Matt Cutts explaining about directory quality
By arin2u | October 7, 2007
Topics: Internet Marketing, Search Engines | 13 Comments »
Few days back I went through DP forums and found Matt explaining about the quality of directories. The basis of judging the quality of a directory seems quite logistical to me. But I wondered how google is achieving it. I agree that Matt and his bots are smart and intelligent enough. But I also believe everything can’t be automated.
Do they use a manual editor to scan all the directories to check the following criterias?
“Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.”
“If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.”
I know you are feeling worried and even I’m too. :-S
Regarding this comment,
What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
All I can say, there are lots of directories available in the web (newly launching also) with a sole objective of manipulating links and website traffics, earning through ads etc. We need to be on the safe side while submitting in those directories:
1) Check for authentic page rank of the site. I used "authentic" because webmasters use fake pagerank.
2) Check for the number of quality backlinks for the directory in yahoo.
3) Check for quailty of websites listed in the same or relevant category based on your website theme or topic.
4) And last of all, check if the directory follows a proper review process (not automatic listings) to list your website.
Nothing is a rule of thumb in SEO but sticking to above rules may benefit your website as google thinks the websites that passed through this test/review are really good websites and can be ranked higher in the SERPs.
Technorati Tags: quality of directories and Matt, Matt Cutts explanation, Arindam
Purpose or need of URL redirection
By arin2u | September 23, 2007
Topics: Tech Talks | 8 Comments »
Today one of my friend knocked me and informed that he is very happy to get one referral link to his new website but when he types the url of page (from where he got the link) and presses return/enter key, he finds that the page url changes from http://www.example.com/ to http://www.example.com/root/home/. He was shocked to notice the unexpected change in the url. My friends, this is simply an url redirection.
He raise the question
why webmasters uses URL redirection
Possible reasons
Human Error: A trend is observed that people tend to forget big domain names and often end up in typing the wrong one. They also make typing mistake. So taking into consideration the human forgetfulness and error, often webmasters use short/simpler form of urls for redirection to the original url of the website, thus keeping the website traffic.
Moving a site to a new domain: If a webmaster wants to change his domain name say for specific business reason, he can use url redirection to keep his visitors in his website. It is quite possible that his website has got many incoming links from other websites or many people have bookmarked his websites. So he will set a redirection to his new url without loosing visitors. Search engines with also detect the new url.
To balance Traffic load or bandwidth usage: Webmasters often redirect url to a less traffic site in order to reduce the traffic load or website bandwidth usage of the existing high traffic site.
Search engine manipulation: Webmasters try to show popular search terms on page to search engines but redirect their website visitors to a different page. They often try to steal the page rank of one page and use it on the redirected page.
N.B.: Search engines now a days become smarter to identify such manipulations and take necessary actions (reduce ranks or ban) with the websites that employ such techniques.
Technical needs: Web tech guys use descriptive parameters in the urls like session information, transaction route etc for running applications properly. That’s why you may notice that the url is getting changed keeping the content same.
These are the reasons why webmasters use url redirection. I mailed all the above reason to him. Hope he’ll be satisfied. Do you like this info?
Technorati Tags: url redirection, site redirection, domain redirection, arindam
Social Media - a brief idea
By arin2u | September 16, 2007
Topics: Internet Marketing | 10 Comments »
Social Medias in the internet have become a good way of marketing your product and services and you can target huge traffic received by some of those kinds of social websites. It is a big innovation in the world of web technology that helps people to share content, knowledge, opinions, thoughts and experiences, medias (images, audio, video) among themselves. Now if I ask you to define “Social Media”, it will be a tougher job for you to define it in a comprehensive way. Here the question comes
“What is social media?”
Let me give you the working definition. Social Media can be best understood as a group of new kind of online media which share all or most of the following characteristics:
- Community Participation - People from different castes and religions with a common objective and interest form community and participate in various related discussion.
- Open platform - Anyone can access content and use it without any barrier.
- Conversational - People have conversation on various topics and put their individual thought.
- Communication and connectivity - Most medias are well connected through links and combine themselves with different kinds of medias in one place.
Different kinds of Social Media available in the web
The most popular kinds of social media available in the web are content communities, blogs, social networks, forums, wikis, podcasts etc.
Content Communities organize and share particular kinds of content For example, flicker shares photos, del.icio.us shares bookmark links, youtube shares videos.
Blogs are online journals where you can share your views and thoughts. It has become the most popular social media now a days. Your most recent entries come at the top of your blog.
Social Networks allow people to build personal web pages and then connect with friends to share contents and also communicate with them. Myspace is the best example of a big social network.
Forums are the place of online discussion on certain topics or interest. For example, Ubuntu Forums is a help and support forums for ubuntu linux.
Wikis websites allow people to add or edit content or information where contents or information act as a communal document. Online encyclopaedia is the best example of wiki based website.
Podcasts websites make audio and video files available by subscription through services like Apple iTunes.
Hope the above information will give you brief idea on the concept of social media. I will try to document the websites category wise in my next posts. If we can create a network of 8-10 people who will be solely working in those websites, we will be able to redirect lots of visitors to our websites.
Technorati Tags: social media, social marketing, arindam
Little bit about Mod_Rewrite
By arin2u | September 2, 2007
Topics: Tech Talks | 3 Comments »
Mod_Rewrite is a rewrite engine or web server software of Apache HTTP server and is used for rewriting web page url at the server level giving the final output to the user. This rewrite engine is mainly used for making the web page url more user and search engine friendly.
If you provide users with meaningful urls that really describes the content of that page, then it will be easier for them to keep in mind. Moreover search engines also find it easy to index pages whose urls have been rewritten using mod-rewrite.
To run the mod-rewrite, you should have the mod_rewrite module installed on your Apache server. To check whether you have mod_rewrite installed, you need to create a file named phpinfo.php, write and save it on your server. Then search for “mod_rewrite” and you will find it in the “Apache loaded section”. If you miss that, you can ask for it to your hosting company.
The Mod_rewrite rule is written in .htaccess file. The .htaccess (hypertext access) file is a text file which contains Apache directives. Any directives that you use will be applicable to the directory where .htaccess files resides and all the sub-directory under it.
The structure of rewrite rule
RewriteRule Pattern Substitution [OptionalFlags]
Where,
RewriteRule is just the name of the command. Pattern is a regular expression, which will be applied to the current url. Any back references or server variable names can be used in substitution. OptionalFlags are the only mandatory part in the RewriteRule. The flags should be written within square brackets and separated by comma. You can find full list of flags in the Apache mod_rewrite manual.
Technorati Tags: mod rewrite, .htaccess, arindam,
How to fix MX record for Google apps?
By arin2u | August 17, 2007
Topics: Tech Talks | 1 Comment »
Yesterday morning while checking my website mails, I didn’t found any new mails. Later I discovered mails have stop coming to our mail server. I checked thoroughly by sending mails from office mail account and found no new mails. Then I found out that the MX record of our domain has changed.
What is MX record?
It is the ‘mail exchange’ record abbreviated as ‘MX record’. It is basically an entry in the DNS (domain name system) record which is responsible for handling emails for a domain name. It specifies how mails should be routed with their priority. For details, you can go through this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MX_record .
How I checked the MX record?
I went to http://www.dnsstuff.com/ and checked the DNS record for our website and found the wrong one. We have set up google apps account for our website. Google has the documentation for changing the MX record here https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomainname/SetupMXInstructions
(you need to be logged in with google apps admin account for your domain).
This was the MX entry that I required to change
ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 1
ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 5
ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 5
ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 10
ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 10
ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 10
ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 10
How to change the MX record?
Contact your hosting company (you can open a support ticket) support
members asking them to change the MX record as shown above. They will
do it for you. Soon I found that mails are working fine for our website. 
I learnt the procedure and just wanted to share with you.
Technorati Tags: fix MX record, google apps, arindam
This is Arindam aka arin2u. I love blogging and I do it in simple ways. I like learning new things. SEO, internet marketing are my niche fields.
