Twitter is huge, this is not news to anyone. A site:twitter.com search in Google returns 1,750,000,000 results. Yup, that’s close to 2 BILLION. Yet, most of those results are actually non-existent pages.

Yes, you heard me right. Google keeps in its index close to 2 billion non-existent pages from one domain alone. How come? Let’s look at the typical URL structure of a Twitter user profile:

http://twitter.com/#!/username

Now, what kind of URLs do we see in the aforementioned SERPs for the site:twitter.com query in Google? Something like:

http://twitter.com/username

Notice the difference? the “/#!” part is missing. Infact, it is not even possible to figure out if Google has at least a single URL with the “/#!” bit indexed as these symbols would get ignored by Google so searching for site:twitter.com inurl:/#!/ just won’t produce any results different from site:twitter.com.

Where did the whole issue come from? Some of you may remember that the new URL structure for user profiles came to exist over a year ago – for some time afterwards, it was still possible to switch back to the old (less-Ajaxy) interface preserved under the old URL. Then, the old interface was killed and all old URLs were redirected to the new ones.

Only, Twitter has never got the redirects right. They use 302 instead of 301! Here is a 2007 blog post by Google’s John Mueller detailing what Twitter’s got wrong and how it should be fixed. Did they ever fix their redirects? – No! Do they think they are too good for SEO? Heck, even CNN has an SEO, and did you ever think CNN should care much about search engines?

Until recently, this profile URL redirect issue used to cause some serious troubles with cached versions of the corresponding pages in Google – all of them appeared as “that page does not exist”:

Lately, however, Google got better at indexing and caching their 302 redirects so the cache screenshots look better. But it was due to Google’s own action only, not Twitter’s. Are the folks at Twitter THAT blind and deaf?

1. Google Webmaster Tools “Links to your site” report
Who am I kidding? Google is notorious for not letting you know much about a site’s backlinks. Even for your own verified sites, it only gives you a little bit, and the links go in no particular order (alphabetical order doesn’t count). No competitive research is possible at all.

2. Yahoo Site Explorer is still available if you want to check a site’s links manually, and the first 1,000 links can be downloaded as a TSV. Not for much longer though, as Bing which now powers Yahoo does not even support the linkdomain operator. Yahoo BOSS V2 API does not offer any functionality related to backlinks and commenters on that post have called it “a paid rebranding of Bing API”.

3. Blekko is my personal favorite. Not only do they have an extensive set of SEO related slashtags, they also can sort a site’s backlinks either by relevance or by date discovered, the latter option giving you a nice picture of a site’s link acquisition progress. Besides, Blekko uses host rank which can effectively be regarded as some sort of a link power measurement. I wish Blekko’s index was larger – but hopefully that can improve with time. On the bright side, Blekko offers an API that developers can use for their solutions.

4. Majestic SEO – they realize all the importance of the chance given to them with the closure of Yahoo’s API and have even done a post about migrating from Yahoo to their API. However, if you want to use Majestic SEO for anything more than just keeping an eye on your own site, you will have to pay for it – the subscriptions start from £ 29.99 per month and the one with API is as much as £ 250.00 per month.

5. Ahrefs – a lesser known alternative. To be honest I haven’t had a chance to look at it much yet as their limit of queries for an unregistered user is only 5 – however even a free accounts expands the number of daily queries to 15 and the highest priced paid option is only $39.99 per month. The tool runs on its own crawler and what is really nice is that it fetches not only backlinks but also anchor texts.

As long as links remain one of the ranking factors (even a small one), link checking tools will remain the key competitive research aid. There may be all sorts of approaches to analyzing them -  but the need to do it is unquestionable. Now I just hope Aaron finds a way around for his SEO4Firefox plugin soon.

So – many things have been changing recently so I will probably need more time than usual to factor them all in. But watch your email boxes and this place for announcements and you will see the new release soon.

First of all, you can imagine that with the amount of attention the even has received, and the amount of memorabilia sold, these would be pretty competitive SERPs. But even after a quick look, one could clearly see what a lost online opportunity this was for the vendors. Here is the comparison of the first pages of Google.com and Google.co.uk for the query “royal wedding”:

The SERPs are a librarian’s dream (and Google AdWords’s dream too, obviously). In both Googles, the official site is placed prominently, as one would expect. Wikipedia is also present, in case of Google.com both the old page and the new one it later got redirected to. The other results are the media covering the event, and the only commercial site in these SERPs is theroyalweddingwilliamkate.com.

The domain has been registered last year, right after the official engagement announcement. The company behind the site, Igniyte, said on their site:

Our team have been working hard on TheRoyalWeddingWilliamKate.com avid link building and on site SEO undertaking extensive research and with  just a couple of weeks work behind this professional website we have already reached page one on Google for certain relevant key words.

Very impressive link building job indeed. The second and the third page of the SERPs have no other commercial sites either. Igniyte’s site’s backlinks feature all the range from directories to blogs. I must note, however, that they are not as social media savvy as the official royal wedding site, featuring a Twitter account, a Facebook page, Flickr photo album and the YouTube channel.

In the meantime, there’s no shortage of AdWords ads for merchandise vendors. So those vendors do run sites and do realize the value of online traffic. I wonder why they haven’t been more active in terms of SEO? 5 months is enough of a timeframe to be able to achieve decent positions should one wish to.

What’s new in this release:

• a reviewed list of directories with updated pageranks (of course!)
• I have added more discount codes for paid directories and now you get nice deals on a total of 6 directories – and I keep negotiating more all the time
• I have added a section on how to decide whether you need a link from a particular directory – and I’m currently working on a tool to automate this. The tool will be made available to those who purchase(d) the ebook for free.
• as always, I am listening to my readers’ suggestions – Jeffrey Behrendt of AvivaDirectory mentioned in his lovely review of my ebook that it would be helpful to list the best directories – which I do by including a cheat sheet of 15 powerful, established directories to help any webmaster quickly decide what to start with. Let me know if you are happy with it or if I should change anything about this list.

I got more suggestions from my readers than I could implement in this release – but rest assured, I keep working on improvements of my product. Your feedback, as usual, is much appreciated.

Reminding all my current customers to check their email for the update information – and if you haven’t yet purchased the Directory Marketing ebook feel free to do it now.

For such website owners, Patrick Gavin and Andy Hagans, veterans of the SEO industry, have started DIYSEO – a framework guiding them step by step through their site optimization and promotion process. For only $49/month, they walk their subscribers through all the steps required to achieve online success with their websites.

Who is this platform good for? Any small business owner launching a new site on a new domain, or those who’s had a website for a while but never got to doing anything with it. Unless your small business sells viagra, what Andy and Patrick teach you should be enough for you to rank in your niche – especially if you target local market.

Who will not find it enough and would still need dedicated professional attention to their site? If you are in a market with fierce competition, or had your site banned, or purchased a domain that previously had issues, DIYSEO may not be enough to sort it all out. However, there is no need to think that in such cases, you are doomed to spending all of your business’ profits on SEO consulting. Often, once you get professional advice of an SEO (like me) to sort your most serious issues, you can then go ahead and continue working on your site yourself – which is when DIYSEO will come handy again.

DIYSEO also offers a free trial so you can see for yourself if their approach is right for you before you commit to the monthly fees. You can sign up for it here

Yea, I know, it’s been a few weeks since the PR update already – so what took me so long? Several things.

First of all, I did a thorough review of the directory list. All the expired domains have been removed, and as usual, those that lost pagerank have been removed as well. Instead, I added a bunch of new directories – so now the list is over 6,000!

Secondly, it’s been a year since I released the first version of the book back in March 2009 – so I felt I just HAVE to come up with some nice surprise for my customers buying the book. I know many of you must have considered submitting your sites to paid directories (of which there are plenty also in the list that comes with the ebook) but been wondering how you could save on the costs of such a campaign. What I did was negotiate special member only discount codes with two nice paid directories – Aviva Directory and GreenStalk for a total of $45, for any number of site you would ever want to submit. So you pay $19.90 for the ebook – and get $45 in discount codes! Nice or what? Moreover, this update (as well as each update) comes free to existing customers.

Moreover, I will keep negotiating such deals further and provide new discount codes with each new update – so make sure you sign up for the newsletter as you purchase the ebook!

Directory Marketing Reborn ebook can be purchased any time by clicking over to the site, and the existing customers should check their email to see how they can get the update.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: My existing customers who have initially signed up with a gmail based email account may have had troubles receiving the email about this update as my server just had a hiccup processing sending mail to such email accounts – if that’s the case with you please contact me and I will sort you out.

How did this PR update treat the sites? First of all, my list now includes a PR 9 directory – lii.org. It used to be PR 8 but got to 9 this update. Overall, I see many directories which had PR 0 or even n/a obtain PR 3 or even 4. Surely there are some that drop to 0 or n/a – but you get what you deserve. What I notice, though, is that Google has become much faster these days (the effects of Caffeine, I presume) and I have seen sites and pages created 2-3 weeks ago obtain PR 2 and 3 after the update.

Ok you may say this ebook update is not a voluntary New Year present from me since I promised I would update it every PR update – but here is something else many of you will surely like. I have been approached many times by those who ordered the Directory Marketing ebook and those only considering purchasing it, with the same question: are there directories in your list that would suit my [insert your niche here] site? Also, people have been wondering if there is a reliable service that would do manual directory submissions according to the principles described in the ebook.

Well, now you got it! I have just launched a manual directory submission service of my own for those of you who do not have the time or desire to do it themselves but would still like to benefit from the techniques I teach in the book. Since this is my own service, I can guarantee everything is done just like it should for the most benefit for your site. The directories suitable for your site niche are selected from the 5,000 directory list, then your site is submitted to them at the speed most suitable for you, with up to 5 different titles and descriptions, then you get a detailed report so you know exactly what you paid for and what has been done, and what results have been obtained. Nothing like those pseudo “manual” submission services that promise to submit your site to 20,000 directories the list of which you will never see and the links from which you may only be wondering about (and as I have reported already, there is not even such number of directories out these worth dealing with, let alone live ones)!

But it gets even better: for those of you who have already purchased the Directory Marketing ebook or plan on purchasing it, there is a special member-only discount code available. You get it either with the update (for existing customers) or with the purchased ebook download (for the new customers) and can use it to get $50 off the cost of your chosen manual directory submission plan as many times as you wish, for as many sites of yours you wish to submit through this service. Let me remind you that all the updates and goodies are free for the existing customers – all you have to do is check your email box for the info about the update (in case you did not subscribe to the newsletter when purchasing the ebook you WON’T get this info – so if that’s the case let me know and I’ll try to sort you out).

So buy the directory ebook and enjoy the manual directory submission service, and all the best to you in the New Year!

I am happy to announce the third release of my Directory Marketing ebook. After the PageRank update that happened a few days ago, I have updated the directory list, and I have also added some more information about the tools my readers may find useful for their online marketing efforts. The book is now 69 pages long and as usual, the update is available for free to my existing customers who had purchased its previous versions!

As for the last PageRank update: it’s been an interesting one. A number of directories with PR 1,2 or even 3 have lost their pagerank altogether, while a good number of PR 0 directories acquired PR 2 or 3. This is all reflected in the updated directory list, of course. I had to remove those that have lost their value – while, in the meantime, a number of new directories have been added.

You may be wondering how complete my directory list is. We have made some statistical estimates – and it appears that there are only about 450 directories existing in the Internet that are not included into the Directory Marketing Reborn list. Mind you, however, that a large part of these are most likely very new or banned directories with no PageRank (a.k.a. “grey toolbar”) – hence their value for your directory marketing efforts is low to none.

So, my existing customers should be getting an email with the info on how to obtain their free update (check your mailbox!) – and if for any reason you have not purchased Directory Marketing Reborn yet do so before your competitors did and beat you at the SEO game!

Well I am happy to inform everyone that this issue has now been resolved and I have just emailed you all the update download link! Please check your email and get the free update.

In case you have not subscribed to my newsletter when first purchasing the book, I had no way of contacting you. There were not many of you – but if you’re one of these people please ping me and let me know the email you have used when buying the book – I will send you a newsletter subscription link.

Hope you enjoy my updated directory ebook with a refreshed and expanded directory list as well as a special worksheet to track your progress. As always, your feedback is more than welcome so let me know what you think of it and send me all your comments and suggestions.