"We’ve made a few changes to the way Digg links to external sites that may impact some folks in the SEO community," says Digg’s John Quinn. "These changes reduce the incentive to post spammy content (or link spam) to Digg, while still flowing ’search engine juice’ freely to quality content."

Digg is now adding rel="nofollow" to any external link that they aren’t sure they can "vouch for." This means:

- External links from comments
- External links from user profiles
- External links from story pages "below a certain threshold of popularity"

"This work was done in consultation with leading experts from the SEO/SEM and link spam fields, in an effort to lookout for the interests of content providers and the Digg community," says Quinn. "As always, we will closely monitor these changes in the wild and iterate based on feedback."

Speaking of Digg and search, Digg also talked a bit today about the search feature they launched earlier this year.

"We’re using Apache SOLR/Lucene which helped us scale horizontally and solved many of our relevancy issues as well as enabling discovery of new content through facets," the company said earlier today. "Beyond site search, the rich set of features has allowed us build a platform that enables other features such as Related By Source and Related By Keywords."

There is a podcast available here, which discusses Digg’s search feature in more detail.

Disclaimer: If you are not a Twitterer, you may be unfamiliar with the concept of retweeting. Basically, when someone updates their status on Twitter, that is called a tweet. When someone likes that status and wants to share it with others, they will at "RT" (for ReTweet) and the user’s name typically and post the same update. This is usually done with Tweets containing links, so naturally it provides a good, viral means of link exposure.

Tweetmeme has been around for a while, offering a service to content providers, where they can add a button onto an article page that lets a reader easily tweet a link to that article on Twitter. It then counts these tweets, which become retweets, just like similar buttons you’ve probably seen for Digg. The more retweets that are registered on that button, the more interesting the content looks at first glance. The reason for this is that theoretically, if a user sees the article has 2,000 tweets, as opposed to 2, they can assume that a lot of people found the article interesting or informative, and will be more likely to continue reading. It’s kind of like the concept behind comments. Articles that display a large amount of comments are likely to catch readers’ eyes for the same reason. The Huffington Post discussed this concept in a recent interview with WebProNews:

More WebProNews Videos

This week, a company called Mesiab Labs launched a service that is practically identical to Tweetmeme, at Retweet.com. Obviously, this company is hoping to cash in on the popular concept, while injecting a powerful brand to go along with it. The timing of this is interesting because Twitter recently announced its own retweeting plans in an initiative called " Project Retweet," which will presumably see a retweet button at Twitter.com (many consider this long overdue), and retweet functionality right in the Twitter API, opening up a lot more retweeting possibilities in third-party Twitter apps.

Sketch for Project Retweet

 But back to why retweeting is useful to businesses. The attention grabbing effect of the retweet button on a piece of content is just one aspect. Another is of course, the promotion the content provider sees from a substantial amount of retweets. They’re viral by nature, and in the best-case scenario, they can drive a ton of traffic to the content.

Famed blogger Robert Scoble started an interesting discussion on FriendFeed about what is better between the retweet and the "like" feature on either Facebook or FriendFeed itself. While I’m not going to get into all of the reasons why one is better than the other, Scoble and other participants in the conversation made a number of good points bout the pros and cons of retweets. Let’s look at some of those.

Pros

- Retweets are viral

- Retweets show up as top-level items in FriendFeed

- As opposed to a Facebook "like," a retweet is shared with everyone

- Retweets typically give credit to sources

- While giving credit to sources, retweets can lead to relationships

- Susbstantial amounts of retweets can say a lot about the quality of content

- Retweets can inspire further conversation

- Retweets can be good for branding

- Retweets can easily be shared across multiple networks, like Twitter, Friend, Facebook, etc.

- Retweets can provide followers with additional value in quality content

Cons

- It’s hard to provide a list of the things you’ve retweeted, as Scoble mentions. He mentions how people can see your "likes" on FriendFeed

- Retweeting creates what many people consider to be "noise" on Twitter

- Twitter’s 140 character limit

- Some people consider retweeting to be like copying other people’s work for your own gain, though this concept is heavily disputed

Conclusion

A recent study from Pear Analytics found that about 8.70% of the tweets it researched were retweets. In some of the more web-oriented circles, this probably even seems quite low. Without a doubt though, Twitterers are retweeting tweets like there’s no tomorrow. Obviously businesses can see value in this, especially if they provide some kind of content that they would like to see shared.

As always, it comes down to providing quality content – the old "content is king" cliché. Even as the web has evolved, that simple fact remains true. If you provide something interesting, people will share it.

Scoble’s whole "Retweet vs. Like" concept is an interesting one in itself. We have certainly seen Facebook make numerous changes to its interface that seem to move the network closer to the realm of Twitter. You have to wonder if Facebook will eventually incorporate some kind of retweet-like functionality itself.

What are your thoughts on retweeting? Do you see value in it or is it just noise? Tell us what you think.

We have restored tr.im, and re-opened its website. We have been absolutely overwhelmed by the popular response, and the countless public and private appeals I have received to keep tr.im alive.

We have answered those pleas. Nambu will keep tr.im operating going forward, indefinitely, while we continue to consider our options in regards to tr.im’s future.

Either way, Tr.im has managed to bring a seemingly important subject into the spotlight, and it is still one worth thinking about.

Original Article: Shortened URLs come in quite handy when you want to share a link, but the URL is simply too long. Twitter’s rise to popularity has carried the popularity of such services right up with it. Naturally, when you have a 140-character limit, such a tool becomes much more in-demand.

Over the weekend, URL shortening service Tr.im announced that it was closing down shop. This is by no means the most popular service of its kind. But the big story here is not that we’re losing Tr.im. It’s that the idea of losing Tr.im brings up a much broader issue in what happens to all of those shortened URLs?

Tell WebProNews readers what you think about the situation.

"When these services go away, tens of thousands of links on the web simply stop working," says Mashable’s Pete Cashmore. "Some sites will lose hundreds of inbound links, and the traffic that comes with them."

"If Tr.im shuts down its servers, millions of links will simply die," says Mashable’s Ben Parr separately. "Poof, just like that. Someone could even buy Tr.im and redirect all the links to spam, porn, or malware."

Tr.im says in its announcement that all of its URLs will continue to redirect until December 31. Parr thinks someone will buy Tr.im before the end of the year. Bit.ly, Twitter’s go-to shortener has a project called 301works, (which archives URLs) told the publication that they offered to host Tr.im’s URL mappings, but it is not clear yet if anything will come of that.

But once again, the issue lies on a much larger plane than that of Tr.im. If more of these sites fail for any reason or get hacked, the web could turn into link bedlam. "Millions upon millions of links could suddenly vanish, leaving users confused and a possibly uncleanable mess," says Parr.

How Big is the Problem Really?

Or perhaps we’re sensationalizing this a little bit. There’s no question that there are many, many shortened URLs out there in circulation, but if they all stopped working, what would happen? Let’s look at where they’re being used – Twitter. In a hypothetic scenario where no URL shortening service works any longer, people will stop using them from that point on. That eliminates the further spread of problem-links.

That leaves you with all of the ones out there that people have posted in the past. That means while they are out there to be clicked on, they will become more and more buried as time goes on. Twitter Search is after all about what is happening "right now."

I don’t mean to play down the issue too much. It is definitely an issue, and there would still be some hiccups experienced by many webmasters. Twitter does drive a lot of traffic for a lot of people. But most of that traffic I would guess comes from fresh tweets, rather than tweets that are days or weeks old that would carry broken links.

I fully acknowledge that Twitter is not the only source of URL shortened-links, but it is easily the largest. Links could stop working at many places around the web, but it’s not going to be a mass web apocalypse. Google results aren’t going to stop offering legitimate links.

Is the 140-Character Limit Bad for the Web?

If anything, the issue casts yet another shadow of vulnerability on Twitter, and at a time when it has already received mass media attention over a Denial-of-Service attack. Without functioning links, Twitter becomes a lot less useful for many users. Does Twitter want to depend on third party services for such functionality as it continues to grow? Is rethinking the 140-character limit in order?

Twitter does have a relationship with Bit.ly, which is alive and well, but maybe Twitter just needs its own such service, just so it (or its users at least) doesn’t have to rely on others. But what would happen to all of those if Twitter had its own shortener? Without such high demand, would they continue to thrive? If not, they could add to the problem with that many more compromised links.

I don’t know. I don’t claim to have the answers. The whole thing does raise some important questions about the web though. If Twitter is to become a long-term major player in communication on the web, some things are going to need to be addressed. Any thoughts on the situation? Please share them.

Original Article: First Twitter ignited the URL-shortening service fire, and now a similar phenomenon appears to be happening with "retweeting" services. Retweet.com is reportedly set to launch today.

First of all, if you are not a Twitterer, you may be unfamiliar with the concept of retweeting. Basically, when someone updates their status on Twitter, that is called a tweet. When someone likes that status and wants to share it with others, they will at "RT" (for ReTweet) and the user’s name typically and post the same update. This is usually done with Tweets containing links, so naturally it provides a good, viral means of link exposure.

So far, a service called Tweetmeme has pretty much ruled this area of content sharing. What it does is supply content providers with a button that users can easily click to share that content on Twitter. The button then provides an ongoing count of how many times an article has been retweeted. You can see one at the top of this very WebProNews article.

Retweet.com is now swooping in to try and capture this market dominated by Tweetmeme. In fact, Mesiab Labs, who is launching Retweet.com even called out Tweetmeme by name. Not only does Retweet.com make for a powerfully branded domain for such a service, but the company is also launching with a $10,000 contest to inspire people to use its service.

The really interesting part of this story to me though, is the timing of this launch. Just last week, Twitter itself announced an initiative called "Project Retweet," in which the company plans to bring the concept of retweeting right to Twitter.com and the Twitter API. This means that people using Twitter on the web should be able to easily retweet something from their stream, and apps all over the web will start incorporating retweeting into their interfaces.

At this point, it’s hard to say how relevant services like Tweetmeme and Retweet.com will remain. Considering that they offer services for content publishers themselves, they will probably still have a place. They may even be helped by Project Retweet just because it will put the concept of retweeting even more into the spotlight.

And don’t be surprised if you start seeing a lot more of these retweeting services popping up in the near future. Everybody and their grandma will likely be offering one by the end of the year. It will be very much like the URL-shortener. Some will have different spins, and may entice different groups of users, but Tweetmeme has an established presence going for it, and Retweet.com has that powerful brand name. These two should have the upper hands.

According to Mashable, Retweet.com should be going live around 12pm Eastern Time today.

Search is changing though, and there are always new elements coming into play. Since social media has come into its own, more opportunities and questions have come along with it. Now Microsoft is going for Google’s throat with a new search engine and an aggressive marketing campaign. What this means for the future of search market share is yet to be determined, but there’s no denying Bing is capturing some attention, and that means there are people searching with it. Altered your SEO strategy for Bing? Tell us why.

SEO for Bing

Microsoft’s stance on search engine optimization really doesn’t appear to be all that different from Google’s. You’re not going to get the same results on both Google and Bing in many cases, but that is after all why the two can co-exist. The real difference is in how the results are presented, and not as much in how the two determine quality and relevancy.

Bing and Google have separate algorithms, but both like quality, relevant links and good content, as opposed to deception and spam. Bing in fact, hasn’t really changed much (from Live Search) in terms of crawling.

"There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing," Microsoft says in a Bing white paper for webmasters (pdf). "However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn’t changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBog."

Sidenote: Webmasters will want to acknowledge that Microsoft has increased the size limit of sitemaps from 10,000 URLs to 50,000. Google is also now supporting up to 50,000 "child sitemaps" of sitemaps index files.

Like I was saying, the biggest difference between the two search engines is in the presentation. Bing of course separates (some) results into categories. This has worried some search marketers, but Microsoft says good SEO will work just as well with this set up. Bing also has the explore pane (navigational menu on the left-hand side of search results), which corresponds with the categories in the SERPs. In some ways, this is similar to Google’s recent addition of "search options."

I discussed what Google’s search options would mean for SEO here. Basically, I just broke it down section by section, and you could do the same thing with Bing I think. Look at the keyword phrases you want to rank for, and see how Bing breaks it up. Let’s say "cell phones" for example. Bing gives you categories like shopping, brands, buying guide, providers, accessories, images, videos, and local.

This tells me that you want to play up the appropriate categories on your site, so that it shows up in the relevant categories on Bing. If you sell accessories, place emphasize that, and you’ll probably have a better shot ending up in that category. With Bing, it’s not about getting to the top of the SERP. It’s about getting to the top of the right part of the SERP. I’ll let you in on a little secret. Having quality and relevant (to that part of the SERP) content is the best thing you can do. Incidentally, this will probably help your cause in Google (and other search engines) at the same time.

"Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design," says Microsoft.

Curious About What Bing Looks for in Links?

Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center recently posted a pair of blog posts looking at what makes some links good and some bad. You may find some of these things familiar:

- "If you don’t feel you can endorse the quality of the content at another site, you shouldn’t be linking to them."

- Don’t seek links from sites whose content isn’t worthy of your endorsement.

- Links to and from your site should be relevant to your site (or at least the page you’re linking from/to)

- Focus on quality, not quantity. Few highly relevant links are better than a bunch of crap links

- Avoid "bad neighborhoods" like dedicated domains or IP ranges that do nothing but set up meaningless link exchanges.

- Avoid hidden text

You can’t stop bad links coming to your site. "We take the approach that bad inbound links won’t adversely affect your site ranking unless most or all of your inbound links are from bad sites," explains DeJarnette.

But in a nutshell, that’s essentially where Microsoft stands on SEO practices, or at least what they are giving to the public.

Social media Really Is Important to SEO

Social media definitely enters the SEO equation. "Effective social media management can be a tremendous source for generating buzz, those all-important inbound links and just plain direct referral traffic," says Mike McDonald of WebProNews, as he discusses a recent interview he did with SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin.

More WebProNews Videos

Facebook

Copyblogger has an interesting article about how Facebook is "killing SEO." I think that’s a bit sensationalist, but the points made by author Mike Wasylik are valid, nonetheless.

"The rise of Facebook creates a growing segment of the web that’s completely invisible to search engines – most of which, Facebook blocks – and can be seen only by logged-in Facebook users," he says. "So as Facebook becomes ever larger, and keeps more users inside its walled garden, your web site will need to appear in Facebook’s feeds and searches or you will miss out on an important source of web traffic."

"What’s the best way to keep your links in front of Facebook users?" asks Wasylik. "The ever-more-important linkbait strategy."

The term linkbait sometimes carries a negative connotation, but generally, again, it’s just good solid content that people want to link to.

Twitter

Twitter has gone from a confusing (to many) communication tool/social network, to that plus a way to  find information in real time. This means that it is a good idea to tweet regularly. When someone performs a search on Twitter, they are searching right now. The fresher the tweet, the more likely they are to see it.

But Twitter’s search implications are not limited to its own search. "Although Twitter is a social media tool meant to create community and relationships, it does have an SEO value," says Mihaela Lica at Sitepoint. "For example, Twitter can affect positively your Alexa rankings by sending visitors to your pages. Usage data is a sign of quality for Google and all the other search engines. If you can make people come to your site via Twitter, then this is an SEO advantage you cannot afford to miss."

With both Twitter and Facebook, good content that you create will be shared. The links within the social networks may not boost your rankings, but they can lead to more links outside of them. Either way, it is added exposure.

Wrapping Up

The roots of search engine optimization really haven’t changed that much. Creating great and fresh content is still your best bet. That’s what people will share, and that’s what will be considered relevant for searches it pertains to. For some great SEO tips and items of note, check out these recent articles:

What’s the Future of Search?

SEO Checklist with Vanessa Fox

SEO Ranking Factors for 2009

Could Comments Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings?

Google Improves Flash Indexing Capabilities

Google Changes to No-Follow on the Horizon?

Are SEOs the "Bad Guys?"

Google vs. Bing – Side by Side

What changes have you made to your SEO practices as a result of Bing’s release? Twitter? Facebook? Tell us what tweaks you’ve made.

There are plenty of reasons to want your content to be linked to: search engine algorithms, visibility, credit, the sharing of valuable information, traffic to monetize you site, etc. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable discusses how link building was popular even before Google came out and spawned the link-building craze as we still know it today. He writes:

Eric Ward (ericward.com) was one of the first, if not the first, person in the link building business pre-Google. Eric has told his story at many SEM conferences. The most remember part of his history is that he did link building as a way to promote Amazon, in the early days. He said that Amazon offered him shares in the company, but he turned it down – that is his legacy. Seriously, he was using links to market companies online before Google and he still uses links in the same fashion. He believes that those types of links are the links that mean the most to Google because they worked pre-Google for pre-Google reasons.

Ward recently offered his wisdom about obtaining links with Twitter, which just happens to be the latest of many Internet crazes. There is plenty of link potential there despite the nofollow/shortened URL obstacles. Twitter is just one of many paths that can lead to inbound links for your site. WebProWorld member Zonked started an insightful thread saying:

Too often nowadays I see guys spending way too much time focusing on on-page factors. By this I mean, worry about you title tags, meta-tags, keyword density, anchor text and so on.

And don’t just get any site to link to you. Google will look at your "circle of friends" and if they consist of spammy sites like article directories, FFA link sites, and so on, then it aint gonna do you a whole lot of good.

Other posters seem to generally agree, and the discussion is an interesting one (join it here).

Melanie Nathan at Search Engine Journal has a helpful article up providing (and elaborating upon) the following tips for getting more out of your backlinks:

1. Control what you can
2. Optimize your existing backlinks
3. Lend a helping hand
4. Strengthen your site’s inner linking structure
5. Be link worthy

She also links to some other great articles about getting more out of links. I’d also like to suggest doing a little digging through the archive for the "Link" tag content on WebProNews (a great way to find content on about any subject we cover btw). You will find a ton of useful tips and other knowledge that will contribute to the better understanding of getting the most out of links to increase your site’s traffic and success.

Have linking tips of your own? Let’s hear them. Share your knowledge with other WebProNews readers.