That’s good news isn’t it? So what does it mean? What does it give to you and your blog?

Well, basically it just means that when you comment on any articles on this blog, the link that you provide is actually getting indexed by Google and some juice is passed over to your blog.

Normally when you comment on any blog, the link is “nofollowed” which means that they will not be traced by search engine spiders, other than Yahoo and some insignificant ones. Now, DailySEOblog is an exception, so if you want incoming links to your blog, all you need to do is write sensible comments on the blog (You are reading t anyway).

So commenting on DailySEOblog has two benefits now.

1 - Get some google juice from the no-nofollow links to your blog.
2 - Get some traffic to your blog from the “latest post” link featured from your blog on the comments.

Why this new change ?

Well, I know for a fact that there are readers out there on RSS readers and other places who read Daily SEO blog on a regular basis and there are some smart and loyal ones like Niyaz who regularly post sensible comments on the articles.
Now, it’s perfectly fair for the rest of them out there not to comment on DailySEOblog, because they don’t get anything out of it. They read the articles and that’s about it. Why should you comment……..? And now you have an answer. For a backlink whenever you need to.

I also realize that this would be good news to the spammers. Well, got to live with it anyway. I’ll be selectively moderating comments and approving them. If there are more, there will be a time limit put on new commenters, before their comments become no-nofollow.

So if you are a regular commenter, your links get indexed quicker than anyone else. Makes sense? What are you waiting for?

—- UPDATE——
The comments will be selectively moderated and keywords/author names that does not give any idea about the author but in turn looks deliberate to drive google juice to the products will not be approved. Ex:- Pharma, Free software, Online games.
However comments that are sensible and makes sense to the community will be approved even though may carry a not so popular name. Consider this a manually approved comments area.

Ever had problems finding what your blogs ranks are on the search engines for particular keywords?
Like for instance, if you wanted to check where your blog ranked on Google for the keyword “make money online”, it would be a big task since the keyword itself is very competitive and if you are not problogger or shoemoney, you are probably in the 167th page or worse. So it’s not quite possible to track where your blog is ranking by searching through the Google results right?

Here is a nice tool that will take care of it. Rank Checker is a plugin for firefox that will take care of this task.
All that you have to do is , install the plugin, restart firefox and given in a keyword + URL combination into the plugin page.

Like for instance if you are finding out where the blog “dailyseoblog.com” is ranking for “wordpress seo blog” then give in these two criteria into the “domain” and “keyword” fields respectively and click go. First you add the combination to the queue and then on clicking the “start” button the engine searches for the results.

You’ll be able to get the search engine rank result for Google, Yahoo and Live (MSN). There is an option to give multiple keywords and also export the results to a CSV file, enabling you to open it in your spreadsheets. Pretty cool eh? However, one minute problem I faced is that it gave me no option to resize he window, it stretched all the way horizontally and wasn’t really maneuverable.

Install the Firefox plugin here.

The next google page rank update is round the corner. No no no…easy, now don’t bug me on IM asking when is the date, I honestly have no clue. The grapewines say it’s around in April mid/last, so let’s watch and see.

Everytime there’s a page rank update the most excited would be the bloggers who started their blogging venture is less than three months earlier. This is the time when there are more searches for the term “when is the next google page rank update” and the related long tail ones on Google. Rest of the best, the boring daily bloggers wouldn’t be as excited as the young blogger because he’d have gone through the  update - downgrade - upgrade process by now and (probably penalized) lost his affinity to the green bar.

Now, the enthusiasm of the young bloggers is something that’s universal. Everyone is worried about whether their blog will get the green bar filled or not.

My question is - How much value does Google page give to your blog?

So you are a young blogger with a blog less than an year old. You have around 100 posts and gathered a few links from around the blogosphere. Hell, you’ve even submitted to directories only to know that they are a waste of time. I’m sure some of you might have even bought links from others in the blogsphere for as chaep as 5-10 bucks. So what value is Google Page Rank going to give you once you are calibrated?

You might sell some links? But Google will penalize you.
You might show off the page rank to potential advertisers? But they are more interested in your subscriber count.
You might show off your PR to a fellow blogger? They might have a better one.

Essentially, Google Page rank does not give you any value what so ever other than a fancy green bar.
It is just a publicly available visualization of Google’s own standards of rating sites to gather information.

And yes, please do not mistake that if you get a higher Google Page Rank you’d get better search engine rankings. That’s a mistake.

Google Page Rank has got no effect whatsoever on the search engine rankings position of a site. It is just an internal metric of Google to grade sites to make it convenient for them for data collection (or something similar).

So this time around, rather than fretting over the green bar, try gathering one way incoming links to your blog and developing unique content rich pages. Those two things can earn you lot of respect from Google, this page rank update.

Hey, last week orkut made a small yet significant change. Orkut now allows to search and add your friends from outside the Google circle. Like AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo ! After all, it has probably discovered that all your “old  school buddies” are on other networks, while Gmail was not there. Good thought there.

SEO guru Eric explains to you how you can win over social media websites using authoritative content, and why  funny images does not bring any value to your business.

Recently, Google was spotted showing sitelinks for many websites.Erick Daffron reports that Google even lists the URL’s blocked by robots.txt in it’s sitelinks. lol

Read write Web has a nice interview with Mark Zuckerberg - I like this guy somehow!

Anthony (The OldschoolSEO guy) has posted some interesting Stumble Upon commandments at his blog. It’s worth a read and probably a stumble !

Donna has got a nice little link building tip for you over here. See if it will work for you.

Twitter has become a rage. Many bloggers have got into it so much that they’ve started to quit blogging. Some think that twittering eat up most of their time and make them less popular. I’m following like some 98 people and 75 are following me. Every day, there are more followers too.

And let me tell you, this thing is getting messy these days.
So there are 75 followers and 98 that you follow, all of them keep twittering every other second on Gtalk, you try to reply to one with the @somebody tag and nothing happens..You post your tweet…you edit it..tweet again…somebody replies..and that’s about it. What’s the return?

Social Media - did someone say? Ah! Cool. So..being social eh? Well…honestly my friend, it isn’t social. Readers…all of you who get replies for every single tweet on twitter, hands up !
…… None?

Okay, everyone who gets a client signed from twitter hands up…

None?

Hmm..everyone who has subscribers signing up for you through twitter….hands…up??

Ok forget it.

See the point I’m trying to make is that, twittering is essentially bad for bloggers. Really bad.
Here goes my reasons.

1. You are already running out of ideas to blog and with twittering, you end up throwing all of that in two lines.
2. And, no one is interested in your twitters, you don’t find a client in your followers.
3. You think it’s social media, but no one ever talks or take the effort to.
4. Everyone is busy shouting their personal stuff, what they had for breakfast, what they did while sleeping.
5. Blogging superstars lose their charm by offering too much of them up close and in real to the followers (exceptions available.)
6. You tell to the world that you have a serious problem with typos.
7. Whoever is following you either know you directly or through your blog, there are no new acquisitions.

Seriously my friend, I could think of more such reasons but this isn’t doing good at all.
Bloggers, stick back to serious blogging. Don’t shout out to the world what you had for breakfast or what you did while sleeping, you might want to keep it to your immediate circle of friends.
And don’t misunderstand that twitter will bring you new clients or new subscribers to your blog. Who ever is following you are either your readers or your friends.

Essentially, Twitter doesn’t give you anything in return , but only takes away from you - your time, your content and a good major part of your brain.

More and more websites and blogs are getting the google sitelinks these days. I’ve noticed some of the popular ones being awarded the sitelinks, which were not having them earlier. I’m guessing this could be as a result of a recent tweak in the google algorithm.

My guess is that the sitelinks are appearing only for direct searches for the sitename or brand. Like “Dailyseoblog” or “labnol” or “andy beard”.

Google seems to have tweaked their algorithm probably in the belief that one who searches for the particular brand or blog name is likely to already know about the service/product and it makes more sense to provide the searcher with relevant information from the blog/site.

Since Google have introduced the “Search Box” feature where a search box appears directly in the search results for that particular website, I think the next step will be to reach that point - to have the search box in the search results itself.

An interesting piece of info here. If you search for “John chow” (who you already know that is kicked off Google SERPs), you’ll get Johncow.com with the sitelinks. Cool huh?

So far, I’ve seen many popular Indian blogs to be awarded the sitelinks, like Labnol, Kiruba, Clazh, Reviewsaurus etc. Have you had one too?

Meanwhile if you’re looking for information on sitelinks, check here.

I thought I might be the only guy who prefers it. In fact, it was an easy guess to me that it would die out soon as any other social media mushroom. But the fact that it managed to get into the good books of many and stood face up to the criticism made me like it more.

ChrisG liked it and I completely agree with him. It has all the features, carefully planned to take down Digg (I assume). Community, UI, Ease to handle, Content - everything is just rich enough to take down any existing social media site. Some of the features made me think - “Why did not Digg implement this earlier, or why aren’t they?” Now, if you compare Digg to Mixx, clearly there are differences that puts Mixx on the forefront.

1. Digg takes more time to submit a story.
   Digg
   A normal story submission process on Digg will take me 2 minutes or more, since there are more clicks involved.
   - First the waiting screen.
   - Second, I’ve to write a description myself and select from a picture.
   - Third, select a category.(No miss here)
   - Four, Enter Captcha.
   - Five, Submit.
   - Six, Duplicate check.
   - Seven, final submission.Mixx
   A normal story takes lesser time to submit, with lesser clicks.
   - First, submit URL.
   - Duplicate check.
   - Three, title and description automatically filled.Select category,tags (optional)
   - Four, Submission.

2. Digg wastes my time and confuses me during a submission
   Ssince it checks for duplicate entries only after I’ve taken time out to write a description about the story. While MIxx checks for duplicate content even before you provide the description, and quickly after you’ve submitted the URL. Makes sense this way.

3. Digg always aks for a captcha, Mixx requires it only when they find you submitting stories too frequently.
   This probably may have something to do with the traffic and spam ratio. But as a end user, I’m not bothered about it, I’m worried about my time, my effort and how easy the process is. Digg fails here.

4. Digg is Spam, has no room for development
   Digg is controlled by the mafia you know it. There is very little or No chance at all for fresh stories to get popular, however good it is, unless you have the help of the mafia.
   Mixx is all new, there is lot of quality submission done and every one gets appreciation. Again, down the line Mixx may become like Digg, but as of now, it’s pretty good.

5. I can’t find an appropriate category on Digg, Mixx has better categories
   It’s a shame that Digg has no apt categories for submitting blogging related stories or niche topics like it. You have very narrow choices that doesn’t make any sense at all. Everyone can’t be running a TV station or a Gizmodo to break stories. Why don’t they understand it?
   On the other hand, Mixx has got a better array of categories, and even if you fail to find one, there’s the option of tags. Which is awesome!

6. Digg throws up stories that it thinks is interesting. Mixx shows me stories that are of interest to me.

7. Digg does not have groups and Communities, Mixx has lot of them
   I think one killer feature of Mixx is that it has groups and communities to share your stories according to your taste and preferences. After all, that’s the whole fun in Social Media isn’t it ?

8. Digg is harsh, It thinks some sites are unworthy of submission
   That’s bull s**t. While I tried to submit a story from a nice site, Digg says that the site is banned from submission, and I can’t submit any article from that site, despite them being good articles.

9. Digg is Dull, Mixx is Hot !
   Looks matter after all. Especially when you are spending more time on one site , you don’t want to strain your eyes looking at dull and pale colours. Mixx on te other hand has got soothing colour scheme for your eyes, not too bright not too dull, just perfect with the best UI and user friendlyness.

So those are the nine points I think makes me prefer Mixx over Digg. Hope they make sense. If you really like Mixx, feel free to join The Mixx Fans group and get the company of the most passionate mixxers.

How important do you think are the page titles on your blog ?

There is a new school of thought in SEO who thinks that they are not important as they were once. And there are people who are not keen on placing their prodcut name or sitename on the title.

I beg to differ. I insist that the sitename/product name/service has to be present on the page title.

Now, the argument from the other side is that, you are being spammy when you put in the blog name or the product name on your page title. Well, actually it is spammy if you want it to be. Otherwise it’s not.

I say spamming is something like this.

“SEO India, Indian SEO, SEO from India, BEst SEO in India, The SEO consultant India”

While, anything along the lines of “Visit Vishnu’s SEO blog - SEO consulting service, India” is perfectly normal.

The idea is like this. If you had an offline business, wouldn’t you put a board outside, so that passers by can know what business you are running from the first look at it?
You’d also place a tag line/name on the board that describes your business in minimum words like - “Vishnu’s Grocery Store”.

Here again, by the title tag we mean to provide maximum information to Google about what you are, what’s your name and what have you got to offer to people passing by so that the interested can come in.

So essentially, title tags and page titles should not be spammy but should take care of the basic intentions of it.

- Let people know what you are selling/what your blog is all about.
- Give them a name or brand to associate with.
- Give them an idea about what they can expect or how will they benefit.

Having said that, it’s easy to compile certain keywords and make it look spammy by repeating them more than once. Please avoid it, try to make it as minimal as possible with the maximum information being displayed.

Have you been waiting to advertise your blog/service on other websites but never could possibly do it because of the high rates in advertising?

Do you have a kickass service or product that you want to show off to others?

Are you a freelancer who wants to get some business and get people to know you?

Here’s a golden chance to grab some ads at damn cheap rates on DailySEOblog ! Being March, which is not the best time of sales, I thought a giveaway at really cheap prices would really help both me and the advertisers alike.

The 125×125 ads on DailySEOblog have been sold for USD 70 per month untill now. This whole month and April, the ad spots will be available for USD 30 per ad. Yes, you read that right. Just 30 bucks for a premium placement !

Also, there is the option for advertising your blog/product/service to around 600 tech savvy readers daily for just USD 20 !!

What do you get?
Place your ad on RSS feeds and let all the potential clients know and talk about your blog/product. All that for just 15 bucks!

Target a tech savvy crowd of search engine experts by placing your logo and introduce your service to them for as low as USD 30 per month.

Here are the new discounted rates !

• 125×125 image ads on the sidebar - USD 30 per ad, for 30 days.Your logo will remain on the most viewed part of the blog, not to mention the traffic and the clicks.
• Ads on the footer of RSS feeds - USD 20 for two weeks reaching 600 readers daily.

So make your mind now. Now or never. Make use of this discount and get that extra mileage and same success rates for even less than half the usual rate.

Wise men make quick decisions!

Order a 125×125 ad for USD 30

Order a RSS feed ad for USD 20

Andy has an interesting article on how to increase your blog readership with 20 hot tips. Must read.

Social Media and networking is not interesting all the time. Ace “social media enthusiast” and “Link builder” Lyndoman thinks that social media is NOTworking and not Networking. Interesting article there.

Caroline Middlebrook has an interesting article on hitting the right balance of work. She says too much work is bad and so is too little work.

Amit Agarwal made an interesting observation about the Lynx love from Google. Amit is ppular fr finding such un noticed errors and mistakes and this  one I really enjoyed.

Jude Festus thinks you can make money from your Orkut profile - well, I’m not sure if it’s a good plan, but check it out and decide yourself.

Arpit has a post that explains you how to check for viruses online on files. Sounds stupid? It’s real. Check out.

Other cool things

There’s a Twitter enthusiasts meet up happening in Chennai this March 23rd, Sunday. If you’d like to join, hop in !