racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

If you’ve been using Twitter clients for some time now, you would notice that these usually automatically convert most URLs you post into shortened URLs. Twitteriffic, for example, uses tinyurl.com. Twitteroo, meanwhile, uses urltea.com. The goal is simple. Twitter gives you only a maximum of 140 characters to type in your message or your current status. And these short URL services let you convert long addresses into URLs less than 20 characters.

For instance, I can convert a URL this long:

http://racoma.com.ph/archives/thinking-of-turning-off-automatic-twitter-updates

into something like this:

http://urltea.com/giv

(you can try it–the URL works!).

That’s easily a 300% decrease in URL length. You can achieve even more, if you have those über-long addresses common with query-type URLs. Some even tout the ability to hide affiliate URLs as one benefit of using these shortened URL services.

In my opinion, it’s great to be able to truncate your URLs into something shorter. For twitter purposes, it’s really useful. But then again from some points of view, short URL services are not that good.

The SEO POV

For one, from an SEO standpoint, short URLs tend to dilute the value of links. Granted that posting a URL on twitter or your blog will not necessarily include anchor texts, which is one of the most important aspects of keyword optimization. However, linking to urltea.com or tinyurl.com instead of the original page (say, racoma.com.ph) would be largely denying that original domain that all-important link from your site, or even from your Twitter page.

So instead of sending link juice over to a site you recommend (after all, you’re linking to it), you send it over to the short URL service. After thousands of links to their domain, guess who gets the link juice? Perhaps they’re redirecting HTML queries using 301 redirects. This should pass on some link juice, but who knows exactly if this is the case?

I guess people who actively want to deny link juice to external sites can even use urltea or tinyurl if they want to link. (Hmm. Gives me an idea.)

Usability and security concerns

Also, there are usability concerns when it comes to shortened URLs. Granted, they’re easier on the eyes because they’re shorter. But you never really know where these things link to unless you click on the link and get redirected to the original site.

I follow several people who use Twitter for their link-blogging activities. Along with a short description of what they’re linking to comes the URL–either from urltea or tinyurl. But I don’t get to know if the original site is coming from cnn.com, nytimes.com, digg.com or any other domain I might find trustworthy enough.

What if the original link is to a virus/malware/worm infested site that can attack my computer simply with my act of browsing? It’s a risk I have to take, because I’m interested in the recommendation the link-blogger has made.

Suggestions

I’m not one to complain if I don’t think there’s a valid reason to. But I think these two problems are worth looking into. And here are some possible ways to remedy these.

First, short URL services can use indirect redirects. For instance, after clicking on a link called http://urltea.com/giv I can be shown a redirect page saying I will soon be redirected to this URL http://racoma.com.ph/archives/thinking-of-turning-off-automatic-twitter-updates. Or maybe the redirect page can even ask me to click before being given access.

This way, I can more or less be sure that the site I’m about to browse is on a domain I trust. In a way, this solves the usability issue I mentioned above.

As for the link juice issue, however, I think it would be a matter of user preference on the part of whoever posts a link on their blog or Twitter using short URL services. I think if you want to share the link love, you’d best directly link to the original site. But if you really have to truncate the URL (i.e., in instances like twittering) it may be best to post both the shortened URL and at least the original domain.

Crude, but these might work.

Any other thoughts or ideas?

I reported on the Blog Herald how Blogging Pro has released its latest InSense theme under a sponsored scheme. This means a sponsor paid for a link at the footer of the theme. The benefits? Users get a great DesignDisease-designed theme, the designer gets paid good money, and the sponsor gets inbound links.

I know several designers who give away WordPress themes to blog hosting services for free, so long as they get a link back to their sites. Now this seems to be a great business model for people who want to monetize their theme creations. Not all bloggers can afford to pay for your themes. But there are companies and businesses that would be willing to foot the bill. In the end, everyone’s happy: users get great themes, designers get good money, companies get inbound links.

There are some who aren’t too happy with such an arrangement, and view sponsorship as a sneaky way to get backlinks. However, Blogging Pro is quite candid with the fact that their theme is sponsored, and the theme license even allows for the removal of the sponsor link if a user chooses so.

Fellow Blog Herald writer Lorelle VanFossen has this to say about sponsored themes:

Actually, this was brought up over a month ago and was seriously slammed. People were digging into their WordPress Themes to remove these. There was a huge backlash against Theme designers and sites which sponsor such links.

A link back is considered appropriate. A link to a “sponsor”, aka advertising, is very much frowned upon by serious bloggers and WordPress fans. The average blogger won’t care or even notice, as you say, but the ones who do have spoken loudly that they find this bad manners, poor taste, and, for some, criminal.

Personally, I would think there is no harm in having themes sponsored, as long as this is stated explicitly outright, and not done in a sneaky manner. Even better if the user can opt to remove the link.

What do you think?

It started as an idealistic move to help combat spam in blogs, websites and comment threads. But today, some bloggers feel that the rel=nofollow microformat is not a good solution to a widespread problem. Some thoughts here:

* Lorelle VanFossen on the Blog Herald
* Jack of All Blogs
* Google Tutor

The idea behind the nofollow technique was to take away all the “link juice” comment spammers wanted, thus encouraging them to stop spamming. Google introduced the nofollow tag to discourage comment spam from flooding their search indexes, and blogging programs added it to avoid being penalized and jump on the anti-comment spam bandwagon. WordPress and many blogging programs and forums added a nofollow by default for all links within comment areas. This instructed search engines not to follow the link as they crawled the page, taking away the credit search engine page rank gives to incoming and outgoing links. Recently, while late to the party, in an effort to discourage comment spam, Wikipedia has added nofollow to their outgoing links.

The argument against rel=nofollow basically revolves around the idea that Google is penalizing even the legitimate bloggers and commenters (e.g., if nofollow is automatically enabled on blog software), and that spammers still keep on spamming.

Here’s one of the sites that’s actively advocating against nofollow: No Nofollow. Here are 11 reasons why nofollow is not effective, and expanded explanations on these (and 5 more).

Do you think it’s time to retire rel=nofollow? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Why didn’t I think of that before?

Anyway, what brought me to this realization is a recent issue of a lawsuit threat because a blog ranks higher than a business site for a Google search. Search Engine Journal has the skinny.

An online shoe store owner is threatening to sue a blogger Dean Hunt (DeanHunt.com) unless the blogger ‘lowers his Google ranking” for a keyword phrase that the store owner feels he deserves.
…

I have been running the site for over two years and we have been ranked very highly for the search term [edited].

On Thursday morning I checked our google positions and your site is now above us for this term. I haev checked your blog and it has nothing to do with [edited], so I think it would be best all round if you remove your blog from google for this search term.

Please understand that we make our living from this, and you are just writing a blog that has nothing to do with [edited].

If you do not remove yourself from google for this search, then I will call them myself and have you removed.

…

You have to understand Dean that an online business should be higher in Google than a blog.

Don’t forget that Google is a business as well, they obviously make more money from other businesses than they do from blogs, so it is in their interest that I am higher than you for certain searches.

I have also contacted my lawyer about this issue, so you should expect a letter in the post very soon.

Wow. That’s stupid, with a capital S! (That makes it Stupid, then.)

This is why I often advocate the use of blogs by businesses and companies. It helps with the image and helps boost search rankings, as well. “BLOG” standing for “better listings on Google” is very appropriate, don’t you think?

I dread the day the owners of racoma.com come knocking on my door demanding I de-optimize my blog for my surname. Or rather, I think I should look forward to that day. Maybe I can charge a gazillion bucks for racoma.net and racoma.com.ph.

Got home this midnight from the “first SEO Philippines BeerCon”:http://www.macalua.com/2006/10/23/seo-philippines-beercon-2006/ (hey, it’s October, after all!). I’m too tired to give a detailed explanation of everything that happened, so let me just use the ol’ trusty bullet points.

* Mr. “SEO Philippines”:http://seophilippines.org “Marc Macalua”:http://www.macalua.com talked on the mission of SEO Philippines as an organization, and as well its plans (and hopes) for the foreseeable future. We want to help professionalize the SEO and search engine marketing industry in the country.
* New Google country consultant Aileen Apolo gave her keynote about Google’s strategies and how the Philippines fits in. She also said (reiterated, actually) that she’s Google’s eyes and ears here in the Philippines. She’s out to feel the market and the environment, particularly on what we need and how Google can best serve (and earn from) us.
* Marc also explained the mechanics of the second SEO Philippines keyword ranking contest. This time, it’s a triple jackpot system–we’ll be fighting for top positions in Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
* *Second contest keywords: ituloy angsulong*
* First monthly raffle of an 80GB iPod was held.
* Buffet dinner, finger-foods and free-flowing beer!
* Great band: *Peppermint Jam*. We had a great serving of ’80s music rendered in acoustic fashion.

Some of whom I met tonight: Anton, Migs, Abe, Jozzua, Erwin, Jayvee, and of course Marc. (Who else?)

Thanks to the sponsors for another great techie meet-up event! In this case, Lakeside SQL was there. Did I miss anyone?