Twitter is not the first online entity to be plagued by porn spammers, as it is an unfortunate and unavoidable part of the internet. As soon as a social site becomes somewhat popular, adult outlets will try to exploit it.

I’m sure many of you had some questionable followers as soon as you joined twitter. The problem has been well reported all over the internet.  At least in this case you can block the followers and/or report them (even though it is a pain that Twitter should still address themselves).

However, what you cannot seem to do at this time is to avoid these porn spammers when searching Twitter for completely non-porn related words, or setting up a feed using the Twitter search on your website.

We at 10e20 have the Twitter Feed right on the sidebar ->. All it does is pull the recent tweets from a search for 10e20, which lets you, the reader, quickly see what people are saying about us.

Well, a few days ago, unfortunately that sidebar has been filled with tweets from 4 or 5 porn accounts in a row, because they tweeted about 10e20.

After checking some of those accounts, you can see that they intertwine their tweets between links to their porn sites and tweeting legitimate news and trendy topics. This way their accounts will show up for legitimate searches, and as we found out, in your Twitter feed as well.

Currently, there is no pro-active way for us to battle this. All we can do is write a script to black list those accounts from showing up in our feed after the fact. But I was definitely surprised to find out that Twitter does not have anything in place on their end.

It’s time for Twitter to get on board and introduce an adult filter that’s turned on by default, but can be turned off if a user wishes so (much so like Google applies onto their search).

It would then be up to community to report questionable accounts as ‘adult’ or ’spam’ (various labels can be introduced) and up to admins to label them as such – so that they don’t show up in the legitimate searches.

A good example of this in action is when you search for Obama on Google. You can be sure that there probably won’t be any porn, even if Google did not have an adult filter, simply because there are many more legit websites about Obama out there. Twitter, however, doesn’t work that way. If you tweet about Obama, you will show up on the search no matter what your account says. So an adult filter seems to be a must in such a scenario.

Furthermore, labeling accounts as adult can open an additional option for users to choose if they want to be followed by an ‘adult’ account or not. So essentially all Twitter activity can be filtered if the individual user wants. Of course, if you don’t mind receiving adult content then you should have an option to turn the filter off.

What do you think?  Is it time for an adult filter and why do you think nothing currently exists?

Last week Jake wrote an awesome post about leveraging relationships for link building and it got me thinking.  Seeing that I am a hermit who lives in front of the computer, how the heck do I build links without those daily “real-life” relationships?  Well, believe it or not, I do actively build links with relationships without meeting people in the flesh and wanted to share some of my tips and tricks for doing this across my social media networks.

The main thing to remember is that if you are helpful and can provide value to someone else, it is basically a virtual handshake and a way to fire up your virtual relationship.  Simple things like a vote, comment, retweet or even just praise can strengthen your relationship.  Here are a few things to do to meet people in Social Media, and turn them into friends (who can help you build links).

Make it Easy for People to Contact You

Put your instant messaging name up on all of your social profiles so that you can connect.  Internal messaging on many social sites is lackluster, and getting someone’s IM name can allow you to get in touch when you need to.  A few tips for messaging would be to create a separate account for your “public IM name” so you won’t overload your personal account with voting/favor requests.  Also, create an account on all of the main messaging platforms.  Many people prefer using Gmail over AIM, or Yahoo! over Gmail, so set it all up and use a service like digsby or pidgin to neatly manage it.

Many times you can instantly help your friends by giving votes which will go a long way when you need a favor.  People who are asking for votes/re-tweets/comments probably have a website that they are promoting – and guess what?  If you have a good relationship, you now have a friend on IM that you can use if you are looking for a link!

Allow People to Easily Find You

So now we see the power of people who are actively promoting social media content, and how targeted they can be for links.  To expand your networks, make it simple for people to find you across all social networks.  Place your Digg profile link in your StumbleUpon profile description, and include your Twitter account in your Digg profile.  The more places where people can find you, the more relationships you are going to build.  Also, having the ability to help people across multiple sites will just add to your cause when asking for a link.

Act Like You Would in Real Life

When a person finds your IM name from a social network, many times they “say hi” by sending you a link in which you should vote on.  This is one of the things that amazes me on a daily basis.  I rarely meet any people who try to get something from me without even saying hello.  When contacting people, you should try to really connect with them.  Say you met someone from StumbleUpon, subscribe to their favorites and let them know when you really liked a story that they found.  Find out where they live, what their name is, see what they like; basically, you should act like a human to them and you will work your way to a real relationship!  The more information you have on someone, the more you can help them, and in turn, the more you can ask from them.

All-in-all, while I might not have as many “real life” relationships as Jake, I have found ways to acquire links while using social media and building my networks.  To me, the biggest benefit of these virtual relationships is that the people you will meet will have a high probability of having a website where they could link to you,  and you can easily help them to start a positive relationship.  So even if you don’t have a wealth of personal connections offline, don’t fret!  These tips should hopefully help you reach your link building goals!

Google Ad Planner has been beta testing for more than a month now, but there still isn’t a lot out there about it except for 1 greatpost and an even better rant, so I decided to check it out for myself.

At first, it looks amazing. The data is easy to find, easy to sort and more comprehensive than what you will find from Comscore. As an internet marketer, I find myself performing extensive competitive
research and this tool makes it easy to not just find more competition but gives me site statistics about them.

If I am creditcardguide.com for example, and I do not know who my competition is, I can simply enter my own website in the Online Behavior section and I get results showing acclaimvisa.com, smartbalancetransfers.com and creditcard321.com.

I can then drill down on smartbalancetransfers to see their websites demographics (in the US only at the moment). This can be a great way to show your boss your websites market share or see how the competition stacks up.

This also works great for e-commerce sites to help you find which competitors or even complimentary sites are also running Google text ads for site placement targeting. When searching for thefind.com, a shopping portal, I see that shopwiki.com and bedbathstore.com display Google ads. If I were TheFind and looking to grab some more of the market share, I would target these sites.

Google Ad Planner is very useful in regards to research and planning, but it still isn’t perfect.

Initially, while looking to see what websites Ad Planner associates with www.seo-chicks.com the list looks pretty good. It was populated with the likes of Sphinn, Bruce Clay, SEOMOZ, and SEO Round Table. It also mentions Chris Hooley, but did you know that Chris Hooley is in the Alcoholic Beverages category? I know he likes to have a good time, but do you think this is a little extreme?

Drilling down for more information about SEO Chicks, I found out that all of the US visitors to the site are 35-44 year old men. Am I the only one a little creeped out by this?

Beta errors aside, there is a lot of potential with this product for both media buyers as well as paid search professionals looking to do some more advanced site targeting, but in its current state it is still missing some key features. In addition to displaying websites that do not accept advertising, Google Ad Planner can be sorted to show if it accepts Google image ads, Google text ads, or gadget ads.

This feature is great if you are looking for new sites to placement target your PPC campaign, but there is no way to ONLY display websites that accept certain formats of Google ads.

Also, once you build your media plan, there is no way to actually execute it inside the interface. If I just spent all the time finding sites to advertise on, I can’t do much with it because there is now way to integrate this with my Adwords account. I could manually add everything into my Adwords account, but Google should know this better than anyone – PLEASE make spending money easy!

Overall, if you can get on the beta list for this one, it is pretty cool and well worth it despite some miscategorization. When checking their stats on my own sites to verify accuracy, the pageviews, visitors and demographics were spot on, even for the sites that do not run Google Analytics. This does beg the question of where Google is getting this information from, but I am not going to ponder that too much, because if I do I will likely run screaming from the internet and go back to two tin cans and a string for communication and the Dewey Decimal system for research in fear that Google really is Skynet.