How Hootsuite stole my juice

I have been preaching about the benefits of using hootsuite as the ultimate social media dashboard for a while now. A week or two ago I realized a HUGE flaw. They are stealing my juice.

The ow.ly link shortener that hootsuite provides is stealing all my Google Juice. The links I have been sending out via that link shortener have been useless due to the fact that the links open up in hootsuite’s ow.ly iframe. I have heard numerous complaints that the bar across the top of peoples browsers is super annoying and I shrugged that off and told them to get over it. Now, I feel their pain, because its canalizing the SEO power of my links.

I found a quick work around to this by installing the bit.ly link shortener exstension for chrome , But it still requires me to manually make a new link when I click the hootlet button to update my social media properties. BOO! (manual work = bad)

I still love and use hootsuite and it is still the best free tool to use to manage your social media life in one easy to use dashboard. They just need to fix their love with the iframe and bar that goes across the top of the browser. (This goes for stumbleupon/digg too)

As more people come to realize the increasing value of SEO to their marketing activities they will want to use a platform that has this functionality built in. I would almost guarantee a huge boost in the adoption rate of Hootsuite over Tweetdeck, if they were to take out the Iframe and integrate bit.ly or a more robust url tracking service. The sheer fact that it is web based will make Tweetdeck a distant memory (or memory-hogging memory)

So please Hootsuite, stop stealing my juice and keep up the A+ work. Your App Rocks.

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Pariuri

I am a great fan of twitter and I am really fascinated that how twitter works.
data recovery

Yes, the problem is fixed now
Foodie

They just fixed something today - I think they removed that bar. Can you confirm this? I want to make sure that my juice gets flowing.
philsheard

Hi David - links from Twitter are no-follow'd already by default so you wouldn't get any juice from any link shortener would you?
David Wells

I'm talking about the links that you send via ping.fm to blogging platforms
with dofollow links, Like vox, wordpress.com, posterous, and blogger.

Those links do count but not if they open in hootsuites iframe.

Thanks for the comment!
Greg Flewelling

I'm not a social expert by any means, but I did catch this in my RSS feeds yesterday from MakeUseOf.com: "The 6 Best Tools To Schedule Twitter Updates" http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/tools-schedule-twi.... Maybe twAitter is the best option for the juice issue (it uses bit.ly) while still providing the management features you need.
Kevin Robbins

Won't the "Barn Owl" release yesterday - which includes "custom URL parameters for deep reporting in Google Analytics and Ominture" - help alleviate that problem? http://hootsuite.com/barn-owl
David Wells

Unless they remove the iframe from the url shortener, the juice will still be stolen. I just want the option to turn off the top bar. Bit.ly links also provide better stats back, at the moment.
Deana Goldasich

Yea...I realized this, too, when pulling numbers for a client a few months ago. I was SO bummed. I've expressed my sadness to HootSuite and hope they tackle it soon--as it's still the best dashboard out there!
David Wells

I hear ya. I have had to go back and switch my clients ping.fm feeds back through twitterfeed.com until the iframe issue is addressed.
Jon Payne

That's a sticking point for me with HootSuite. Good call. On another note, do you find that they support all (or most) of the social networks you are using?
David Wells

I am currently compiling a list of all the Dofollow links you can drop using ping.fm. The service totes the ability to update 47+ networks at once and maybe about 20 of them are do follow. I'll keep you posted
Jon Payne

Yes please do.