LZZR

Pownce Invite - Microblog SEO cheatsheet, tips and tricks

Quite frankly the first item in my ToDo List was to write a roundup on LZZR Linking but the scheduled work on this project that mainly consisted of watching people joining in and backlinks spreading over the network was mercilessly interrupted by getting a long-awaited Pownce Invite. I can’t help applauding their market-entry strategy where the main element is to roll out a public beta but make it an invitation only service (not original per se but beautifully implemented). By doing this they were able to kill two birds with one stone: firstly creating an aura of exclusivity around the service and secondly providing starting points for user trees to branch from.
BTW if someone needs a Pownce Invite ask my lovely friend SexySEO through her MyBlogLog account as she must have some invites left. You can also message me on MyBlogLog but please, care to send private messages!
So what this so far exclusive Pownce thing is all about? Briefly it’s yet another one microblog. Although you have probably guessed my personal attitude towards microblogging from my post about Twitter, this emerging Web 2.0 genre pioneered by Twitter seems to be steadily gaining ground in terms of popularity and traffic. The problem with Pownce is that it has to catch up with Twitter that has a good gain since about a year ago. Pownce appeared just at the end of this June but is doing remarkably well despite of a recent saddle in the graph.

Now, why do we have to bother with a service that seems to be mimicking an already existing one? Is it just another blueprint startup? Without falling into an already common Twitter vs. Pownce comparison I feel I need to point out two important things. Firstly, Twitter in my opinion is ugly while Pownce team did a good job to make the service visually attractive including even changeable skins. Secondly, Pownce was founded (among others) by some Kevin Rose who incidentally happened to be a co-founder of Digg.com at the same time. Taking into account his past service record this guy must surely know something. If you ask me, my money is on Pownce as I believe it will eventually take over from behind. What is your bet? Well, it actually does not matter as in the near future we will see a good run where both players will be willing to put as much resources as they can into promoting their services in terms of popularity, visibility, functionality as well as Google PR. And here we are, standing right under and ready to rip the benefits.
Enough of comparison, let’s see what Pownce is in it’s own right. Honestly, I was shocked to realise the kind of approach they took designing the core of the service. This microblog does not have any kind of mobile integration. Does this mean that microblogging as an Internet activity is considered mature enough already to make it possible to cut off the umbilical cord of SMS and other mobile messaging or it’s just a sign of immaturity of Pownce itself I don’t know and I am honestly puzzled by this. If the absence of mobile interface can possibly be explained by the current beta stage of the project another no less surprising feature seems to be a part of the design. The central page of your profile on Pownce aggregates and displays not only your stuff but also all kind of stuff from your friends! That’s a kind of a surprise I did not expect. They’ve done a thing completely opposed to Twitter structure, pardon me for the inevitable comparison again. And this does not seem to be a mistake but rather a part of the design. I might have guessed from the name… What do you think of the following definition of the slang word pwn taken from reference.com: to take unwilling control of someone else or something belonging to someone else by exploiting a vulnerability? This is exactly how Pownce works. In effect your own profile page is being hijacked by messages and links posted from your friends. You are no longer in control of your own frontpage! This and some other rather weird features make SEOing Pownce a bit of a challenge.
So what Pownce can offer us in terms of SEO? I believe that as a result of competition with Twitter Pownce is bound to gain in both Page Rank and exposure power. Our task is to optimize Pownce to make it useful in some bigger project (I hope nobody expects a microblog to become a major content distribution source). So let’s try to work out some helpful tips and tricks to make powncing useful for your main site. Once again the task is not just to optimize Pownce itself as being a microblog it simply has no chance to rank high in SERPs but to make it a point from which your main site will get additional exposure and benefit in terms of Google Page Rank.
Having your profile page stuffed with messages from your friends doesn’t help a bit. Your main profile page is the strongest as it gets most internal links from within the system from all of your posts through author link and avatar and hence it will be gaining most of PR and exposure. At the same time it is the most useless page as not only you are not in control of its content but also it will have a horrible link and content churn rate. What we need is to create some alternative place within the Pownce itself and make it as strong as your main profile. Luckily there is one already – it’s your Me Only page. This page is what you get by default on Twitter only here, on Pownce it had been given a second-rate status compare to your profile. It already has a direct spiderable link from your main profile page, so it has to be known to Search Engines but will be ranked very poorly. Our idea is to give it some additional weight. I assume that Pownce will gain a good standing with Google and eventually Google PR will flow easily within the site. In this case it is usually enough to give it some two or three external inbound links to kick-start PR accumulation.
Hence our SEO tip number one: when you promote your Pownce account at external resources link to your Me Only page, NOT to your main profile. Note: you also have a Sent page which should be the same but isn’t always the same at all! There is also another juicy place within your Pownce estate – your Type Links page where you get only links (both yours and not yours). On Pownce there are four different types of Pownces you can write: messages, links, files and events each capable of generating a stream of it’s own. The only problem with this that type pages (and streams) stay unlinked and Search Engine Robots have no way of learning about their existence. That is of course true only until you show those pages to them. You can post links to your Type Pages from external resources but it certainly won’t hurt to have some internal links too. Unfortunately Pownce is plagued with nofollow too and all links in your profile and messages are nofollowed. The way out of this trap is to post your links as Link Type thus creating a kind of internal loopback.
So here goes SEO tip number two: if you want a certain type of your Pownce postings to be spiderable too – create external links to this type page and use links type to post internal links. If you want to have as many of your pages on Pownce spidered – rinse and repeat for every page type. Mind you if you are a friendly character there is some point in pulling out your friends lists too. Of all possible combinations Pownce links only to your Friends and Fans pages and hides a page with people you follow which is logical enough as those followed by you give only links from their fans page while both friends and fans publish your stuff in their profile streams. All of these three types of friendship relations pages can be strengthened using the abovementioned method. You can also create groups of your friends to gather posts from selected accounts excluding your own strangely enough.
At this stage it is perhaps the time to talk about more dubious SEO and SMO tricks that Pownce is prone to. Please, bear in mind that I don’t endorse them by any means due to their ethically problematic nature and I don’t use them myself (only for experimental purposes). Look at this list as anti-recommendation and use this information to protect your account from falling a victim of these tactics. Perhaps not surprisingly the star of our list is Mass Friending. Although very well-known and widely used across social networks it is particularly powerful on Pownce since Pownce posts your messages direct to your friend’s profile. Having a huge number of friends allows you to swamp the system with your messages and links. This warning might have been completely redundant if I did not see the results of my small SEO experiment strictly as a part of my eSEO programme. I randomly befriended a good hundred of Pownce users with a third profile that had nothing on it and over 50% accepted this friends request. It’s amazing how unprepared are average Social Network users to this kind of malicious activity. Another method is a variety of this one called Mass Stalking. Of course less effective as you only get a link from My Fans page of the profile you stalked but no less dangerous as you as an account owner have no way of getting rid of your stalkers. The last tactic I would consider to be particularly evil and dirty could be called Friends Infidelity and is based on unfriending mutual friends thus gaining an asymmetrical advantage. But this is a No-No, it is pure abuse of trust and I don’t even want to talk about it any more!
These methods combined with alphanumeric trick can be widely used, so beware. The alphanumeric trick itself is based on the fact that at this early stage Pownce is still using alphanumeric sorting when they have not enough of other information and as a result profiles and usernames starting with special characters or letters close to the top of Latin alphabet tend to pop up at the top more often.
Now we are able to compose a small SEO cheatsheet for working with Pownce. It will not guarantee to make you the number one Powncer but will certainly improve your chances and help to avoid the most common pitfalls and more importantly it can be used for other Social Networks as well.

1. choose username and account name close to the top of the alphabet
2. post your links as Links Type to avoid nofollow
3. concentrate on your Me Only and Link Type pages and optionally on other secondary pages while building your external and internal links to Pownce
4. be reasonable while building your network and don’t become a stalker and don’t annoy others with friends requests and mass posting - remember, your posts are turning up at all of your friend’s profiles
5. beware of malicious SMO tactics and especially on Pownce otherwise you are running a risk of your account page being effectively jacked (or Pownced) by spammers
6. remember that by default Pownce posts to all of your friends and doesn’t post to your stream (Pownce indeed!) so you need to switch from default all my friends to the public in pulldown menue

So this is in brief my small tutorial on how to make your Pownce account a SEO success and as a form of glazing to the Pownce cake you can even entirely subvert the Pownce structure by using your account as a subject group. All you need is to use your Pownce invite for another email address of yours, choose subject and start stalking Pownce users writing on this subject and voila your group is hot and ready. Check Pownce SEO Group for working example of implementation of this idea. I’ll write another tutorial on creating and managing Group Accounts on Pownce soon (time permitting). No, really, I promise!

Disclaimer: 1) I dont work for Pownce (I work for myself, remember) 2) Tips and Tricks and cheatsheet presented here a valid at the time of publishing. Pownce is a beta startup, so expect them to correct some of their most stupid mistakes in the future!

tags: google pr, google page rank, lzzr, lzzr linking, mybloglog, pownce, pownce invite, seo, seo cheatsheet, seo success, seo tip, seo trick, smo, search engine, sexyseo, social media, social networks, twitter, cheatsheet, eseo, experiment, exposure, link popularity, microblog, pwn, robot, stalking, startup, tips, traffic, tricks

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Posted by LZZR under Social Networks, bSEO |