Posts Tagged ‘Wordpress.com’

WordPress Listens to Their Customer Audience

October 22, 2009

Several months ago WordPress announced the introduction of their own url shortening service under the WP.me branded domain.

At the time, I congratulated the WordPress staff on their blog while also asking when or if I could ever Tweet WordPress blog posts directly to my Twitter account.

The Official WordPress blog approves or disapproves comments and my suggestion went – for what seemed like an eternity – without being published.

Then within the last week or two, WordPress announced their new Publicize feature which Tweets WordPress blog posts directly to Twitter accounts.

I thought – unbelievable, Are you kidding me WordPress?!

As a consultant I am used to sharing strategies and techniques for growing businesses with my clients, but I provide them because my clients reciprocate by paying my fees.

Sharing ideas freely on the web is a requisite for participating in web culture yet not giving credit where credit is due is what keeps additional ideas from flowing and then multiplying.

This morning I woke up thinking about the above process and how I was going to write about how my suggestion had been perpetually embargoed in an approval que at WordPress while they went ahead and launched their Publicize to Twitter service.

To my surprise, my comment and suggestion were actually published several weeks ago while also being acknowledged by Automattic’s User Engagement head @Wordpress –  Heather.

Wordpress Listens to Their Customer Audience

Wordpress Listens to Their Customer Audience

Congratulations WordPress… you not only listen to your customer audience, you also act on that which you have heard.

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My First WordPress Blog Tweet to Twitter

October 8, 2009

WordPress.com has announced a new feature called Publicize which let WordPress publishers tweet their blog posts directly to their Twitter account.

The feature is enabled from WordPress Dashboard’s → My Blogs admin page.

Enable WordPress.com Account To Tweet

Enable WordPress.com Account To Tweet

Once enabled, WordPress users are directed through an authorization procedure to confirm that they want to connect their WordPress.com blog and their Twitter account.

Wordpress Twitter Authorization

Wordpress Twitter Authorization

After Twitter allows access to a WordPress blog, the blogger’s account will display a message showing a successful connection has been made.

Successful WordPress.com Connection to Twitter

Successful WordPress.com Connection to Twitter

I assume publishing a WordPress blog post then automatically Tweets the post and it’s WordPress shortened url (Wp.Me) to the previously selected Twitter account.

Google Sitemaps No Errors

October 4, 2009

In a previous post, I wrote about how I have had ongoing problems with this website and its traffic since I switched to WordPress.com’s domain mapping service.

I have added Google Webmaster Tools to this site to begin the process of diagnosing and correcting what problems may exist on this side of the server.

According to my Google Webmaster Tools account, my recent sitemaps.xml file resubmission appears to have been successful.

Google Sitemaps No Errors

Google Sitemaps No Errors

Although approximately half of my pages are being indexed by Google, I remain encouraged by the message above.

Google Webmaster Tools Sitemaps

October 3, 2009

I purchased domain mapping from WordPress.com to move posts from this blog’s original address @ cohn.wordpress.com to my SearchMarketingCommunications.com domain.

After I bought the domain mapping service, my blog went from having a Page Rank of 5 to a Page Rank of 0.

To add insult to injury, my WordPress blog then effectively lost most of its several hundred visitors a day traffic.

To keep up with the carnage, I added Google Webmaster Tools to the site as suggested.

Although I have been able to get some of my pages back into Google’s index, my site’s Page Rank has not returned nor has my traffic.

I recently resubmitted my WordPress sitemap after Google Webmaster tools said it discovered errors.

Google Webmaster Tools Sitemaps

Google Webmaster Tools Sitemaps

I am waiting to see whetherthe WordPress. com sitemaps.xml file I have submitted will be error free or not.

Sitemaps Resubmitted

Sitemaps Resubmitted

How To Create and Search Your Own Twitter Followers List

July 22, 2009

Yesterday I wrote a post about how to create and search a list of Twitter updates in both WordPress and Google.

Today, I am going to tackle a similar problem: Searching Twitter Followers and Following lists.

Until Twitter makes searching Twitter account followers and following lists part of Twitter search, finding someone who follows you or who is following you isn’t very easy to do.

Creating a searchable list isn’t too dificult it just requires some time.

Go to your Twitter account and click on your followers link and select list view.

This will produce a list of 20 followers per page.

Twitter Followers List

Twitter Followers List

Copy the list of followers from each page.

Depending on how many followers you have will determine how many pages you will have to scroll through and scrape to create your own searchable list.

I have 873 followers at the moment so I had to visit 43 pages to create my list.

Paste the list of followers into a Word document or Excel if you extracted tables and save.

You can now sort either the Word or Excel documents alphabetically to create your first archived list of Followers in a searchable hierarchy.

To archive your Twitter followers list in the cloud, import it into a Google indexed WordPress blog and wallah! – you will have a instant browser searchable WordPress file with a list of all your followers.

After the Googlebot visits your site, your list of followers will also be archived in Google’s search engine results pages.

I have posted my current list of Twitter followers over on TimothyCohn.com

WordPress.com Search Results

September 29, 2008

A search today for “Bailout Bill Text” produces a list of WordPress blogs which have purportedly written about the US government bailout of the mortgage industry.

Search

Search

Instead, the top four search results WordPress provides searchers who have clicked through to its site are from the same splog.

Splogs About

Splogs About

Clicking through to any of the results produces stolen content the splog has scraped into their post combined with an embedded and totally unrelated video.

Splog

Splog

I realize it may be difficult for WordPress to stop the proliferation of splogs and their ilk.

However, can’t WordPress at least identify and then filter Splogs from displaying their scraped content within their own search results?

Not doing so does both its publishers and the search audience a disservice.

Here is a copy of the Bailout Bill Text.

Why Aren’t WordPress Possibly Related Posts NoFollow?

May 15, 2008

I recently noticed WordPress.com hosted blogs started displaying three to four links to “possibly related posts” WordPress has deemed related to their hosted page’s content.

Usually the first link is pointed to somewhere else within the same blog while the balance of the links are then distributed to other blogs which more often than not appear to be other WordPress blogs.

I have been watching my referrals and haven’t noticed hardly any new traffic coming in from other WordPress blogs but I have noticed my search related referrals have dropped by nearly a factor of 10.

My drop in search traffic appears to coincide with the launch of the WordPress “possibly related posts” automatic link generator.

cohn wordpress traffic

If I were to to guess why my search traffic dried up I would guess it is because my blog posts that had enjoyed near constant search positions have been devalued vis-a-vis the links WordPress has now inserted in all of my pages.

WordPress blog comments automatically receive the “No follow” link attribute so as to not unnecessarily pass site value to spammers so why does WordPress think they can rob all of their bloggers of the value each one has built in their blog by redistributing their sites search value to other blogs – especially other WordPress blogs?

Regardless of whether my search engine traffic dropped because of the addition of the “Possibly Related Posts” links now being generated by WordPress, WordPress.com should add the “No Follow” attribute to their “Possibly Related Posts” link scheme to preserve the continued good will of the bloggers who’s content produces WordPress traffic.

Possibly Related Posts?

April 29, 2008

Today some of my blogs started receiving traffic from other WordPress.com blogs I wasn’t yet familiar with.

After investigating the referral strings, I noticed WordPress has begun placing a set of four links at the bottom of their WordPress.com hosted blogs.

I have tried for nearly 20 minutes to upload screen capture of the links being displayed but seem to be having problems loading any images.

Wisely, WordPress has made their first link to a post already within the author’s site. The other links point to other WordPress blogs.

Cross pollination of blogs should increase WordPress traffic significantly.

Make This Blog Your Personalized Blog.com Domain Mapping Trial

April 29, 2008

I am trying out the WordPress.com “Make this blog your personalized blog.com” domain mapping service with my personal domain: TimothyCohn.com

Make This Your Personalized Blog.com

Previously the TimothyCohn.com domain was hosted and parked at WhyPark.com.

TimothyCohn.com at one time was in Google’s search engine results. However, like all short cuts – the WhyPark.com domain parking solution proved to be both: short and cut.

I own TimothyCohn.com and haven’t changed the domain’s ownership during this trial. Only time will tell if my realigning my site with WordPress.com will find the TimothyCohn.com domain back in Google’s index.

Google recently made it clear they weren’t planning on indexing parked sites while also outlining their methodology for identifying parked sites and eradicating them. Google simply searches for parked domain “web template patterns” and then deletes the parked sites and their offending patterns from their index.

This particular WordPress.com sub-domain TimCohn.Wordpress.com is in Google search results and also appears in Google Blog Search.

The purpose of this blog post is to see if and how Google will crawl and then supplant this TimCohn.Wordpress.com subdomain with the TimothyCohn.com domain.

I am looking forward to seeing how long the “Make this blog your personalized blog.com” domain mapping service from WordPress takes to replace the TimCohn.Wordpress.com subdomain results in Google search results – if at all.