Rooturaj's Blog

Here is the Ultimate list of SEO forums for you to learn the sacred scientific art of Search Engine optimization. (lolz Sacred is it?)

Warning : For all you spammers who are looking for lists of forums to gain signature links. Get lost and get a life.

What you are supposed to be doing with my list. I will tell you how each forum stands today. How strong is their SEO community and how good are their spam fighting moderators and admins. My final words – Learn and dont spam. Search for something in the forums before you ask stupid questions that have been answered 100 times or more before.

SEO Chat Forums (http://forums.seochat.com)
It now belongs to DevShed and they have (as people often point out) gone a bit far in monetizing the forum. Nevertheless it a solid platform and the community, though small, is very strong. I am a regular there.

SEO.com Forum (http://forums.seo.com)
That was the first ever forum I ever joined. Things turned a bit pale there but nevertheless I learned loads there. Dan Sculz and KingPin where the best I remember from there.

Digital Point SEO Forum
Its heck popular and hell active but lots of rif raf questions from newbies and less of advanced discussions. I am a member there but not so active though. Don’t know anyone in particular there but I have found some good freelancers to work with. Thats the DP advantage.

Search Guild
I remember this was started by Chris Riding. Some people claim it to be their most preferred forum. I have been there once for a while but could not continue there any longer.

SEO Guy SEO Forums
The SEO guy used to be a top member of SEO chat until the mis-understanding came up. So he went on to create the new SEO forum and many good people from SEO chat followed him there. I haven’t yet been there though.  But I will definitely be there soon. Just need to find a bit more time.

A few days ago I installed Chitika Ads to this blog of mine after getting approved by Chitika.  I had to wonder aloud scratching my head why the ads were not being displayed.  Was I doing something wrong? Did I miss some part of the ad code? I am a programmer so I know when some part of the code is missing so that last doubt could be ruled away.

After a deep search I could not find a proper guiding post that could answer my query.

Finally I decided to dig deep into the mystery so I took my Pipe and put on my Hat to do a La Holmes. Lol. Here is my report and I hope it helps you doing justice to your Chitika ads.

Lets Assume you already have registered with Chitika and have the ad code ready with you. If not Click here to get Chitika .  Make sure you have the right ad format and you pasted in a proper place on your website/blog in a fashion so that space you provide on the sites is never smaller than the original Ad size.

Now to view if the Ads are active or not add #chitikatest=keyword at the end your site url in address bar and hit enter.
for Example to see if the ads are active on my site I will use one of the following URLs :
http://rooturaj.com/#chitikatest=technology
http://rooturaj.com/society-nature/einsteins-riddle-complete-solution-to-einsteins-puzzle/#chitikatest=puzzles games

Now when you check your url with the #tag you should be able to view some stuff in the ad space. This means you Chitika ads are already active and ready to roll.

Now this is what I see for after using #chitikatest on my own blog.

So why does it not show on my website without those #tags ?

That is because  displays ads for Search Engine Traffic only, that too primarily from US or Canada. If the User arrived on your blog/site from the search engines then you should see those ads. Else they stay empty or Collapse as per your preference while creating the add unit. You could also prefer to show Non Targeted Filler ads from Chitika network. More on Chitika

Now this is some thing unique I discovered today.

I have a squidoo lens 10 KILLER ways to promote your Squidoo lens which was not being indexed. So I was doing a search for its title and I came across the following results. Now there was some thing which came as a surprise.  Look at the snapshot below.

Links in google site Description ?? Hows that possible?

Notice the third result and its description. There is a link within the description that has been picked from the sites navigation content. Squidoo has an auto generated Navigation feature that links to different sections of your lens. Now this seems to be a bug at Google’s end. Unless they have decided to add this new feature to the description content. But if the latter be true they are not linking to proper places on the page in question.

I will definitely be raising this issue with Google but I thought I would share this with my fellow Programmer, Bloggers and SEOs to find out some more about this. Have you ever come across something like this before?

Update : Looks like a bug. Isha, SEO form Mumbai did some further digging and reports it to be a Firefox error. I did some cross checking but found the error IE6 too. So I am almost convinced its a google problem.

Recently while working for a Popular Ratings and Reviews site I learned a lot about various types of Web Directories out there. I had to find and analyze various local business listing sites and industry specific directories. If you are a SEO or a webmaster with some idea about Internet Marketing you would know two things for sure : -

1. Every so called internet marketer would tell you directory submission will help you boost your search engine ranking.
2. Every expert SEO will tell you Directory submissions are a waste of time and only a couple of them are worth the time.

So it becomes mind-boggling for newbie promoters to decide what to do with Directory Submissions. The latest trend is SEO friendly Web directories. When you say ‘latest trend’ that means a lot of people are now starting to mention the term without even knowing what makes a Directory SEO friendly.

So I thought I would share my thoughts with my readers on this subject –

How to find if a directory is SEO Friendly?

I am going to be brief. So I am listing down my thoughts as points.

• The Directory should provide a direct dofollow link. No javascript window.open or server-side redirects. Well we can accept 301 redirects to some extent.
• Your Listing page should be indexed regularly and therefore should be easily reachable for the search engines. It would be really awesome if your listing can be reached from the home page in 3-4 clicks.
• The site should have a aggressive linking structure. You should be linked from the category / subcategory / locality / tag pages which generally attract the maximum visits and carry most weight in terms of authority and Page Rank.
• Page Rank of the Directory does matter what ever other suggestion you might have heard. Make sure not just the Home page the category pages have good PR.  Anything above 4 is welcome. But remember that the PR is on a logarithmic scale so the difference between PR5 and PR6 is exponentially higher than the difference between PR4 and PR5.
• Pagination is a major woe. Some of the directories have thousands of results to be displayed for a single search or category. In that case they have to break the results into pages and display them separately. Now your job is to make sure these sub pages are indexed as well.
• Check the directory’s domain authority and the page authority of some of its most popular category pages. That should give you an idea of the value it hold for you.
• Finally make sure the directory is popular. It should have decent monthly traffic and should be useful to the visitors. You may try some traffic crunching service like compete or alexa.

I hope that helps you in some way of other in finding a proper SEO friendly web directory.

Hola webmaster… since you are here I assume you are looking for a solutions to redirect duplicate looking and sounding pages on your website to a global format. In the next 3 minutes you are going to do exactly that. Read on…

By the way did you know search engines see www.domain.com , domain.com and domain.com/index.php as three separate pages. So when the search engine arrives on the site it get confused.

SE Bot: What the hell? Which one is the right URL? Ok let me pick one which ever i think is good.

What you should do? You need to 301 redirect all the versions to one global version.

Ok enough Rambling Mr Pattanaik, tell me how to do it.

Well yeah. I use the htaccess method in apache servers. Here is how to do it for your website using htaccess.
Step 1: Create an HTACCESS file. Open notepad save the file as .htaccess …thats it.
Step 2: Add this code to the file in editor.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Step 3: Thats all. Upload the file to your root directory of the domain. Dont worry its not a virus or spam bot I am asking you to upload.

Now Share this post if you find it helpful.

Now News Wire dropped a bomb yesterday declaring that “Google is planning to enter SEO Business”. But they just forgot to pack some explosives into that bomb. The result of that crazy post by Serena Shaper0 c was that half the SEO world got perturbed real bad. Questions flew everywhere and Facebook and Twitter went crazy with Serena too? How can you dare make such bid claims without valid proofs? The SEOs may be mystics but they are not dumb.

Funny thing is that some people will believe anything they read. They dont even bother to cross check the validity of the claims made by the other person. So I took some time to dig out the fact behind this all. First I arrived at this Google Forum post where a concerned SEO wanted an answers from professional whether Google is really planning to kill our profession? Similarly our dear old Matt Cutts clarified this on his twitter account.

Apparently google did post something like this on 1st April and we know how to deal with such big announcements. Remember BBC once claimed with an online show on April fools day about the improving harvest of Spaghetti noodles where europeans were plucking noodles from trees?  Ha ha… So our funny reporter found the article some 27 days latter and lost her brains over it.

Hey You...its a April Fools Joke

The final product is that we have the hoax circulating the whole web and spreading like hell fire.

Just out of curiosity I searched the term “Search Engine” on Google. I was actually testing if Google returned google.com for the term “search engine”. This is what I got. (see snapshot below)

Wow, according to Google, Bing is the No One Search Engine on the planet. Interesting, eh?

Bing Is King - Google

This was the result on google India. There were different results on Google.com.

So to what extent are these listings valid? Shall we take that as the real results? I do a wee bit of SEO so I ask from the SEO angle. Is it possible that Bing could have mustered more backlinks than yahoo and Google for the keyword “search engine”. I wonder.

What does Google want here? May be they feel shy suggesting their own name when someone asks them ‘which is the best search engine around’.

Well there is always the obvious fact that we must consider here. Since the search is being made on Google the user is aware of Google. So the result google.com looses relevance. But that does not answer the question? Is this factor included in the algorithm? If no, then these are filtered results with the previously mentioned factors included.

But if you want to filter yourself then go off completely. What does it mean when google.co.in and google.com feature on the next page of results after www.123khoj.com and www.mamma.com . I say these results are strange. What do you say?

With the launch of BING, Microsoft’s new search engine some people have become highly optimistic about it. In particular those who did not manage to get good SERP rankings for their keywords in Google. Now with the merger of Yahoo search and Bing WWW would see bing as the single largest challenger of Google for the place of world’s most popular search engine. Well I don’t see this as an age heralded early. The combined forces of Yahoo and MSN used to control a fourth of Search engine market. Yahoo used to be the second, behind Google. It remains to be seen how well will Bing do. Will the market share rise of the ardent Yahoo followers switch over to Google?

As far as BING goes I do like some features of the SERPs. To stay up to date with the happenings I joined the webmaster’s forum at BING. You would not believe the support they provide out there totally sucks. There are a bunch of Rag Tag web master who, like parrots, recite a line or two for every query you post. The official responses are not very encouraging either. Experts are no where to be spotted. What ever you ask related to indexing, algorithms, delay in caching, geo location errors, ranking etc etc here are some answers you would invariably get.

1. BING is new so it will take some time to index.
2. BING is slow so you have to wait till your site is updated.
3. Submit your site map and URL to web master tools
4.Get more back links if you are not indexed.

I was so pissed up with the BING being SLOW thing that I even posted this back on the forum for the web master and Admins to see : -
What use is a “SLOW Thing” to anyone but the snail. If this continues, then the world would start using BING as a synonym for SLOW. Like this ..
The Traffic was very BING today.
Hurry up mate, you are BINGing down the group.
Let me know your experiences with BING web master tools or forums.