard thing to measure. Generally you want links from a site which is in a similar area of relevance to your own. Links from a site about body building to your online pet store probably won’t help much, but links from a blog about pet ownership would be very useful. Search engines and users are discerning and will only be interested in a link if it is relevant.

In this way, you could say that 100 irrelevant links could be worth 1 relevant one from a good site. In the end the cost might be the same – weigh it up in your head!

However, nothing beats natural links. Paying will get you so far but the real benefit comes from the snowball effect of good content people want to share. Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook can be especially good for this kind of thing.

I haven’t gone into much detail as there is a hell of a lot of information out there about links and their usefulness, but I just wanted to get the concept of “quality beats quantity” into people’s heads once more.

Well it is it is Christmas Day again and while for most of us, it is predominantly a time of excess and gluttony, we must remember that it is also a religious time of year. That made me think. What SEO  problems would Jesus’ website face?

• Keywords: Jesus, Religion, Christianity, Crucifixion, Carpentry, Fish.
• Set all pages to robots, follow.
• Change the parables because of hidden content.
• 301 redirect the Jesus-is-dead-page to the he-has-risen.htm
• Duplicate content: Father the Son and the Holly Ghost (only on the Catholic website.)
• Create a  blog on a sub-domain called, “Loaves and Fishes” and direct it to the main site.
• Each page would be a PR-10 because it had a link from God.

Merry Christmas and best wishes for the New-Year.

A partnership between the BBC, ITV, BT, Five, Channel 4 and TalkTalk has been given a provisional thumbs up by the BBC Trust to develop an internet television standard. The project known as Canvas, would develop set-top boxes to access services such as BBC iPlayer and ITV player.
The boxes could be available by the end of next year and will sell for around £200. In addition to these services, users will be able to access internet services such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. The news of this free service has not pleased everyone however. Pay TV providers such as Virgin and BSkyB are critical of the scheme.

Speculation  today that Google will develop its own phone. This is not news I hear your say and you would be partly correct. The operating system developed for telephones and mobile devices has been around for some time. However, this has been made to run on telephones that have been produced and sold under the manufacturer HTC.

Now the Google telephone is going to be made for Google, with Google branding. The research phones have been issued to some employees at Google to test the facilities.  Unfortunately, that is where the story ends as further news is not forthcoming.  I would expect that it will probably have something to do with augmented reality as applications for this seem to fit well with Google’s information retrieval model.  Don’t you get the feeling they are trying to market this for all it is worth?

Bing is making great efforts to differentiate itself from its arch nemesis, Google. One of the ways it is doing this is with a new visual search. ( This creates sets of data and allows the images to organised in ways that show relationships between them. One example is the Priministers of the UK, and the images can be sorted and arranged in many ways.
As well as the usual alphabetical order, the prime ministers can be ordered in terms of their age, how long they spent in office, which political party they belonged. Hovering over an image produces lots more information.

Other data sets include the periodic table, oscar winners. At the moment this is in beta and there are limited data sets.
However, an interesting dataset is the shopping dataset which allows products to be arrange in terms of price, brand, number of reviews and who they are suitable for. This can be ordered and arranged to suit your particular queries. People find it easier to look at images than read text and the way in which queries can be answered by sliders is an interesting and tactile way of interacting with the information.
If it can be adapted to larger dataset from search queries it could prove to be a winning search tool that bests Google.