I keep reading more and more about the negative Digg effect - that increasing numbers of domains are being permanently blocked by the Digg admins and the users are digging down stories en masse.

Admittedly, the majority of complaints come from pro-bloggers and social media marketers. They all have very valid things to say in their respective fields, and personally I enjoy reading their posts and subscribe to a number of blogs in the area.

But the Digg users don’t want them.

Sad but true. A lot of these bloggers have got hooked on quick fix traffic off the back of Digg, and they’ve been writing about techniques to get on the Digg home page - optimal time of day to post, write about Digg, using the friends system, etc.

What’s worse is they all focussed on Digg and totally excluded other areas of social media. Where are the posts about Reddit, StumbleUpon, mag.nolia, NetScape and all the other (often better) communities out there?

A Message To Social Marketers & Pro-Bloggers

Rejection always hurts, but you have to move on.

The pro bloggers and SEO practitioners helped build the Digg userbase through their enthusiastic support for Digg. You can do it again. Choose another social bookmarking service and focus on it for a while. Write about it, promote it and analyse how to succeed with it.

The Digg userbase has spoken, and though many of you have loved the spikes in traffic, others have disdained the snide and insulting comments left by Digg visitors.

Too many bloggers have come to rely on Digg as a quick fix way of getting new visitors, but its been an eggs-in-one-basket scenario and it looks like Digg is no longer a friend to pro-bloggers and SEOs. Which is a shame, but there you go.

Now, let’s start the debate: Which social media platform should we use as an alternative to Digg?

I had my first visit to Search Engine Journal today, and their excellent 13 Reasons Why NoFollow Tags Suck.

NoFollow is an attribute you can add to any link on a website. Its usage tells search engines that the link is not endorsed by that site. As a result Google will not use the link in PageRank calculations.

The idea was to thwart the increase in blog spam and to prevent spammers gaining PageRank from a litter of links they’d left across the blogosphere.

For responsible bloggers, though, NoFollow means they get no credit for their comments and contributions to other blogs (which is a bit of a disincentive to leave a comment, really). But on the other hand, the less SEO-aware masses may let blogs go dormant or not bother checking their comments, therefore allowing spammers to amass links back to their sites with relative ease.

One of Loren’s points is that NoFollow is a mark of failure by the search engines to deal with the problem of blog spam, identify it and penalize it in the rankings:

No-follow is a poor search engine’s solution to conceal its own failure to rank websites appropriately. What’s next, No-linking?

Search engines should be able to develop a method of identifying and devaluing links to spam sites which were placed in blog comments. Why should everyone who posts in blog comments suffer from the actions of a greedy few spammers.

Which may be a valid point, but I still think it’s a good thing that Blogger, WordPress et all have NoFollow on by default. More savvy WordPress bloggers can disable NoFollow links with a plugin called DoFollow.

By the way, if you want to be able to tell what websites use NoFollow, grab the SEO for FireFox plugin. It has a feature that highlights NoFollow links in red (might be hard to read - I usually tone down the colour!). You’ll be surprised at how prevalent the NoFollow attribute is!

Oh, and here’s a few thoughts from Dougal Campbell on the implementation of NoFollow in WordPress.

Savvy bloggers use press releases as a method of getting exposure for their blogs in the mainstream media.

We’ve used it recently with our reality TV website and had good coverage with local press and media. In fact, word has it that the BBC spotted my wife on a rival channel and tried frantically to get in touch, even ringing people with the same surname in the village! We must’ve forgotten to send them the press release!

Aaron Shear, who I’ve been reading for the last few weeks has some useful pointers if you’re considering press releases as a marketing strategy for your blog.

Firstly, Aaron recommends using an internet wire service, presumably PR Leap or PR Web. This is your best bet anyway, although we’re trying to amass a database of relevant journalists and publications that we can contact directly also.

Another important point is to include hyperlinks in the document to specific pages in your site. You should also target the link text for appropriate keywords, because if your release is used, you will receive very well targetted backlinks!

Probably the strongest suggestion Aaron puts forward is to publish press releases on your website. This is an approach I hadn’t considered before, but it would be useful to have an archive of press releases available for journalists to look back at prior developments.

With our reality TV blog, I try to write a thought-provoking piece on a topical show (say the recent race controversy in Celebrity Big Brother) or perhaps start a campaign to support a particular contestant. I’ll then create a press release linking to that piece and stating our opinions.

The most important thing - if you’re going to use press releases frequently - is to document the process: publishing a newsworthy piece (in my case), writing an interesting press release and then releasing it. You’ll be sending to targetted people as well as general services like PR Leap, so get a spreadsheet or database of contacts and use this every time. Add to it as other sources come up.

By documenting the process, you’ll be able to carry out a press release campaign with military precision every time.

Mack Collier started a mini-whirlwind a fortnight ago in his Revenge Of The Z Lister post.

I’ve seen various discussions on the web about this.

One point of view is that by using the ‘Z Lister’ term, Mack’s reinforcing the heirarchy that exists in the blogosphere through sites like Technorati, etc.

Let’s face it though, the heirarchy exists, whether we like it or not. And most of those ‘A List’ bloggers got there through hard work. But the fact remains that there are talented bloggers who remain undiscovered.

I’ve discovered a couple of good sources over the last week or so (via Matt McGee), who are now in my Google Reader sandbox. Among them are Aaron Shear’s SEO blog and Avanish Kaushik’s web analytics blog which looks like a scarily intense look into the world of analytics. I’m looking forward to learning new things from both those blogs.

Anyway, just to reinforce Mack’s original post, his chosen blogs are below:

• Shotgun Marketing Blog
• BrandSizzle
• bizsolutionsplus
• Customers Rock!
• Being Peter Kim

What about you? Any unsung heroes of the blogosphere that you want to mention?

According to Nick Wilson, the Performancing team are now considering dropping their Metrics webstats system less than a year after launch.

It’s a decision I received with mixed feelings. I wasn’t terribly impressed by Metrics when it launched, the interface was a little obscure and hard to read compared to the StatTraq plugin I was using at the time.

However, I’ve only recently discovered a useful tool in Metrics that measures AdSense clicks and what pages they occurred on. If you’re checking your stats regularly enough and notice that a particular page is earning well, you can check the ads on the page and identify what keywords may have attracted the high-paying ads in the first place.

Needless to say, this is a very useful tool, but the rest of Metrics is less than helpful. One complaint is that the interface doesn’t display complete URLs - you have to hover over a URL to discover the exact page address, which makes it harder to scan results.

Why Is Metrics Closing?

Nick explains in his post that the cost of running the Metrics system is high in both bandwidth and server space. For a new company, that cost is overwhelming and they can’t subsidise Metrics indefinitely.

The Performancing team are discussing spinning the product into a standalone Open Source stats package, which is nice. However, with the intimidating, yet vastly superior Google Analytics freely available, current users won’t be left totally high and dry.

If the product was to go the chargable route, I’d actually be more inclined to go the route of investing in Mint, which might be a bit more useful. Metrics was is too bare bones for my liking.

I think professional blogging (yes, as in ProBlogging) has been stagnating for a long while now.

When I started blogging almost 2 years ago, I found resources such as Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger invaluable in getting my blog configured and promoted through services like Technorati.

However, recently the ProBlogging circle has become very dull, and I think it’s being eaten up by the linkbait virus. Everyone’s writing “How To’s” and “10 Ways” articles, because they’re a safe bet for Digg, reddit and del.icio.us popular.

Look, here’s Darren inviting his audience to fill the Internet up with crap. Digg, del.icio.us et al were particularly congested that week, let me tell you.

A few years ago, all content was written for Google. Webmasters wanted to get into Google’s pants, get to the top of the SERPs for whatever keywords choices they felt were important.

Blogging came along, and we heard a lot of idealistic banter about conversations and whatever, but with the advent of social bookmarking, blogmasters are back chasing the traffic and the AdSense clicks.

A lot of the stuff you read about blogging now will not be new. Let’s face it, Darren wrote the book on blogging and pretty much exhausted the topic. The principles of blogging (especially blogging for money) are now well-established. Still, people will scour posts about blogging hoping for some tip that will bring the dollars flooding in.

I know I do. I’ve hoovered up top 10 everything you need to turn your life around, get my dream job, achieve top Google rankings and make my wife bark like a dog*.

The problem is, if you follow popular posts on the major aggregators (I recommend popurls), you’ll see that there are loads of lists being written each day. The value of those lists is diminished because the people who pick them up are reading to damn fast to act upon them.

Obviously this type of bite-sized content is popular across the web, but my argument is that the articles are being written not to help people but to get that addictive digg-effect. What a shame. SEO’s have been talking for years about not writing for the search engines, but for the audience. Now quick and dirty bloggers are writing the crappiest of content in order to get hits, AdSense clicks or whatever.

Anyway, my next post will be entitled “Why getting the Digg-effect is better than an orgasm”…..

*I just ask her and she does it…nothing sinister

ProNet Advertising have been making quite a name for themselves recently in the ProBlogging space, particularly around their articles about Digg. Neil Patel is a great writer, with lots of good advice to share with bloggers.

However, I got really wound up at Neil’s latest title: The 5 Deadly Sins Of Blogging.

What Neil Patel is doing is attempting to do here is enforce an arbitrary set of standards for how people manage their blogs. I think this is patently wrong: blogs are a personal medium - you can do whatever the hell you want with them, it’s YOUR decision.

The ProBlogger community have been pumping out this kind of tripe for the last couple of years, and their blinkered approach to blogging and linkbaiting has obscured the original nature of blogs: they are a personal publishing medium.

• Change the default template. Change the record, Neil! If you’re on a hosted blogging platform like Blogger or WordPress.com, it’s a cinch to change the default template. Anyone with the know-how to install WordPress will have no trouble downloading a template and activating it. Besides, some people just want to write their thoughts, they don’t care about the template.
• Readibility. Agreed, but again, there’s no one size fits all solution.
• Conversation. Yes, one of the main tenets of blogging is joining in the conversation. But some people prefer just to write their thoughts, and that’s alright too. Look at Pavlina, for crying out loud - he’s disabled comments on his blog and people still flock to it! Are you telling me that’s a deadly mistake?
• Simplicity. I agree with Neil on this point, but again that’s my personal taste. I ‘tune out’ clutter like I do with AdSense ads. There may be useful stuff in your sidebar, but if I came for a particular post, then I’ll probably just read it and leave. My reason for preferring simplicity is that I believe too much sidebar material may be misleading to search engines.
• When to display adverts. Neil says that you should wait until you have enough content on your site, but who’s going to care? A lot of blog traffic is pass-through, and in the early days you’re unlikely to get return visitors, so why not have the ad spots already in place? That way readers who become regulars will be used to them and there won’t be outcry about you starting to monetize your blog.

The ‘wise men of blogging’ may offer sage advice to blogging newbies, but I’d ask all of them to try and remember that blogging is a personal exercise. Titles like “5 Deadly Sins” may be great for linkbait, but they’re pushing a templated outlook on personal publishing that ignores the individual.

That’s a deadly sin in my book.

Any SEO worth his (or her) salt, knows that Google Sitemaps are a great way to tell Google about the pages that are available on your site. Using a sitemap, you can basically pass Google an inventory of your content and let wee Googlebot crawl your pages without having to rely on your shaky navigational system!

What Is A Google Sitemap?

A Sitemap is a very simple XML file that you use to list the URL of each page in your site. We’ll get to the syntax and structure of the Sitemap XML in a minute, but first let’s look at the data you can record for each URL:

• URL: You’ll need the URL for each page you list. This is represented by the loc element.
• Last modified: Not required, but if your ASP.NET application records the date each page was updated, you could include it here. I’m assuming that Google will check this against the last crawl date and crawl the page if it’s been updated recently.
• Change Frequency: Not required, but allows you to specify how often the page is likely to change. For example, content on your homepage is more likely to be updated than an archived article from 2005. Google say that this tag is considered a hint and not a command and that pages may be crawled more or less frequently than spidered.
• Priority: You can use this tag to assign a weighting to each page, indicating it’s importance on your site. The valid values are from 0.0 to 1.0. Could be useful if you could find a way to assign priority to your pages.

Sample Sitemap

Here’s a sample sitemap. Notice that it starts with the XML declaration at the top. The first (root) element is urlset and within it, each url is defined by an <url> element. Note that for the moment, I’m just using the URL (loc) and the priority value

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
	<url>
		<loc>http://www.yoursite.com/Pages.aspx?pageid=21</loc>
		<priority>0.5</priority>
	</url>
	<url>
		<loc>http://www.yoursite.com/Pages.aspx?pageid=22</loc>
		<priority>0.5</priority>
	</url>
</urlset>

Creating Our Sitemap File

For this example, I’m going to assume you’ve got a fairly basic content management system, running on ASP.NET. Let’s say each page is stored as an entry in a database table called pages. You have fields for page_id, date_created and date_updated among others. Our sitemap is going to focus on displaying each page’s URI and last updated information.

In Visual Web Developer Express, create a new .aspx page in your website (I called mine Sitemap.aspx for the sake of originality). When the page appears in the editor, strip out all the HTML, except the ASP.NET declaration on the very first line. The page should look something like this:

<%@ Page Language=”VB” AutoEventWireup=”false” CodeFile=”Sitemap.aspx.vb” Inherits=”Sitemap” %>

Now, press F7 to open up the codebehind file, and let’s get to work.

Firstly, add the namespaces you’ll need to access the database, retrieve the data and write an XML file: At the very least, you’ll need System.Data and System.Xml.

Second, create a Page_Load event. We want the sitemap to be generated dynamically each time the page is accessed. Within the Page_Load, we begin by writing the headers of the XML document:

Response.Clear()
Response.ContentType = "application/rss+xml"
Dim objX As New XmlTextWriter(Response.OutputStream, Encoding.UTF8)
objX.WriteStartDocument()

Next, we write the root element, urlset and set the xmlns attribute to import the Google Sitemap schema:

objX.WriteStartElement("urlset")
objX.WriteAttributeString("xmlns", "http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84")

At this point, we’ll access the pages table in the database. The script below creates a SqlDataRead which iterates through the available pages and lists them by the date they were updated. As it iterates through the results, it creates a start element (url) using WriteStartElement, within which two other elements are nested using WriteElementString. The url element is finally closed using WriteEndString

Dim oCmd As New SqlClient.SqlCommand("SELECT * FROM pages ORDER BY date_updated DESC", sqlConn)
Dim oRdr As SqlClient.SqlDataReader = oCmd.ExecuteReader
If oRdr.HasRows Then
    While oRdr.Read
        objX.WriteStartElement("url")
        objX.WriteElementString("loc", "http://www.yoursite.com/Pages.aspx?pageid=" & oRdr("page_id"))
        objX.WriteElementString("priority", "0.7")
        objX.WriteEndElement() 'URL
    End While
End If

Finally we close our database objects and publish the XML document using objX.Flush:

oRdr.Close()
oCmd.Dispose()
objX.WriteEndElement() 'URLset
objX.WriteEndDocument()
objX.Flush()
objX.Close()
Response.End()

Now you’re done, you should be able to call up the Sitemap.aspx file in your web browser. Type in the URL (I found Internet Explorer best for this - FireFox tried to download the file for some reason), and the XML document should appear.

Now, to finish the job off, create an account for Google Sitemaps, and follow the instructions there to set up a profile for your site and add your sitemap. After a few hours, Google should start to tell you if it parsed the sitemap correctly.

WordPress‘ default theme (Kubrick) is great, but I’ve always had a problem with the title tags that the Kubrick theme generates. They could be so much more search engine friendly, don’t you think?

<title>
	<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?>
</title>

This usually results in the title reading like Interweb World » Perfecting WordPress Title Tags, which is fine.

But isn’t it better to serve the title tags with the title of the article first? That’s the key information, not what website it came from. And that title tag is what’s going to be used in people’s browser favourites, search engine results and social bookmarking services (del.icio.us, Digg, Stumbleupon, etc).

Improving your Blog Titles

I’ve opted for a simple bit of code which you can see below. Basically, for the homepage (is_home()), we want to display the Blog Name and it’s description or strapline. Then, for every other page (category pages included), we want the title to show up first, then the site name.

<title>
	<?php if (is_home()) { ?>
		<?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> &raquo; <?php bloginfo(’description’); ?>
	<?php } else { ?>
		<?php wp_title(”); ?> &raquo; <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> 
	<?php } ?>
</title>

Looking good. Test this out on your own blog and see how you get on.

Modifying Title Tags for UltimateTagWarrior

If like me you use Christine Davis’ Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for internal tagging, add the code below (just after the is_home() condition) and your tag pages will have the same effect.

	<?php } elseif (is_tag()) { ?>
		<?php UTW_ShowCurrentTagSet("", array(’first’=>’%tagdisplay%’, ‘default’=>’, %tagdisplay%’, ‘last’=>’ %operatortext% %tagdisplay%’)); ?> &raquo; <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> 

Via ProBlogger, a new way to track your position in the SERPs. I’ve been using Digital Point’s Keyword & Backlink Tracker tool for a couple of years now - which isn’t bad, but is it time to look around for an alternative?

Plus Points For Sitening

1. Sitening’s SERP tracker is certainly easier on the eyeballs than Digital Point with a relaxing green/blue theme.
2. The graphing functionality gives you a good at-a-glance overview of your SERP positions over time - you can specify daily, weekly or monthly views to refine the information.
3. The SERP Tracker also beats Digital Point by identifying which page appears up in the SERPs. This is really valuable information to have, and I’m surprised that DP haven’t gotten around to building this in yet. It allows you to look at the page and determine why it’s ranking so highly. Ignoring off-site optimisation factors for a minute, you’ll be able to establish if it’s a single post or a category page showing up.
4. Where Digital Point requires you to log on daily and start the update process, Sitening does this automatically, so you can forget for a few days and it’s no biggie - your keyword rankings will still be updated.
5. You can receive your stats for each site by RSS.

Where Digital Point Excels

There are a couple of shortcomings in Sitening’s offering:

1. Digital Point allows you to view all your keyword rankings at a glance, which you can filter by domain. Sitening requires you to view stats for each set of keywords individually. The interface could use a little more flexibility in terms of the number of views offered.
2. Digital Point also offers the ability to track keywords in MSN and Yahoo as well as Google. You’ve got to install a script on your web server (I think this offloads some of the processing to your host), but it’s valuable to track keywords on different engines.

In summary, I quite like what Sitening is offering in terms of keyword tracking. Digital Point is starting to look a little dated and hasn’t had any recent new features to speak of. However, before I could move over completely to Sitening, they would have to offer a more diverse range of dataviews.

Has anyone else compared Sitening / Digital Point? I’d be interested in other opinions, and other products doing similar if you’re aware of them.