Last week I have noticed a sudden fall in my blog visitors through Google.I took the matter lightly. But the problem persisted. Four days back, while checking the source code of my blog, I found nofollow and noindex robot tags inserted in the Meta data of my blog. I was shocked because I haven’t used those robots in the template of my blog. When I inquired about it, I think that new Google Blogger is injecting these tags automatically in some blogger blogs who have recently switched to new blogger from classic blogger. This was the reason why I lost all of my Google Juice. I removed those robots from my blog code and republished it. But till now Google haven’t crawled my blog. I was simply heartbroken. I have worked hard on this blog since last three months.
Because of this whole Google Dance, I lost my interest in this blog. I planned moving to Wordpress. I brought my domain and web hosting and got Wordpress 2.1 installed.
But then last night I felt really nostalgic about Blogger. I started blogging around fifteen months back with my personal blog on blogspot. Blogger was my first home.I love Blogger, so I have decided to stick to it.What If Google don’t crawl my blog? What if Technical Bliss never appears on Google.com again? It really doesn’t matters to me now. My blog has a good readership and I cannot disappoint them. I want them to find a new post on my blog each and everyday. What else I can hope is that Google do crawl my blog soon. If anyone can help me to get my blog on Google soon, I will be highly thankful.
Usually I try my best to keep my personal emotions away while posting on Technical Bliss, but today is the time to say thanks to some great and loving people who have helped me in the course of my life. Without them Technical Bliss was impossible.
Thanks to Rishi and Atul for their kind faith on me. Rishi is a real wiz kid (although he never likes calling kid : P). He is a school going kid and an excellent blogger, His knowledge about computers and internet amazes me. But the best part of him his that he is really helpful. Yesterday he worked for hours to set up my Wordpress blog. He is simply great. Atul, who usually calls me ‘Bhai ji’, has shown a real faith in me.
I also thanks Meeta, Bhajji, Chetan, Shekhar, Shival, Ankit, Anoop and Dushy for there support and love.
And not to forget Abhishek Gupta, with whom I have seen my dreams turning into reality.
And above all I pay my regards to the readers of Technical Bliss for their support and love for my blog. I assure you that you all that this place will rock again as before.
Google algorithm updates always bring the fears of webmasters to a boiling point. In the aftermath of an algorithm update, some people come out swinging, making claims that Google is trying to put them out of business. Others look at their Google rankings and pat themselves on the back for having survived another “algo” update.
It has been known in search engine optimization (SEO) circles for quite some time that one could successfully implement what is referred to as a GoogleBomb. The best example was a search on the phrase “miserable failure”. A search on those words within Google would show George W. Bush's biography at the White House website, in the top three or four results of the search results. This would occur, despite the fact that neither word in the search criteria resides on the White House website. At one time, Bush's biography had been in the #1 spot, but counter-bombing campaigns moved Bush's listing down the page a bit.
Many people have written about this phenomenon in time's past. I have even written about it myself. When I wrote about it, my point was to show the importance of anchor text in a link to build the value of a web page in the Google search engine result pages (SERPS).
The “miserable failure” GoogleBomb came to exist within a loophole within the Google algorithms. Google puts a lot of value on the anchor text that point to a particular web page. It is part of their “one link – one vote” philosophy as to the value of a web page.
Bloggers joined forces to create thousands of links pointing to the White House website with the words “miserable failure” in the anchor text. The shenanigans of the George W. Bush bashers were eventually countered by their fellow bloggers on the other side of the political aisle. Eventually, the search phrase “miserable failure” would also bring up the Michael Moore and Jimmy Carter websites in the top few results for that search phrase.
The average person who did not understand the nature of the SEO game would occasionally stumble across these esoteric search phrases and get him or herself into a huff, because they thought that Google was stating their own political views. Of course, Google really does not have an opinion, at least not one that would ever appear in their search results.
The GB Update...
In this case, the GB Update is not so-named because “George Bush” disappeared from the “miserable failure” search results. Instead, it is so-named because it is the “GoogleBomb” update, which Google implemented in January of 2007.
Once the update was implemented, the “miserable failure” search began to only return pages that talked about GoogleBombs from a technical standpoint.
With the GB update officially rolled out (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/01/ quick-word-about-googlebombs.html), people began the standard Google-update panic process.
Hundreds of posts began appearing on forums concerning the GB updates and the fear that link-building efforts undertaken by search engine marketing (SEM) companies and webmasters would be hurt as well.
So, I did a bit of research. I have run several linking campaigns on my own behalf, and on the behalf of clients. Those campaigns were put together with a mix of keyword phrases nestled in the anchor text of links to our websites. I checked the status of all of the websites I represent, and without fail, our linking campaigns had not been hurt by the GB update.
Interesting Changes From The GoogleBomb Update
According to Matt Cutts of Google, the changes in the GB update were all completed within the Google algorithm. Cutts has always said that Google does not like to manually rearrange the search engine results, so an algorithmic solution to the GoogleBomb was in order. A few of the Google engineers worked together to find a solution to the GoogleBomb issue.
In an attempt to understand what had changed, I looked at a few of the more notorious GoogleBombs of past and discovered some interesting facts.
Broken Google Bombs:
> “Miserable failure” no longer returns George W. Bush, Michael Moore, or Jimmy Carter websites. > “Worst president ever” now only returns pages that make the claim the GW Bush has earned that title. > “Waffles” no longer returns results that point to the John Kerry website. > Tony Blair's homepage no longer comes up under the search term “liar”.
Unchanged Google Bombs:
> A search for “Scientology” still has the “Operation Clambake” listing in the #2 spot (2007-01-31). Operation Clambake is a website that is critical of Scientology. > “Click here” still points to the Adobe website (although this was not actually a GoogleBomb). > “French military victories” still goes to the same page on Albino Black Sheep when you hit “I feel lucky” on Google's search page. (I still get a kick out of this one.) > The “great president” GoogleBomb survived. It still points to Bush's bio on the White House website.
The Question On Everyone's Mind
Everyone seems to be asking the same question. How does Google defuse Google Bombs?
Well, Google isn't saying, so we are left to figure it out on our own. Based on what I was able to uncover in my study of Google Bombs, I came up with a theory.
What I have been able to take from the results shown above is that Google may have targeted only “negative links”. If you want to review what is shown above, all of the Google Bombs that are now gone had negative connotations to them. All of the Google Bombs that survived can be construed as having positive, or at least non-negative, connotations to them.
If my assertion is correct, then average, ordinary webmasters will have nothing to fear from the Google Bomb update. My sites and my client's websites also reflect that the Google Bomb update did not have any affect on us.
Maybe I am just grasping at straws, but I don't think so. You be the judge... “Worst president” is gone, and “great president” survived. To me, that says a lot.
The Google Bombing Legacy Continues...
Following my logic, Google Bombing is still a possibility for those who Google Bomb with a positive set of anchor text keywords. So, some Google Bombs will continue to live well into the future.
In 2004, Search Engine Watch suggested that Google Bombs are better defined as Link Bombs, since they can affect all of the major search engines, including Yahoo and MSN.
Google has finally addressed link bombing in a positive way, but Yahoo and MSN are still prone to link bombing attacks. For example, as of this writing, MSN still has George in the top spot for “miserable failure” in the MSN Live results.
________________________________________________________________ About this author
Bill Platt has been involved in article marketing and link building since 1999. If you are in the market to have someone build keyworded anchor text links to your site, using unique and interesting content as the foundation, then Bill's team can help you: http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com - If you would prefer to talk to Bill by phone, he can be reached at 405-780-7745 between 9am-6pm CST, Monday thru Friday. Platt Services, Inc.
Google Adsense is a very clean program which helps you to earn money with your site or blog. Through Google Adsense you can display the ads on your webpage/blog and earn some revenue. When a site/blog visitor clicks on these ads, Google pays you a particular amount which varies from few cents to as high as $15 (or even higher). Google also provides Competitive Ads Filter facility in your Adsense account through which you can block some particular website(s) to display there ads on your site/block. For example you can block Coke related ads on a site related to Pepsi or vice versa.
Now this Competitive Ads Filter can be used to increase your Adsense income. You can use this Competitive Ads Filter to block the low paying sites and MFA sites (Made For Adsense). This is 100% legal and is not against the Google Adsense Terms and Conditions. Low paying sites are sites which offer a very low amount per click. So blocking low paying sites will help you to increase your Adsense income substantially. MFA are the sites with content that is primarily made of Adsense ads or other advertisement systems like Amazon, eBay, Chitika, YPN, etc. Now when your site user clicks on ads of your site/blog (an MFA site ad), he will land on a page which don’t have any meaningful information but just a bulk of ads. This may destroy your site reputation. Also your readers may endup in not clicking the ads (as they know that the ads on you site do not tend to give them any help but a bunch of MFA)
How to use Competitive Ads Filter.
Step 1. First you have to get the list of sites (low paying and MFA) which you want to generate. To get this list use AdsBlackList.com. This is a site dedicated to create the list of such site related to the content and keywords of you site.
Go to this site here and in Demo column, fill the following information: URL: fill URL of your site or blog like http://technicalbliss.blogspot.com Keywords: Fill the keywords related to your site or blog. Category: Mark the categories you want to block form you Adsense ads. I would recommend marking both ‘low cost per click’ and ‘Made for Adsense’ Now click ‘Get Black List!’ Button. The list will be generated. (This may take some time, so have patience)
Step 2. Now when you have got the list of sites to be blocked, login to your Adsense account and go to tab ‘Adsense Setup > Competitive Ads Filter > Adsense For Content’.
Paste the list generated in step 1 in the box and click ‘Save Changes’ button.
And you are done with it. Google generally takes around 24 hrs to apply the changes.
This is a 100% legal way to boost your Adsense revenue. If you have any problem in using Google Adsense Competitive Ads Filter, feel free to ask me.
If you want to earn more money on internet, go read The University Kid. Jason has some awesome money making ideas and he share them for free. ENJOY.
If you own a website or a blog, it is always advisable to give you email id somewhere in it. You can provide it at ‘About Us’ page or at Contact page. Some times a curious reader may have some doubt or enquiries and in such case email is an excellent way to communicate. But while leaving your email id on a public page over the net, some precautions should be taken. This is because there are so many automated programs or robots that scan pages in search of email id. And once they find your email id, your mail box will be heavily spammed. Although email service providers; like Gmail are well equipped to protect your inbox from spam mails, but still why to take a chance?
Also you can use the following trick while leaving your mail id in the comment space of blogs or on public forums and message boards.
1# Instead of giving your mail id as xyz@abc.com give it as xyz[at]abc[dot]com. This is because most of the automated bots search for characters @ and . while scanning for email ids. So when you use this [at] and [dot] notation, your email id is only readable by human, not by computer programs.
2# On your website or blog you can display your image graphically by a small image. Like :
That’s my email id.:) The graphical display is a well known method and is followed by many sites in word verification or captcha verification.
Just came to know about something through TonNet'sEducation and Technology blog. Google blogger has deleted the blog (http://web-messengers.blogspot.com) of Deniz Akay(aka Protesto). Blogger has considered his blog iMessengr as spam and has deleted it. Protesto is a good blogger and I think we all should help him. You can support him by sending an email to support[at]blogger[dot]com. If you wish you can use the text suggeted by Hackosphere.
Subject: iMessengr.com disabled as spam blog incorrectly Hello,
I have been reading the blog iMessengr (http://web-messengers.blogspot.com) and recently the blog has been disabled because it was wrongly identified as a spam blog. I can assure you that it is not a spam blog and so, please re-enable it.
Also if you have blogger account, you can use this form.
When I opened MyBlogLog today, I found something strange there. The Box which shows Top 50 community on the community page of MyBlogLog was not there. I think Eric and folks have removed it, or may be it is down due to some other reason.
Anyways Am not happy with that. Because my blog community Technical Bliss was among Top 50. :(
I wish that it comes back soon.
Edit:Its back now. I think that was temporary. :D (11/Feb)
11. RSS is must. Do have an RSS feed for your blog. Feedburner is the best option to burn your blog feed. A tech savy reader always prefers to subscribe the feed of blog. You just can’t ignore this feed thing.
12. Place RSS button at right place. Don’t slip the RSS button at the end of your page. Even providing it on your ‘About us’ page or on subscription page is not enough. Keep it in the side bar or some prime location of your blog. Instead of going for that single orange RSS button, you can provide buttons to some major RSS readers in the side bar of your blog. Also you can write a post about RSS, explaining what it means and how to use it and link it near the RSS button(s).
13. Offer email subscription of your blog. Not everyone is comfortable with RSS. Give the option to get your blog feed through email to your readers. FeedBlitz is one such popular service which provides such service. Also ensure your readers that their email address will be 100% safe and their privacy will be maintained if they choose to subscribe the service.
14. Full feed or partial feed? This is the question of your personal choice. You can provide an option of full feed with RSS ads supported in it, or can go for partial feed where readers will see the small snippet of your post and have to visit your blog to read the complete post. Choose whatever you feel better. You can also provide both options. Also if you are option for partial feed, make sure your readers click the link to read full post. Provide a snippet with good interest generating description.
15. Give relevant title to your post. The title of your post should be very relevant to the content of it. A reader should get a complete idea of what the post is all about just by reading title of it. Don’t forget that title creates the first impression about the post, and that counts. Also use titles like ‘100 Adsense-tips’ rather than just ‘Adsense tips’. Such titles always perform better.
16. Create a better URL of your blogpost. A good URL can help you a lot to rank better in search engines. Generally the post URL has format like http://www.blogURL.com/2007/02/10/blogpost_title. You can customize the blogpost_title part easily. Make sure you have your main post keyword is stuffed in the post title. Also avoid special characters like $ or % or = or & or + in the URL. Sometimes search engines spiders ignore the crawling of the pages whose URL contains these special characters.
17. Give proper credits. If you are quoting someone else, do provide proper credits. You can also give the links to the posts form other blogs, which are similar to your blogpost. This will help your readers to get better information over the topic. And trust me, if your blog is helpful to a reader, he/she will automatically return to it.
18. Link smartly. While providing a link in blogpost or side bar give good ‘Anchor text’. Suppose you are linking to someone’s post (or even you own post) about Adsense tips, then do not use text like click here or read it here. Instead use a descriptive text like ‘100 Adsense-tips’. Also you can use HTML tags like ‘target blank’ which opens the page in new window. Use such very wisely. You have to decide which page you want to get open in same window and which one in new window. Always remember that opening the link in same window will take the reader away from the current page. So be smart while linking.
19. Ping other sites. Whenever you update your blog, don’t forget to ping the other sites like technorati, icerocket Feedburner etc. The option of automatic pinging is available in many blog hosting platforms like Wordpress and Movable type. You can also use the services like Pingoat and Ping-o-matic to ping various sites on the net.
20. Tag you post properly. While posting on blog, always add your post to two to three relevant categories. Many search engines and services like technorati treats your categories as tags. Also adding technorati tags to your post is a good idea. Some nice technorati tags can bring a good deal of traffic to your blog. Don’t be over enthusiastic while tagging your post. Tag you post only with relevant tags. Over tagging may be considered as attempt to spam.
21. Provide bookmark options. Your blogpost must have an easy option to bookmark by the readers. Create the options like ‘digg this post’, ‘add to del.icio.us’ or ‘Furl it’. Also you can provide the same options for your entire blog (i.e. homepage) in the side bar.
22. Interact with your readers. Give a sincere and honest try to interact with your readers. After posting, just don’t sit back and wait for comments to flow in. Try to answer the readers’ comments. Sometimes a curious reader may like to mail you about some issue or some doubt, so give him/her an option to do so by providing your email id (do take some primary precautions while doing so).
23. Manage the comments. It is always advisable to turn on the comments moderation in your blog posts. It means that comments will always be published in blogpost after the approval of blog owner. Don’t tolerate a spammy comments, or comments intended for the purpose of promoting some other blog or sites. If you are hosting a blog on your own domain and webspace, add nofollow tag in you comment space and declare it properly on your blog. This will discourage the backlinks obsessed commenters. You certainly don’t want Google and other search engines to look at you blog comments space full of spam.
According to Technorati, there are more than 55 millions blogs registered on it. Your blog may be one of them. Now what makes the difference between handful of good blogs and remaining others? Here are some tips to good blogging. Mind you that these tips will not convert your blog into those best one. But still it will give you a good start.
1. Forget the default template. Looks matters. Try to customize your blog template. Don’t use one of the default templates provided by your blog host. It is always favorable to hire a professional designer for your blog template. But if you can’t afford to hire one, just take advantage of free templates available on net. Download them and give it a bit touch of yourself by adding some images, favicon, logo and colour scheme.
2. Mind the colour scheme of your blog. Just give a second thought to the colour scheme of your blog. Keep yourself in the shoes of your readers and then decide what colour you should opt for your blog. A shining bright colours may look attractive to teenage folks, but it may irritate some grown up mature readers. Also if you are blogging about some serious topic like politics, a simple eye-friendly colour scheme is suitable.
3. Optimize your post length. Avoid writing a long post. A standard blog post has 250-300 words. A very lengthy post always creates a chance to loose reader’s attention and hence affects the readership of your blog. If the post is long, try breaking it in parts. Instead of writing a long post titled ‘100 Adsense tips’, you can go for posts like ‘100 Adsense tips- Part 1’ and ‘100 Adsense tips- Part 2’
4. Avoid spelling and grammar mistakes. Always use spell check in your browser and have a proofreading of your post before publishing to avoid any spelling mistakes or grammatical error. Am not telling you to be hysterical about it, occasional typo or slips are ok, but a chain of errors may irritate your readers. You can use Microsoft word to type your posts, as it has a powerful inbuilt spell and grammar check.
5. Mind the fonts. Use simple and universally available fonts in your blog post. Everyone do not have all the custom fonts installed on their computers, so if you are using some whacky custom fonts in your post, what they will see is a standard font such as Arial or Times. Also choose the size of your font according to readership of your blog. If the readers are young or lower middle aged, you can use a small font size, but for upper middle aged or grown up readers, large font size is must.
6. Provide easy navigation. Encourage your readers to check the other posts of your blog. This will not only increase the page view count of your blog but also will lead you to get some loyal readership. Always provide links of some real good posts in the side bar. Also you can give ‘related posts’ links in the end of every post. Remember that people are lazy enough to explore a site or a blog on their own. Go up to the extent of spoon-feeding. Anyhow you have to make sure that they click other links on you blog.
7. Create a relevant Meta Data for your blog. Always create a relevant and well describing meta data (i.e. meta description, meta keywords etc) for your blog. Create separate meta data for you blog’s main page and post pages. Meta data helps in better indexing of you blog and blogposts in search engines. Also optimize you blog’s meta keywords for relevant one.
8. Page loading time. Try to decrease the loading time of your blog. The best way to decrease the loading time of the page is to check the widgets. Popular widgets like MyBlogLog and Flickr makes your blog look fancy, but they increase the loading time of the page. So optimize them properly. You can decrease the loading time of MyBlogLog widget by decreasing the number of visitors it shows. Also avoid embedded flash and multimedia elements in the page.
9. Post regularly. A regular update of your blog will attract Google bots and other search engines to your blog. Google loves the pages that are regularly updated. Its simple ‘Feed the bots’. This will certainly results in good search engine ranking. Also every time your readers visit your blog, they expect to find some new content in it. Don’t disappoint them.
10. Create unique content. The very basic rule of blogging is ‘Content is the King’. If your blog lacks good helping content, you will never get a long term readership. So try providing some original story. If there is some good news, try to be the first one or among the firsts to blog about it. Also keep your post focused on the topic. If you are blogging on a common topic, try providing atleast a point or two which appeals as new to the reader. Also if you create some real good new content, your chances of getting linked by other bloggers increase many folds. This will certainly bring a good deal of traffic to your blog and offcourse Google and Technorati juice.
Till now Gmail was freely available in some countries like US. In other countries you needed an invitation from a pre-existing Gmail user to have your own Gmail account. Gmail is now offering a free signup in the countries across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as well as in Brazil, Australia, Russia and Japan.
So if you are from any of the above country you can create a Gmail account by signing up here.
Googlefight is a fight between two terms on Google. The term which gives more search results on google.com wins the fight. For example in Googlefight between Arpit Agarwal (that’s me) and Harry Potter, Harry Potter wins. This is because when you type Arpit Agarwal in Google search box and hit enter, it returns 32,000 results, while Harry Potter returns 60,000,000 results.
Lets have some interesting fights.
1#Good vs Bad Good: 1,200,000,000 results and Bad: 592,000,000 results So Good is better than Bad.
2# Love vs Money Love: 979,000,000 results and Money: 679,000,000 results So Love is powerful than Money.
3# Aishwarya vs Sushmita Aishwarya: 4,240,000 results and Sushmita: 723,000 results So Aishwarya is the Queen.
4# India vs USA India: 343,000,000 results and USA: 637,000,000 results So here too USA is leader.
5# Life vs Death Life: 952,000,000 results and Death: 400,000,000 results So Life is Beautiful
6# Blog vs Website Blog: 1,030,000,000 results and Website: 773,000,000 results Yessss Blog. :D
7# Loser vs Winner Loser: 26,400,000 results and Winner: 147,000,000 results Winner wins again.
8# Angelina Jolie vs Brad Pitt Angelina Jolie: 6,110,000 results and Brad Pitt: 4,880,000 results Jolie rules.
9# Google vs Yahoo Google: 787,000,000 results and Yahoo: 786,000,000 results Google is the Boss
10# Google vs God Google: 787,000,000 results and God: 404,000,000 results What to say??
Disclamer: All the tricks, tips and hacks provided on this blog are correct up our knowledge. We dont take any legal or moral responsibilty of the damage arising due to use of information provided here.
