There are a lot of blogging talents around, that we often over look just because we are so used to think about our own blog only. Nirmal TV is an active blogger in the blogosphere here in India. His blog Life Rocks 2.0 features articles on technology, tips and tricks, blogging, tutorials and the internet ! I’ve been very impressed with his socializing skills in the Indian Arena of blogs. His blog receives on an average 20 comments on every article. Pretty cool that is!
I’m still unsure how he’s able to make others comment on his articles. However one thing that I noticed is that Nirmal himself makes it a point on other blogs too. And most of the commenters on his blog are reciprocal commenters. Which is not bad at all.

When a first time visitor comes to his blog, they’ll see a lot of comments and gets a good impression about him. And he’s likely to grab his feed. This is a great lesson to learn from Nirmal.

Nirmal is up-to-date on technology within his reach, and often strikes a point blogging about it prior to anybody else. Clever! Something to be noted about Nirmal’s articles is that he churns out lot of “Numbered lists”. Like Top 10 themes, Top 10 plugins and the like which gets dugged and stumbled upon by his readers which in turn gives him lot of traffic. Interestingly, Nirmal prefers lists with odd numbers like 7 and 9 rather than 5 and 10, which are very common on the internet.

Apart from all these stunts, Nirmal is out to grab more organic traffic online by harnessing the power of SEO. He’s approached me for a quote too. Too clever!

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

Photo courtesy Sunset Chaser

This is a bit off topic - hope you will cope up with it.

Blog Action Day is a new phenomenon happening at the blogosphere. Well, it’s for a noble cause so, I’m in.

On Oct 15, bloggers around the globe will blog about a common topic - Going green!

Well honestly, I’m somone who likes to think green be it at my home or at office. Here are a few things that I do. ( Excuse me for the self-promotion here, really not itended but they want me to )

• I walk to office and save on fuel and emission.
• I take the stairs instead of the lift.
• My office uses eco friendly furniture and less paper.
• I prefer paper bags to plastic.

So that’s my little bit to help the event.  Hope you guys will also support the event with your posts on how you go green.

More info on the event here

Cheers all !

One of the traffic building methods in the blogosphere is commenting!

Oh! Great Mani, I’ve heard it a million times from others already!!(Did you just say that to yourself?)

I know, i know - you’ve been commenting around at blogs all the time, and all it gave was that tiny bit of increase in traffic - after all that eye-straining and spell checks.
I completely agree.

On a normal day, i spent a major part reading blogs - for “inspiration”, another few hours writing on my blog, and the rest of the time researching and doing my work(Daamn.That’s very less!).

It’s not surprising - i can’t write more than a few valid comments on a blog. First - you got to read the article thoroughly to write a valid comment. And i don’t have the time to do that - everytime i read an article, i’m impatient and is more likely to click on another link and surf along..
I’ve seen comments like -

Good post there - Keep up the good work!

But isn’t that spam? It does not make any sense. I don’t think any author would take such comments.

Okay - so what’s the point here talking about comments?
Today on - I’m going to allot a day a week only for commenting on other blogs. And I’ve chosen friday.

Reasons for a friday.
- I dress casual.
- I’m in a jolly mood.
- Saturday is around.
- I have some lovely plans for the weekend and..
- I can see people talking

Stupid reasons they may be, but i’m going on commenting spree on Fridays. So if you have a great blog, please do let me know.I’m starving for quality articles…

I know that title would bring a frown on your face!

- It’s all over the internet Mani, what are Google images for?

Well, well i know i know! Let me explain.

In India, this is not a popular concept, but elsewhere it is. I’m talking about stock photography and royalty free images.
In the US, UK and rest of the world (excluding some countries like china,India etc) images can be used only with the photographer’s agreement.
Be it on online, editorial or any other use. There are stock photo agencies that buy the pictures from photographers and provide online stores for users to buy them.
As you buy the images, the photographers are given a percentage of the sale.
There are many affordable online stock photography agencies like istockphoto.com dreamstime.com that offer you images from as low as US $1.

But this is of no interest to us unless you want to spent a few bucks for every image on your posts. What we are interested is free royalty free images to use on every blog posts.Before we go into the sources to get free royalty free images, let’s see how this topic affect us bloggers?

Okay,so if you are in India or China or such countries where the licensed use of images, are not popular, you can manage to get free images from Google or Live image search.Fine.But what about others? Do you find images from google or ask for permission from the photographer/agency?

I think it’s fair to be asking the photographer permission to use it on your blog. you can very well reciprocate the favour by linking back to his site through a credit line.
Many a times, this results in email exchange delays and other bottle necks -hell you don’t post the article because you haven’t recieved the permission yet.

There is huge potential for stock photo agencies here - if there is a stock photo agency that will provide us bloggers with images from as low as US $1(squeeze it down even), then considering we have around 15.5 million blogs, imagine the revenue that could be generated from image use on blogs?

Darren says that he normally gets images sent to him by companies so finding images for new products is not a problem for him.I’m assuming that might be the case with Gizmodo or Techcrunch. But what about the rest of blogosphere?

Well, luckily we have a few options here -

1 - Stock Exchange.
These guys offer free royalty free images for any use. They have a pretty impressive collection of images as well. Good enough for a amateurs but not professionals.They have many smudged and brushed images also, so you may want to keep away from them but select the best ones.
They don’t want you to link back for credit or anything of that sort but from the number of backlinks they’ve got it’s clear that anyone who uses their image will link back to them.

2 - Morgue file.
The morguefile contains photographs freely contributed by many artists to be used in creative projects by visitors to the site. To acknowledge the artist’s accomplishments, we ask that you credit the photographer when possible. They have an impressive collection of images too.

3 - Indexstock
These guys have an impressive collection of images across many categories. they may not be hi-reosultion ones but fit enough to use on blogs.They are one of my personal favourites.

4 - Free large photos
This is a free images site that provides great collection of places and people photography. You have to link them back in order to use the image in your blog.

So, you have all these resources where from you can collect images of good quality for blogging purpose.The advantage you have over using Google images is that you know exactly whether the photographer/website need be credited or not and that you get good quality images.

And it is a good habit to credit the site where from you have used the image so that they know that you appreciate it. Also, asking the photographer as to whether you can use the image on your blog is also a good idea, and when it get’s frustrating you have all these free resources to try.
Images courtesy

You might have come across this topic on various other tech/seo blogs, but what prompted me to write this article is that - they all seem too techie to me, so i’m guessing it’s not reached all the bloggers yet. And this is my attempt to reach all the non-techie bloggers on what are Google supplemental results and how they are affecting an ordinary blogger..

By ordinary bloggers(no offense please) i mean passionate bloggers, who wouldn’t want to tweak the HTML code for search engine optimization but who doesn’t want to get into trouble as well due to any ignorance on SEO.

So, what are the Google Supplemental results?

When you search for a term(keyword) on google, you get results from many websites on the same topic/term.Right?
Suppose, there is a website called cats-dogs.com. It has information on “cats” as well as “dogs”. So when you search for cats, the pages on the site with information on cats are shown on the results page. but when you search for dogs the site does not come up at all.

Or simpler yet - Google sometimes think that some of the pages on your website(here cats) is not as important as other pages(dogs) on the same website. They are seen with different weightage and pages with less or no importance are kept in a separate “folder” called supplemental results - which will not be shown on the google’s results page at all.

So in the above example, if there are two pages cats.html and dogs.html on the same website, dogs.html will not be considered at all to be

shown when some one is searching for “dogs” on google, while cats.html will be shown for searches on “cats”.

So two types of pages on a site - 1) Normal Index and 2) Supplemental index. Get the idea?

Now, if you want to see how many pages on your site are in the supplemental results category, just use this query at the google search.

site:www.yourblog.com *** -view (note that there is blank space before and after those three stars)

Every search result that appears on the results page now has this green tag on it which says - supplemental results.
Now you have an idea on what pages in your site will not be considered to be shown on the google search results.

Now, there’s nothing to panic. Having supplemental results on google is but natural. For example, if you check with the above query on how many pages are supplementary on google, you will be surprised. Search for site:www.google.com *** -view

What causes supplementary pages on your blog?

1 - Google thinks there is duplicate content on your blog.
It needn’t be true but if Google thinks that some of the pages in your site are having the same content, they may place them in the supplemental results.

2 - Short posts or posts with less content.
If you have posts that are very short, it is likely that google cannot make out the real content of the page, and when you have several short posts, then it is more likely that they are labelled as supplementary pages, because google simply doesn’t know what your pages content is.

3 - Template generated pages.
This is applicable to websites that generate many pages using the same template and very less change in content among thm.Since the same template is used, the content will be repeated on every single page.

4 - Non usage of meta tags.
If you haven’t used meta tags properly on your blog, bots will have trouble detecting their content from the body alone, so they may push those pages to the supplemental index.

5 - Poor linking structure.
This may be the most significant point out of all.
If you have a chunk of template generated pages or some pages that you didn’t care to link since you posted them, may be ignored due to the fact that they are redundant and have not been linked(external and internal). For this reason, google thinks these pages are less important and pushes them to supplemental index.

6 - Inequal distribution of PR.
Another important one. As i have said in another post, internal linking is very important because, you don’t want your valuable content to be ignore just because you don’t promote them yourself. It is quite natural that the wonderful piece of information you wrote in your early blogging days had not been read by anyone, so it’s your responsibility to link to it in one of your new posts, so that people read it.
This also distributes your blogs page rank in an equal fashion to all the posts, new and old. If you miss to do this, certain pages would have higher PR and some less PR.
Since google sees a pages importance on the basis of PR, make sure that none of your pages is deprived of Page Rank.

So those six points shows us that yes - supplemental pages are quite natural and any site can get it(even google).

Let’s see how we can get out of this, or stay away from getting supplemental index on your blog.

1 - Practice good internal linking.
Make sure even your oldest post is linked once in another post, and read by users.Maintain a column of best posts from your archives on the sidebar for quick access.

2 - Get quality inbound links to your blog from other sites.
This is the most repeated statement on the blogosphere these days - Write quality content rich articles and gain incoming links. Well, nobody says how patience is required for this and nobody can guarantee you anything. But hey, it is an important point.

3 - Categories
When you post articles, make sure that you don’t tag them into more than one category. If you do this way, it creates duplicate entry in each category and the chances of those pages landing in the supplemental index is high.

4 - Don’t encourage duplicate content
When you post an article, make sure that it’s not a repetition of what you had posted earlier. If it is, make the necessary changes in it’s text content so that it seems different from the old article. May be add more of a different keyword in it.

So, that brings us to the end of this article - What is supplemental index, why does it happen and how can you get of it or stay away from it. I hope this was a easy to understand article and not as techie as many other articles on it is. So check today, if you have any supplemental index pages on your blog, and pull your socks up to fight them out.

References - Matt Cutts Search Engine guide Google groups Seobook

Here’s Part 1 if you missed it.There, we talked about your own domain name, traffic, related content and space.

Let’s go further deep.

5 - Do you network?
Are you the type who socializes at the blogosphere? If not, start doing it today. Cos, that’s the new mantra of blogging. Although you may have an excellent blog with exclusive articles, it’s no good if you are a loner and you don’t link to people around.By networking i mean linking to others, participating in other blogs, commenting and the like.In short, you have to interact with people around, accept them, review them, comment and make sure your posts are read.Without networking you are cut off from the loop and you stand no chance to win the game.

6 - Incoming links from neighbors?
Incoming links are not just page rank boosters. They are votes given by others. Only if they find you reliable will they ask someone else to visit your blog - else they are taking a risk. In order to make sure that you have a blog where people are ready to click on your ads, make sure you are linked from those blogs that are already playing well.You know the blogs that are doing well in monetization, so keeping a smooth flow from them to yours(by getting links through their articles) will ensure that the same kind of enthusiasm will be maintained by the visitors in clicking the ads on your site, just like the way they do it on their site(provided other factors are in place).

7 - Target?
Study your target inside out. Who they are, where they are from, what is their age group and what are the pages they visit most on your site and which are the ones they don’t.This will help you to identify the kind of ads that will be accepted by your visitors. Suppose the most visited page on your article is your about page, you might want to consider giving more ad-space there.If you have a target audience of the age group 16-22, you might want to select affiliate ads that cater to them.

8 - Credibility factor
This comes in as a result of many factors combined. You are responsible to create this on your own, there is very little that others can do.This counts right from the attitude you show in posts, language, contact details provided on blog, how you interact with others, replying to comments/emails, being consistent to an idea and the like. Viewers can easily make out any deviation from the above factors and will result in instant dying of your readership. While on the other hand, if you have readers who trust you and think you are reliable, they will click on the ads you show too.

Blogging is a phenomena today. No doubt about that. User generated quality content, networking and folksonomy has become the essence of blogging. And this is what makes it a phenomena. There are no juniors and seniors in the game as many believe. According to me, everyone who manages to generate quality content is a star - irrespective of whether he started his blog one month back or 3 years.

It’s disappointing when there are categories and lists in blogging. There are bloggers who are categorized as A-List and “Pro - bloggers”, while others are “Z-List” and newbies. According to me this is rubbish, because somebody categorized them on the basis of
- who’s making more money
- who’s got the biggest network
- and who started the first.

None of them is a genuine scale to measure the quality of a blogger.

If it’s making money, then only the ones who managed to initiate an affiliate network, or only the one who managed to make 1000 MFA articles(by employing 5 copy writers), will manage to be the top bloggers. Or if it’s about “starting it first” then those who started blogging in the last 2-3 years are losers.Right?

These days every second blog you come across is a “How to make money online” blog or a technology blog. It’s anyone’s guess that if everybody blogger get’s a 5 digit check from Google, then there’s definitely something wrong in the system. Either there are fraudulent clicks or even if they were genuine, the advertisers should be suffering in their ROI figures(more clicks-no buys).

Okay, let’s ignore the money part - it’s a boring game. I saw this interesting comment on bloggingtips, in my article. It was from a gentleman called Dollar Bear who was frustrated that every other blog he came across was a “Tips to money making one” and clearly he was not interested. He says - I’m not in that group. I must appreciate his statement. It is the voice of a thousand plus bloggers who are sick of the money making blogging thing.

They want to blog because they need to tell the world a different story about something we all have turned a blind eye to, or they want to think differently about an axiom - or they simply have a new business idea. Shouldn’t such kind of talen be recognised and appreciated? What if he too jumped into the bandwagon and wasted his time trying to monetise his site, thinking about the ad-sizes, referrals, links and stuff? That would corrupt his mind - would it not?

The blogging community is a network - the “blogosphere” as it’s called. There are many think-tanks out there who want to make a point.
Any sort of classification and labelling, be it based on the money, or the popularity only corrupts the idea, and should not be entertained. I’d be happy to listen to your thoughts on this..

If you don’t know John Chow - He’s one of the most popular blogger who writes about making money online, posts yummy pictures of dishes he had the other day at the restaurant, posts pictures of those snazzy cars and yet somehow manages to boast of a fat check he made that month end with his experiments with money making tools online.

He’s been running a Link back offer quite recently by which you can get a free PR4 link as well as some traffic if you review his blog and tag him with “Make Money Online” anchor text.

A bit of history here - John Chow had been running an IM Ad campaign on popular blogs like Problogger.net using Google AdWords and I’ve been doing the same thing on Labnol as well. Legend has it that i had copied his idea.

Well, as for me, the PR 4 thing was not at all attractive, what was actually attractive is that Traffic he would give me if he had reciprocated my link. So i did a quick review here on March 21. Before the post, i had infact checked out some already linked posts on his website so that i made no mistake. Since then, I’ve been watching regularly his “Reciprocation Links” - but in vain.

Wonder why John missed my blog linking to him? I see that in the current batches on his site, blogs that have reviewed him after i have is shown up - which leaves me to assume that my link is ignored.

Curious - probably John didn’t like me call him “Evil guy with huge head” - like Mubin did(who is already linked back by John!).

These are the scenarios when the blogosphere get’s rusty with poor linkers and people with no community spirit. Sad.