Twitter Takes Over Rankings

With Twitter's recent SEO tweak to the profile title tag a lot of users are becoming aware that their Twitter profile is starting to rank #1 for their own name. Now this can have implications for those who have a personal blog and have built up their personal reputation. Instead of funneling visitors to your blog (that may have ranked #1 for your name) there is more of a likelihood that those visitors are now going to your Twitter profile instead. Getting bumped from #1 to #2 can result in 3.5 x less clicks and from #2 to #3 1.4x less clicks (source).

You may also want to add the rel="me" attribute to all of the links pointing to your personal blog. This can create a "bi-directional" link, proving that you have ownership of the web site. Watch Google's "Introduction to the Social Graph API" to see how rel="me" links work. I have not seen any studies that the rel="me" has any influence in search rankings. Not all search engines have adopted this format as well.

Twitter Stats from Neilsen Online

Neilsen Online released some new stats on Twitter usage and demographics. The report, Twitter's Tweet Smell of Success, notes that Twitter saw a 1,382% increase in unique visitors year-over-year. twitter went from 475K unique visitors in Feb 2008 to 7M in Feb 2009. The report also broke out the current demographics of Twitter users.

• Age 2 -17 3.6% (250,000 Unique Users)
• Age 18 -24 Insufficient sample size
• Age 25 - 34 19.6% (1,379,000 Unique Users)
• Age 35 - 49 41.7% (2,935,000 Unique Users)
• Age 55+ 16.6% (1,165,000 Unique Users)
• Age 65+ 6.8% (477,000 Unique Users)

SuperTweet - When 140 Characters is Not Enough

Have you heard of the SuperTweet? A SuperTweet post is a post that is larger than the 140 character limit provided by Twitter. A SuperTweet post can be as big as 250 characters in length. Edward Lewis (@pageoneresults) first discovered it and wrote about it, Twitter 250 Character SuperTweet. Edward mentions that you can post a SuperTweet directly from Twitter as well a Twhirl. You can see my SuperTweet.

Twitter Censoring Posts?

Eric Lander (@ericlander) noted that one of his Twitter posts that contained some explicit words within it had suddenly disappeared from his Twitter stream. It looks like Twitter has some kind of curse word filter. The orginial post can be found here. While still an active status page, it is not being displayed in his current Twitter stream.

We Follow - Twitter Directory by Users

Kevin Rose (@kevinrose), the founder of Digg, just released a beta version of WeFollow.com. We Follow is a user generated Twitter Directory that allows any Twitter user to tag themselves. To get started all you need to do is send a tweet to @wefollow. You can only place yourself into three categories at the moment. So to do this you would ad #categoryname to the post.

TIP: Just note, to create a multiple keyword category you will need to use the underscore (I do not think a lot of people use this - see socialmedia category). This could have better long term benefits since people will search by "social media" versus "socialmedia".

Twitoria - Find Inactive Twitter Friends

Twitoria is a nice Twitter app that allows you to discover which of your friends have not been active on Twitter for a given period of time. Twitoria allows you to see all inactive friends for the past week, past two weeks, past two months, past six months, or for the past year. A nice tool for cleaning up your Following list.