What is Twingly and what has it to do with links?

To get all of these things right we have to explain some things about Twingly and why it’s one of the best tools to have on a news site to attract links from blogs. Twingly have a lot of products but the most interesting I’m going to talk about here is their blog widget that you can add to any site/page.

Here’s an example on how it looks on SvD.se in Sweden:

And here’s an example on how it looks on the newspaper Telegraaf.nl:

The funcionality is quite simple – with Twingly you can show every blog that links to the given page/article with title and description. With this you add value to the visitors who reads an article about a current topic and can then see interesting blog post about it. Twingly also have good spam-detection so news papers don’t have do moderate everything.

The bloggers gain from this from the easy perspective that they gain traffic from the given posts and thus can benefit from this. It’s also some form of ego boost for the bloggers.

Bloggers and the faithfulness of linking, Twingly = Link Love!

If you have Twingly on your site and your competitors don’t have it you have an advantage, because where do you think that the bloggers will link? To the article about Princess Madeleine that doesn’t give you credit for linking or the article that gives you credit?

Of course – if you’re a blogger your blog posts links will go to the newspapers with Twingly. This is exactly what’s happened in Europe and especially Scandinavia where a lot of sites have the Twingly Blog Widgets.

How Dagbladet.no lost 5000 natural inlinks!

In Norway the major newspapers had Twingly installed on their sites and enjoyed a lot of incoming links, but one day some stupid person decided that they didn’t want Twingly on their site. The result?

Above you see VG.no and Dagbladet.no compared when it comes to number of incoming links from blogs. As you can see in October 2009 Daglbadet.no had a huge drop when it comes to incoming links but VG.no stayed the same and actually had a increase if you compare January/February 2009 with January/February 2010.

If you look closer at this graph you’ll see a drop of over 5 000 new natural inlinks per month! Here you see the true value of adding incentives to bloggers.

If you scratch their backs you will get a lot of links, if you don’t – they will link to your competitor.

The first thing here is that Dagbladet.no now looses a lot of blog traffic but this is not the most important thing because the traffic from blogs is not enourmous compared to the traffic a newspaper can gain from good rankings on search engines.

What do you think that Google will think of your site if you suddenly have approximately 5 000 fewer incoming links per month?

So to summarize this Dagbladet.no has managed to do the following things:

• Impacted their relationship with bloggers
• Lost traffic from bloggers that won’t link anymore
• Making it harder to rank on current topics because of fewer incoming links
• Worsen their total SEO job due to the fact of lesser incoming links

Great job Dagbladet.no – you screwed up big time!

P.S. f I were VG.no I would order some Twingly-cake and cheer

How to lose 5000 new natural inlinks… per month! (Dagbladet.no story) is a post from: Late Night Marketing

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I have recently studied statistics from Facebook when it comes to demographics and growth. I’ll publish the whole thing on monday on my Swedish blog but in the meantime it’s interesting to look at some statistics for Scandinavia and the Nordic countries.

40% of Scandinavia have Facebook

If you compare Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Denmark) with the rest of the world we have a lot more users in % of population than the most of the countries in the world.

If we compare the Facebook data with official population statistics we see that almost 40% of every living person in Scandinavia have Facebook. This includes every living person, even the just born child and the 102 year old grandmother.

Sweden like Facebook

Sweden is the largest country in Scandinavia both when it comes to Area & Population (9,3 Million). I will publish more data about Sweden on Monday when it comes to demographics and growth. Stay tuned for more info .

Denmark are crazy Facebook lovers

Denmark is one of the top countries in the world when it comes to Facebook population with only fellow neighbours Norway and Iceland beating them.

Norway have the most Facebook users in Scandinavia

Our neighbours Norway was one of the first countries that embraced Facebook early. During the most part of 2007 Norway actually had more Facebook users than Sweden which is quite impressive.

Finland have their saunas

Finland is the only dissapointment within the Nordic countries when it comes to Facebook. I don’t exactly know why but it seems like they are more interested with saunas than Facebook when you compare them with other Nordic countries.

Iceland is the #1 Facebook country in the world

Iceland is the only country within the Nordic countries where over 50% of the population have Facebook..

There you have the data for Viking-land! As you might have guessed I love pie charts and statistics. Always fun to look at a Friday like this, and especially when it comes to Scandinavian Vikings.

* All data are based on Facebooks own data and local population data from SCB, SSB etc.

Scandinavian Vikings Love Facebook is a post from: Late Night Marketing

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I love Matt Cutts videos on YouTube. They are good and for webmasters they can often be quite educational when it comes to SEO.

Sometimes the videos are just funny or sometimes you just ask yourself: Why did you put up this video on YouTube?

A couple of days ago Matt Cutts published a short answer from a person who asked: “Why do cats bums go up when you stroke them?”

Actually a quite interesting question where Matt Cutts answers the question with “I have no clue”, “Go and check a website” and somewhat indicates that you should just “Google it”.

There’s just one problem here. If you search for that exact phrase on Google you will find this spammy SERP:

Thanks to Matt Cutts and this video the first results refer to this video and do not answer the direct question.

If you search for results that were not published before this video you got this result:

Yep. You’re totally right. Matt Cutts just made a SERP worse

For the record: I love cats.

When Matt Cutts screw up a Search Result with bums is a post from: Late Night Marketing

Related posts:

1. Twitter Search Growth 2009: +586%
2. 10 Search Predictions for 2010

For those who know me I have the track record of breaking iPhones. I manage to drop them but like a miracle they still work even though the glass is broke – but they are not that pretty.

The first reaction you have when this happens is that you get sad. Your love no #1, iPhone, is broken!

But after a while you don’t cry that much anymore, simply because the broken iPhone has turned into a enormous tool with a lot of possibilities.

Why? It’s your perfect pick up tool! Forget all that’s been written about peacocking, dressing up like a rock star and everything else.

If you want the techy, cool, iPhone-loving girl or boy – all you need is a broken iPhone.

This is how you do it by the playbook:

Playbook – The Broken iPhone

1. Make sure you’ve got money to buy a new iPhone or a bulletproof insurance that covers it.
2. Smash your current iPhone so the display breaks (see pic above). You don’t want to break it too much, you want the iPhone to work afterwards.
3. Prepare an amazing story on how it was broken:
   “I was on safari in Africa last week and then a lion came and started chasing me…”,
   “I was at the release of the movie Shutter Island and at the party Leonardo Di Caprio and I had a drinking game. Suddenly…”
   - You can pretty much come up with anything. Just make sure the story boost yourself.
4. Find a girl/boy that have a nice phone. Preferrably it would be best if it’s an iPhone.
5. Walk towards her and stand next to her. Look important while you put up your iPhone so she/he clearly can see that it’s broken.
6. Wait for it… She/he will ask the question: “Oh, what happened to your iPhone?”
7. Game on! Start telling the amazing story with the lion or Leonardi di Caprio, lions or another amazing story.

That’s pretty much it. Now you’ve broken the ice and the rest is up to you.

Don’t cry over a broken iPhone – it’s perfect for Pick Up! is a post from: Late Night Marketing

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There have been a lot of talk about that Twitter doesn’t grow that much anymore and that we are seeing the end of the hype behind Twitter. I think this is wrong in so many ways and there is one thing that you can look at that shows that Twitter is growing and that is Twitter Search.

During 2009 Twitter Search has become the natural place when it comes to real time search, especially during live events like Michael Jackson death, Iran election etc.

Search + Integrated Search = Twitter Search

One problem many people do when they try do analyze Twitter Search is that they only look at search.twitter.com which is a big mistake. In July 2009 Twitter launched their new site and there you could see something quite interesting. They focus with a big search box and every search made through the homepage are done on integratedsearch.twitter.com.

Many people just look at search.twitter.com and the they see that the traffic didn’t increase that much during the last couple of months.

Twitter growth 2009

To solve this problem I’ve added upp both search.twitter.com & integratedsearch.twitter.com to see how the growth has been during 2009. The data below is from the fantastic Compete.com where you can find good data for U.S.

As you can see in the graph the growth of Twitter Search have been quite amazing in the US during 2009. From December 2008 to December 2009 the growth is 457%. Twitter Search was launched during 2008 so we can only see data from July 2008 and forward, therefore you can’t compare whole 2009 with 2008 but…

If you compare Q4 2009 with Q4 2008 it’s a 586% increase in traffic.

It’s not fair at this point to compare the traffic with big competitors like Bing, Google or Yahoo Search but you can indeed compare it with niched search engines like Google Blogsearch, Technorati, Yahoo Images etc.

Here you can see the interesting regarding Twitter Search growth. In comparison with these Twitter Search has grown and today Twitter Search has 4 times as many visitors than Google Blogsearch.

Twitter Search may not be the largest engine right now, but if it continues to grow like it did during 2009 it will become an engine that marketers need to focus on.

Twitter Search Growth 2009: +586% is a post from: Late Night Marketing

Related posts:

1. When Matt Cutts screw up a Search Result with bums
2. 10 Search Predictions for 2010
3. Google Zeitgest 2009 Sucks! Really bad.

Today I saw the video from Matt Cutts regarding 2010 Search Predictions and as always it’s good to know what comes out from the Google Plex. I don’t know if there were any good predictions in the video but I do agree with him regarding the problem with illegal Black Hat stuff.

But to get serious – there must be some other predictions regarding search than hacking, malware in 2010, right? Of course there are! Some weeks ago I wrote an article about trends within Search in Swedish. It was before I started this blog so now  I’ve taken the time now to translate it into English so you won’t have to use Google Translate all the time.

Some of the predictions in the original article are completely based on Search in Sweden, and it’s quite differenent internationally. Therefore some predictions have been taken away and some have been modified.

So here comes this weeks list: 10 Search Predictions for 2010 that not have gone through Googles filter:

1. Dude, Where’s My SERP?

The classic, organic search results that we all now will be much harder to find. With real time search, Personalized search, images, blogs, news, local and other kind of results that Google, Bing and the others provide it will come to a point where we ask ourselves the question: Dude, where’s my SERP?

2. Twitter will become a real player within search

2010 will be the year that Twitter will become really good regarding real time search. They’ve already said that they will put relevancy, links and authority into consideration when they present search result and I do believe them. Of course they will compete with Bing/Google because of the fact that they now include tweets. But the natural place to search when it comes to real time events will still be Twitter in 2010.

3. It’s a Bing, Bing World!

2010 will be the year that Bing will rise and for some people it will become a more fresh alternative to Google when it comes to search. I think that Bing will have a market share of 15-20% in the US at the same time that Yahoo will keep their position. For the first time in a long time we will see that Googles market share will decline when it comes to search.

4. Paid Tweets is the new Paid Links

I like to call this “Pay Per Tweet”, PPT, just because it makes PowerPoint nerds scratch their heads in confusion when I write about it.

Nontheless, Pay Per Tweet will become an effective tactic when it comes to search. The rise of real time results will make the use of tweets and status updates more efficient when it comes to ranking.

The big question here will of course be: Shall search engines follow Paid Tweets? Yep you are perfectly right: Paid Tweets is the new Paid Links.

5. Bye bye nofollow!

Google have launched their own URL shortener (goo.gl) so for me it’s quite clear that it is time to not listened to what Google says regarding “nofollow” anymore. Google wants us to believe that they do not follow links with rel=”nofollow”, but I don’t trust them on this issue.

Ask yourself this question: If you get 1 000 ReTweets on a tweet with a fantastic link – don’t you believe that the search engines will take this into consideration?

6. SEO-investments will increase

There will be a lot more investments in SEO in 2010. Maybe not that classical SEO companies will increase their revenue with 100% but rather that more agencies will sell SEO services. Especially in Europe we will see more web agencys, adertising agencies & PR agencies offering SEO services.

7. Your mobile is your best search friend

With services like Visual Search (Google Googles) and other smart implementations there will be a huge challenge for SEO 2010 to optimize for mobile search. You have no idea how many 16-20 year old girls in Sweden that wished for a iPhone as christmas gift and got it from their nice father, just to make her lovely daughter happy. SEMPO has already written about this and it will become even more important in 2010.

The big question is: How to we target a iPhone/Android-user that use the mobile for search?

8. Real Time Spam

I’ve written about this earlier that spam will yet again be a huge problem for search engines. This time it will come in the form of Twitter spam, Facebook spam, blog spam and other things to target the real time results. There will be a huge debate about this in 2010 just because Google and the other engines have opened up a big can of spam that a lot of Viagra sites will use.

My hope is of course that the search engines will manage to fix this pretty fast and that we in the end of 2010 can look back and see that it was just in the beginning of 2010 spam was a huge problem.

9. Facebook release an upgraded search engine

Facebook is huge in Europe and in the Scandinavian countries over 40% of the population have Facebook. That’s a lot! When a lot of people have Facebook they will start searching on Facebook if they provide with good search results. Approximately 90-95% of all girls between 18-23 in Sweden have Facebook, just to give you a hint. The real question to ask yourself is this: Why do I have to go to Google when I can search on Facebook?

This is something Facebook knows and that’s the reason why they develop their search quite a lot. Facebook will be better at this 2010 and we will start talking about Facebook as a search engine, not only a social network.

10. Personalized Search is here to stay

Many SEO:s love to just not think about personalized search and tell that it doesn’t matter that much. I think that this is a huge mistake and that personalized search will grow a lot in 2010. We have just seen the beginning of it yet and therefore the search results will not be that different, but be so sure that Google will tweak this more during 2010.

There you have my predicitons for this year. Will I be right on my predictions? Maybe, maybe not – only time will tell…

10 Search Predictions for 2010 is a post from: Late Night Marketing

Related posts:

1. How to lose 5000 new natural inlinks… per month! (Dagbladet.no story)
2. When Matt Cutts screw up a Search Result with bums
3. Twitter Search Growth 2009: +586%

Yes, it really does and it should be a lesson for all marketerers that “The Google Zeitgeist fail” – To make a conclusion based on false or not enough data is not a good strategy.

Google Zeitgest 2009 sucks

Yup, do not believe what’s says in the Google Zeitgeist 2009. The reason is quite simple: More than a month ago, before the last month of  2009 have not even started Yahoo launched a Press Release of the most popular searches for 2009. Bing/MSN couldn’t be far behind so they released their data as well. The Spin Doctors at Google then thought this through for maybe 2 seconds before they released their own Google Zeitgeist 2009.

There is only one problem…

The data is not correct, 2009 wasn’t over at that time.

Some people will then say “Well, but 11 months is good enough to release this”. When I look back at 2009 you can easily say that the answer is simple: NO! This because Google misses two of the most searched keywords of 2009…

Tiger Woods

One of the most interesting phenomenon of 2009 was the Tiger Woods scandal where it came to light that he constantly cheated on his Swedish wife, Elin Nordengren. This led some weeks of massive news reporting regarding the scandal. It didn’t make things better that he also crashed his car after being chased by a raged Swedish girl.

But if you look at the list from Google News for the most searched keywords:

Google News – Fastest Rising (US)

1. swine flu
2. susan boyle
3. jon and kate
4. adam lambert
5. rihanna (chris brown)
6. new moon
7. inauguration
8. michael jackson
9. nadya suleman
10. missing link found

Wasn’t Tiger Woods a lot in the news in december? And why isn’t Tiger Woods in the section which they specifically call “Celebritiy Scandals”

Tiger Woods (and his mistresses) have been on top of Googles Hot Trends since the car accident 27th November and the scandal as risen to the most talked about scandal of 2009. In retrospect we will see this as a huge blow to Tiger Woods image and the largest celebrity scandal of 2009.

We love scandals and gossip and if we read it or hear it somewhere the first thing that we do is “Google it“. That’s how our brains work and it doesn’t matter how much we try to resist it, we are a searching people and we are curios to find information. If you also look at the most searched keywords on a daily basis you can see that his mistresses are there as well and the reason is quite simple: We want to search for the mistresses he’s been with to see which ones hotter than the other.

No matter how you look at it the Google Zeitgest is wrong, because from every search data I can find on the web Tiger Woods should be on the top of 2009.

Avatar

But it is not only Tiger Woods. Google Zeitgeist have not taken in the massive searches that will be done when Avatar opened wide in december. It’s was of the most hyped movies of 2009 with director James Cameron that  revolutionized computer technology on screen.

It was talked about in social media, it was a trending topic on Twitter all the time and we heard stories of the amazing 3D technology. It has since the release been a huge success and as I write now it’s only a matter of days before the movie will break the record for All Time Grossers Worldwide, beating Titanic.

But let’s take a look what Google Zeitgest 2009 says about this:

Fastest Rising in Entertainment (Global)

1. michael jackson
2. transformers
3. eminem
4. naruto shippuden
5. beyonce
6. peliculas id
7. paranormal activity
8. anime online
9. natasha richardson
10. poker face lyrics

Transformers is there and also Paranormal Activity but not Avatar. You bet that we searched for Avatar. It doesn’t matter if it will flop or be a box office success – we will search.

Do not believe Google Zeitgest

As a conclusion, let’s look at how much people searched and the trend locally the US for Avatar & Tiger Woods during september:

Number of searches in December for the phrase “Tiger Woods”: 45,500,000

Number of searches in December for the phrase “Avatar”: 24,900,000

Google Zeitgeist has always been a good source for looking at trends for each year, but this year it sucks! Really bad. I really hope that Google will fix this with correct data, but I’m afraid that it will be printed in the history books and there we will see no signs of two of the biggest phenomena in the World 2009.

But in Googles History Books they will not write about this, and it’s bad…

Google Zeitgest 2009 Sucks! Really bad. is a post from: Late Night Marketing

Related posts:

1. Twitter Search Growth 2009: +586%
2. Google Sitelinks, actually not so good…

The reason behind this is quite simple. During the last year I’ve blogged a lot about Marketing, Social Media and especially SEO in Swedish. The number of readers has consistantly grown and the blog has from then become one of the largest blogs in Sweden within Social Media and SEO.

During this time I’ve also been twittering a lot and also spoken and chaired a lot of conferences about Social Media & SEO. This has led to a lot of communication in English and a lot of interesting discussion with international experts within Marketing and specifically Social Media and SEO.

The long wait
Due to this I feel like I want to get my word out about Marketing and how I look at things. A lot of people have asked for me to blog in English and I’ve always answered:

“I will start to blog in English soon…”

The only problem with this is that I’ve said this for about one year now but there has always been something else that I’ve had to do. A year ago I tried to launch the English site under the name “Late Night SEO” but during that time I had too much at work so I didn’t have time to blog in English.

I’ve now decided to brand it as Late Night Marketing instead because everything will not be about SEO. I know that this site may look crappy as hell right now, but I don’t care because for me it’s more important to launch this than to make it absolutely perfect. I even made it look almost exactly like my Swedish blog

Suicide mission ahead?
As many of my fellow Swedes now I’m partner and Digital Director at the Advertising & Communications Agency Honesty which takes up a lot of time. It’s a hard job to be an SEO in a world of Advertising people. Add this that I have two blogs in Swedish: Joinsimon.se and my personal blog Simonsez.se.

So now I’ll begin to write a third blog. It’s almost a suicide mission but I’m determined to accomplish it. It may be that I will not update my personal blog as much but all of you Swedish readers can be calm: I will not let Joinsimon.se down.

So what will this blog be about?

Simple as it sounds – it will be about Marketing. When I say Marketing i mean everything but I will focus on SEO, Social Media, Internet Marketing and also some PR. You can also see the name of the blog to some form of tribute to David Letterman, Conan O’Brien & Jimmy Fallons great show “Late Night with…” on NBC.

Because of the name I will also make this blog with at least one weekly video update and also invite more persons than be to blog here. There’s a lot of knowledge from the SEO & Social Media community in Sweden that doesn’t get through because most of it is written in Swedish. So are you interested in writing here, just send me a mail or DM on Twitter.

So stay tuned for more blog posts this week and welcome to Late Night Marketing!

P.S. The on-page for this site sucks right now, but it will be fixed soon.

Welcome to Late Night Marketing is a post from: Late Night Marketing

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I searched for my own name this morning on Google to check the Search Results and look what I found on Google SiteLinks for my Swedish blog…

Nice to have Black Hat associated to me, thanks Google! The interesting thing here is that I have almost never written anything about Black Hat except for on my Glossary. The other silly thing about this is that the SiteLink does not point to this Glossary, but instead to my Wordpress admin page.

I investigated this a bit more and I realized that one time I had a broken link on my Glossary that instead of linking to http://www.joinsimon.se/ordlista/#Black-hat linked to http://www.joinsimon.se/wp-admin/#Black-hat. This was up approximately for about 12 hours.

Come on Google! One small mistake that links to WP-Admin should not result in these kind of SiteLinks, especially not if it was up 12 hours and then taken away…

I know that I can take away this in Google Webmaster Tools, but I will let it stay up for educational purpose for some days.

Google Sitelinks, actually not so good… is a post from: Late Night Marketing

Related posts:

1. Google Zeitgest 2009 Sucks! Really bad.