Google have now started to email webmasters notifying that their website is violating their guidelines (if they have), while their accounts are on hold. Google had stopped emailing webmasters as there were lot of spoofed up emails that were sent earlier to confuse webmasters. Google had started sending messages from the Google Webmaster Central console some time earlier, but since this limits their communication to verified webmasters only, they have resumed their email notification service. So are there going to be more spoof emails? Let’s wait and watch.

Get the whole story here

If you'd like to stay updated with SEO, grab the RSS feed now !What's this?

Matt Cutts recommends in his White hat tips for SEO’s that they convert feedburner feeds to their own blog using myBrand option of feedburner. I’m not sure how much this is effective, but since we heard it from the Google man himself - let’s not take a chance but get it done.

What is myBrand?

As of now, all of us have feeds on feedburner, so the url for the feed would look like - http://feedburner.com/yourfeedname. Now, Matt wants us to change it to http://yourblog.com/yourfeedname OR feeds.mattcutts.com instead of feeds.feedburner.com

According to FeedBurner -

MyBrand lets you create an alias at your domain so that you can “mask” your feed URL at FeedBurner. For purposes of this e-mail, we’re going to assume that your domain is “yourdomain.com” (yes, we’re clever), and you have a feed that today is at feeds.feedburner.com/BestFeedEver. Once MyBrand is active, you can use feeds.yourdomain.com/BestFeedEver instead of feeds.feedburner.com/BestFeedEver.

However, this does not affect your subscribers as the url does not change at all. It remains at the previous feed url. So there’s nothing to worry.

How to activate FeedBurner myBrand ?

This requires you to change your CNAME records on your domain name settings. Here are the directions for GoDaddy users.

To Manage Your DNS from the NEW Domain Control Center (For GoDaddy)

1. Log in to your Account Manager.
2. From the My Products section, select Manage Domains. The Domain Control Center opens.
3. In your list of domain names, click on the domain name that you want to view. The Details for the selected domain display.
4. Under the Total DNS Control section, click Manage Subdomains or Total DNS Control and MX Records.

How to activate MyBrand?

1- Sign in to your FeedBurner account
2- Click My Account
3- Click MyBrand, enter your domains and activate it.

Although this sounds simple, it may be confusing. But it’s worth a try. Finally you should get the url like this working - http://feeds.yourblog.com It will take 24 - 48 hours to get activated, so don’t worry if you don’t see the new domain immediately after the change.

More details on how to configure MyBrand on Feedburner FAQ

Here are the best of the best must read Search Engine Optimization tips from around the web. All collected from the best SEO blogs around. Suited for bloggers ( blogger, typepad, and wordpress users), this post will serve you as a reference when looking for SEO tips for your blog.

1. Top 10 SEO tips Cool
2. Google man Matt Cutts white hat SEO tips for Wordpress users
3. Top 10 SEO tips from Rank for sales
4. 10 SEO tips to remember while launching a site - SE journal Cool
5. 6 blogging SEO tips
6. Basics of Search Engine Optimization explained
7. 21 Essential SEO tips and techniques
8. Ultimate Wordpress SEO tips
9. John TP’s simple SEO tips for blogs
10. Top 52 SEO tips Cool
11. Simple Wordpress SEO tips
12. Wordpress SEO tips from SEO Moz
13. Blogging and SEO tips from the Pros
14. Savvy SEO tips for bloggers on WP
15. Top 5 SEO tips for bloggers
16. Search Engine Optimization tips from Living Room
17. 15 SEO tips - A tip a day
18. Google SEO tips - Online Sales Success
19. Darren’s SEO Tips - Problogger Cool
20. SEO tips from Laughing Squid 

August 1st, Google officially pulled off the supplementary index search operator because Matt thought that it’s not really important and people are un necessarily crying over it.

So the  “site:www.yoursite.com ***-view” operator does not function anymore on Google.

For those of you who are obsessed with checking the number of supplementary index pages (like how i used to be prior to Matt’s declaration), Daniel from dailyblogtips has come out with an idea to find the number of supplemtnary index pages on your site.

He thinks that the following query will show you the supplementary index number.

Total Pages Indexed = site:www.yoursite.com
Pages in the Main Index = site:www.yoursite.com -inallurl:www.yoursite.com (or allinurl:www.yoursite.com)

Pages in Supplemental Index = Total Pagex Indexed - Pages in the Main Index

Daniel proved that he’s a smart guy with this logic. Otherwise, why didn’t anyone else think this way?

Well, why i didn’t think this was is because I’ve been using a free online tool, that would give me the number of supplementary pages on my blog on various Google data centres. Here is the tool. Just give in your domain name and it shows you the data server, along with the number of pages in S.Index against it.

The results are similar to Daniel’s method - though the tool shows some more pages (few hundreds) on this blog. Now, that’s good or bad - you decide.

Oops! Almost forgot to write the advatage/disadvantage list. Here goes..

Disadvatages of Daniel’s method
- You got to learn how to use a calculator
- You have to have learned the basic of mathematics (a boring subject.)
- You have to know how many lakhs make a million (10 lakhs = 1 million)
- You waste your energy with more number of clicks

Advantages of the free tool
- No mathematics
- No calculator
- Less clicks
- save your time

Let me know if you can list more..

BullZip PDF Printer - BullZip PDF Printer is a virtual printer driver that enables you to convert any printable document or image to PDF format.

doPDF - doPDF enables you to convert any printable document to PDF format.

PDF Xchange Viewer  - PDF-XChange Viewer is an alternative viewer for PDF files that enables you to view and annotate PDF files. You can add text, sticky notes, and other annotations and save them to the file, which will be compatible with the standard Adobe PDF reader.

Foxit PDF Reader  - Foxit PDF Reader is an alternative to Adobe Reader, that allows you to view and print PDF files. Unlike Adobe Reader, it opens PDF files very fast, without any delay.

Scan 2 PDF  - Scan2PDF enables you to scan paper documents and save them to PDF format on your computer for digital archiving or backup. In addition, you can also load images from your hard drive and combine them with a scanned document, or combine multiple documents/images into a single PDF file.

Cute PDF Writer   - CutePDF Writer allows you to convert any printable document to PDF format. It installs as a virtual printer and is available from any application that offers a `Print` option. The program is easy to use, just select the CutePDF printer and click the print button.

A PDF Number   - A-PDF Number is a simple tool that lets you add page numbers to the bottom of the pages contained in a PDF file. You can choose between regular numbers or roman numbers, and also select the color and optionally define a prefix. The number can be inserted to the left, right or in the middle of the page bottom.

Adobe reader speedup   - Adobe Reader Speed-Up allows you to significantly speed-up the time it takes to load the Adobe reader application.

PDF to Exe   - PDF2EXE enables you to compile a PDF file into a standalone executable (.exe) file that integrates a simple PDF viewer and does not require Adobe Reader (or any other PDF reader) to be installed on the system.

Enhanced Google Image Search, is an opt-in option/ tool in the Google webmasters central dashboard, available to webmasters for making the images in their sites more visible to the Google search engine. And thereby increasing the chances of incoming organic traffic through Google image search.

How to?

To make the images in your site available to Google images enhanced search feature, tick select the option in Webmasters central.

• Sign in to Webmaster tools
• Click the site for which you want to enable enhanced image search.
• On the Diagnostic tab, click Enhanced Image Search.

What does it mean to opt-in to enhanced image search?

If you choose to enable enhanced image search, Google will use tools such as Google Image Labeler to associate the images included in your site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images.

1. On opting in Enhanced Image search,
   - Google makes available the images in your site (which have the public access ) to Image Labeler tool.
   - The Google Image labeler tool will assign users to keyword the images on the website and the most favored or matching keywords will be assigned to the images.
   - Any queries matching the keywords (assigned by Google) will throw up pages from our site on Google images search.
   - Google follows a complex algorithm that helps them decide images from which site is be ranked higher to another in the image search results. Much of this has got to do with the normal SERP’s ranking factors combined to the user keyword tags assigned to the images.

Recommendations

- Google Image labeler is an excellent tool available to help increase the visibility of your image on Google image search.

- Although there is ambiguity over how efficient would the user generated keywords/tagging be.

- Also, if the website follows the normal onsite image optimization procedures like ALT tags, Longdesc tags, Text surrounding image, image name, URL etc, they are enough to give the visibility required on the SE’s.

- Google Image labeler also poses the threat of competition corrupting the search results by using improper/meaningless keywords to your images through Google Image Labeler.

Opting in Enhanced Image search is a good option to give that extra visibility to our images on Google. I think it is more suited for small scale websites (or sites selling retail products) that does not follow onsite optimization procedures for Images and make it difficult for crawlers to copy the content from the sites. For blogs that uses less images compared to a normal website, it will bring very less traffic.

Sources
Google Support SeoMOZ Webmasterworld Googlewebmastercentral

Last March, Live had pulled off it’s search operators (link:yoursite.com) abnormal usage by third parties and since then it’s been a black room out there in the Live search engines, because you had no known way to know your site statistics on their engines.

To cover up, Microsoft has launched a new application called the Webmasters Portal (similar to Google Webmasters Central ? ), which will enable us to follow site statistics from one single interface. Right now, the program is in beta and if you’d like to apply for the beta version testing, send an email to lswmp@Microsoft.com.
Find the whole story here on Live search blog.

MSN is probably the most abused and “out of shape” search engine around. While I really have nothing against MSN/Live, it’s a fact that they give me less organic traffic when compared to Google or Yahoo. Which is indeed a very good reason for bloggers and webmasters to focus their efforts on Google rather than MSN.

While Live Image search is far superior to Google Image search, Live is not able to beat Google in Web search for obvious reasons. However Live is very popular in some niche regions, and for this reason some of my clients would like to optimize their sites for MSN along with Google.

If you are interested to optimize your blog for MSN Live, here are a few ranking metrics that would help you prioritize your SEO efforts to MSN. Here goes..

• Keyword Density
  Just like Google, MSN also gives importance to keyword density in the copy. While it’s yet to be found out as to what is the average keyword density MSN accepts, I’m assuming that it should be closer to what Google suggests, 6%.
• Keywords in Title
  This one’s the hot favorite for all SE’s and MSN is no different. To test it’s importance, just do a normal search for any keyword and compare it with the results for allintitle:same keyword search. Both results would be mostly similar.
• Anchor text of incoming Links
  You all know what it is. The text other use to link to your site Anchor text to internal pages too play a handsome role in discovering content on your blog. I’m assuming that this is the third most important factor, but honestly it is to be found out from further experiments.
• Keywords in H1
  Keywords included in H1 tags are also picked up by MSN crawlers and is evident from the bolded content in the SERPs results page.
• Strong keywords
  Keywords included in the STRONG tag, is also seen picked up by MSN crawlers and has more importance to other text in the copy.

Though many of the onsite optimization metrics are similar to Google’s, MSN has a unique algorithm to rank sites on the SERPs. It’s definitely not a fool proof one as of now, but Live sure is catching up in many areas. Let’s give them some more time. 

Yahoo has a different set of metrics and priorities when calculating your rank on the SERPs. Most of the times, they are similar to Google’s metrics like the number of incoming links, title page content etc. For obvious reasons, duplicate content has been a bottle neck both for Google and Yahoo (others as well). And both the search engines are in the process of rolling out new tools everyday to beat the phenomenon of content duplication.

Yahoo is the one who has come up with a brand new tool today - Dynamic URL rewriting. According to Yahoo!,

The new feature provides the ability for site owners to alert Yahoo! of the dynamic parameters in URLs that they’d like Yahoo! to ignore, which we’ll then automatically rewrite accordingly.

And the benefits of this feature as explained by Yahoo!

• A more efficient crawl of your site, with fewer duplicate URLs being crawled.
• Better and deeper site coverage, as we’ll be able to use our crawler capacity to find and index more new content on your site.
• More unique content discovered, as we’ll handle more dynamic parameters in your URLs (if you remove the content-neutral dynamic parameters).
• Fewer chances of crawler traps, or web page sets that can cause an infinite number of requests or a poorly constructed crawler to crash.
• Cleaner and easier-to-read URLs displayed in the search results.
• Better site ranking due to reduced fragmentation of links and anchor text to your site’s pages.

I’m an admirer of Yahoo! for it’s fresh and innovative approaches to improve their tools. This one sure looks promising. Get the full story on the Yahoo search blog.

This one’s funny ! Honestly I’m tired using those facebook applications that crop up everyday. I have to install one just because my friend installed it. And most of the times, after that 21 click process of installing one application - it turns out to be a crap and you have nothing to do other than to un install the application.

Here’s a new guy  - Arsebook. just for the people who hate facebook. Novel idea huh?

Don’t get excited, It’s only a look alike with some nasty words - not functional at all. All the links on the homepage are dead. I’m hopinig that it will go live someday!