The service analyses your followers, who you follow and your tweet history to generate a “Twifficiency score”.

As you can see from the following Google Trend – the growth of Twifficiency traffic has exploded over the last 24 hours:

Now that so many people have fallen for the novelty, people are starting to have second thoughts about the service – is it secure, could it be a scam, have I compromised my twitter account?

Where Did Twifficiency Come From?

Well firstly, here’s a bit of background on Twifficiency.    It was developed by a (now rather shocked) 17yr old web developer from Dundee in Scotland.   James Cunningham (@jamescun) describes himself as :

“17 year old Coder, designer, gamer and wannabe-entrepreneur. Fascination with random facts. Doesn’t always make sense to anyone other than myself.”

Is it secure?

Looks like it – yes!   According to James, Twifficiency is based around the open source oAuth which means that he has no access to your Twitter password.

If you’ve used Twifficiency and want to remove the connection to your account, use the following page on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/settings/connections�

It’ll be interesting to see what becomes of James and Twifficiency since becoming so popular on Twitter!

While I agree with Rand’s conclusions, I thought it’d be interesting to compare the results with Bing so see if things are as just as bad?

Rand suggested that the following search terms provide spammy results when searching in Google:

So I decided to run the same queries through both Google and Bing, then compare the results.

What I found interesting is that when there isn’t much of an intersection in the results, it’s usually due to Bing listing more local (and less spammy) results than Google.  

Take for instance the “Birthday Party Supplies” query.   Most results returned by Bing were to local suppliers.

The following Venn diagrams illustrate the overlap in the results.   Google results are shown as yellow and Bing results are shown as orange.

SEO Software

Starcraft 2 Strategies

Birthday Party Supplies

Currency Trading Online

Tennis Racquet Review

s

Leather Crafting Supplies

Nanny Services

Home Business Ideas

French Doors

Vietnam Tours

Antioxidant Supplements

Home Espresso Machine Ratings

A tweet from @tomcritchlow of Distilled this morning had me wondering how the transition to the new site was going:

I first noticed that the PR of the new www.bbc.co.uk/news website is currently 0 – though this is understandable as the PR updates are fairly infrequent.   It’s interesting though that a 301 redirect doesn’t transfer the PR value of the original source page?

Next – I thought I’d take a look at the cached page that Google have for the new home page to see how recent it was.   Here’s the surprising result:

Odd?   Are Google not indexing the new home page?   A check of their robots.txt file didn’t show any problems?

Looking at the robots.txt file – I noticed that the news site has it’s on sitemap:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news_sitemap.xml

Looking through the contents of this file – it looks like there are entries for most languages on the site – but oddly I could not see English in the list?

Is this an oversight or are the BBC just relying on in-links and internal linking to ensure that Google indexes the site.

Here’s the (albeit rough) stats from Google on the number of pages of each site in their index:

Quite a difference!   It’ll be interesting to follow this over the next week to see how the figures change.

What was also interesting was the pages shown in the index.   For the old site, the home page and the top category pages are showing top of the list:

However for the new site – only deeper article pages are shown, which matches what I saw earlier with the home page not showing in the Google cache.

We’ll have to keep an eye on the results over the next few days to see how the statistics change.    It’s certainly a brave move on behalf of the BBC to undertake such a widespread restructuring and maybe the results will help others in similar situations?

What’s interesting about this update though is that a lot of the changes seem to be SEO driven.   In November last year, BBC editors wrote a blog post explaining how they were already making changes specifically for the benefit of Search Engines.

Site Evolution

Lets start by looking at the evolution of the BBC News website over the years courtesy of the Wayback Machine:

BBC News Website 1998 -1999

BBC News Website 2000 – 2001

BBC News Website 2002 – 2003

BBC News Website 2004 – 2006

BBC News Website 2007 – 2009

As you can see, the layout has stayed fairly static over the years, with the main changes being to fonts, color schemes and additional graphics.

New Design

OK – so now let’s take a look at the new site:

The first thing you notice is that the categories are now across the top of the page, rather than down the left.   This gives the page additional real-estate for larger graphics, and more importantly longer headlines.

I mentioned earlier that the editors had blogged last year about how the site changes were SEO based.   In a post by Steve Herman he explains how they decided to make the headlines on article pages longer for the benefit of search engines (chasing the long tail?)

With the extra space gained by moving the categories to the top of the page, they can now extend the headlines as they did with internal articles.   There are also theories that links higher up the page are given more weight than those lower, in footers or sidebars (as on the original layout).  

Redirect

The next change is quite subtle and I doubt a lot of people will notice – the original home page at http://news.bbc.co.uk now 301 redirects to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news.     Is this a sign of the BBC trying to improve their www. site by sending to link juice and PR it’s way?

Social Media

The BBC have now embraced social media and have added the usual share buttons to all articles as you can see in the screenshot below.

BBC Editor, Steve Hermen said last November “A growing number of users come to stories on the BBC site from places other than our own front page – for example search engines, other sites, personal recommendations, Twitter or RSS feeds”.   

This change will make it much easier for readers to share news articles on the major Social Networks.

Link Sculpting

There’s more emphasis on links to other (in particular – popular) articles now – an example of which you can see below:  

More page space has been dedicated to related articles and analysis and there’s also a push to include more media with additional links to image galleries and videos.

By creating additional inter-article linking, is this a sign that the BBC are trying to spread the flow of link juice throughout the site?

Summary

Whether you like the new look or not will be a personal choice, but as you can see from above, it looks like the BBC is taking SEO seriously.  

So seriously, that their willing to use SEO as a reason to change the look and feel of a site which has been popular with readers for many years!

Apparently in the last few days, Caffeine went live on all data centers.  

According to Matt, in the past Google used to roll out large updates using a “Google Dance” whereby datacenters updated gradually.   In 2003 Google introduced an incremental indexing system in which they crawled 10% of the web every night which was pushed out to all datacenters nightly.   This update system was known as Fritz.

The new crawl algorithm is now known as Caffeine.   With the new update, pages crawled are immediately added to the index and will instantly appear in the SERPs.

According to Matt – the results are 50% fresher and Caffeine enables Google to scale up their index in a massive way.

You will not, and will not permit your users or other third parties to:

directly or indirectly generate impressions or clicks on Bing results, or authorize or encourage others to do so, though any automated, deceptive, fraudulent, or other invalid means.

Does this mean that Bing use CTR and Impressions as a ranking factor? 

This has been dismissed before as a ranking factor for Google before due to the possibility of falsifying results by paying for clicks.   Has Bing found a way around this – or are they hoping that this ranking factor won’t be abused?

Bing API Terms Of Use

Site Explorer gives users an insight into the backlinks on any domain and is an important tool in the SEO workplace.

Sasi Pathasarathy, Program Manager for Microsoft’s Bing search engine announced at SMX that Bing would continue support for Site Explorer if users want it.

Lets hope enough people can persuade MS to continue support for this useful tool.

Today at SMX, Janet Driscol Miller and Rand Fishkin presented their findings on the difference between Bing and Google from an SEO perspective.

Here are some quick tips from the presentation:

Janet Driscol Miller

Bing when combined with Yahoo will result in 30% Market Share
Lower volume Search Traffic from Bing, but more pages viewed per visit
Similarities between registering local listings
Bing good at showing geo-relevant results
You can see the value of a backlink in Bing Webmaster but only for top 1000 links

Rand Fishkin

Bringing science to SEO
Exact Match Domains Important – powerful in both engines
Hyphenated versions are less powerful
Keywords in domains important for both
Keywords in subdomain more preferred by Google than Bing
Alt attributes of images important
Keywords in URLs considered best practice
Keywords in URLs more important than on page
More important to have link diversity than quantity
Links still major consideration in ranking
Google better at analysing links
Many anchor text links from same domain don’t count highly
Links far more important than on page content for ranking

Additional Resources

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

Evidence?

There’s an interesting article over at the onreact blog discussing potential Google algorithm changes which not only de-value exact matches in anchor links, but actually hurt your position in the SERPS.

The article describes how some blog posts which were initially ranking well, completely disappeared from the SERPS when exact match anchor links were pointed at them.

To add to the evidence, apparently the posts re-appeared in the SERPS after the links were removed.

Exact Match?

But what is classed as an “exact match anchor link” – and why may Google be using them to filter the SERPS.

The article describes exact matches as fairly generic – high value phrases, an example of which is "SEO Company UK”.   

Anchor text has been becoming increasingly popular over the last couple of years as a way of improving SERP positioning.   More and more spammy backlinks are implementing exact key phrase patterns for anchor text, so this may be why Google are taking notice.

Blackhat?

This leaves a worrying question though : can your competitors damage your position in the SERPS by “exact matching” links to your site?

Google have always been aware of the potential for Blackhat SEO’s to use the ranking algorithms against competitors, so I don’t believe it’s that straightforward.   

I expect Google must be using other factors such as link patterns, source addresses, anchor text distribution, page content etc before taking the step of removing a page from the SERPS.

Stop Using Exact Matches?

I don’t think this is evidence enough that we should stop using exact match anchor links, however the links should continue to be natural in both growth and context.    For example, exact matches can be used when the content pointed to – is indeed a match of the anchor text context.   And if the link comes from a page with related content – this will also be proof to Google that the link should be counted as good.

I’m sure additional research will be done on this and there will be other blog posts discussing the findings.   It’ll be interesting to see what correlations are found when more people start looking into these findings.

For now I’ll keep linking where linking makes sense to the user and the content..

In the video, Google’s Matt Cutts runs through several site reviews with the help of Greg Grothaus, Tiffany Lane and Vanessa Fox.