Ha, this has come out to be a tennis match between Google and Live/Bing now. After Bings release last month, this is one of the most exciting features they’ve come out with.

Bing has now come up with a fragile version of the future “real time search integration”. Its not quite there yet, but Bing can take the credit of trying to implement it first than Google.

In an official report, Bing says -

Starting later today, when you search for these folks* names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results

*These folks – are a special category of Twitter users, like Danny Sullivan and Kara Swisher, whose twitter accounts have been handpicked by Bing and integrated with Bing search.
This is a first attempt by Bing, if I’m right, and looks like its come out well. Just one question remains.
“How would anyone benefit from being shown only tweets from a bunch of people ?”

It looks to me like, Bing wanted to do something desperately to come out first in the rat race. So why bother about who’s benefiting from it or not ?

So, Goog, what’s up next ?

I’ve been making lots of friends on Twitter recently and I admit that its very flattering. For the record, Twitter has been the most successful social media tool ever for me. I mean I haven’t enjoyed this kind of growth and exposure on any other social media channel so far. While I must agree its grown upon me since the day I used it, its no easy job here compared to other social media channels. The amount of work that goes into it is still the same but the rewards are more and quicker than anywhere else.

And I’ve always thought of ways to keep the followers engaged. How could I ever reciprocate all the love and help these people are showing ? And I’ve been trying a lot of things, just to make sure that even the latest guy who followed me feels comfy being a friend. I admit that its not possible to make everyone happy, and its a wrong decision to take for that matter, but I always try to make sure that at least people who follow me doesn’t regret it. Let me try and share with you some simple things i do to show my love and respect to my Twitter followers.

1. ReTweet those who tweet/retweet your blog articles/links

Obviously, this is the easiest way to thank your friends on Twitter, especially the ones who re-tweet or post links from your site often. I keep a separate group in TweetDeck, of the people who tweet articles from DSB, and if possible in all circumstances, re-tweet their articles, when ever they have and interesting one. Since I have the Tweetmeme button, (which is configurable to reply to you) I can easily keep track of who’s tweeting my articles from DSB.

2. If they have a website, subscribe to it and help them promote their stuff

Mostly, everyone would have their blog linked to the profiles. When I find interesting profiles, I go to the website and subscribe to them on Google reader. On Google reader, there’s a separate label for “Twitter friends” and I make it a point that I visit them once a while and tweet their interesting articles.

3. Help them by joining in their efforts

Sometimes (not all) there are initiatives made by some friends on Twitter, like a new hashtag or a giveaway, or simply some crazy stuff on a friday. I try to keep track of all these and whenever there’s an initiative from my friends, I jump in. its that little something to you, but it could mean a lot to a friend. Ex- Jasonpollock had the grand screening of his movie at LA film festival, where he asked a bunch of his friends to try and make the event a  trending topic, and it was nice to see a bunch of guys immediately jumping in to help Jason !

4. Connect with them on other social media profiles

Another wonderful thing you can do is to get in touch with your friends on other social media networks where you have so many friends than your new friend. I know how it feels like to get connected with a more popular guy on facebook/linkedin. Its like..man, Yaro Starak knows me…or Darren Rowse knows mee !! Yippeee..

I normally make it sure to search and add new guys I meet on twitter on Facebook and Linkedin. Some accept, some does not..but that doesn’t matter as long as you took the step forward.

So those are my four humble suggestions to you, if you want to make more happy friends on the social media. I can’t guarantee you any numbers but it will definitely make you feel good, having reciprocated back something to your friends, and they will surely appreciate it.

Hope you liked it

If you sucked at making money from your websites, now try making money through mobile applications. AdSense has now rolled out their new service which will allow mobile application developers to show off AdSense ads on their applications and possibly make revenue out of it. At the moment, applications for Android and iPhone are supported.

The program is now in beta and you can apply for it here. Google ads will feature the same “contextual” nature and developers can use keywords, demographics and location to target the ads.

Was tracking down my referral stats to find this interesting URL. Take a look and see what you can make from it.

This is what I see.

- Either Google doesn’t want to accept “bing”.

- Or Google is so confident that it will buy Twitter soon.

(P.S – I found this kinda funny.)

404 error pages are unavoidable, they creep in somehow no matter how well you build your site. But its normal. 404 error pages could appear because of the user typing a wrong url, or a bad incoming link to a deleted/moved article.However an increased number of 404 error pages aren’t good for the general health of your site because a lot of them appearing only means that there is an issue gone unnoticed. Its recommended that you keep your 404 error pages to a minimum and where ever possible, find out the broken links and issue a 301 redirect for them if the content is shifted to another URL. If its just another 404 error page that occurred due to  a wrong URL or a typo, then its recommended that you try to provide alternatives for the user, by customizing your 404 error page and not showing him the ugly error message.

Here are 10 WordPress plugins that will help you to manage, monitor and customize your 404 error pages, so that your visitors don’t leave your site annoyed. These will help you to manage your 404 error pages more efficiently.

1. 404 SEO Plugin

This simple plugin will give you a customized, smart ‘Page Not Found(404)’ error message. It will automatically display links to relevant pages on your site, based on the words in the URL that was not found.

2. 404 Notifier

Detects and notify you of all the 404 errors that might creep in on the site unknowingly.

3. Smart 404

This plugin will perform a search of your posts, pages, tags and categories, using keywords from the requested URL and the search term. If there’s a match, it redirects to that matched content instead of showing the 404 error.

4. AskApache Google 404

AskApache Google 404 is a must-have WordPress plugin that uses some ajax and a couple tricks to display a very helpful and SEO Error Page. The default displays Google Search Results for images, news, blogs, videos, web, custom search engine, and your own site.

5. Dunstan style 404 error page

This plugin makes your 404 error pages more interactive giving the user various options like recent posts, feedback forms etc.

6. Redirection Plugin

This is a great plugin that handles all sorts of errors. Includes 404 error monitoring – captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects.

7. Useful 404’s

As the name suggests, creates a more useful 404 error page, including email notifications for bad links.

8. Google 404 Error pages

The Google 404 plugin is a quick and easy way to embed a search box on your custom 404 page and provide users with useful information designed to help them find the information they need. Where it can, the Google widget will suggest other ways for the user to find the information they need, thus increasing the likelihood that they’ll continue to explore your site.

Additional Resources

1. 404 Error Pages and Redirects for SEOs

A handy guide explaining what 404 errors are what you can do with them to minimize SEO issues.

2. Get Creative With Your 404 Error Pages

Anther great article from SEO Moz explaining the possibilities of having a custom 404 error page

Hope you enjoyed the collection.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources

- Albert Einstein

I can’t possibly completely agree with this quote but I think there’s a lot of meaning to it, than I can see through, at least.

Let’s talk in bloggers perspective. I believe that we all take inspiration from all around, designing our sites, writing content etc, but how often do you credit the source ? Is it a good idea to let people know that you’re inspired from another person ? Does it make you insecure ?

People think differently, so it may not be right to make a guess here. Personally, I think it takes a lot of guts to let others know that you’re inspired , and you’d be comfortable doing it only if you believe in it. If you prefer to hide it, won’t it let you down ? Its difficult to find an answer. So, let me ask you readers…

Would you credit your sources while taking inspiration ?

I have to really thank TweetDeck team for this new feature. The latest update to TweetDeck (June 26th 2009) adds a new sync feature which will let you share your settings (of groups/columns/colors etc) over any machine or iPhone for that matter.

I was so in need of this feature as I often switch between machines. Sometimes I work from my Mac and when I miss the Windows Live Writer jump back to PC, and one tool that I constantly keep “ON” is TweetDeck. Tweetie, is an excellent tool for Twitter but it has limitations, and a frequent Twitter user can’t possible get enough from any tool if he’s used to TweetDeck groups. I have more than one group on Twitter to keep track of things, so that’s something I’d miss when on the Mac, even though I use TweetDeck there.

So what do you need to do to sync TweetDeck between machines ?

- Download the new version of TweetDeck to all the machines that you will use TweetDeck from.

- Sign up for a TweetDeck account (Prompt appear while you open the app)

- Click on ‘Settings’, ‘Sync’ and then enter your TweetDeck account information and click on ‘Verify Account’.

- Open  TweetDeck in the other machine, click on “groups” and select the available groups to import from the list.

That’s it. Now you’ll have the same settings on all those machines where you have the new version of TweetDeck installed and verified.

Since yesterday, after the shocking news of sudden death of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, came out, the online world saw the biggest search traffic ever ! Just goes out to say how popular and loved the music icon was among millions.
Both Yahoo and Google has released their data showing the traffic boom that happened yesterday.
Yahoo saw the biggest ever unique visitor traffic and clicks to one of its stories – Michael Jackson rushed to hospital. (Although Yahoo doesn’t give out the numbers)

There were huge number of searches also for his top songs, among which Thriller, “Man in the mirror” and “Billie Jean” were among the popular ones.  Yahoo also says that there are interesting searches like “why did Michael Jackson die” that are being searched more at very alarming numbers. Find the official Yahoo article here.
Google on the other hand, saw an unusual rise in search for terms related to Michael Jacksons death around 3:00 pm PDT, and mistook it for an automated attack, and even gave no results for it on Google News for up to 25 mins. But later they figured it out.

Google Trends was actually flooded with queries on Michael Jackson’s death, it almost takes 70% of the entire top searched terms.

Spam has always been a villain for bloggers and it has taken newer forms, deviced newer methods of attack these days. And the only way to control spam is to update our anti-spam softwares and plugins, and keep evolving up to and beyond them. Understanding the importance of fighting spam, Google webmasters have posted some tips that webmasters could follow in order to fight spam on their sites/blogs.
Some of them include, using clever CAPTCHAs, monitoring your server logs and banning IPs, no following and no indexing profile pages and using Google alerts.
The post deals with all these measures in detail, check it out here. Fighting spam 2.0, they call it !

The saga of “Natural links and Google” continues. The latest episode being this one from Matt, where he says that links must indeed be “natural” and not merely appear natural.

The entire SEO industry would completely agree to what Matt said. Links should be natural, and not “artificial”, but the problem is that not many people do understand Google’s version of “natural links”.

In my humble opinion any links placed irrelevantly anywhere on your site is a non-natural/artificial link.
So that includes, sponsored reviews, paid text links etc.
Now, if any of these “non-natural links are advertisements, then that’s completely different.
Advertisements are okay, even though technically they are “Nofollowed – Sponsored Links”.

But why do Google have a problem with paid links / artificial links ?

- Because the link might take you to a non-contextual/non related source.
- Because the sponsored review post you did might totally be of of context of your domain.
And so, when google spiders your content, they might get “misleaded” to non trusty or simply non-relevant source.

Problem No.1
The problem with the web is that not all are SEO’s or webmasters. SEO’s constitute may be 20-30% of the web but the rest are people seriously dealing with great amount of information, be it on blogs or their websites. And not all of these people know that Google doesn’t quite like you to plug that link of your friends or the guy who paid you to do so.

Problem No.2
Google does not and I firmly believe that it cannot ever give us concrete rules on what artificial links are. Because clearly, not everyone on the internet can take Goog’s perspective, and Google knows it best. Here’s an example.

Go to this post on the Google official blog – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/day-in-cloud-challenge-featuring-google.html

In the post Google posts a link to Virgin America. Its contextual technically because the blog post deals with a contest. Fair enough. But I’m wondering how would Google see this had the post been on a normal blog ?

- The link on the Google blog is not nofollowed. But can it be left the same way in another low profile blog ?
- The link is to a reputed website (of virgin america), but does that mean every webmaster can follow what Google did and link to any website that they might think is “friendly and reputed?”

Now, this is the problem with natural links. What is natural to you may not be natural to Google. And sadly, not everyone are webmasters and SEO’s to understand this.
If only Google came up with a clear and precise explanation on what “natural links” are.