GymnasticsHoes.net is our newest addition to the BotGoneBad club!

paraphrasing the email:

‘AboutUs made it so that it has another meaning.
Would you mind correcting it?
People could be confused.
Yet, it’s fun how AboutUs wants to have it.’

In keeping up with one of the spirits of wiki — simple website editing that you can do — check out how you can change the spelling at our wiki page: Fix capitalization

Our apologies goes to the Gymnastic Shoe aggregator… and thanks for the chuckle.

This is very related to our These Websites Aren’t as Dirty as They Sound article!

The HTML code that runs your website is most likely designed by a person. People make mistakes and you need to check to see how ‘valid’ your code is. You do want it to show up in every person’s web browser, no matter if they have Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Camino, Opera, Rockmelt – or any one of dozens of others.

Validate your website code! Did you even know such a thing existed! Michelle Knight walks you though why it is important, how to do it and what to look out for in her article W3C Validation.

Local businesses take notice. This means those folks with brick and mortar or location based business, heck even people accepting money for much of anything. Do you accept debit / credit cards now? Do you want to? If you haven’t heard about Square, read this article:

Jack Dorsey, Founder of Twitter and Square: Twitter has changed how people communicate. Dorsey’s new project Square will transform how you pay for everything.

Granted you need to go out and get yourself a smartphone – but figure out how how much the phone and data plan are and see how long it would take to recoup that cost.

I received this fantastic question about what is the best practice for editing multiple pages on AboutUs:

I manage several websites for clients and want to know If I can have one account and maintain several pages, or must I create a unique account for each client.

The choice is yours, and the easiest is to create just one account and maintain multiple pages. That way, all of your notifications go to one account. You can get notifications for someone else updating a page you care about, or one of our weekly emails letting you know about an SEO tip we have, updates to our products or a random piece of goodness!

Additionally, if you make your account personal,
meaning you put your portrait up and fill out your
personal profile, you will gain more reputation.

Have a great weekend!

In an email exchange with Ross Taylor of Alameda Internet Marketing (visit), he surfaced a question I thought more people would have:

I just had a thought – I could see they system being abused by:

Finding wikis approved for dofollow, editing the wiki, and inserting their own links. Is there any protection against that? Or let’s say a wiki gets vandalized, is there revision control to send it back to the way it was before it was hit?

Good point. We look at every edit within 24 hours and revert spamming. It is a pattern that we can usually easily pick out.

It is easy to fix, as easy as it is to edit, so we don’t worry so much about it. Occasionally we deal with a hard case, but usually that cools off when they see they aren’t getting anywhere.

The revision is in ‘more’ next to search in upper right area. Then click on ‘history’. You can revert on individual time date stamped versions.

Make sure to confirm your email and you will be alerted to edits on pages you care about.

We’re giving away one free year of the AboutUs Site Report (our in-depth SEO analysis tool for your entire website).  We’ve announced this contest on Facebook and to our email list, but we want to make sure you get your chance to have your name drawn on Tuesday.

To enter, just comment on our post about the contest on our Facebook page. (If you don’t already “like” us there, you’ll need to do that first.)

If you haven’t used the Site Report yet, you’ll get it free for a year if you win. If you’re already a Site Report customer, we’ll set you up with 12 more months – free!

If you want to get started right now, or if you don’t win, you can still try the Site Report for free for a week, and you can cancel any time. Start your free trial of the Site Report now.

Questions?  Email SiteReport@AboutUs.org.

Chris of the Dutch lighting company RoseDesign.nl (visit), recently found AboutUs and editing a wiki!

“I discovered AboutUs.org when I viewed my ip details on DomainTools.com.

To my surprise a wiki page about my website existed. I decided to edit it, filled in my company information, website title and micro summary, even tried the wiki text.

Later after reading an article on do-follow links on AboutUs.org I asked for a review. The page needed more work however, so following the suggestions provided by Mark Dilley and with his help I continued to edit the wiki text , also adding links and a logo.

Soon we were both satisfied with the result, and I now have what I hope is an informative AboutUs.org wiki page which also links to my website.

In conclusion learning how to do this has been an interesting experience that I would recommend to others.”

Chris Rose 26-5-2011

Our latest newsletter went out this morning, sign up to get it direct to your email box!

When was the last time you edited – or even looked at – your website's profile on AboutUs.org?

It could probably use some love. It may be missing something like contact info or a summary at the top. And we bet you'd be amazed at how much you can do in the Wiki section to transform your site's page into a beautiful marketing piece for your company.

Take a look at some outstanding website profiles, and learn how to do cool things with wiki formatting.

Find the page about your website by searching for it (like example.com) at the top right on AboutUs.org. To edit, sign in a blue pencil icon on the page.

Bonus! Once you're happy with a page, let us know and we can make its links to your website DoFollow. Those are the type of links that help your SEO, and DoFollow pages also show up much higher in AboutUs.org search results.

More Coming Soon + Free Trial
We're working to make the Site Report a more robust SEO tool for you.  Stay tuned for a few new features next week.

Aren't using the Site Report yet? Click to try it free for a week. If you ever stop loving it, you can cancel any time.

Questions? We want to help you create a great page.
Chat with us, reply to this email, or call 1.800.AboutUs or +1.503.488.5763

We have kicked around the idea of having the means of talking about technical matters regarding our website AboutUs.org for a while.

And last week one got rolled out. Granted there are now a whole two posts on it, and you can subscribe to it to be enlightened.

Dev.AboutUs.org

It is beautiful looking and it does the job.

As the largest wiki directory of websites on the internet, we want to shout this out loud!

If you’ve ever made a wiki better, pass along your birthday wishes at the original wiki! Here’s a wiki birthday greeting to wiki lovers from Ward Cunningham, the inventor of wiki:

Best to anyone who ever made a wiki better. Thanks. — Ward

If the simplicity of wiki editing seems scary — “What!?! I don’t have to log in to edit? How will that ever work?”  – Then go ahead and ‘like’ the wiki birthday celebration page on Facebook.

You might even want to post something longer, like Alex William of ReadWriteWeb.com. He wrote a great story of how he was introduced to wiki. Maybe you’d enjoy seeing what people wrote for the past two wiki birthdays: WikiBirthday 15 and WikiBirthday 14.

You might know AboutUs as a resource for great SEO advice. Maybe you didn’t realize that AboutUs offers every website on the internet a wiki profile page, which we encourage you to improve. Kate Ford thinks we are the Slickest Wiki In Town, in part because we provide friendly hands-on help to anyone who asks.

Andreas, who’s known AboutUs for a long time, pointed out in a recent post, “AboutUs.org has developed from ‘just’ a wiki about sites to a good resource for information for webmasters and web site owners.”

We love Wiki. Linking is arguably the most valuable thing on the web, and wiki is the easiest, purest form of linking. You can even link to a page that doesn’t exist yet, creating an invitation for anyone to edit and provide good information. What could be more creative?