August 31st, 2010
Sandeep
Only a few hours after RIM managed to avoid the Indian ban hammer, it now looks like Google and Skype could be the next target. India’s Home Ministry, the country’s interior ministry (think police force and other domestic policy matters), has told the BBC that “any company with a telecoms network should be accessible” to the country’s security services. India says it needs to be able to be able to tap into such communications in order to thwart potential terrorism threats. Since Google’s Gmail uses encryption, and Skype is a proprietary protocol, the Indian government would have no way to tap into them should the need arise.
It’s the exact same situation that RIM had been facing, so we could be looking at a case where India is merely “working its way down the to-do list.”
August 30th, 2010
Sandeep
Digg recently launched its long-awaited redesign, making the site much more appealing to publishers, as it is now easier to push content out to Digg users. Some Digg users apparently aren’t as thrilled about it.
The new Digg site has essentially turned into nothing more than a glorified RSS dump for sites. In case you’ve missed the news, the biggest problem behind the new version is that it allows sites to push their RSS feeds directly into their timeline, which can cause the overall quality of front-page posts to diminish.
It’s obvious that Reddit has its Digg account set up to auto-publish any Reddit stories from its RSS feeds (a luxury afforded to any publisher). Publishers who are getting their content shared on Reddit are benefiting doubly.
Previously, it was harder to game Digg because a user would have to submit a link and then the link would have to be up voted by the population. However, due to the random nature of Reddit’s readership, it’s now quite easy to sway the entire front page as all articles are submitted regardless of how good, bad or indifferent.
Clearly, Digg is going to have to do something about the situation. It’s very doubtful that they’re going to let Reddit dominate the entire Top News section for long, particularly as the site is trying to reinvent itself, and spark a renewed interest
August 30th, 2010
Sandeep
In a big respite to all Blackberry users in India, BlackBerry mobile phone maker Research In Motion (RIM) today gave in promising access to Indian security agencies to monitor all its services with immediate effect.
The government, meanwhile, says it won’t ban BlackBerry services for at least 60 days, easing up on the threat leveled over access to encrypted data.
The Ministry of Home Affairs says it will “review the situation in 60 days”, after telecom authorities examine Research In Motion’s proposals to give security agencies greater access to corporate e-mail and instant messaging.
RIM is facing widespread concern over its strong data encryption, which is beloved by corporate customers eager to guard secrets but troublesome for some governments in the Middle East and Asia, which worry it could be used by militants to avoid detection.
Nearly two months after insisting that it does not have the provision to grant access for such monitoring, RIM made certain proposals for lawful access of BlackBerry Enterprise Services (BES) and BlackBerry Messenger Services (BBM) by the law enforcement agencies.
RIM’s response came after the Indian Home Ministry made it clear that Blackberry has to shut down its operations in the country from 1st September if it failed to provide access to monitoring of its messenger services.
The Ministry has made it clear that any communication through the telecom networks should be accessible to the law enforcement agencies and all telecom service providers including third-parties have to comply with this, it said.
August 30th, 2010
Sandeep
Nielsen released its version of the U.S. search market rankings for July this week. Google is of course on top with 3 out of 5 searches (64.2%). Yahoo came in second with 14.3%, leaving Microsoft in third at 13.6%.
Yahoo and Microsoft both gained in month-over-month share (2% and 4%, respectively). This is all good for Microsoft, as Bing has now completely overtaken Yahoo’s organic results in the U.S. and Canada.
“In terms of a Year-on-Year comparison there has been little change in Google’s share but more significant movement amongst its closest competitors,” says Nielsen. “MSN/Windows Live/Bing’s share has grown from 9.0% to 13.6% (a delta increase of 4.6% or a relative increase of 51%) while Yahoo!’s share has fallen from 17.1% to 14.3% (a delta drop of 2.8% or a relative drop of 17%). Consequently, over the last year Yahoo!’s delta lead over MSN/Windows Live/Bing has been reduced from 7.1% to only 0.7%.”
Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft account for more than 9 out of 10 searches (92.1%).
The total number of searches in the U.S. over the last year has gone down by 16% from 10.5 billion to 8.8 billion. This is a very interesting stat. I wonder how much of this has to do with increased use of smartphones and mobile apps or mainly due to internet filled with all sorts of websites that contain good and valid content in large numbers. People are starting too bookmark these websites and search on them directly instead of going through search engines.
I guess people visit those specific websites that return better and more specific answers than general search engines. Your thoughts on this ?
August 25th, 2010
Sandeep
The ranking formula for Google’s main search function looks for the keywords in the visible body text, header tags, title tags and hypertext links. Google gives a very heavy weighting to the link popularity, with extra points for quality of links and relevancy of text around the links. Google also has miscellaneous points available for such things as:
• Age of domain/site—The longer your domain name has been registered, the more likely you are serious about being online for the long term.
• File size—Try not to exceed 100k. A recent study found that the body section of your site ranks best between 50 and 70k in size. More than 100k in size might not be cached unless it is considered exceptional content.
• Freshness of content—Google is always looking for sites that are updated on a regular basis. The more frequent you update your site, the more frequent Google’s spiders will visit your site.
• Links from directories—Google awards points if directories such as Yahoo!, Looksmart, DMOZ, and About provide a link to your site.
Most of the search engines are giving heavy weighting to link popularity— that is, the number of links to your site from other sites on the Internet. The search engines are getting very sophisticated in the weighting of link popularity, with the search engines giving extra points for link relevancy—that is, how high the site with the link to your site would rank for the same keyword. Other points are awarded based on the keywords in the text around the link pointing to your Web site.
March 17th, 2010
Sandeep
Also called link acquisition, link velocity is something that you need to be aware of and it forms part of having a natural link profile.
Link velocity and is most apparent with new websites. Site owners go mad building links through press releases, campaigns etc that bring them in a quick amount of links. However, that volume of links quickly peaks, and then just as quickly as it grows, it falls back down to its “natural” level, which is usually virtually no new links being grown naturally.
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March 16th, 2010
Sandeep
A blogs success depends on various factors. Based on my experience, I’m listing a few:
1. Find a great niche and create great content - This is the foundation towards your blogs success. Make sure that you give your users good reasons to come back and to bookmark, tag, and link to your site. If you do only this and nothing else, your site will rank well without any specific optimization activity.
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March 16th, 2010
Sandeep
The importance of a having a good host can never be ignored if you’re looking at making your internet career a 
success. In the Internet world it could be said, that your hosting provider could either make you or break you.
At times it does get difficult deciding among the various web site hosting plans that are available in the virtual world. To help you sort out your problems on deciding which host to opt for, Webhosting Geeks provides you frank and honest reviews of the different web hosts available in the market.
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December 27th, 2009
Sandeep
This post is an inspirational one. Talks about how this guy turned the leaf over by utilizing his blog’s experience – which he thought was a failure into a complete success..
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December 25th, 2009
Sandeep
Google does not use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking. Google’s Matt Cutts explains this in a Webmaster Central video. This is not breaking news, by any means, but there are a lot of people out there that still put a lot of stock into this.
“About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page,” says Cutts. “In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.”
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