Category — Uncategorized

What happens to rankings of a website after it is sold, is one of the open seo questions. Matt Cutts is believed to have said in domain round table 2008 that is a domain changes hand, then google resets the link value to zero/ near zero. If that were true then the entire business model of site flipping would be dead by now. Hence I have a strong suspicion that rankings of a domain remains unaffected by its sale.

Good seos are expected to confirm their views through experiments So I am going to set up a simple experiment to find out what happens to a site after it gets sold. Recently one of my favorite blogs, bloggingtips.com got sold on flippa for USD 60,000. That may explain my interest in Binaryday, even though I do not have any adsense after splitting with my partner. The important thing is the analytics report was posted on the site. I have created a list of top keywords and where on google bloggingtips is ranking for them.

1. Blogging tips – 1
2. Blogger Themes – 8
3. Blogger Theme – 4
4. Great  Blogs -2
5. Blogger widgets – 13

I shall be again checking these rankings one month from now and we shall know if domains have a life after sale

Lax from Techzoomin is conducting a unique contest wherein he intends to pay out 100$ to the users for commenting on his blog. Unlike the typical top commentator contest it is not the top commentator alone who is going to win the money. Rather the prize money will be split across the top 5 commentators as follows

• Top 1 commentator will win $50
• Top 2 commentator will win $25
• Top 3 commentator will win $15
• Top 4 commentator will win $5
• Top 5 commentator will win $5

This increases the chances of getting at least some prize money for all serious participants. More details about the contest can be found at Comment and WIN $100 Hot Cash Every Month

All the best for your participation in the contest which starts from October 1.

Seems like google news is the latest target of seo tactics. I have been aware that blogsearch was always vulnerable to spamming as it focuses too much on the title and recency. However over the last few days, I have been observing the disturbing trend of the same thing happening with google news.

People just target the keywords that are hot on google trends, write an article without much of research and try to monetize the traffic that flows in especially after integration of google news into universal search. I have been researching the trend for quite somedays now and got an awesome example today.

For some reason the keyword kidd kraddick divorced has become hot on google trends today. Searching for the keyword gets you 2 articles in the google news section. Both the articles are wirtten in a menner as if the kidd kraddick divorce happened recently. The fact is it is a pretty old news which was obvious from the wikipedia article that puts the date as April 2008 and this forum post dating back to September 2008. The 2 guys do not seem to have done even basic research as a 5 minute search got me to these articles.

May be Google needs to think hard about the quality control of the sites that it is serving up under the news section. Especially since we put a lot more trust on topics appearing under the news section.

Update1: Tarun of techbanyan seems to have done his homework better as he atleast refers to the divorce happening in April. The other site is a blatant copy paste of wikipedia site and google is serving it up under news section!!!!!!

I seem to have found a new interest in technology. After writing a post about free rapidshare premium account yesterday, I am back with a post about free download of Directx 11 for Windows 7. The few people who visit this post regularly for posts related to blogging, need not worry. The reason I am not posting about blogging is I am in the middle of a really good research about twitter. So please bear with these posts about Directx 3D while I complete my research.

Directx 11 for Windows 7 is the latest graphic technology

If Directx 10 was the preferred version for Vista, Directx 11 is the recommended graphic technology for Windows 7. Directx 11 is available as part of technical preview for public testing. It has got several new features. Hence our recommendation is that you must download Directx 11 ASAP.

Free Download Directx 11

The following are the links to the section on microsoft site from where you can directly download Directx 11.

• Download Directx 11 SDK here
• Download Directx 11 End-user runtimes here

Directx 11 with Directx 3D

The Directx 3D seems to be generating lof of buzz. Honestly I have not been able to figure out what is great about Directx 3D. Please leave a comment if you know the answer. The links to download Directx11 3D are the same as the ones listed above.

Cricket is a religion in India. I am sure we shall see a lot of action around ipl 2009 in the days to come. Have you planned to take advantage of it.

My experiment of getting traffic from hot words on google trends seems to be working quite well with the post about Princess Kemeria Abajobir Abajifar bringing in good amount of traffic yesterday. The other post about Melissa Huckaby has not been successful at getting traffic. I intend to make several changes to rank it as well.

I have never been angrier than when reading the last paragraph of this link building article by Josh Dreller on SEL. I have seen many stupid people calling Indians as spammers. But then who cares about what stupid people have to say. When a well respected site like SEL calls Indians spammers, it is time for us to wake up and take note. In the defence of Josh, he has clarified that there are smart people in India. Thanks Josh but you are wrong to assume that we are not smart enough to understand what the client is trying to achieve.

Then I came across a post titled Here’s How India Can Be Good for Your Links and I was happy that there is at least one enlightened soul who knows that not all of us are spammers. I read through the entire post only to be insulted even more. Here is what the author had to say

“While I agree with Eric that Indians may not be in touch with the cultural and business subtleties, I have to disagree that they need to be in touch with our cultural subtleties to hit the send button. From my personal experience, they’re quite good at it.”

It is not their fault

I do not fault the authors of the above posts. Both of them normally know what they are talking about. Unfortunately they seem to have interacted with the wrong set of people from India.

The problem lies with us

While the spammers, the mindless link brokers go out and agressively pitch their service, we who understand seo in more detail and can do a really good quality work sit silent or continue to work on our own websites. Is it any wonder that people from the west seem to think that the only skill we have is to hit the send button.

I am sure we can find a solution to this problem. Looking forward to your views on how to increase awareness about quality seo work that can be done from India.

Stop words are some commonly used words like a,an,the,from, to etc. Since these words occur atleast once on allmost all pages, previously google and other search engines used to ignore such keywords. If you ever conducted a search with these keywords, you would have seen a message the “the keyword from was ignored”. Looks like Google has changed the algorithm and now uses stop words for ranking the pages.

I found a proof of this fact while analyzing the ranking of a post about removing virus from USB drives. While I search for remove virus from usb, the binaryday post appears at the 6th position. While a search for “remove virus usb” finds the same post at 11th position. Similar is the case with my post for gmail proxy. While the entire world searches for gmail proxy, I am stuck with a title that reads gmail for proxy

How can you use this for better ranking?

Many users just enter the keywords like gmail proxy, remove virus usb, resume format etc to search for required information. You can make your posts to rank better by removing the stop words from

• the title
• backlink anchor text
• use of keywords in the body

A good way to remove the stop words without making your title to look spammy is to make use of tags. So while my post continues to have a title of “how to remove virus from usb?”, I can add a tag of “remove virus usb”. Next I can edit the theme code to convert the title of the page as “remove virus usb” and that will take care of the ranking issue and the post will rank well for both the keywords. Similarly a little time spent in writing the post copy will help your page to rank for both keywords.

It has been long since I wrote the last post on this blog. It was a simple problem with the internet connection at home but the service provider decided to take its sweet time to fix. That meant I have been away from blogging for all this time. However issues are resolved now and I am back to blogging.

I had a lot of time to think about issues and I shall be writing about them in the days to come. Some of the topics that I shall be writing about includes

• The true value of your blog. Hint: It is not the daily adsense income alone
• Completing the link building article
• A detailed keyword research guide
• Some new monetization tricks

More importantly I shall be publishing the source code of several seo tools that I have built myself and that I use for my own SEO projects. So stay tuned for updates…you will not be disappointed..that is a PROMISE.

Why to download video from Megavideo?

• I use Megavideo to download videos simply to standout from the rest. Since everyone else uses Youtube, I use megavideo to get videos that noone else would have ever watched.
• Moreover Megavideo pays people for uploading and sharing videos and hence it ends up attracting many professional video creaters.
• Finally Megavideo is a real darling when it comes to downloading videos. While you need a lot of third party tools to download videos from youtube, Megavideo allows you to download the videos directly.

How to download video from Megavideo?

1. Identify the video on the megavideo site that you want to download.
2. Let the video load fully
3. After watching the video online, go to Tools -> Internet Options -> Settings -> View Files
4. You will get a large size file with long name and unknown type
5. Copy and paste that file onto the destination directoru
6. Rename the file to .flv extension

The downloaded file can be watched using a flv player only. If you don’t have flv player, you can download it at http://applian.com/flvplayer/ for free.

If search was a game like tennis, keyword research will just help you identify a tournament with 10 million prize money. Great. But then do you know who are the opponents? Do you have it in you to play in the wimbeldon of search?This is where keyword difficulty analysis comes in.

I will continue with the same example about sample resumes. So I have done my keyword research and found out that enough people search for it everyday. I also know how to write a page best suited for the term. But how long will it take for me to outrank the existing results on google’s result page? Keyword Difficulty analysis is the process of finding an answer to the question of whether to pick up the fight or not.

How to do keyword difficulty analysis?

1. Find out the competition: Before you can start the analysis, you need to identify them. Well a simple google search result will get you the list of top 10 sites for the keywords. For our existing example keyword of “sample resume” the #1 position is with the site bestsampleresume.com. So I need to figure out how easy or difficult it will be to beat the site.
2. Keywords in URL: The site bestsampleresume.com has got the keywords in its url. My site jhingalala.com does not have them. The main advatage of having keywords in the url is that many people tend to link to the site with those keywords. Are there sites in the top 10 that do not have the key words in the url? If there is a site like that you can easily trump it on this parameter.
3. Sitelinks: Does the #1 site have sitelinks for the keyword?
4. Are they targetting the keyword? Soometimes you will be able to find pages on the SERP that are not directly targetting the keyword but still rank because of domain strength alone. This is normally an indication that there is less competition for the keyword. Look at my earlier post about how to use keywords for maximum impact to see what are the elements you should target.
5. Do they target for variations of the keyword? Strong authority sites will rank for both sample resume as well as resume sample. However if there are 2-3 sites that rank for sample resume but are not present in top 30 for resume sample, then I have a good chance.
6. Pagerank If the 10th guy on the results page has a PR of 6, then you have little chance of succeeding ever. On the other hand if the third guy has a PR 2, then you can be more hopeful.
7. Backlinks ( Number and quality): Use the yahoo linkdomain search to find out the number of links. If you want to do a good job then extract all the links to a csv file and then check the quality of these links. For determining quality I normally look at the PR of the page, the PR of the site, how many are nofollow and the anchor text used for linking. Remove the nofollow links. Then do a count of how many PR6 links, how many PR5 links are there. I suggest that you write a php script for this.
8. Age of the site: Most of the time I find this as the most difficult task to compete against. If all the top 10 sites are 6 years old then you have a really difficult task on your hand. Make use of the domain age tool for this purpose. The only possible solution is to make your site age faster.
9. Social Media Power of the author: Very often I will try to locate the webmaster and see on which all social media sites he is present. Does he have 1000 or 2 friends on digg? how many favorties he has on SU. Has he dicovered many popular articles, number of followers on twitter etc.

At the end of it I normally have a table like following. Looking at the table generally I can make up my mind whether to get in or not. Expand it to 20 sites if you think you will be happy at the 21st position.

Amitabh has just set up a squidoo lens with list of good Indian blogs. Bloggers can include their own blogs into the Best of Indian Blogs page and can vote for their own or other blogs. If you are an Indian then go ahead and submit your blog there. Please remember to vote for the lens as well. The lens is ranked #14 in SEO and #776 overall. That is quite an achievement. Let us help Amitabh to get it to the #1 position. BTW you will get a free link from a highly valuable page by submitting your blog there.

Btw manushi m’s design has been nominated for a contest by wordpress and infectious. It is a really good design. Vote for the design to make it win.

Who is Nadya Sulaiman?

Nadya Suleman was an ordinay person who became a mother on the 26th of January. Nothing great except that unlike ordinary people she did not give birth to one or 2 children. But she went on to give birth to 8 children. And then all of a sudden people suddenly interested in Nadya Suleman and Nadya Suleman Octuplet. There were lot of discussion about everything related to this incident.

Nadya Suleman Family Website

Finally someone has decided to capitalize on the episode by putting up a website with the pictures of the kids and a donation link. What caught my attention is the amount of discussion that this 1 page website is generating and the large number of links it is getting.

Ironically all of us are advised to slug hours and hours everyday, with the dream of getting that sort of publicity. We are told to create useful content, interact with fellow bloggers and blah blah blah to be successful may be 175 years later.

All my effort looks stupid to me

I may be a bit bitter about the fact that people seem more interested in a trivial subject like someone giving birth to 8 children than the posts I have created after pain staking efforts. However I have no doubt in my mind that our belief of good work leading to online success is flawed. I do not know what is the flaw. But looks like I will be better off creating lots of crap and then marketing it properly. I am not so sure of anything right now. Will like to hear about fellow bloggers’ views about the topic.

P.S: If I came across as unrespectful to Nadya Sulaiman or her babies, I am sorry. That is not the intention.

Everytime I face a problem, binaryday gets a rather useful post. The last time my USB got infected with virus, I had posted my experience about how to remove virus from usb. More than 500 people have found that to be useful since then. (Though not many people have visited my post about how to convert word into pdf, I will ignore that)

This weekend I had to go searching for a Nikon service center in Mumbai. While the addresses are present on Nikon India site, it could not be easily found. Hence I decided to put up the information on the blog.

Nikon Service Centers in Mumbai

Sattelite Silver Shop No.6&7.
Opposite National Garage, Marol Naka,
Andheri Kurla Road, Andheri (E),
Mumbai 400059, India
Phone: (91-022) 4092 5555
Fax: (91-022) 4092 5599 

Mazda Camera Centre (Mumbai)
306, Veena Killedar Industrial Estate,
Pais Street,
K.Khadye Marg Mumbai
400011, India
Phone: (91-022) 2307 9284
(91-022) 2307 9293
Fax: (91-022) 2308 9211 

Nikon Service Centers in Pune

Surana Service Center (Pune)
629/33, Raviwar Peth,
Below Muslim Bank,
Bhori Masjid Building,
Pune – 411002
Phone: 020 – 2447 5341
020-6416 6259
Email: nikonservicepune@gmail.com

Nikon Service Centers in Ahmedabad

New Electronic Centre (Ahmedabad)
Shop no 13-14, Shahjanand Trade Centre,
Opp Kothawala Flats, Preetam Nagar,
Near Paldi Cross Road,
Ahmedabad – 380006
Gujarat
Phone: 079-2657 9822
Email: newelectroniccentre@hotmail.com 

Nikon Service Centers in Delhi

Photo Vision (Delhi)
Address:
223, Okhla Industrial Estate Pharse III
Near Modi Flour Mill,
New Dehli 110020,India
Phone: (91-011) 2692 5999
Fax: (91-011) 2692 9857 

Nikon Service Centers in Gurgaon

Nikon India Private Limited.(Gurgaon)
Address:
Nikon India Pvt Ltd,
Plot No.17,Sector 32,
Institutional Area,
Gurgaon 122002, Haryana
Phone: +91-124 4688514
Fax: +91-124 4688527 

Nikon Service Center in Bangalore

Inter Foto India Pvt Ltd (Bangalore)
Address:
310,Kedia Arcade,
92,Infantry Road
Bangalore -560001
Phone: (91-080) 080 41132935
(91-080) 080 41132936
Fax: (91-080) 080 41132921
Email: service@interfotoindia.com 

Nikon Service Center in Chennai

Camera Service Centre (Chennai)
Location Map  Address:
No.5 Vijayashanthi Complex
Basement 3, Blackers Road
Anna Salai,
Chennai 600002,India
Phone: (91-044) 2859 4392
(91-044) 2841 3513
Fax: (91-044) 2852 4662
Email: cameraservicecentre@vsnl.net

Nikon Service Center in Hyderabad

Astro Camera Tech (Hyderabad)
Location Map  Address:
1st Floor, Above Bank of Baroda,
Beside Reddy Hostel,
Hotel Jaya International Lane,
Abdis, Hyderabad – 500001
Phone: 040-6646 0248
Email: nikon.act@gmail.com

Nicholas Francis of pixobytes is conducting a Valentines Day contest on his blog. All that you need to do to enter the contest is suscribe to his RSS feed. The best thing about his contest is that he is giving away 100$ in cash prize even though there are no sponsors for his contest. Speaks a lot about the commitment of the young person to his blog. You have one fan Nicholas. 

I have just started to use performancingads on binaryday. Since I am just starting to figure out how this thing works, I have set the price at 0.5$ per week. That translates to less than 0.1$ eCPM.

Why 0.5$ per week 

That is the minimum allowed by the system The idea is not to make money but to figure out how this entire thing works.

0.5$ per week is not free 

OK. I will refund you the money if you let me know before buying the ad space and then let me know your experience in advertising on my site. 

This is valid for only 1 week from today

Just realized that Adobe flash player 10 has a lot more functionality compared to the earlier version of flash player 9.

Download adobe flash player 10

Adobe Flash Player 10 is the latest flash player available. While I had no complaints with the earlier version i.e Adobe Flash Player 9, if you are going to install it, you should go for the latest version. Here is the The download link for Adobe flash player 10. 

Things to look out for while downloading adobe flashplayer

You might have to first install the adobe flash player installer before being able to download the adobe flash player. Look for the warning message about activeX control at the top of your browser. Right click and the installation of the installer.

New features in adobe flash player 10

1. 3D Effects
2. Custom Filters and Effects
3. Advanced Text Layout
4. Enhanced Drawing API
5. Visual Performance Improvements
6. Enhanced Sound APIs

More details about adobe flashplayer 10 is available here

Some of my earlier posts in technology section

1. Everything you may need to know about how to fix errors in USB Flash drives and how to Format USB Flash
2. How to remove virus from usb drive?
3. Difference Between Intel core 2 duo vs Intel dual core vs Intel Pentium D

It is Vasanta Panchami today

Many of you might be knowing it as Saraswati Puja. The day has a lot of emotional significance for me. Especially because Saraswati Puja was one occassion on which I did not have to study at all!!! What fun it used to be. Here I am slogging it out at 12 in the night, hoping that vasanta panchami 2009 will bring good luck to me and Binaryday alike.

I have lost my book of saraswati mantra or saraswati vandana. Let me know if anyone knows an online source for the same.

We bloggers very often feel like Aliens. Our friends think we are crazy to be so excited about that stupid comment on the blog. They look at you with strange eyes when you ask them for treat to celebrate the first PR5 link.

No need to feel frustrated any more. Aliens, I mean bloggers are talking. And honestly some of these discussions are more interesting than any blog post that I have ever read. I have just put some of the discussions that I found interesting. Go through them and I can bet that you can not resist the temptation to be a part of this incredibly interesting discussion among bloggers.

I am no way related to Indiblogger

1. Has blogging created workplace/family problems for You?
2. If you had Rs. 100 to promote your blog/website
3. How many of you use blogs as a stress buster?
4. Do women bloggers have more readers than Men?
5. what matters to you – readership or stats
6. Blogging Ethics
7. Simple & Easy Ways to Improve your Blog and its Traffic and Visitors
8. Top 5 SEO Mistakes new Bloggers should Avoid
9. Are anonymous blogger more honest than others?
10. Would you as a blogger change your views on a subject if offered money?
11. Blogs with Social Networking Funda
12. Different Page rank on Different Page rank cheking sites, Why it happens
13. When do you blog the most? Weekends or weekdays?
14. Traffic driven monetization techniques will die
15. Which one among this you think as the best way to increase blog traffic

1. Stumbleupon gives you instant traffic No need to wait for 6 months for your blog to age, then beg other bloggers to link to you and then wait for another 3 years to see your blog on the index of big G. If you have a half good post, then stumbleupon will send you traffic immediately
2. Stumbleupon values quality Google loves crap. Just look at the pageview numbers on my posts. Absolute nonsense like some ron pratt car collection has got 1500 visitors from google whereas the post about ranking of indian blogs, created after some 30 hours of coding has got hardly any traffic from Google. I actually notice the power of Stumbleupon when it started to send traffic to the posts that I am rather proud of.
3. Stumbleupon lets me do what I love i.e blog No keyword reasearch, no worrying about h2, h3 tags.
4. My friendship decisions are not affected by the size of the green bar

Do you Stumble?