RSS Update To FriendFeed And Twitter

Hi all,

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