Where did Twitterfeed go?

Twitterfeed, the online service which lets you send RSS feeds to your Twitter account, seems to be having some problems.

Their site appears to have been replaced with a spammy domain holding page. Maybe the owners have pulled the site down, or someone else has managed to renew it? Also, the feeds I had set up don't seem to be publishing.

Whatever the reasons this is a real shame - I've been using Twitterfeed for months now to send third party feeds to client twitter accounts, to help increase their tweet volume.

I've been looking for replacements, and am trialling http://rss2twitter.com. It doesn't seem to have all the same functionality as Twitterfeed, like scheduling of updates of the RSS feed, but we'll see how it works - at the moment its set up to send 3 rss feeds to http://twitter.com/dressingupideas.

Free Directory Submission Software Reviews

I've been test driving a couple of free directory submission software programs. Now normally I tend to take the 'quality over quantity' approach to directory submissions and do a small number manually.

However I have so much link building work on the go at the moment, including some sites with pretty much 0 backlinks, that I thought I'd try out a few programs, ideally free. I also thought about using a directory submission service in India, but don't quite have the time to wait (or the budget) for some of these projects.

The first one I tried was http://www.fastdirectorysubmitter.com/ which offers a free download for a trial. Fast Directory Submitter includes 2000+ free web directories. In the free mode the program allows you submit the site to 150 directories only.

The download was smooth enough and then the interface seemed fairly simple to use, to set up a campaign first although there was quite a lack of explanation. However as soon as I set her rolling, the whole program crashed - not very encouraging.

Then I tried a free download of http://www.sliqsubmitter.com, which again offers a free version that submits to just 100 directories, but you can upgrade to a monthly program to get the full list.

I really liked the interface on this, really simple with lots of rollover help comments and suggestions making it a good proposition for use by temps and freelancers who might do work for me. The submission seemed to go well, although you do have to remain involved to handle the category selection and recaptcha completions for submissions, and it is quite slow. You feel a bit like you are watching a machine in a factory after a while!

I also checked out http://directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com/ but I'm afraid the US style never ending sales landing page kind of put me off, and I don't think it is genuinely free to try (just a free download of the software).

Trying out PeerPower B2B Social Networking

I've been invited by an old contact, Julie Anderson at http://www.rapinteriors.com to try out what looks to be a new b2b social networking site, http://www.peerpower.com. So far it has quite nice functionality but most members seem to be based in India. I will wait to see if the weblink on my profile page gets detected by Google Webmaster.

New Features for Google Webmaster

Google have at long last released some useful new features for the Google Webmaster Central control panel.

One of the most handy additions is the new way of granting access to individual sites to other Google Accounts - gone are the days of having to create a separate Google Webmaster account to share with a client, because you don't want to grant access to all your client sites.

There's also a new way of verifying your site ownership using a DNS record.

Finally, there is a lot more detail on impressions and clicks from natural search terms, but I've been reading a fair amount of criticism over the accuracy of the data when you compare it to stats from Google Analytics for example.Far too many long tail search terms are just categorised as getting <10 clicks, which could mean 0 or 10 - there's quite a difference!

How Twitter Followings Illustrate Link Popularity on Google

I've been setting up some new Twitter accounts for clients like Premium Sofas and Zen Cart Web Design, and working to get them more followers. In the process it occurred to me that the relative value of different Twitter accounts based on the Followers/Following quite resembles the theory of link popularity which Google uses to assess popularity of a website.

For example on Twitter, a lot of Followers make a user look good, just like a lot of backlinks to a site look good. But look deeper and if you have more Followers than people you follow, you look even better. More sites linking to your website than you link to, also looks good (which is one of the reasons I don't tend to focus huge amounts of effort on self cancelling reciprocal links).

But then I thought about how your new Twitter account can gain kudos just by having a very popular Twitter user follow you. I mean, imagine the impact of say Stephen Fry following you, based just on the number of people who follow him (nearly 1.5 million followers at time of writing). This immediate surge in publicity is kind of like the extra brownie points Google gives your site when you get a link from a really credible and authorative website, that in turn has a lot of links which point to it.

This is why whenever clients send me a cold link request they've received and ask what I think, I always check the Page Rank of the site offering to trade links first. If it's not popular, there's little point.

In the future I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter replicates some kind of version of Page Rank (if they don't already) based on the difference between your Followers/Following, and the number of Followers your Followers have got.