We know that a lot of members have been manually pinging the pages their bookmarks appear on, so this should help all those folks free up some precious time.

And best of all, there’s absolutely nothing you need to do to get it to work and we’re not charging a cent for it.  This new service will work for every SocialAdr user effective immediately.

In addition, this release includes a bug fix on the “Add Bookmark” page that wouldn’t allow special characters like ampersand (&) to be used in the Spin Preview.

• New Instant Credits page to allow members to make 1-time credit purchases.  Perfect for the ‘Free’ members who are sick of sharing or the ‘Lazy’ members who want an extra boost of backlinks.
• History – Stats page updated to hide sections that don’t apply to the ‘Lazy’ accounts.
• ‘Lazy’ accounts welcome page updated to include a short video explaining what they need to do.
• Help – Videos page updated to include the ‘Lazy’ video from above.
• Members menu item removed as the menu was getting cluttered and it was unimportant for most users.
• Existing paid members may now use the Upgrade Account page without having to email support for assistance.

The purpose of this is so that we can start sending bookmarks to social bookmarking services that require categories.  There’s quite a few of them so this opens up a lot more possibilities for integration.

We strongly recommend that you update your existing Bookmarks.  If you don’t then we won’t be able to send your bookmarks to any site we integrate with that uses categories.  So any time anyone Shares your bookmarks you’ll be missing out on potential backlinks.

If you can’t find a category that’s a perfect match for your bookmark, just pick the most appropriate one.

This new functionality is the v2.15 release.

Spin Tags are used to dynamically convert a single piece of text into many unique variations.  The idea is to use psynonyms throughout the text which are then ‘spun’.  We’ve decided to use { for the start tag | for the separator and } for the end tag. If you’re really hardcore you can even use nested SPIN tags!

 

Example:

SocialAdr {automated|autopilot|bookmark} backlinks are great for {SEO|Search Engine Optimization}

Result: (one sentence turns into 6)

• SocialAdr automated backlinks are great for SEO
• SocialAdr autopilot backlinks are great for SEO
• SocialAdr bookmark backlinks are great for SEO
• SocialAdr automated backlinks are great for Search Engine Optimization
• SocialAdr autopilot backlinks are great for Search Engine Optimization
• SocialAdr bookmark backlinks are great for Search Engine Optimization

The benefits of using SPIN tags for your Bookmarks are:

1. You can use multiple keywords (tags) in the Title, with the help of SPIN tags.  This means that rather than having hundreds of backlinks to your URL all using the same anchor text, you get a variety of different anchor texts, using different targeted keywords.  Variety is good!
2. You get multiple unique variations of the Description text.  It’s arguable how beneficial this is in regards to social bookmarking, as many of the sites allow NO description.  There’s also debate on whether search engines care about the uniqueness of content on a page where a backlink originates from.  However, at least you’d be playing it safe by spinning your Descriptions.

How do I use the new SPIN tag functionality?

It’s easy!  Log into SocialAdr.  Go to the Add Bookmark page.  Enter the details of your new bookmark, making sure to use the SPIN tag format as described above.  Remember that only the Title and Description can be spun.  Then click the Spin Preview link for each entity to verify that your SPIN tags are entered properly.   Save the bookmark as normal.

You can also Edit your existing bookmarks and add in the SPIN tags.   Just go to Bookmarks – My Bookmarks.  Click the Title of the bookmark you want to edit.  Then click the Edit link.  You’ll be taken to the form with all the existing details filled out.  Make whatever changes you’d like and click Save.

 

What about Tags?

We haven’t forgotten about Tags.  It didn’t seem appropriate to allow SPIN text for them, but what we’ve done is randomize their order and use a subset (at least half) of them when the bookmarks are submitted to the social bookmarking services.

Example:

Original Tags

• social bookmarking, bookmarking software, bookmarking tools, socialadr, backlinking

Tags used for the bookmark submission

• bookmarking tools, backlinking, socialadr, social bookmarking

The patch notes from last week were almost all about the new Quick Share feature on the site.  We think this is a great enhancement that will make SocialAdr better for everyone concerned.  In particular, these changes were targeted at two goals:

1) Reactivating our existing free user base.  More activity among our free users means more sharing opportunities and backlinks for our paid accounts.  By making it faster and easier to share bookmarks, plus reminding people on a daily basis, we expect to see an overall increase in the activity in everyone’s queue.

2) Preparing for the re-launch of our services.  I’ve been talking a lot about upcoming changes, overhauling accounts, etc.  You’re going to see many of those going live in the next week, after which we’ll be going on a major recruiting drive.  These changes will pave the way to keep those new users engaged and active, which benefits the entire community.

Most of the additional changes have already been made in our development environment and are just going through final testing before being moved up to the production site.  ‘Coming soon’ is on the way out, rapidly being replaced by ‘here it is’.

In case you haven’t checked the stats, SocialAdr has posted almost 30,000 backlinks to members’ sites.  That’s a LOT of linking in a pretty short period of time.  We keep track of every individual link: who created the link, who shared the link, what the result was, etc.

We use that data for all kinds of things like showing you what’s happened to your links and figuring out what’s available for you to share.  As you may have guessed, we’re crunching a lot of data to deliver some of the pages on the site.  And that translates into a lot of server resources and sometimes, slow response times.

So naturally, as the new guy, my first suggestion was that we completely rip out the entire history tracking system and rewrite it.  To Kane’s credit, he didn’t hang up on me and call the whole thing off.  Instead we started talking through how it could work, what impact it would have, and how hard it would be to get done.

The amazing thing is that less than a week later we rolled out an updated version of the site with a completely revamped history tracking subsystem.  You probably saw the unassuming post announcing some performance enhancements; we didn’t make a big deal about it, but it was no minor upgrade.

If you haven’t already, you’ll definitely be able to tell how much faster the site is.  The share queue, the history page, and even the dashboard are much more responsive.  Even better, as the number of users and shares increases in the future, we shouldn’t have any trouble handling it in stride.

Now that we’ve got that behind us, we’re turning our focus to other tasks including keeping the share queue full, revamping user accounts, and enchancing and adding to the bookmarking services.