PicSquare, which provides “photo based gifts” services in India, has come up with a new feature for their users. A photo blog, where users can upload and store pictures like albums or blogs - a photo blog as they would call it.

Manish says -

To continue our effort to provide best value in online photography to Indian users we are launching a new feature at Picsquare (http://mysite.picsquare.com). The new feature – Personal Photo Site, will allow users to create their own photo website and could be described as blogs for photographs.

Some of the main features of the photo blog are:

- Personalized domain name like http://manish.picsquare.com

- Theme selection, variety of theme option available like weddings, vacation, birthday, family etc.

- Customized home page

- Permission control, user can make his site accessible to anyone or decide who can get access

Hope this tool will help users to share more and order more .

Picsquare had completed 1 million images last week.

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I’ve always wondered - “How did they make it to the top?” If someone could tell me the 10 ways to make me a popular blogger and make everyone link to me. I read and I read but it’s all the same s*** everywhere. B

So what does it take to become a popular blogger, accepted and trusted by everyone (well almost) ? I’ve found some traits interesting, from every blogger that I followed. Some were common, and some unique. As a blogger I think we should absorb the best ones, from the people who made it big. Here are a few i gathered, let’s see if you will disagree with me.

 12 habits of successful bloggers you should copy 

1 - Read more than you write ( Courtesy Darren Rowse )
I found this habit of Darren, very interesting. We bloggers spent a major part of our time tweaking, and writing contents for our blog isn’t it? And with a popular blog like ProBlogger, anyone would assume that Darren uses most of his time with his blog, writing content and tweaking the design. But it was interesting to know that Darren spends most of the time reading than writing.
That is indeed a great habit for a busy man like him. I guess it’s about keeping you updated and “in the loop” with the blogosphere.

2 - Respond to emails (Courtesy Darren Rowse )
Another habit of Darren that I admire. Even though he’s a celebrity, if you send Darren a genuine question/suggestion on email, it would most probably be replied. This shows how passionate he is and open to ideas. I think we all should keep this as a reference point and copy it in to our lives.

3 - Social media (Courtesy Pete Cashmore)
Every popular blogger is the super star in a social media network. A look at their friends number itself will make you feel like the silliest living thing on the planet. Well, it’s not magic that got them those many friends, but hard work. Popular bloggers are social media enthusiasts they talk to people, they are open to discussions and ideas and this reflects in their friends number on facebook or orkut. So go out talk to people and build your network, it’s a powerful tool.

4 - Be the first to jump in ( Courtesy John Chow )
I learned this from John Chow. John jumps first into any affiliate marketing or money making tool that comes in (or so I guess). And this is exceptionally good because if the tool takes off, he’s probably going to sit on top of a gold mine some time from now. All he needs to do is sign up at the first place. So be the first to jump into things, most of them are free, so what’s keeping you waiting?

5 - Ask questions ( Courtesy Darren Rowse )
Another one I loved about Darren. He always asks questions and manages to spark off discussions on the “seemingly” silly topics. It’s very easy for bloggers to “feel” that they are masters of the trade and asking questions only will degrade their status. Of course not!

6 - Be friendly ( Courtesy Michael Martine)
I love to talk to friendly people, and so do you right? To me, it’s not the knowledge level or celebrity status of a person that makes me respect him, but his willingness to be friendly and share the same frequency with you. Many a times, you have people who have enormous amount of knowledge but would never come down to your level and share knowledge with you. It’s a frustrating situation. But there are some very pleasant personalities like Michael Martine, who are very friendly and supportive. The interesting thing about talking to such people is that they are willing to share the same frequency with you, and they’ll share knowledge with you. It’d be a win-win situation than a one-way process. I wish more bloggers be this way, and it’d be lovely to network with them.

7 - Either be seriously good or be evil ( Courtesy Kumiko )
I learned this one from Kumiko. And she’s very right. People like to listen, hear and sometimes do evil. So if you are all set to grab people’s attention, either be seriously good or be damn evil - the smart way. Either way, do it the appealing and smart way. (Being evil doesn’t mean harming someone, but being smart.)

8 - Show off your money ( Courtesy John Chow )
I don’t think everyone will agree with it, but I have to agree that some guys do it best. Like John. This man flaunts his money like none does and hey, that’s his USP. So if you want to help people make money, come on first show me how much you got? (A good lesson to all those “money making gurus” on blogspot.)

9 - Give attention to details that others may miss ( Courtesy Amit Agarwal )
This is a simple yet very effective in convincing readers. A good example of this would be DI’s Amit Agarwal. Amit’s “WOW” factor in his posts are the simplicity. If you look at his popular posts, all of us would feel unanimously say - “Damn! Why didn’t I think about it earlier?”
That’s exactly what makes the man popular. He has keen attention to details and he brings up all the tips and tweaks possible for even the less important applications.
Paying attention to details finally pays off !

10 - Be consistent (Courtesy Amit Agarwal )
I think every popular blogger would agree with this one. Think about it this way, was Darren popular when he started his blog? Was Amit aware that he’s gonna be featured on the cover page of a national weekly? No, isn’t it?
So the point here is - Consistency. If you have the passion in you, keep it going and success will automatically fall in place.

11 - Live on criticism (Courtesy Amit Agarwal )
Criticism and bad mouthing is the part of the game. No one would be popular without hearing abuses and criticisms. Or ask the blog celebrities today. They would most happily agree that through out their career, there were criticisms, bad mouthing swearing even. But the idea is to keep the flame burning, come what may. (A good lesson for young bloggers who fret over monthly AdSense earnings and Google PR)

12 - Link Voraciously (Courtesy John TP )
We all know it’s about the network ! Let me give you an example. John TP. This young man is not very common in comments or networking (John this is only an example, hope you will take it in the right spirits) so once I thought he’s not social. But looking at his posts, I found that John links voraciously, to every possible resource. And he even writes posts to refer someone or a tool. That’s a great virtue if you ask me. Because, you may not be good in socializing but linking to fellow bloggers and resources makes you equally popular. (This is a lesson to all those bloggers who think 24 times before linking to someone. Spare me, I think only thrice )

There must be a couple of other habits too that makes a blogger popular but I’m leaving it to you. We all know there are no “Top 10″ rules (Like the digg lists) to fame in the blogosphere, it’s all common sense and hard work. We all have the answers in us, it’s just that we are not speaking about it.

Linked in has opened it’s store where it would be selling branded products for affordable prices to help you wear that “professional” look where ever you go.

They have some fun featured there on the store, where all the models that you see are the actual employees at Linked in.

The gorgeous lass you see on the left is Veronica and she helps in recruiting. You can find out who the models are by hovering the mouse over their pics.

Linked in has T-shirts, Outerwear, Caps, Jackets, Gel pens etc all at affordable rates.

Wearing a Linked in Tee to the disc is kinda awkward, but I sure like the laptop bag. Anyone interested in gifting it to me?

Rajesh asked me this question - How does some sites manage to get their pages listed beneath the snippets in Google search? They appear in groups and all the pages/navigation structure appears there. I can’t get my blogs pages appear near the snippets.

Rajesh is talking about Google Sitelinks (See screenshot).

Sitelinks are the group of links to the pages or navigation links in your blog/site that appear right beneath the snippets, or site description text during a google search.

As you might have noticed already, sitelinks appear only for certain sites and not everybody gets the privilege to show them. It appears for almost all high traffic sites and authority sites.

To answer Rajesh’s question, there is nothing at the moment we can do to make the sitelinks appear for your site.

Meaning, Google says it’s completely automated. That is information like, which sites are eligible to show sitelinks, how many sitelinks are to be shown, which are the pages that should appear at the sitelinks, are decided by the google site crawlers and there is very little a webmaster or SEO can do regarding it. Read Google’s theory here.

Okay so as usual, Google speaks from it’s own perspective with no or less help to webmasters. But from our observations, we can make calculated guesses though, can’t we? Here’s what I found.

• Only websites with huge traffic seem to have been displaying sitelinks.
• The links listed in a sitelink are mostly the most-viewed pages in a site.
• The links are mostly a copy of the links in the site’s navigation structure.
• In sites that have sitelinks, the category pages or the navigation structure is universal or repeated many times, this may be a criteria for Google to understand that these links help reduce the user’s navigation time.

As Google says in it’s explanation, their algorithms pick up short-cuts that will help reduce user’s time in finding pages on a site. This could be a pointer to the navigation structure. But you can’t completely rely on this information.

If you take Yahoo! for example, in the sitelinks that were shown to me, I got the following links (see screenshot).
Mail - The best web-based email! My Yahoo! Finance Games Radio Sports and Movies.

So clearly, all the links in the navigation menu are not included in the sitelinks but yes, the one’s that are shown clearly are the ones that either have the maximum page views or are the most popular ones.

So that could be one pointer to us - The pages/links in the navigation menu with the maximum clicks or page views will be picked by Google to include in the site links. But again, this is only an assumption and a calculated guess.

As of now, Google does not give us any information on how to add sitelinks to our sites, to help searchers find more information from your sites. I’m unaware if this is a “premium feature” available to some sites, but Google does take feedback from you on this. That is if you have sitelinks appearing for your website, and it is wrong the way it is shown right now, you can let google know of this and get it corrected. See how to do it here.

With the new Google PR updates, I thought this might be the right time to go for the site redesign I’ve been planning for quite some time. So here it is!

Daily SEO blog will now sport a new look. The new theme highlights content along with advertising options which was limited in the earlier design from Scott. It was an excellent theme with highly semantic coding and cross browser compatibilities. But the advertising real estate options were limited in it.

This theme is a free one called Green Wave 1.0 from Romow. I hope it runs smoothly, if at all you come across anything worth noting, please do let me know.

My friend Aseem seem to have reserved a great batch of sought after domain names to himself and would like to sell them off. While I don’t think that .info domains are the best choice when considering your website, the in availability of top level domains leave you with no choice but select the next available options. .info domains are cheap and many sought after keywords are available on it as well. And Aseem have quite some great ones with him. If anyone would like to buy one of these, please let him know. Here are the list of domains.

WEBMASTER RELATED DOMAINS
GUIDETOSEO.INFO
SEOTUTS.INFO
CHEAPSEOSOLUTIONS.INFO
ADSENSETIPSANDTRICKS.INFO
ETUTORIALS.INFO
TEMPLATESCATALOG.INFO
THEWEBDESIGNBLOG.INFO
EARNMONEYONTHENET.INFO

TECH RELATED DOMAINS
TECHNOLOUNGE.INFO
TECHSQUARE.INFO
BROADBANDMONITOR.INFO
LAPTOPREVIEWER.INFO
CELLTOUCH.INFO
GADGETCENTER.INFO

GAMES RELATED DOMAINS
GAMESFREAK.INFO
GAMERSARCADE.INFO

ENTERTAINMENT RELATED DOMAINS
SEXY-LINDSAY.INFO
HOTKATRINAKAIF.INFO
HOTPARISHILTON.INFO
URVASHI-SHARMA.INFO
SEXYINDIANMODELS.INFO
INDIANREALITYTV.INFO
HEROESTVSERIES.INFO
OURBOLLYWOOD.INFO
HINDIMOVIETRAILERS.INFO
YASHRAJMOVIES.INFO
HOTHOLLYWOODPICS.INFO

HUMOUR RELATED DOMAINS
VERYFUNNYADS.INFO
FUNNY-VIDS.INFO
LAUGHWITHJOKES.INFO

ANIMALS RELATED DOMAINS
THEAQUAWORLD.INFO
CATLOVERZ.INFO
DOGLOVERZ.INFO
BIRDPICS.INFO

SPORTS RELATED DOMAINS
FORMULA1TRACKS.INFO
SOCCERSHOUT.INFO
CRICKETNEXT.INFO
TENNISNEXT.INFO
TENDULKARS.INFO
INDIANCRICKETSTARS.INFO
GOLFCLUBBERS.INFO

HEALTH RELATED DOMAINS
TIPS4URHEALTH.INFO
DENTAL-BLOG.INFO
PLANYOURDIET.INFO
BUILDURBODY.INFO
HAIRISSUES.INFO
CURETODISEASES.INFO
SKINCAREDOC.INFO
YOURGUIDETOSEX.INFO
SEXHEALTHTIPS.INFO

PARENTING RELATED DOMAINS
PARENTINGEXPERT.INFO
GUIDEFORMOMS.INFO

AUTO RELATED DOMAINS
CARACER.INFO
BIKERSLOUNGE.INFO

HOME AND LIFESTYLE RELATED DOMAINS
STYLENFASHION.INFO
STYLEME.INFO
WOMENSMAG.INFO
BEAUTYASSETS.INFO
WEDTODAY.INFO

FOOD RELATED DOMAINS
FOODMANIA.INFO
FOODRECIPESLIST.INFO

TRAVEL RELATED DOMAINS
WORLDSBESTBEACHES.INFO
HOTELLISTER.INFO
INDIATRAVELBLOG.INFO
UKTOURISTSPOTS.INFO
WORLDTOURISTSPOTS.INFO

FINANCE RELATED DOMAINS
HOTREALESTATES.INFO
REALESTATEGYAAN.INFO
MANAGEYOURWEALTH.INFO
STOCKX.INFO
MAXINSURANCE.INFO
LOANLISTER.INFO
MBAJUNCTION.INFO

BOOKS RELATED DOMAINS
AUTHORSCLUB.INFO
INDIANWRITERS.INFO
INDIANBOOKREVIEWS.INFO
BOOKSCORNER.INFO
COMICSCOLLECTION.INFO

EDUCATION RELATED DOMAINS
JOBLISTER.INFO
TOPCAREERS4U.INFO
TOPJOBS4U.INFO
BELLTHECAT.INFO
PLACEMENT-PAPERS.INFO
ELECTRONICS4U.INFO
PERSONALITYDEV.INFO

LOVE AND DATING RELATED DOMAINS
LOVEANDDATING.INFO
DATINGMANTRA.INFO

HOBBIES RELATED DOMAINS
PHOTOGRAPHYTRICKS.INFO
RIDDLESANDPUZZLES.INFO
HOBBYTIME.INFO

TEENS RELATED DOMAINS
TEENACHE.INFO
JUSTFORTEENS.INFO

MISCELLANEOUS DOMAINS
BLOGGERSPORTAL.INFO
SCIENCEFUNDAS.INFO
ORKUTTING.INFO
DOWNLOADFREESTUFF.INFO
VIDEOZSITE.INFO
ENGLISHSONGLYRICS.INFO
INDIANPAD.INFO
ASTROPREDICTIONS.INFO

Quite a good list isn’t it? If you need one, contact Aseem at webincarno (a) gmail (dot) com

Just noticed that DailySEOblog is ”awarded” Page Rank 4 !

And, I still strongly stick to my words.

I just don’t give a damn about it.  Eat that Google! (Courtesy-JC)

Interestingly, there seems to be shuffling again all over the web. Here is the old list from DBT with the updated changes. Seen in green are the ones that managed to hit back and seen in red are the one’s gone further down.

• Statcounter (from 10 to 6)
• Engadget (from 7 to 5)
• AutoBlog (from 6 to 4)
• Problogger (from 4 to 6)
• Copyblogger (from 4 to 6)
• AdesBlog (from 7 to 5)
• Search Engine Journal (from 7 to 4)
• Quick Online Tips (from 6 to 3)
• Search Engine Roundtable (from 7 to 4)
• Blog Herald (from 6 to 4)
• Weblog Tools Collection (from 6 to 4)
• JohnTP (from 4 to 3)
• Coolest Gadgets (from 3 to 4)
• CyberNet News (from 4 to 1)
• Washington Post (from 7 to 5)
• Washington Times (from 6 to 4)
• Charlotte Observer (from 6 to 4)
• Forbes.com (from 7 to 5)
• SFGate.com (from 7 to 5)
• Sun Times (from 7 to 5)
• New Scientist (from 7 to 5)
• Seattle Times (from 6 to 4)

New entries - Bloggingtips.com (0 to 4) and DailySEOblog.com (0 to 4)

So, it’s regret time for Google? Seems like they have taken off the penalty on some websites like Problogger and Copyblogger, while maintaining it for some, and even further degrading on a few like John TP.

Is this the end or is there another shuffling going to happen? 

The Indian blogging arena is on a high these days.In about an year there have been huge increase in the number of technology related bloggers in India. There are students, professionals and learners actively blogging on their respective fields of interest. Many of them also make decent amount of money online. I thought, with the new PR update happening, it’s time we rank some of the popular ones based on some common metrics like traffic. I hope you find it interesting.

According to traffic rankings, here are the top ten super stars.

1. Blog: Clazh -  Author: Arpit Jacob, Chennai
2. Blog: Technospot - Author: Ashish Mohta
3. Blog: Life Rocks - Author: Nirmal T V, Kerala
4. Blog: Online Tech Tips - Author: Aseem Kishore, US
5. Blog: Shankar Ganesh - Author: Shankar Ganesh, Chennai
6. Blog: Think Abdul - Author: Abdul Azeez
7. Blog: Freakitude - Author: Lovedeep Wadhwa
8. Blog: Jsbi - Author:Jason S
9. Blog: Madhur - Author: Madhur Kapoor
10. Blog: Rishi Raj - Author: Rishi Raj 

Professional bloggers like Amit Agarwal have set example to many young bloggers in India, and as I understand from talks with these bloggers, a good amount of them have been inspired from Amit. So he deserves a special applause.

Google today announced that webmasters could submit their Sitemaps for multiple hosts on a single dedicated host.

So let’s say that you own www.example.com and mysite.google.com and you have Sitemaps for both hosts, e.g. sitemap-example.xml and sitemap-mysite.xml. Until today, you would have to store each Sitemap on its respective host. If you tried to place sitemap-mysite.xml on www.example.com, you would get an error because, for security reasons, a Sitemap on www.example.com can only contains URLs from www.example.com. So how do we solve this? Well, if you can “prove” that you own or control both of these hosts, then either one can host a Sitemap containing URLs for the other.

Google is talking to other search engines so that they too follow and accept this cross-submission sitemap procedure.

Read full story here

Though Google Page Rank doesn’t carry much importance to decide your rank on search engines for particular keyword, I think we have solid evidence to suspect if this is false.

Matt Cutts once said in his article -

Reputable sites that sell links won’t have their search engine rankings or PageRank penalized–a search for [daily cal] would still return dailycal.org. However, link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext).

Now that reputed sites like Problogger.net, Copyblogger etc have already lost their PR, as a result of penalization for selling links(which some of them haven’t), Isn’t this a case of double talking Google does?

On one side Matt says - Reputed sites won’t have their Page Rank/SERP ranks degraded for selling links.

One part of it has already been proved wrong. While, many authoritative sites have lost their PR charm already, what’s next? SERPs and Organic Traffic ?

Am I being too skeptical about it or do you see anything?