Well, pageviews are now up to 17439 for February - this is a 2.6% increase over the last month. I guess that's not bad as Feb had three fewer days than Jan. But it looks like I'm going to have to get used to 2.5%-3% monthly improvements unless I can think of a way to speed things up.
I've started to go back at look at hubs and other things I created last year with a view to backlinking them. But am also curious about Facebook and twitter.
I know that Twitter links are all no-followed, but something curious happened to me: a site I had reviewing a product, got picked up by the manufacturer of the product, who tweeted about it. It then jumped up in the search rankings by three places. So of course I thought, "this twitter stuff must have some influence" and tweeted some of my own stuff - but it made no difference. So I'm guessing that Google is treating certain twitter accounts differently? Perhaps the manufacturer's twitter account had authority and mine didn't, because I'm a nobody and they are a multinational?
I can't imagine Google is entirely thrilled at Twitter no-following everything especially as Twitter has become a real-time search source in itself, and thus a rival to Google. Given the amount of tweets in the search results, Google clearly wants to piggy back on this resource.
Then there is Facebook. I came across a post by a car dealer who mentioned that when his Facebook business page got over 1000 fans, links he was posting there started to jump in the search rankings.
I'm guessing it's down to internal backlinks. Each fan sends a link from their homepage to the business page they've fanned, and 1000+ links is a lot to your page.
I had a look at the source code of a public Facebook page (which I approached by Google's search results - i.e. I was signed out of Facebook). Links posted within messages on Walls were no-followed - but links using their link attachment feature were followed, but were wrapped in a Facebook script of the following type:
://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%253A%252F%252Fwww.myurl.com%252F&h=8dec6c5af3fd9a61eb08ea0f31be014b&ref=share" target="_blank" onclick="ft("4:20::684224154:::0:::290806722375:::5:1:28:0");
It shouldn't be too hard for Google to extract the URL from that - eg %253A = ':' %252F is '/' the onclick thing is just the message you get when you click the URL and facebook gives you a warning before you leave.
So, am going to conduct a small test, where I join a group with a lot of fans and post one of the URLs to my sites up. Will see if it makes any difference.
