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?

With a rush of Google’s product updates recently, I keep wondering what’s going on – have they fired and completely replaced their internal staff dealing with interface designs and who are those people working on these things now? Are they clueless newbies, do they even test what they create? Has Google decided to cut down usability testing expenses? Because a lot of what I see looks like a complete disaster.

Take just two products, for example. Those I use quite a lot in my daily work.

First, there is Google Analytics. OK, you sell me on getting access to real time data – but considering the new interface it is just not worth the move for me. I wonder who the typical Google Analytics user is, how many sites/accounts do they have under their login? I of course might be more of an exception with my dozens and dozens, but I’d suspect typically people would have at least 3-4 sites there.

Now, when I check my Analytics I like to have a quick glance first at what’s going on with the traffic and its dynamics and then dig deeper to identify any possible issues, and with the old interface it is easily doable:

But compare that to this sad shit of an interface in the new Analytics:

Takes me 3 clicks just to get to that same data for each single account, nevermind getting the data for all my sites! And they don’t make it easy switching back to the first screen, either – took me quite a while to figure out how to do it (for those still wondering, click on the dropdown in the upper left corner with the list of all accounts and click the button appearing there that says “Accounts list”).

OK with Analytics I am not a typical user but what about Google Docs? I only really use them when I need to share something with other people and have it updated in real time, otherwise I don’t think Google Docs will ever be able to replace the real Office applications for most of my document creation and editing needs – there’s just too much stuff missing. Anyways, I found out that the search shortcut (Command+F or Control+F, depending on the OS) doesn’t work in some browsers. Anotehr issue, again, is a less-than-straightforward way of switching back to the old interface. The only place where the link to do it appears prominently is the Google Docs home page, but when you are viewing a document you just don’t see how to do it. Here’s how: click Help and select “Use the classic look”.

I could go on and dissect the failures of the newly updated Reader but I will stop for now and maybe get back to it some other time. For now, let me just say: I’m sticking to the old GA and Docs for as long as they stay alive.

What surprises me most in this whole discussions, however, is that people somehow fail to see the other side of this whole issue. I was looking if anyone would mention this but nobody did so far – don’t you think what Google is doing is actually an attempt to push more users into (1) creating Google accounts and (2) using Google’s services via those accounts? In other words, encouraging users to stay logged in (of course as a result Google gets to collect more and deeper data, regardless of SSL). Here’s something they say in their official announcement that can act as proof of the above intention (bolded by me):

we’re enhancing our default search experience for signed-in users

In other words, you want security and privacy – you can have it, you just have to log in. Seems like it’s their marketing move to improve the sign in rate which seems to be not so high, to quote Barry Schwartz:

Google says this will likely only impact less than 10% of the searchers. So in a sense, Google is saying that less than 10% of their users are signed in when performing Google searches?

In any case, I wonder if this feature will be as half assed in its implementation as the new Google Analytics and Google Docs interfaces (will post about it separately).

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.

What do we know about this beast tho? Here are a few things I noticed so far:

• To click a +1 button in the SERPs you need to sign up for the Google Labs experiment – to click a button on somebody’s site you only need to have a Google profile and be logged into your Google account
• The button on the site behaves funny – different people may see different number of +1’s at the same time (poor synchronization? data not travelling fast enough between datacenters? anyone remember Google Dance – is this Google PlusOne Dance?)
• No matter how many people +1 a site, in the SERPs you will only see mentions of those you are connected to +1′ing it
• +1’s are like PageRank – they are a page characteristic, not a sitewide characteristic (i.e. if you +1 the home page 20 times but some internal page just 1 time the home page will show 20 +1’s and the internal one will only show one +1)
• So far, there is no Google policy forbidding to place the +1 button on an empty page, or highlighting it by arrows, or encouraging users to click it, like there is with Google AdSense
• Double clicking the +1 button kills your “vote” – so does clicking the button in the SERPs if you already did on the site itself and vice versa
• When putting the +1 button on Wordpress, you need to apply special tweaks for it to work for each specific page – just using the default code will make the button work for the home page only

Questions remaining unanswered for now:

• How will +1’s affect a site’s rankings?
• What will happen to a site that got a bunch of +1’s if the button is removed off it? (hat tip to Paul Madden)
• Will placing the +1 button on a site / clicking it cause Google to index / recrawl the site faster / more often?
• Will withdrawn +1’s affect sites negatively?

Overall, looks like Google rolled out the +1 button for sites in a great hurry, without taking much care of how it will work and what potential bugs and privacy concerns are out there. Site owners have already started placing the +1 buttons on their sites – as more sites adopt the button we will be seeing the effect it has on the web as a whole, the SERPs and our search (and I guess Google hoping, social too) behavior.

Have you noticed any other interesting things about the +1 button? Are you running any experiments with it? What questions it makes you ask? Feel free to share below!

I have made 4 commands for the Firefox Ubiquity plugin that can be used for retrieving the Blekko data for sites. Get the Blekko Ubiquity commands here and feel free to provide your feedback or share what uses of Ubiquity you have found so far.

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.

It lets you check the competitiveness of your keywords in Google.com as well as 5 regional Googles: UK, France, Germany, Spain and Canada. (should you have any requests as to any other countries, just let me know). This means also that you can check keywords in any language.

The idea behind this tool is the same that I mention in my ebook – by comparing the total number of results in Google for any given keyword and the number of exact match results, you can see just how competitive your keyword is and who is your actual competitor. The tool helps you automate your keyword competitiveness research.

In the current free version that will probably remain free for everyone you can check up to 20 keywords at a time and download them as a CSV report. In the future, I plan on releasing a more advanced version that will still be available for free for those who purchase or have purchased my ebook but have a monthly fee for everyone else and feature even more complex and intelligent analytics.

HostGator is mere weeks away from offering domain registration from our very own domain registrar service. Not only will the registration prices be significantly cheaper than GoDaddy, but you will also receive the legendary 24/7 around the clock support that you have come to know and love from HostGator.

Not sure how much cheaper they can really go given the ICANN fees, but this will certainly be interesting to look at. What I would be looking for is bulk registrations as well as the variety oc ccTLDs they would offer.