No discussion of social media's effect on organic search results is complete without considering Facebook's well-laid play for "search" domination, in a closed-loop-members-only end run around Google's public algorithmic crawl. With 250 million users, the recent purchase of friendFeed and newly offered ability to search at macro and/or granular users' network levels, Facebook's internal community-search platform may well threaten other search models by sheer magnitude of participation and users' trust of their friends, extended networks and themed groups. Why SEO for Facebook is now cruc [...]

Related Topics: Facebook | How To: SEO | Search Engines: Social Search Engines | SEO: Blogs & Feeds

The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced that Google will no longer include RSS feeds in their search results, with the exception of podcast feeds. The reasoning behind Google dropping RSS feeds from the results is that it is very likely that the RSS feed is a text duplication of an html document, and when users view RSS feeds, they may not be able to render the XML format in their browsers. A quick way to tell if RSS feeds are out of the index is to do a site command on a popular RSS feed producer, FeedBurner. Google shows zero results for the site:feeds.feedburner.com command, while Y [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | SEO: Blogs & Feeds

Last Saturday, there was a gasp of collective horror in the blogosphere as FeedBurner subscriber stats plunged for many sites. Today, it's happened again. Don't panic! Your subscribers are probably all still there, with Google Reader to blame for the missing numbers. Below, our comprehensive guide to how FeedBurner compiles subscriber stats explains all, today's glitch, and why those occasional plunges happen. Last weekend's drop of Feedburner subscriber numbers by as much as half was a temporary glitch. Google Reader didn't report figures, and all was back to normal the next day. Today's dro [...]

Related Topics: Google: FeedBurner | Google: Reader | SEO: Blogs & Feeds

Bloglines Beta has launched the Bloglines Top 1000 list. Didn't Bloglines have a top blog list already? Yes, they had a top 200 list, but users wanted to see a larger picture of what feeds people subscribe to, so Bloglines has released an expanded top 1000 list. A formal announcement is planned to go live on the Bloglines News page later today, but here's a closer look at what you can see now and some explanation. Bloglines compiles the top 1000 list by looking at the number of "active" subscribers for a particular feed. Bloglines told us that they know people may try to game the s [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Bloglines | SEO: Blogs & Feeds

When Google Reader launched new subscriber figures earlier this week, I touched base with Google to find out if they'd be doing a real top blogs list rather than the ad-hoc ones now out there, plus how often the stats were updated and a few more things. Answers have come back from Google Reader product manager Nick Baum. Will a top list come? He can't say. But he did say figures are updated roughly every day and anyone with a subscription is counted, regardless of whether they read the feed. Longer answers are below. Question: Why did you start reporting counts? Nick: We had the data [...]

Related Topics: Google: Reader | SEM Tools: Web Analytics | SEO: Blogs & Feeds | Stats: Popularity