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I wanted to write about this but don’t know why it always missed. I ahave a few blogs added to which I have subscribed via RSS and Email. I prefer going to http://reader.google.com to get the daily dose of all the posts. Below is the list and an explanation why I have chosen them.

1. John Chow - This guy needs no introduction. He makes huge amoun of money online and also provides great tips on how he makes money from his blog. His reviews are simply great and he keeps coming up with new ideas all the time. 

2. Shoemoney - Jeremy Schoemaker has wonderful posts about affiliate marketing and the latest happenings in the search engine world. I like this guy for being  what he is.  Shoemoney  writes whatever he wants and  dosent really care about what people think about him. He has a great fan following. I got to know him via Digitalpoint Forums.

3. Inside AdSense - For every serious AdSense publisher, this is a must. Subscribing to Inside AdSense will keep you up to date on latest changes, news and updates happening with Google AdSense.

3. Matt Cutts - Matt Cutts heads the spam department at Google. Subscribing to his blog is a must for everyone who owns at least one website and is serious on knowing how Google is treating it. Matt’s blog is an unofficial one but he really helps people by explaining the Dos and Donts forwebsites with respect to search engines.

4. Official Google Blog - Latest happenings and announcements from Google. They are coming up with so many products. One has to be up to date on this one.

5. Search Engine Roundtable -  Serious with SEO, SEM, link building etc.? You have to read this blog everyday. These guys have good updates all the time.

6. SEO Black Hat - I subscribed to them after having a look at a couple of their posts but nothing great after that. Seems like all the black hat tricks are paid (of which I am obviously not bothered of). I might unsubscribe from there pretty soon.

7. SEOMoz - SEO, SEO and more SEO. These guys really provide indepth knowledge of Search Engines, SEO etc. They also squeeze info about their employees and co-workers which makes the blog a bit more interesting.

8. Yahoo! Search Blog - YAAAAWN!!! Nothing much here but have to be up to date on whats up with Yahoo Search Engine.

9. Live Search’s Weblog - Again nothing much but have to keep up to date with this as well.

10. Inside AdWords - As an advertiser it is necessary to know about the latest happenings, changes and updates going on at Google.  More intrestingly, the new features and offers.

11. The Affiliate Toolbox - Checked this blog a few days ago. This guy gives real nice tips on making money with affiliate marketing.

12. 45n5 - Great tips on making money online. This guy has all his posts in form of videos which makes life more easy.

13. Alokk - Blog by a friend cum mentor of mine who is a handwriting expert. Excellent tips and a must read for every human being.

14. John Cow - Nice tips on making money online plus latest happenings and news on affiliate and search engine marketing.

I won’t say that these are the best blogs but are the ones I read everyday. If you think you have a blog that would interest me then please post in comments below.

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is not scared of Google. Hear and watch him say it in the video below:

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We all are aware that many sites, directories and blogs lost their page rank in the latest Oct Google Page Rank update. Many people are very unhappy because they have spent lots and lots of money on buying links and were expecting a high page rank. Matt Cutts had already warned people of this but many seemed to ignore this and are facing the consequences now.

I always said and will continue to say that for me Alexa rank is more important than the Google Page Rank. First I would like to point out why people spend money to advertise on high PR sites:

1. To get high PR and in turn rank high in Search Engines to get more traffic.
2. Get traffic from direct clicks.

Now the point here is traffic. You want good PR for traffic and for that you end up paying high amount of money. Here we have more respect for a website for its Google Page Rank and not the amount of visitors it receives daily.

Everyone knows that to earn good amount of money from a website, you need visitors who can click your ads or buy products. Advertising on a website with Google Page Rank of 8 and alexa of above 1K will always give you less visitors. Whereas, advertising on a website which has Alexa Rank of below 100 and Google Page Rank of 0 will definitely give you more traffic and in turn more money.

Google now has made a very smart and much required move to penalize websites which buy or sell links. If this move was not made then any bad website would have had gained a high PR by buying links outside. Now, I feel a website will be rated on its proper merits rather than the website owner’s pockets.

Conclusion:1. Concentrate more on content rather than backlinks. If you have good content then people will always link you.
2. Always have a look at your traffic and Alexa rank. You should always aim at reaching the below 100 mark.
3. Ignore the Google Page Rank completely. Good PR will come automatically if you concentrate more on good content.

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Pamela Anderson - Google - Silicon - Valley.. Picture Perfect.

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A few months ago we heard that Google does not like websites buying and selling links. They still stick to their words and there is something new now. We have heard Google and Matt Cutts talking about “Exchanging Links” with websites having same niche and how Google appreciates it. It seems now they do not like exchanging links as well. Google will ban websites who link each other.

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:
• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (”Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
• Buying or selling links

What do we do now? We cannot buy/sell links? We cannot exchange links. Google says the best way to gain popularity is by writing good and unique content. They say a website will link to you if you have good content.

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

This means people should write good things and link to a competitor’s website and say “Hey! What are you doing here? Please visit that website.” I understand that lot of bloggers and websites link to other websites but why are they doing it? How will Google know if a link on my blog is paid or I like that website for good content? Does Google really penalize such websites? If they are serious about all this link exchange, link buying & selling stuff, I guess they should first ban websites which encourage people in buying and selling links. This way lot of problems they are facing will be automatically solved.

Webmaster Guidelines - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356

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Last time I predicted a Google Page Rank update and it indeed did happen after a few days.

Today I see changes in backlinks for all my sites. What does this mean? Yes it means there will be a Google PR update pretty soon. Last time, the back links update was noticed by me on 15th Septer 2006 and the page rank was updated 29th Sep 2006. This means we can expect an update within a couple of weeks or just after that. I have checked all data centers and did not see any changes yet.

Will keep on checking and update all my readers when it actually happens. Till then lets keep waiting for the update.

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Google is providing search facility for businesses who have their own websites. This is different from the search option provided which contains ads. Businesses can now run Google search engine on their websites without ads. This service can be bought by any business from Google. Google will charge basic $100 per year for a Google’s Custom Search Business edition for websites which have up to 500 web pages.

Larger websites will have to pay $500 per year to search up to 50,000 pages.

This is really good for websites who are having trouble managing search engines on their websites. The indexing can consume lot of your CPU usage which can cause your websites to run slow.

According to Google Enterprise product manager Nitin Mangtani, the software is easy to customize and takes maximum of 10 minutes to implement. Google currently offers two search options for business. One is the free and the other one is Google Search Appliance - a hardware device that sells for around $2,000.

Read more »

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Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google was at the third SEMNE (Search Engine Marketing New England) event. Dan spoke about Google search engines for some time and then answered questions from the audience. There was a lot Dan talked about and the question asked but I am going to talk about things we… or maybe I was not aware of and my readers would like to know about.

1. Google PageRank - Dan spoke about high rankings on Google and PageRank. He said, Google PageRank still plays a vital role in determining importance of a page. PageRank does help in list a website or a page high and it is not something that Google uses just for “amusement purposes”

2. Unknown tags - Dan Crow exposed some tags that can be used on your site which will tell the Google bot to do stuff. For e.g. The “no snippet” tag can stop Google from crawling and showing your snippets. Another tag that can stop showing your cached page on Google SERPS is the “noarchive” tag. This might not be necessary for all websites as per Dan but the facility has been provided by Google and can be used by webmasters.

3. Robots.txt - Robots.txt still has lot of importance for Google bots. The robots.txt is the best way to tell bots where to go and where not to.

4. New Tag - Google is working on a new tag called the “unavailable_after”. As the tag says, it will tell the Google bot not to crawl stuff after a particular period. This is quite useful for websites where the content is expired after some days. Most importantly useful for auctions, quiz and competition hosting sites where such things usually get over after a period of time. Using this tag will tell Google bot not to crawl it as the contest or offer is over.

5. Supplemental Results - Dan said, supplemental results are pages which have low PageRank and are not update quite often. This means if you have a page which has PR2 and is not updated since 2-3 months, you should be surprised to see it in Google supplemental results. The good news is that Google has started crawling such pages more often o check if there is an update. Once an update on such a page is found, Google will remove it from its supplemental results.

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Lot of Google AdSense publishers involved on AdSense arbitrage are getting emails that their publisher accounts will be closed on 1st June 2007. The email says that as a publisher you will be paid for the May earnings but the AdSense publisher account will be closed as it is an unsuitable business model. For people who do not know meaning of arbitrage I will explain in simple words - Person A advertizes on various sites using Google AdWords by spending as low as 3 cents per click. The page where people go by clicking these 3 cents links in turn have nothing but AdSense ads which pay him more than 3 cents. That means he is buying cheap traffic using AdWords and earning more money by making the same people click ads on his site. There are hundreds of such sites also called as Made for AdSense sites which pay very less and in turn earn a lot more. Lot of publishers suffer due to this and earn as low as 1 cent per click. Google has now decided to stop this as advertizers are not getting benefited. This is a right move by Google to stop MFA sites, spam and let genuine people earn money.

You can receive such email even if you do not have an MFA site. Google can send you an email that they are closing your account if advertizers are not getting benefitted by putting ads on your site. This means people on your site are clicking ads and going to the advertizer’s website but are not purchasing anything from the advertizer. End of the day Google has to ensure that all advertizers are happy and getting benefitted by their advertizing network.

Closing all such accounts will also lead to large number of publishers moving on to Yahoo. I personally feel a lot of publishers will opt for networks like YPN, AdBrite, Kontera etc monetize their websites. Infact lot of publishers will also try to sign up with Google AdSense using a company name or any other name (friends or family).

Many publishers are already delighted by this move and are reporting as high as 25% increase in the cost per clicks. The simple reason is that MFA sites are closing…they have already got the email and they are busy thinking on the alternatives and are not spending money anymore. The most important change in my opinion would be seen at anytime around 5th of June 2007. Webmaster forums will be flooded with people discussing about bans, alternatives and of course there would be many selling eBooks on how they are still earning money using AdSense.

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Recently, I changed the theme for my wordpress blog and Google did not like it :(. Within hours of changing the theme, 95% of the pages went into supplemental results. The good thing I noticed here is that the Google bot likes my blog and visits it quite frequently. I thought it might be some error from Google’s side but I was wrong. Today morning when I check this URL I got to know what the problem is. The problem is that the right side bar is loaded first. Since the blog does not have any meta tags, Google bot was taking the content from the right bar first which happens to be the poll. All pages were given the same (poll) description which resulted in supplemental results. To rectify this, I have made the right side bar to load at the end and have also used the wordpress meta tags plugin. This means that Google willl read proper description of the pages and will also load the content first. Hopefully, my blog would be out of the supplemental results pretty soon.

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