TheAnand

The recent reshuffle of the Google results has severely affected one of my most active websites with traffic falling more than 80%. It was one of my biggest single earners in terms of money and loosing revenue from it is a big time bad news for me.

After almost 3+ years of solid rankings and earnings, the sudden drop on the website was a surprise. The website in question was very genuine, with original content, optimized and valuable content for many keywords. Initially it was curiosity, to know why PANDA update caught my website in its filters and kicked it out of top spots.

My dad is a huge fan of the stock market. He spends time studying the market, trading and watching the ticker on for hours. It was last week I heard about the youku Initial Public Offering(IPO) listing in the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) with a valuation of $5 Billion giving it a worth which is more than AOL!

I was stumped to be honest.

A video sharing site, which is popular in China alone and posting a loss of RMB 167 Million (25 Million USD) in 2010 gets a run away hit on the NYSE taking its listing up 167% on the first day.

This post is a response to this post I came across the other day tonight on Twitter about the Google Caffeine Search Engine Ranking factors which claimed to put tips to optimize your website to the new version of Google Search which is reportedly live on some datacenters. I question the source  of that article and how the author came to those points.

1. Loading time of your website/blog – This a fairly recent rumour if you ask me. Most webmasters work really hard on reducing load times on their websites. While it is NOT a SEO advantage to do so, it is a BIG user experience factor which is not only appreciated by Google, but by normal users like you and me also.

There are a ton of advantages to go online with your press meets and Press releases. I have been a part of at least 5 press meets this year and personally, I think its a waste of time for everyone involved. We see a turn-up of around 10-15 people who do not interact with us or have any interest in what we publish and in the end, only 2-3 companies cover it online with the usual spelling mistakes and factual mistakes.
I am all game to take these Press Releases online and it is virtually used and abused to a great extent by smart marketers who use it to constantly generate buzz around their own websites.

This is a very absurd. Google seems to be very aggressive or is stuck in its cashflow that it is approaching clients directly for managing their PPC campaigns at pretty much no expense at all. I was kinda confused to learn that one of our clients was approached by Google themselves to manage their PPC campaigns online.

Though, the initial reaction was to scream “Fake!!”, seeing the documents and other information they had sent to my client, I was kind of speechless. Is Google really trying that hard? Tough times eh Big G? But in the process a lot of small Internet Marketing Consultants like me are getting bitten in the backside.

I used to have the number of subscribers on my blog displayed as text on the sidebar of this blog for sometime, but when my feeds got migrated to feedburner.google.com which was incentivized to me with their Adsense for RSS, my subscriber count just stopped updating and it was showing me errors.

I recently saw this powerpoint on Mashable, and this was one of the very posts that got my attention last week. As I went about working, this powerpoint was still playing out on my mind. Google has some vision if this was the truth. Domination. Total Domination. Check it out!

Guess what I found when I searched for myself on Google?

Looks like Orkut is being integrated into google search results now. That is good news! Suppose I want to find any other blogger or a friend, I only need to do a google search with his name. Neat, but it seems that the results are personalized to the person signed in. Which means you will probably not see it when you do the same search unless I am in your friends list at orkut.

I wish I had some cash to buy Yahoo! Stocks now! They have been seriously busy since they launched the all new Yahoo! Mail beta sometime back. I track Yahoo! very religiously since I love Yahoo! as a responsible corporation. I was one of those who did not want to see a Micro-hoo!

Recently Yahoo! started off its makeover spree with the all new Yahoo! homepage. It is only being phased into for international users yet, so your next bet at a perfect homepage is My Yahoo! which also recently went through a facelift. I fell in love at first look with the ability to add tabs and page tabs to organize your stuff.

Last month Google opened up their adsense for feeds for the public and I had tried to add my feeds, but I had to move all my feeds from feedburner to google feedburner. I had requested for the switch and forgot about it. Yesterday I got their mail about the confirmation of the transfer of feeds.

Hello TheAnand,

Success! As you requested, we have migrated your FeedBurner account to your requested Google Account.

You may now access all of your feeds by visiting this address:

http://feedburner.google.com

Google Chrome finally has seen the light of the day. Google is really on its way to domination with this Chrome browser. I got the all new browser installed within hours of its launch yesterday. I was going through the videos on youtube and it answers a lot of things about the Google Chrome browser, its development and features.

Today most friends in Orkut started to mail me if chrome will beat firefox and IE (not a competition ), I was looking forward to see what this firefox killer has.

Some important questions include

Why is Google building the Chrome browser?

Taking off from my previous post about 32 SEO tips you never know about search engine optimization, I continue. Hope you find them useful and do remember to add in those I have missed at the comments.

15. Use a robots.txt to tell the bots. Though bots have been having better brains now than they had in the 90s, they still need to be told where to go and where not to

16. Whoever told you that reciprocal links, blogroll exchanges and tag memes and webrings still get you better on SERPS, seriously has a sense of humour.

Open Social, the Facebook killer by Google is fast approaching launch I guess. Its possibly only hours before everyone announces the launch of the much awaited Orkut Killer Apps! Orkut Killer? Yea, just the sort of thing that will kill Orkut. The new favorite pastime of millions of teenagers in India/Brazil.

Since the past week, pagination errors have been too much and other minor bugs evident on the system. I should have guessed something was coming up. Logging into my account today I noticed this:

Happened last weekend and I absolutely have no idea why it happened. I added my site to the webmaster central and within a week my PageRank is like poof! Gone! It does not really mean much to me on this site since I do not sell pagerank here, so advertisements are not a reason.

Alexa ranks hates this blog since every other week its only going downwards, so does PR now. Technorati refuses to index my new links and hence a stagnant ranking there. All this makes my blog pretty much useless to potential advertisers. The traffic to the blog has only been growing all these days and I end up being bitch slapped?

In todays world, when you want to answer something you know nothing about, you just say: “Yo Just Google it Maan!”. Google is a search engine that is supposed to know everything right? Right.

Check out the answer to the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

And guess whats on sale on Ebay ?

And to deal with fake advertisements that should have acctually read:

“Show me your credit card and I will show you my Vagina!”

Have a great weekend guys!

Source: Stumbleupon, damnthe.com

Millionaire? Not Exactly Last week I got my first Adsense Check from Google. Nothing else for a better New Year Gift! Hope I keep getting these every month!

How much was it?

The check was a huge princely amount of 127$! Yep, I have not left out any zeros on either side intentionally or otherwise!

First?

Yep, right again. This is my first check from Google ever ever ever! I have been online for more than 7 years now, blogging for about 16 months now and this is my first check? YES! Thats the best part, I just learned the hard way that pennies and cents do addup to a nice amount.

Since the facelift, Google’s Orkut has been silently adding new features to the Indian/ Brazillian MySpace (is calling them that justified?). Along with better spam management in communities, choosing what you want to show to the world and other numerous features tell us that Google is dead serious about making it big in the US market.

Today I was browsing Orkut and came accross a profile that had a lock on its album. It was only then I noticed that now Orkut has a option to show certain parts of your profile only to friends, like the album, testimonials. This will stop prying eyes on those privacy concerned girls out there.

Last weekend saw one of my humour posts hit it big with StumbleUpon users. It was well received and hence a few ‘thumbs up’ brought in a lot of visits in a short time of 20 minutes. Now thats fast!

But the other day I was checking the stats from all sources and MyBlogLog and Adsense stats confused me a lot. The variation is simply too mind blowing. Check out the MyBlogLog stats for the blog:

Refferal Stats of MyBlogLog:

MyBlogLog Adsense Stats:

Today the much awaited Google led Open Social went live and there is a large buzz in it since a lot of social communities are a part of it including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. Though MySpace was not on the list, it seems to have joined the party. Wonder what will happen to facebook now. Here is a beautiful video which covers the all new Open Social.

My Alexa rankings were dropping like anything for the last few weeks without any kind of explanations or reasons. In a bid to increase my rankings, I decided to try the recently released Alexa Plugin for firefox. I was using the Search Status plugin earlier which was pretty nifty giving me a lot of informations about the sites I visit like WhoIs and other site details.

When I read the Privacy Policy of the Alexa Sparky plugin, here is what I found:

I am going to share some really useful tips on how you can get guaranteed top listings for any term you want. Do let me know if I missed anything in your comments below the post. Here goes! Before starting off, please do not read about my other SEO tips.

1. Cloak your pages. This means putting in loads of keyword stuffed paragraphs and coloring them the same as your page background. Normal visitors will not see it, but search engine bots will. Yeh! super tip…

This post is sponsored by OrkutBase – Free HTML codes for Orkut scraps

I today loooooged (Goooooogle way! ) into orkut, which is a Google attempt at social networking which clicked only in the Indian Subcontinent and Brazil and has mass following here with every teenager spending lots of money and time “orkuting”.

I used to be very active in this service, but these days I am restricted to my close group of friends. Today while logging in, I found this:

I have no words at the moment to explain my happiness. I am quiet only cuz I don’t want to wake the neighbors and have them yelling at me! India just won the best semi-finals in Twenty-20 world cup to reach the finals beating the unbeatable Australians! Its a great feeling to win over a team that has been on a winning spree and are formidable world champions Yee Hah!

But I missed the other semi finals between New Zealand and Pakistan earlier today. But a search on Google gave me the answer to that too. I was surprised to find this result:

How NOT to SEO

I recently noticed that I rank pretty high for the keyword “Web Designer Cochin” on the first as the 4th result. I got all happy and then I decided to have a goal to reach the top to topple the currently numero uno. I with my knowledge of search engine optimization, I optimized my pages with keywords in the title(I did not have it before), keywords in the body and stuff like that. But to my astonishment, I found Google kicked me to the second page for all my good ranking terms. Now I have been going up this week again to reach the 6th position. So the moral of the story is – “Do not optimize your sites too much for keywords, anchor text is important and don’t live by Google!”.

This is an antique debate on using the do-follow plugin on your blogs. Are you looking for more comments on your blog or are you concerned about having a blog that “leaks” pageranks? I had some thoughts on this since I started blogging about a year back. But when JohnChow decided to sell do-follow on the comments on his blog, I decided to take some steps to make commenting more prominent on my blog too.

I found that a lot of people are using minisites about different topics to make money with adsense and other programs. Lot of webmasters feel that they should have a lot of sites in different niches to get a decent income without much trouble.

What are minisites? They are small sites with information about a topic and the subjects around it written with SEO in mind to obtain high results for a set of keywords to bring in traffic.

This post is Sponsored by OrkutBase – Your Orkut HTML Codes base!

If you are a regular user of Orkut you will find out that they have added a new friends update feature which shows what your friends have added to their profile. This is a very useful feature which I liked a lot in Hi5. But it can be a reason for embarrassment too as I recently discovered my friends interest in hot videos )

Are you the #1 out there? I am usually asking this since I have seen a few #1′s being toppled off by others. These new #1′s are then toppled by others and so on. It is usually very easy to target the numero uno and try to overtake them. But staying at the top is pretty difficult since you have to do things done by none, you have no guiding light and have to tread ways untread paths.

I have been terribly busy the past month looking at ways to increase my revenue and presence online. Also I am a bit pissed off by the pending page rank. As a webmaster or as a money seeker online, you must know the importance of page rank. It is what determines your ceiling to make money on the web. I am angry with this update since it is not being fair to me. I build a lot of sites build links to them and wait for the Pagerank update, but where is it?

If you remember, I had made a post about adsense earnings a few days back in which I said your site must well, suc to make money with Adsense. This month, I am happy to report that my site now sucs more than 100% than last month!

Well, the best part is I am happy about it! My Adsense account is really old and when I say old here is what I mean

I am all exited about getting my first check soon. I am also pretty confident about it, since I am adding sites to my portfolio that will help my adsense. And no, they are not bandwidth eating proxies!

I usually take some time off to optimize my sites once in a while. I always thought that Search Engine Traffic is the best traffic for a blog. Since this traffic is highly targeted and they reach your blog looking for something specific and they are more likely to click on your contextual ads since they relate to what the visitor is looking for.

This seems to be hitting the web recently. Search engines are biasing their results, especially Google is manipulating its own results to get more attention to its own products. I had this doubt since ages, but never gave it much of a second thought. It is only logical that Google will do this to get more attention since they are a late entrant to many markets like messenger, email and other things. But it seems to be true and you can find it in action too.

Well, its time! Seriously.

I think its time we call internet as Google, considering the amount of influence they have on internet and its users now. With the acquisition of Feedburner last week, Google has totally taken close to full control over how we receive information to our computer. The search, the emails, the RSS reader, the feed channel, traffic statistics, online advertising, social networking, blogs, firefox and host of other services. How can this affect us?

I just noticed. The all new fresh and cool Yahoo! Web Messenger.I never really used it except for a few times some years back. I was a faithful user of Trillian, then switched to MSN Messenger when the inter-chat between Yahoo! and MSN was announced, mainly cause I was lazy to download the Yahoo! Messenger or Trillian. MSN came built-in with my XP. But then, being biased with Yahoo! I returned to their desktop client soon. But recently I logged into their Web based Messenger and I was shocked! It looks so AWESOME!

I first this term from John Chow’s blog. I first thought it was some really nice sounding tagline for his blog. But as I found out from John Chow’s blog. I really have to see how far am I from reaching the dotcom mogul status.

To be considered a Dot Com Mogul you must meet all the follow requirements.

• Your income is made from the internet.

Right now, my income comes from various sources online and offline. Business, freelancing, as an executive and some share trading. No Check

I am a active user of the social community Orkut, not simply because its a Google company, but due to the fact of its simple yet addictive social networking capabilities. The other day Pallab was telling me that Orkut is not the most popular network in the internet. MySpace is indeed the biggest, but then this trend of social networking is new in India and it is only likely that with a simple interface and a good sticky service called scrapping, Orkut soon becomes the favoured site of the teens in India. Indians constitute around 14% of the total user base of Orkut as of now. Not a bad number at all.

Today I was doing what every teenager does online, using the most popular social networking site on the net – Orkut.
But what was different today was a new button on the sidebar – Video. Naturally curious, I went on to check it out, I was surprised, it enabled users to share videos. It is out, Orkut and YouTube have been merged. I tried to read the official “Learn More” page, it was empty when I tried, what did you read?

Adsense updated their TOS [Terms Of Service] with a few changes that shows how much they hate competition!

Competitive Ads and Services In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.

Implications?

The other day I was banned from my company community on Orkut due to some misunderstanding with the owner. When the issue was solved, the owner was at a loss on how to unban me and get me back to the community. After gooogling for a while I found this important post in Devil’s Workshop which helped me for get into the group again.

Here are steps to unban a banned member!

1. Right click on any link (profile, scarpbook, etc) related to that banned person.

2. Press “Copy Link Location” (in firefox) or “Copy shortcut” in IE or similar option in ur browser!