SCOTIA SYSTEMS BLOG

If you’ve been watching Twitter over the last 24 hours, chances are you’ve seen at least one post from Twifficiency.    

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!

Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »
Tags: twitter

Rand Fishkin over at SEOMoz has just posted an interesting article about how Google appear to be showing increasingly spammy entries in the SERPs.

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

Posted in SEO | No Comments »
Tags: Bing, Google, SEO, SEOMoz

Following the recent changes to the BBC news website there has been some talk in the SEO community about the affect this has had.

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?

Posted in SEO | No Comments »
Tags: SEO