DISC Inc

Social media users are 83% more likely to be loyal customers, retailer says For a new marketing medium, social media isn`t doing too bad at Lion Brand Yarn Co.: 20% of shoppers coming to the e-commerce site from one of the retailer`s social presences, including those on Ravelry and Flickr as well as its own blog, buy merchandise. What`s more, Lion Brand Yarn finds social media users are 83% more likely to be very loyal to the brand compared with those shoppers who don`t use social media. "We didn`t go in with a big P&L—blogs, podcasts and social networks do not involve big out-of-pocket costs, and they just made sense for us because we`re used to communicating with our customers," said Rabinowitz, who spoke at IRCE in a session titled "Social Media: If Not Now, When?" "Through social media we can talk with people online directly, we can convey we are a small, family-owned business, and we can help them understand who we are as individuals within a company, which is important because people like buying from people, not corporations. With social venues you can personalize your company."

Additionally, Yahoo! search will now accept Google Base, a product publishing tool. Five Google Base items will now be supported: Event, Product, Review, Job, and Personals. Those who have Event and Product information can submit their feeds to Yahoo! Site explorer to get their enhanced results automatically displayed.

Internet tracker Hitwise claims that "the share of search traffic to Web sites generated from paid listings has dropped to about 7.25% over the last four weeks, down from 9.8% during the same period a year ago. And Hitwise noted that paid clicks from searches for brand name terms--such as Home Depot ( HD - news - people ) and Orbitz ( OWW - news - people )--saw especially sharp drops."

This week at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, Cutts joined the discussion around nofollow during the duplicate content session. According to Outspoken Media's Lisa Barone: A debate broke out mid-session when Matt Cutts got involved about whether or not nofollow is still effective. Of course, as soon as it got hot, all search representatives got very tight lipped about who said what and what they really meant. As far as I could, Matt Cutts did NOT say that they ignore nofollow, but he DID hint that it is less effective today than it used to be. Later, Cutts addressed the issue again in his You&A keynote. When asked about PageRank sculpting, Cutts said that it will still work, but not as well. Basically, using nofollow will still prevent PageRank from passing from the linking page through the nofollowed link. But that PageRank is no longer "saved" to be used by other links on the page. It just "evaporates," according to Cutts. Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz has some visual aids to help describe the process. This change mainly affects those SEOs that have tried to optimize their pages using the nofollow tag for PageRank sculpting. It's safe to say that most site owners have no idea what PageRank sculpting is, which is probable a good thing, since it can quite easily be done wrong and cause more problems than it solves.

So how can you engage more users and potentially increase merit-based inbound links?Many webmasters have written about their success in growing their audience. We've compiled several ideas and resources that can improve the web for all users.Create unique and compelling content on your site and the web in generalStart a blog: make videos, do original research, and post interesting stuff on a regular basis. If you're passionate about your site's topic, there are lots of great avenues to engage more users.If you're interested in blogging, see our Help Center for specific tips for bloggers.