BinaryDay

Ajax or SEO? Many webdevelopers face a very difficult choice i.e to Ajax or not. Noone doubts the superiority of ajax pages when it comes to user experience. However while google keeps on saying that build websites with users in mind, it absolutely sucks at ranking ajax pages.

Ajax Sites suck at SEO for a very simple reason. It is Googlebot’s inability to read and interprete javascript properly. If you have any doubt about how badly googlebot sucks with javascript, you should read this post by..well..google itself.

The problem with AJAX then boils down to 2 important ones i.e internal navigation and on-page content.

On Page content issue with ajax
If you are rendering all the content using ajax only then google bot will find a blank page. (googlebot ignores javascript for all practical purposes) On the other extreme if you load up all the content in the html code as hidden content then you shall get into even more trouble as all that content will look like spam.

Solution to On Page content issue with ajax
Build separate content blocks as standalone pages. Like say you want to show hotels if mumbai or kolkata, depending on what the user selects on left navigation. Create the data as mumbai.php and kolkata.php. It will make it easier for you to serve the data. The individual pages should be crawlable on their own. We shall discuss how to make sure that googlebot crawls these pages next.

Making ajax links crawlable. So you have created mumbai.php and kolkata.php. But the link to these pages is present in javascript and hence googlebot never bothers to crawl them. What to do? Use Hijax

Code for the link will look like href=”ajax.htm?foo=32” onClick=”navigate('ajax.html#foo=32'); return false”>foo 32. This combines a html link for the spider and ajax link for user. Brilliant

For details about how to make ajax more seo friendly read this awesome presentation.

I am sure you are aware of a local dukan who prepares really great food. He really enjoys preparing the food and does not think in terms of profit/loss. What do you think will happen if he moved his his store to the main street? Will the quality of his food deteriorate?

Why am I writing about food on a blog about blogs? Because many bloggers think like that local food store. We argue that we blog because we love to blog. Focusing on SEO will make the quality of their blog posts. They forget that google is the new highway of internet. Page 1 of Google is the main lane, page 5 is the bylane. And if you are not on Google, then you live in a village without electricity or water. Even if you do not care about traffic/ money, you must seo your blog to make sure that less quality content does not dominate search results.

That does not mean you need to focus on seo at the cost of content creation. Contrary to what SEO experts will make you believe, more often than not SEO is all about getting your basics right. Always take the advice of SEO experts with a glass of salt, because they have a huge incentive to make you believe that SEO is rocket science.

P.S:I am no SEO expert. So you can take my advice without any salt. Amitav, no offences meant man. I was just trying to put across my view as strongly as possible.

Considering the latest pagerank update that is underway, I thought this is the best time to post about my study on pagerank of more than 6000 (6020 to be specific) Indian blogs. All these blogs have been collected from indiblogger.in, a social network for indian bloggers.

Total Blogs studied : 6020
Maximum Pagerank : 6
Minimum Pagerank : 0

78% of all these blogs are hosted on subdomains of wordpress and blogger. Blogger wins hands down with 3976 blogs present on blogger vs 741 blogs for wordpress.

A whopping 93% of blogs have a .com TLD. However that is because all the blogs on blogger and wordpress have .com extension. Once I excluded the blogger and wordpress blogs, the number of .com blogs came down to 70%. .in was the second most popular TLD with a 14% contribution.

Here is a list of 8 PR6 blogs as a bonus tip for you visting my blog list.

http://visheshunni.wordpress.com

http://www.infosysblogs.com/managing-offshore-it/

http://floatingsun.net

http://www.webyantra.net

http://nitawriter.wordpress.com

http://tech-buzz.net

http://www.sirensongs.blogspot.com

http://www.swaroopch.com

If you are new to SEO, Read my tips for getting free backlinks to improve your pagerank.

Over the weekend there has been speculation that there will be a pagerank update by Google pretty soon. Now I have definitive proof that the update is in progress

Just found out that a google pagerank is in progress. The forum on mywalkin has gone to PR3 from a PR0. The IT blog retains its PR0 status. Surprisingly the main website mywalkin.com has gone down to zero Hoping that this is something abnormal as the pagerank update is in progress.

On a happier note my brand new second hand mobile site has got a PR1. Binaryday is yet to regain the pagerank that it had lost in the domain name goof up a month back. Just hoping that it shall be restored by the time this update is over.

Let me know if your PR has changed recently.

Bloggers love comments. Comment is our weapon of choice to fight amongst ourselves and comment is the way for us to show our love and appreciation for a great blog. On a serious note, comments make a blog post more interesting by adding new viewpoints. They also increase stickiness by building a community feeling amongst the users. Hence you must actively incentivize your users to comment on your posts. These are some of the wordpress plugins that are expected to encourage discussion on your blog.

CommentLuv This plugin shows a link to the latest blog post of the commentator. Definite encouragement for other bloggers to leave a comment on your blog especially if your blog gets decent traffic.

Top Commentators widget Shows the top commentators of your blog. You can select the duration over which the top commentator is calculated. Avoid the temptation to set it to 1 day as then only spammers will show up. If you set the time period to 7 days or a month, regular commentators on your blog get a free link from you.

Show an email to first time commentator: It does exactly what it says i.e sends an email to the first time commentator on your blog. I wish it could check my rss subscription list and send a message asking him to subscribe to RSS as well. (Let me know if you know any such plugin)

Most recent comments Displays the recent comments on your sidebar. Keeps the discussion alive by getting attention to posts where discussion is going on.

subscribe to comments plugin lets a user know when someone has replied to a comment that she has posted. Works like a charm in getting some passionate discussion going.

Nested comments is a great way to keep different threads of discussion among the users separate. Not necessary for smaller blogs with less than 10 comments per post though.

Finally the comment highlighter allows you to make the comments by the author stand out by highlighting the same in a different color.

Let me know your experience with plugins related to comments that you might have used.

I am confused about how to reply to comments left on my blog posts. Normally people reply on their own blog. However then there is a risk that the person who left the comment will not see my reply. Alternatively I can go and comment on their blog. While the commentator will definitely see my reply, the discussion will be confusing to others.

what do you do? Any wordpress plugin to solve this issue?

I know that is a stupid question. Obviously you know your rss subscriber number or do you? The reality is you think you know your subscriber number, but you are wrong. You are absolutely wrong. You have at least twice the number of feedburner subscribers, you think you have. You think I have lost my mind? Please give me a chance and read on. You will be glad that you did.

If you are like me and look at the feedburner counter on your blog to find out the number of rss subscribers, then you are in for a surprise. Get Ready for the surprise.

1. Log into your feedburner account.
2. click on the link “See more about your subscribers”
3. Go to the bottom of the page and click on FeedBurner Email Subscriptions. Then click on Manage Your Email Subscriber List
4. You can see the details of the feedburner subscribers. Look at the Status field. Look carefully. Do you find a good number of people with status of unverified??

These are the people who liked your blog. They wanted to subscribe to you but have somehow forgotten to click on the confirmation mail. Will you ever find a better list of people to convert into feed subscribers??

How do I convert the unverified users into feed subscribers?
Simple, send them a reminder. Not worth the effort, is it? A lazy person is the best one to take advice from and I am yet to come across someone who can beat me on laziness So I started googling for a solution. And the solution is Notify unconfirmed subscribers plugin for wordpress.

This plugin automates the process of sending reminder emails to unconfirmed feed subscribers. Make sure to try this plugin. BTW do not forget to come back to this page and say thanks to me by giving me a digg or stumble.

Nimbuzz, the company offering Instant Messaging has agreed to a major distribution deal with Spice Mobiles that will see Nimbuzz applications pre-installed on the new Spice Mobile handsets. These applications will enable users to chat, message and send files on the go.

The Spice Mobiles deal is a global contract. In addition to India, pre-installed Spice Mobiles devices will be sold in other APAC territories. Customers will be able to communicate with the growing community of Nimbuzz subscribers in over 200 countries, using Nimbuzz for features such as social networking, instant messaging, location and file sharing.

greeting cards are so 2000. Youtube has come up with this awesome idea of video greeting cards. You can either select one of the featured videos or create your own greeting by recording with your web camera. Compose the message and send it across to your freind. as simple as that but absolutely brilliant.

How to make money online is one of the few topics that will never go out of fashion. Top bloggers are making millions of dollars. More than enough has been written about the topic of how to make money online, some good ones and mostly lot of crap. I will not try to reinvent the wheel, rather I shall be sumarizing some of the best articles on the topic.

Many beginners think of blogging as the only way to make money online. However that is not the case with 50% people using other methods to make money. You can make money by Website Design,Selling ebooks,Software Development etc. Pick a method that is compatible with your skill sets

In this post, I have concentrated heavily on how to make money from blogging, simply because this research was done by me for myself, to start making money from binaryday. To summarize all the articles that I have read about how to make money online from your blog, I can say that the most popular methods are 1. adsense 2. other advertisement networks and 3. affiliate marketing

Getting the best out of adsense: Adsense continues to be the most popular method for monetizing blogs. However the golden word with adsense is optimization. It is possible to increase the income from the same blog by 6 folds through proper optimization. To get better income from adsense, always use bigger formats, choose the color scheme that blends with your blog and place the advertisements blocks in locations that are more prominent.

To be continued as my research gets completed.