Thanks for joining me for another blog post in the RSS Aggregator series.

Since finding out that FriendFeed.com now has nofollow tags in all outbound links, rendering the use of this service for backlinks effectively useless, we’ve been searching for a viable alternative.

We’ve come across something decent, and that is swurl.com. I suggest you check it out.

This is an easy to use website that allow you to setup a set of other webpages in a similar fashion to FriendFeed, but then have the power of the links pointing back to your websites.

Instant Backlinks!

It’s a little bit tricky finding the RSS feed for the website, as it’s not easily identifiable, after a bit of hunting and detective work, I found that appending a /rss to your url gives you an RSS feed.

e.g. http://mindmoviesreview.swurl.com/rss

You can then submit this as you would normally do to feedagg and other RSS aggregator websites.

I want to make the point that you should still use friendfeed.com because it can be a website that will still rank well for you.

Indeed I would recommend you setup your FriendFeed web site and then add it to your swurl.com website which will drive backlinks to your FriendFeed website.

FriendFeed won’t pass on the link love, but the act of linking to your FriendFeed account from from swurl will help FriendFeed rank in the SERP’s.

And let’s face it, if you getting targeted traffic from FriendFeed nofollow tags or not, you would be happy to accept it, right?

One limitation I’ve found (that we haven’t found a way around yet) is that unlike FriendFeed, there does not seem to be a way to add a generic website that is not specifically listed as an option (you may recall in this friendfeed rss video we added websites that were not specifically listed as options on FriendFeeds page).

These means you are limited to the services they have defined. However swurl have a reasonable collection of sites including youtube, blogger, wordpress.com, digg, tumlr.com, facebook, and more.

There are a few other websites I have my eye on offering similar functionality as FriendFeed and swurl but need to test further before recommending.

We’ll pass on the details of these in due course, once I’m happy that they are useful.

Have you found a website with functionality similar to FriendFeed and swurl? If so please leave a comment and let everyone know so we can test them out.

Apart from the websites I am currently testing, I’ve found a few other exciting sites, that are only in early beta, and require invitation codes. More details of them when I can create an account and start using them.

For email subscribers, the next part of the formula is coming, where I go into more detail on the actual strategy we used for the mind movies promotion.

Stay tuned for that.

You will literally be able to copy what we did and start using this in your promotions.

I’ll be back with another post soon.

By the way, it’s looking like we will be releasing our complete  “Page One Total Control Formula” close to the end of this month.

This  will be an incredible  system and there will  only be strictly limited numbers available so stay tuned.

Cheers,

Tim

PS. Anthony is busy working on new keyword videos. (at least that’s what he’s telling me!- he’s probably off playing guitar somewhere!)

Quick post today about FriendFeed and Twitter.

In a recent video, I proclaimed the benefits of 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 pagerank to a friendfeed or twitter account are now penalised 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