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.

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 !

I’m unsure how by metrics am I going to depict this, but it is surely a remarkable reference. Some would agree and some ould not, just as it should be. What are the things that you’d take into consideration before linking to a site?

If we were to dissect out the essentials of blogging, links play a vital role. Links as many calls it are votes given by one person for the credibility of another. Every time someone want to link to a site, he things twice. There are many thoughts that goes through your head. Some bloggers are voracious linkers like John TP, some are selective like Darren and many are in between.

Now, if we all know that links are the building blocks of the internet and the blogging world, why do we hesitate to link?

After all, a link is important to another person as it is to you. So why do you not be proactive and link to others?

What are your mental blocks?
Few of the things that keep you from linking to a person are these questions.

Is extensive linking good?

Many a times, people ask me, Mani why do you keep linking to Google , AdSense and such sites often, Is it good for SEO?

Well, not really. I link to them because it helps as a reference to even novice readers who might be new to a product like AdSense. It might help me in SEO in very little amounts, but that’s not my interest first.

And, I’ve never recommended anyone not to link too much. It all depends on how many incoming links you’ve got. If the ratio of incoming to out going links is fat, you are in good shape, if it’s thinner then you might not want to link too much. That’s the point.

So provided you have a healthy number of incoming links to fight the competition, you can go ahead link to various resources and content relted websites, that’s not a problem at all. Having said that, make sure that you dont go about inserting stand alone links on the sidebar and the footers as non contextual links. When Google spiders a page, it can easily make out the contextual links and the non contextual links.

If there are 10 links within an article write up, referring to content related websites, it is perfectly fine. But at the same time, if there are 10 links on the sidebar referring to websites (which cannot be determined if it’s contextual or not), it may not be ahealthy situation.

So please expel your doubts on linking and number of links. If it’s all well withing the article and it supports the article, Google sees no harm in them.

Does the guy who’s linked deserve the link?

This is yet another popular factor. Before linking to (mostly personal sites) a site, it is normal for someone to think as to whether the person being linked to is actually deserving the credit. Well, the choice is your’s. If it’s not a relevant content you better not link. Keep in mind that you are not linking to a person to make him happy. You should be linking to a site because the content in the website is interesting and you like to refer it to someone else. Simple as that.

When you think in that sense, you might link to a person boldly than otherwise.

Will he reciprocate?

Again, here are two situations. 1 - If you are linking to a person to make him happy, then chances are that he would just be happy with your link and never link back to you.

2- If you are genuinely linking to a person because you think the content is interesting and you agree/disagrre to it, then he sees some value in your link and is more likely to reciprocate.

So, when you link, let the question be as to whether your link is passing on value or not rather than it is to make someone happy.

Will he acknowledge it?

This is interesting. There is no thumbrule to this, but from experience I’ve found that genuine and gentlemen bloggers do acknowledge links. Some of them I can name are Nate Whitehill, Michael Martine and Kevin Muldoon. They are big names in the blogosphere but rarely miss a chance to acknowledge genuine links. I’ve experieinced it over the years.

So if your link is genuine and passes on value, people are likely to acknowledge it. Again, it depends on whom you are linking.

Will he just enjoy the link or will he return it back?

This might be of interest to all those link-exchange freaks out there. My sincere apologies to all of you. But this practice is something that I don’t recommend. If you are linking to someone assuming (or even nudgin him on chat) that he will link you back, then I’m sorry even if they link back, it is not going to give you any value. It just becomes an excercise that is not going to help in long time.

So essentially speaking, when you realy have to link to someone, because an article he wrote is interesting or you’d like to refer it to your reader, please do go ahead and link to him even if you don’t like his hairstyle.

But never link to someone in the hope that tommorow he will link back to you or send you some money over paypal.

So how often do you check for incoming links to your site? I must admit that I keep an eye on incoming links like a hawk. I believe most people have a special liking to incoming links, and boy, they have all the reasons to. Don’t they?

So how often do you check and where all do you check for incoming links? Do you keep record of them? Do you accept all or do you keep away from some?

I normally get alerted by the Wordpress engine when someone links to me. They come up as track backs on the comments approval area. Most of us would be relying on this method. But is it always relevant and correct? I trust many of us get more than spam links than genuine ones. And especially when there are more “splogs” appearing, it is not surprising that we get linked from them every now and then.

One thing I’ve noted over time is that whenever I use the term “Google” in my post titles, soon after the post is published, I’d get a couple of incoming links, and all of them would be splogs.

Splogs are engineered in such a way that whenever there’s a reference in the blogosphere for a certain set of keywords (like the term Google), they immediately catch hold of the blog and link to it with their automated mechanism. And this many of them time is along the lines of -

Your article title here…
I found this interesting information written by (Tom/Dick/Harry), see original article here(your link)

Well, that’s not what I’m talking about here. Where do you look for incoming links?

1. Google - Search term (link:www.yoursite.com)
2. Yahoo! - Search term (linkdomain:www.yoursite.com)
3. Google blog search - Search term (link:www.yoursite.com)
4. Technorati

Are there any other places that you’d look for incoming links? Any way,the most important guy here is Google. And if you’d like to be alerted whenever someone(who is indexed on Google) links to you, here’s a shortcut.

1. Go to Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts)
2. In the search term field, give (link:www.yoursite.com)
3. In the type field, select “Web” (third option)
4. In the “How often” field, select “As it happens” (second option)
5. In the email field, give in your email.

That’s it. Now whenever, a site that’s indexed on Google links to you, you’ll get an alert mail in your inbox. So you don’t have to go always checking for incoming links on Google. Clever isn’t it?

If there was one thing that you could do to dramatically boost your website traffic, what would it be?

You may go buy a copy of “Click monkeys”, buy the “Ghana Institute’s world famous Traffic Booster software”, or enroll in a “Double your traffic with popups” program. The first one doesn;t even exist, the second one will hack your paypal id and the third one will get your AdSense ads a lifelong ban. Kaboom!

Now, is there something that you can do worthwhile to really boost your traffic by double fold?

Honestly, I don’t think it’s fair to claim anything such. After all we know that there is nothing as “predictable traffic”. If that was the case,then SEO’s like me would’ve given you the exact measure of traffic boost you’ll get if we tweak just the title tag!

So coming to the reality version of things, is there really something that I can do to boost my daily traffic? Yes of course!

Now, this is no magic or “trick” as they call it. It’s sheer hard work. I’ll tell you the short-cut if you are willing to work hard.It worked for me so it should work for you, provided you try.

Step 1 - Subscribe to all those blogs you are interested in. They may be from the same niche you are in or they may be different, that’s not a problem.

What matters is,
- whether the blog authors are popular
- do they reply to comments
- are they likely to get high number of comments and
- do they update regularly

Yea so keep those in mind while subscribing.

Step 2 - Watch out for updates at these blogs in Google reader like  Hawk!!
Do you have a problem doing that? Then you are out of the game. If not, please continue.

Whenever there’s an update in these blogs, be the first to comment. No second no third, be the first!

I know what you are thinking - That’s not easy Mani, there are time differences, there could be others, and the topics may not be interesting, you know there are all these troubles.

Well, my friend, that answers the question why you are not seen a blogstar in the blogosphere!

Had you been the first to comment on the blogs..

- You’d get personal attention from the author.
- You’d get attention from the rest of the commenters.
- You become genuine and passionate blogger.
- You write meaningful comments, not a “I’m doing it just because I have to” thing.
- You’ll get insights on how to write better blogs.

Get the idea? You know that you can’t write great articles like them (the super blogs that you’ve subscribed to), so why not get the maximum out of them with the minimal effort? Makes sense isn’t it?

Some of the blogs that I’d recommend you to subscribe and star commenting firs would be - DailyBlogTips.com, Problogger.net,45n5.com,Copyblogger.com,Bloggingtips.com and Dailyseoblog.com

The inspiration to this article is Amit Agarwal when he “called” me A Rising Blog Star.

One way links, the reward you get for great content and creativity at the blogosphere. You’ll do anything for it isn’t it? (The title was only an eye-catcher, so relax..)

Well, an idea just popped into me, while I was reading Michael Martine’s blog. Michael has a list of testimonials written on one of his sidepanels, and it has links to people who wrote it. It is on the homepage and has excellent screen presence. Get the idea??

Yes, writing testimonials about other bloggers would be one great way to get quality incoming one way links. No expense, no trick, nothing evil!

But what you need to be careful about is,

- Whom you are writing for.
Don’t go around writing testimonials for ever tom,*(beep)*, and harry. Write quality ones for the really good guys.

- Do they accept testimonials?
You can write testimonials only if some one is accepting them isn’t it? Find bloggers who accept testimonials, or who are likely to accept a testimonial.

- Don’t flatter them,but write a testimonial
Don’t simply go ahead and flatter them, it would create a negative image for you. Test their services/read their blog and go for a sincere review. I’m sure many of the professional bloggers would accept honest criticism that will help them grow. Anyone can make out flattery from the rest.

- Ask them a link back
If it’s got to be a win-win situation, ask them for a link back. There’s nothing wrong in it. If they are impressed with your testimonial, they’d be happy to link back.

Hey, anybody care to write a testimonial about DailySEOblog? What ? No takers?

The last two people I met on the internet, asked me this very same question, which got me thinking.

They were curious and one asked me,

Mani,how did you manage to write up all these content?

Other guy told me that he was curious to know if I copied the content from any other site.

Both very interesting questions. I believe I have a duty to clear these doubts to my readers.

Well, to be honest, very honest - I haven’t copied content from any source (website,newspaper,magazine,) at all. In fact, had it been that way, you would’ve seen at least a few hundred more pages on the site. :) 

All the articles you read here are all written by me and are original in thoughts. Well, on the blogosphere, everybody has their own platform and their own voice. So it’s just about how well you raise it. I have been inspired by many, and I think I’ve expressed my gratitude to all of them in the respective posts.

To be frank, writing articles daily isn’t easy at all. But there are a few things that I learned from my experience that help me make it, even today. I’d like to share it with you.

1 - Consistency
Every blogger who is serious about impressing others should be consistent. Consistency should be maintained in the frequency of posts and the quality of articles. You can take deviations once in a while, like writing a steroid article, like a 101 websites list, that is likely to make it to to Digg pages, but that is just garnishing. The basic course is your articles (whatever your niche is) and the quality of them.

To me, SEO writing SEO articles was more like maintaining a journal entry. I was lucky that I never ran out of topic to write an article. In the old times, while I was an SEO learner, I use to experiment with stuff and whatever the result was, I used to write it all down on the blog. That was a neat trick right? You study and you let others show your work at the same time.

2- Personal style
Even though this is something that I am still confused about, many of my readers tell me that they like the articles because they like the style and the way things are rolled out. So I guess, that forms my personal style.
I always assume that I’m talking to a normal person, who is not keen to  listen to the technical jargons, and write the articles catering to him. This works both for me and the reader. I talk to clients daily and this “jargon less” style is much appreciated by many of them. I adopt the same policy here on the blog.

3- Knowing your audience
Well, honestly, if there is anything that I’ve deliberately done to help me make a better blog, then this is it. There are numerous ways to get this done. You can assume things, try out a trial and error method, ask questions to your readers, and most importantly study from your stats. Use any method, but knowing who your real audience is really important as it lets you know what you should deliver. I get many clues from my organic referrals as to what are the contents that are missing in the blog. So I make it a point to write them up if it’s possible.

3- Communicating with readers
First off, let me say that this isn’t something that’s easy, but I love doing it. I’m not keen to talk to each and every reader at the same time, but may be one at a time. It’s not possible to make all of them happy as well. But what’s important is that you communicate to them. Many people ask me questions on email, and this itself gives me clues on what to write on the blog. People are reading your blog to learn something, so deliver it at the shortest time, in the right manner. It’s a simple concept I follow. To help this, talk to the readers.

5- I’m not a preacher I’m a learner like you
I don’t think that if you believe you are a guru or whatever, (giving advice to everybody), is a good idea. I cannot set myself in that frame of mind, it simply doesn’t work out. I prefer to be working along with my clients or the reader, and sit with them to find a solution, rather than sit on the other side spitting out “gyan”.

This is very much effective, as it helps you and the person you are helping. If it was otherwise, only the person I’m helping would benefit. Which is good, but if you have a better way why not try it?

So everyday, when I face roadblocks and bottlenecks during my work, I research on the topic myself, and record all what I’ve learned. Many of the posts that I’ve featured here are my research topics.

6- Forget who’s listening to you, talk to yourself
Now, this is a worst case scenario, I must admit that when I started off blogging there weren’t too many readers at the blog. Just like any other blogger,  I too struggled to get an audience. But at one point of time, I found that instead of wasting time in looking for readers, it’s better to focus my time in writing good articles. So that if at all someone visited your blog, there was enough content for him to browse. So whenever there was no reader at the blog, I’d talk to myself and write up a post. Adding a little bit of decoration to it, the very same post becomes enjoyable to a reader as well.

So those were some crude tips on how you can write articles on your blog too,and pile them up! Keep in mind, it’s all about quality not quantity, which is why I don’t agree with anyone who’ll say that there are lot of articles on this site and I did a good job in that. It’s a process and it’s going on, it’s  just about making sure that the process is enjoyable, not the final product.

Hope it helped you.

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.

Hey did you notice it? Seems like everything in the blogosphere is viral? No, I’m not talking about “i-phone reviews” by someone who even haven’t seen one or “I hate Aglocco because you didn’t pay me ” campaigns ….(Yeah! I made that up).

Did you notice the new “Ad - crazy” syndrome happening?  yeah, poor souls like you and me are spared, this has only got to do with the “ProBloggers” who have sponsors waiting in Queue for an ad-spot.

I first saw John Chow do it, then came in Darren, then John TP, then DailyBlogtips, then my buddy Kevin Bloggingtips. All of them have gone for a site template redesign and opted for a theme with more importance to ads. Particularly the square button (125 x 125)ones. What’s with this now?  

Darren has pulled off AdSense ads completely from his blog. So gone are the days when bloggers picked templates based on how it would accommodate AdSense ads and how the background colours blended with your AdSense ads.

Today we have templates that have 30% of it’s real-estate reserved for sponsored ads. In fact, these ads give them more money than Google Ads. When Google ads give them a dollar or two only when someone is clicking it, these image/banners ads are paid for impressions. And with probloggers enjoying huge traffic, it’s but natural for them to opt for these ads to AdSense.

An issue that’s raised (necessarily or unnecessary you decide) is the effect on user friendliness. It’s a fact that these blogs give more importance to advertising than the content, and this sudden change have even confused some readers. The bloggers argument is that sponsors like to show their ads ‘above the fold’ and hence they had to push the content to the lower half pane. Fair enough! John Chow has gone to extreme that almost all of this above fold region is either ads or promotion.

Another argument from the bloggers is that - regular readers always use a reader to read the posts. So the ads won’t bother them much. While the sponsors are targeting on organic traffic and “stoppers-by” from search engines, this is an excellent strategy where the ads are delivered only to the right kind of audience.

Now, that all probloggers are into “Ad-crazy” syndrome, I don’t think it’s far when we have Problogger and JohnChow look alike free themes on Wordpress.

Are you going for a redesign? Not me (atleast, until I have sponsors queuing up) !

I’m back from Searchcamp and missing it badly.

I’d like to give my hugs to Kiruba and The Knowledge Foundation team, for their efforts in making this happen.

It was indeed a pleasure to meet many professionals and entrepreneurs under one roof. Many faces, young and vibrant, their every word.. wisdom to me.

I’ll have to name a few here for..I don’t know why.. but I have to.( In no particular order )

• Ashwin from OrganicApex - He’s a young chap who’s the CEO to a company which has got many branches in India and employs quite a good number of people. I wouldn’t have know about this wizard had I not attended the SearchCamp.
• Kiruba of course. Been a fan of his, met him at the searchcamp only to know that I’m one among thousands. A gem of a person.
• Praveen from Sulekha.
• Balaji from Sify.
• Madan, Prasanna and Rajesh who took me to a movie and made me feel at home in Chennai. I felt and salute the “Chennai spirit” in them
• Chetan, whom I’d known only as a well-reputed member of the DP forums, came out to be a medical student. A very pleasant modest wizard in money making.
• Chandrasekhar - Another amazing guy.
• Satish who came all the way from Vizag.
• Sasidhar, the man from Google who enjoyed a typical “Googler’s day at conference” getting grilled at the Q&A sessions.
• Mayank Gupta - Another money making guru in the making.
• Sojan from Chennai - Saw the true spirit of SEO learner in him.
• Tilak - An awesome young chap from the blogosphere.
• Rajesh who rushed home to pick his daughter and return so that he can attend my session.
• And all the great ones who managed to make me write down my number and contact on paper.

I still have some very clear faces that I’ll recognize ..but unfortunately I’m not very good in remembering names. So please let me know if I’ve missed you off the list..you know sometimes you need to remind your friends that you are one. Please feel free to do that.

If you are looking for snaps from the SearchCamp. Here it is.