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.

For all you link building professionals, website owners mystified by SEO, Newbie SEOs and others I am taking time to review another link building service. Generatebacklinks.com

I was on facebook and their ad banner caught my attention. I know almost all cheap SEO packages available are total crap. But it helps you to know what people in your industry are doing to lure more clients – so that you might find the loopholes and improve upon them.

So I follow the banner to their website and take a look the packages which are no doubt very attractive. Then I notice the Live chat option and give it a try. Someone named Jeany comes up to assist me. I make it from the language that she/he is an Indian compatriot even though the site is Western (or so they claim). Halfway through the chat I confirm that too.

I ask them how many different domains will the links be from and what kind of links. To which the agent answers 2000 links from 2000 different domains and all of them forum signatures. That sounds very generous to me for an investment of 10$.

Now I ask them about samples and the agent promptly sends me a link.
http://thecity.sfsu.edu/~csc313/bb/profile.php?id=90670
I see the link and jump – wow .edu links. Could I have asked for anything more? So Happily I say – ” I am bookmarking the site and I will come back to close the deal latter”.

But but Butt …..

My enthusiasm dies out as I go into my second phase of link analysis. I open that link and its a bloody profile page. With almost zero content which I am sure will be duplicated over 2000 similar pages.

I check the page for an index on Google and behold nothing there as well.
So I go back to the chat and the same agent comes up. Upon my enquiry if there will be any real forum posts or just profile links she/he says just those profile links. I explain how they are shitty for SEO as they are not indexed and she says many of their clients are benefiting from the service so I should also be benefiting. Thats a mugged up answer almost every bull shit SEO company gives in response to your arguments.

The agent even tell me about 5% of the links will be indexed. Pooh .. thats only 100 links out of 2000. Now by this time I am suppressing that demon inside me from getting inside the screen and strangling her/him by throat. Further the agent tells me I can get more benefit by making RSS feeds of those shitty links and bookmarking them as well.

Blah… you make me 2000 crapy links in 5 days and I spent months trying to get them indexed? How smart.

So there you go friends .. I have shared my thought and experience with you. I hope it will help you in deciding before you opt for an SEO package.

Cheers
Rooturaj

PS : By the way I tired to send myself a chat transcript and they have disabled the sumit button. But I copied it and you can see that below.

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.

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.