Important RSS Aggregator Update To FriendFeed And Twitter

This post was written by on October 9, 2008
Posted Under: Rss Feeds  

Hi all,

Quick post today about FriendFeed and Twitter.

In a recent video, I proclaimed the benefits of the RSS Aggregator FriendFeed for a few reasons, backlinks, and search engine rankings.

It appears at least one of these benefits has recently been stamped out.  FriendFeed has now introduced nofollow tags in all outgoing links, meaning you won’t unfortunately get any backlink love any more for any feeds from that website.  Damn and double damn!

In a related story, Twitter have caved into Google demands and put a nofollow tag on links from the profile page.

Here is my profile page as an example

http://twitter.com/timbuchalka

You can see the nofollow tags in there, which is disappointing.  I can see the reasons why Twitter (and FriendFeed) would do this (to target the spammers who are using these services and building thousands of accounts to try and get great search engine love) but in my opinion it’s bad, because it’s really just not playing nice.

Shrewd Internet Marketers who have built up decent page rank to a FriendFeed or twitter account are now penalized and FriendFeed and twitter get to “keep” all that lovely link power to themselves.

There must be a better solution that just caving in like this.  Perhaps they should have a system where they turn off dofollow tags if there are two many links initially, or if they determine it’s been abused.  Or allow an existing account to “earn” the dofollow tag.
To me that would be a fair nicer thing to do.

So where does that leave us with using these websites?

Both websites are still incredibly powerful sites to use for marketing and I suggest you do continue using them,but you need to focus on other websites for backlinks.

Remember backlinks is only part of the equation, both of these sites will still rank well in the search engines, and will ultimately bring you traffic, so from this point of view you should still be using them.

It’s a situation like I mention in my tags video, WordPress.com tag’s pages have nofollow links, but are still incredibly useful in rankings, the same applies to these two sites, make sure you continue to use them, don’t give them up purely for this reason.

This does not effect the overall RSS strategy much, it just means the rss feeds from FriendFeed will no longer have any power for backlinks, and you should look for other sites.  The rss aggregator site strategy mentioned in those video’s still works.

In the next few days I’m going to research some alternatives (real alternatives) to FriendFeed.  They are out there, but I want to try them out before recommending them.

I thought you should be aware of this change so quickly pumped out this post as soon as I heard.

As always drop us a line if you have any comments, we would love to hear from you.

Cheers

Tim

P.S.

Why not find out more about SEO Link Building right here?

About

Tim writes a lot about Internet Marketing on this blog. If you have a question ask away and I feel sure you will get a reply. Anything about Internet Marketing in general, but also search engine optimization, web 2.0, google+, twitter, even yucky ol Facebook.

Post to Twitter

  • http://www.intensedebate.com/people/fiction Joseph Dunphy

    One other thing – would you please consider setting your system so that it doesn’t strip away paragraph breaks? I did use them in my last comment. They do make a post easier to read, and there’s not much that one can do with them, that’s very evil.

    If you’re concerned that somebody will insert a few hundred carriage returns just to be a pain, maybe you could set your system to strip all returns past the second, resetting the counter whenever it encounters the text of a new paragraph?

  • http://profile.typepad.com/fiction Joseph Dunphy

    I tried Friendfeed, myself, and was turned off by it, almost immediately.

    The nofollowing definitely added to my displeasure, and certainly would have deterred me from doing as I had initially planned to do, and uploading photos directly to my FF profile and posting a little writing to it as well, to give it some unique content of its own. If a user is doing the work to create the content, and people like the work enough to link to it, for the user to enjoy some of the benefit of that is just simple fairness. Think of the link juice as a kind of currency. If I’m bringing money into a business through my own hard work, and the business is never willing to even pay me a commission on the profits I’m bringing them, how long am I going to continue working to that business’ benefit, on those terms? How long should I be willing to do so?

    But that was not the only problem. Having added a few blogs to my account, I soon leaned that while the content then on the feeds for those blogs quickly appeared on my new Friendfeed page, the page never updated on its own. Days would pass, and new content visible in the feed, would not appear on my FF page. I wrote to user support about the problem, and never heard back.

    To what should have been my amazement, I found that the users of this service took the position that whether or not the service actually functioned was quite beside the point. What truly mattered was that the service was being run by a bunch of volunteers, who were working without pay, they said – apparently out of some sort of clubhouse, I take it. Really, I asked, then how did they explain the fact that Facebook, a corporation that has been priced at $82.9 billion dollar by Businessweek, had listed Friendfeed as one its subsidiaries? If our “volunteers” were playing in a $82.9 billion clubhouse, one might imagine that it must surely be a well furnished one. No, they said, this was a charity, because Facebook had passed on doing anything to make money off of it.

    In other words, poor service is being defended by the user base on the basis of bad management. Amazing. Conclusion: Friendfeed allows one the chance to hook up to an ethically challenged community of fools, using worthless software as one does so. I can only hope that this will be a once in a lifetime opportunity. I can say that it is, by far, the worst functioning service I’ve ever seen online, and as somebody who does social bookmarking, I’ve seen a lot of them. Other services would have irritating breakdowns, flaws in their service, but they’d at least provide the service they were there for, however imperfectly or even poorly. Friendfeed is the first web service I’ve ever seen that failed at its core purpose, altogether.

    It’s a good place to avoid. By the way, Tim, did you notice that you’re nofollowing comments, yourself? You are free to do so, but you do understand that given your own complaint, you’re opening yourself up to a lot of not very good natured teasing?

  • http://depressionsingapore.com depression

    Hi Tim,

    thanks for the heaps of info you share and i’m learning so much and have seen more traffic to some of my sites already..

  • http://www.davida-yemi-akanle.com Davida

    I’ve just joined friendfeed, but thank you for keep us upto date with the latest information.

  • http://www.cvnilam.com aakdedy

    Welcom, I Like your Product

  • http://moneymakingonlinetip.blogspot.com/ Kyle

    I have just started to use the 2 you mentioned. I only just now that all links there are no follow. Urghhh…bad. But anyway…thanks for the info. How about updating friendfeed from twitter? Is it possible?

Next Post:
Previous Post: