(Source)

The blog had no way to contact the author (on purpose I guess) but I left a comment on the copied article and using whois information [What is whois] about the domain, sent an email to the domain contact email as well.

Wait for 2-3 days did not result in any mail from the owner. That really pissed me off. This guy dared to copy and then ignored my emails asking him to rectify it. I guess most of the people are not aware of steps so they never follow up after initial warning and that is why people like these keep copying, without any fear. I was able to get it rectified though.

Here are the steps in exact sequence which resulted in me successfully getting my copyright restored:

1. I prepared a list of my articles as well as others which this site had copied.
2. Sent a mail to the website owner (email address found using whois lookup using his domain name on http://www.whois.net/) and left a comment on the problem article on his blog asking him to fix it and give proper credits.
3. I never got any response from him for 2-3 days.
4. I read that there is Digital Millennium Copyright Act [read about it here] which can help me.
5. At first I did not realize that the blog was a wordpress blog so I sent a DMCA notice to Google using their online form (applicable for blogger blogs only).
6. I got a reply from them that it is a not a blogger blog so they cannot do anything.
7. From the whois (http://www.whois.net/) information I found that the site was hosted with Godaddy
8. I went to Godaddy.com and tried to find a way to contact them.
9. I sent a mail to Godaddy Spam and Abuse Department (abuse@godaddy.com) explaining them the situation and asking for their help in taking action against the site.
10. Godaddy folks were prompt in sending me a mail stating that I had to send a claim to CopyrightClaims@GoDaddy.com in accordance with the Copyright and Trademark Policy located at http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/legal_agreements/show_doc.asp?se=%2B&pageid=TRADMARK%5FCOPY
11. I did exactly that. It seems every ISP has a what they call AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) and this comes under that.
12. Godaddy was prompt to bring down the culprit site and informed me about it.
13. It was then that I received a mail from the site owner stating that he had fixed issues on his site.
14. I checked to see that he had proper credits in place.
15. Godaddy lifted the ban

Hope this will help people out who are having similar problems. All hosting companies will have AUP so they should be able to help you out.

Please share your experience here on how you protected your copyright.

Bookmark to:

1. Exclusive page titles: Unique and non similar page titles (html title tag) are quite significant when it comes to ensuring that your website gets featured prominently in the search engines. The HTML tags of your pages indicate the essence of your website and make it possible for the search engine robots to crawl it more effectively.
2. Keyword based Links: Search engines are able to look up web pages by linking and interconnecting them with other web pages. If the pages have specific keywords, then it becomes easier to give the page a better rank in terms of the keyword search.
3. Use of Keywords in the pages: It is quite imperative to include well researched keywords on your web pages so that the SEO rank of your site becomes better. After all, it is the keywords that form the basis on which visitors look for sites, and on which the concept of search engine optimization is based.
4. HTML Optimization: You should ensure that the html on the page is optimized to ensure fast load time for your website. Moving CSS and JavaScript code to separate files ensure parallel load and exposes the most important content for search engines to crawl.
5. Clean website design: You should not have too heavy or disorganized form of website that hinders SEO. Too many graphics are also a hindrance. It’s best to get professional advice and help to make your content and the entire site SEO friendly.
6. Targeted content: Your website cannot be everything to everyone as that would make it too diffused and messy. It’s always best to know which audience you are targeting and to go about catering in a focused manner to it. This also greatly improves your website rankings.
7. Internal linking: Inter linking of pages using proper keywords and judicious use of nofollow tags can give tremendous benefits. Also very important is how internal pages are exposed on different pages to increase crawlability.
8. Relevance of links: One must be careful of the relevance and quality of content of websites and web pages that link to your site. This enhances your page’s ranking and also makes your site more relevant and useful to your reader.

Please share your experiences and point out what other things can be done to improve search engine rankings.

Bookmark to:

But how do you find if your brand name or the keyword you are after is available as url on major sites?

Recently I came across a very useful tool which makes finding vanity urls easy.

Visit http://namechk.com/, enter your keyword of choice and see what is the availability across major social networking and bookmarking sites. Easy!

Bookmark to:

• Europe (UK)

Your choice is limited to yahoo.co.uk

• India: I get the following URL to register with the options of email id as shown:

as you can see clearly the choices of my email id  is restricted to yahoo.in, ymail.com and rocketmail.com (I do not get yahoo.com as an option)

So what do you do if you for any reason want a generic yahoo.com email id?

Here is what you can do, which will allow you to get a yahoo.com email id very easily:

• Look at the url of the registration page (UK it should be: http://edit.europe.yahoo.com/config/eval_register?.intl=uk and India: https://edit.india.yahoo.com/registration?_ea=c6WhqMEzkVUzBxR2F3A4vJk-&_intl=in)
• Change the intl=uk or intl=in in the url to intl=us and hit enter. You should have a screen like this to register with a yahoo.com email id:

You are all set to create your yahoo.com email id.

Bookmark to:

Quality Score for Google and the search network is a dynamic metric assigned to each of your keywords. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user’s search query. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower its cost-per-clicks (CPCs) and the better its ad position.

Quality Score for any keyword on Google and the Search network is calculated based on the historical clickthrough rate (CTC) of the keyword and the matched ad, your account history, the historical CTR of the display URL in the ad group, landing page quality, keyword relevance to the ad in its ad group, relevance to the query of the ad text and the keyword, your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown and few other factors.

High Quality Score not only saves you money but also gives your ad higher visibility (As it appears higher). IT also is an indication of how successful your ad will be (conversion rate).

Here are some tips to go about improving your Adwords Quality Score:

1. Organize your campaigns such that each product and service has its own campaign (e.g. if you offer several products like ecommerce tools, cms systems, social networking scripts then you might want to create a campaign for each of them and same for services)
2. Here I am going to talk about keywords targeted adgroups only. Within a campaign you can create several adgroups and associate keywords with them. In order to achieve high adwords quality score, create adgroups of very closely related keywords. The way to go about it to decide on root/common keyword for the adgroup and all keywords in that adgroup should have that term as a common/root term, e.g. let us say we decide to use “software development” as the adgroup root term then we should have keywords like “custom software development”, “software development India”, “best software development” etc in that adgroup (Note: you can decide to choose “software development India” as your adgroup root term and have keywords all other keywords based on that, the decision is upto you and will depend on how granular your targeting needs to be) [NOTE: Google Adwords Editor has a pretty decent keyword grouping tool, download and try the editor from here.]
3. The ad copy you write for that adgroup should include atleast the root term.
4. To start with you can create multiple ads and turn off ad optimization so all of them are rendered equally. After a week or so you can pick which ones work best for you and stop the others or write more ads based on what you see seems to be working.
5. Experiment with the “match type”: exact, phrase, broad to see which one gives you best quality score and lower cost per click.
6. Landing page is crucial not only from conversion point of view but also from the point of view of saving money on your campaign by ensuring you score high on quality score for them. Few high level things to keep in mind for the landing page design are: provide relevant, unique and substantial content on your landing pages.
7. Create an about us page and link it to the landing page
8. Create a privacy policy page and link it to the landing page
9. If you have enough time and are working on a long term campaign, it might be worthwhile to create a sub-site for the PPC campaign
10. Put relevant content, link to related content pages and provide details on refund and returns. It might be worthwhile to mention your no-spam policy.

Google also factors in the historical performance of your adwords account in its quality score calculations. Sometimes you might be better off with a new account if the earlier one is already messed up by someone.

Bookmark to:

Aggregator Travel Sites

(sites which bring to you prices from various other sites at one place, do not sell the tickets but only help you locate tickets and then you book on those sites from the link they provide)

http://travel.bixee.com/: offers air (domestic and international), rail, bus and hotel ticket search. It also gives you the fare price graph so that you get an idea on when the prices are low and when high.

http://in.farechase.yahoo.com/: Yahoo’s offering for airlines ticket search for domestic flights in India. They have integrated this with Yahoo Messenger so you can your friend can plan for a travel and choose flights together. [Yahoo Messenger India Flight Planner]. They also have a neat “my fare alert utility” which allows you to create an alert for flight fare for a certain date. As soon as the price falls below your set limit, it can alert you via email or your yahoo messenger.

http://www.ixigo.com/: one of the first travel aggregator sites with fare trends which I know of. Very fast and user friendly. Brings you flight, hotel and bus deals from several sites at one place.

Other Travel Sites

http://www.yatra.com: offers you cheap domestic and international air tickets. Also has a miles program, wherein you earn miles for every ticket you purchase. Recently they came up with a system on how people can redeem those miles [How to Redeem Yatra Miles].

http://www.cleartrip.com: search for flight, train and hotels, get fare alerts. Even has a mobile search application.

http://www.travelocity.co.in: used it recently and liked it. You can book flight, cars, cruises, hotels and travel packages using this site. The interface does not allow you to search for flights next day or previous day, which was annoying for me.

http://www.makemytrip.com: one of the pioneers of travel booking. Used to serve more as a phone booking company for international flights then moved to domestic and enhanced their web site to offer online booking (they had online booking earlier but was not very good). Now is it a very good site and you can look for flights, hotels, bus, rail, holiday and travel packages.

http://www.travelchacha.com : very funny name. Haven’t had the chance to use their site much but they do keep coming up with ridiculous deals on flights in newspapers. Anyone who has used them before do share some insight here.

http://www.ezeego1.co.in: offer really good deals from time to time. Offers extensive range of travel related services: flight booking, hotel booking, car booking, sights, holidays, rail, buses, forex, insurance, visa etc.

http://www.expedia.co.in: haven’t used it much, a late entry in India but used it quite often in US. Book usual things like flight, hotel and travel packages.

http://www.travelguru.com: started as a site for hotel booking but has migrated to flights, hotel, holiday packages. They claim to have largest hotel network with them.

Sites Specializing in Bus Ticket Bookings

http://www.redbus.in/: pioneers of bringing bus ticket booking to the Internet. I like their clean and simple website. Please feel free to share your experience about them here.

http://www.ticketvala.com/: started after redbus but claims to be India’s largest online bus ticket platform.

Bookmark to:

This post however is to raise an issue which I am sorry to say was very badly handled by the TATA-NEN team.

Our company Zitz Software Solutions (http://www.hotteststartups.in/viewandvote.do?method=fetch&businessFn=viewandvote&startupId=792) also participated in the contest. What I want to discuss over here is the section "Expert Comments" where few experts (in our case 2 of them) comment on the company and the comments are made publicly available for anyone to read. The names of the experts are not disclosed.

The point of concern is one of the reviews which we got from an expert. Here is a snippet which is the cause of concern (use can read the details on the site here):

If the service that they provide is Online Education Marketing then why project the portals -Also Zitz’s claims on expertise on SEO does not reflect in the search results, a search on ‘Bangalore Schools’ does not lists Bangaloreschools.net in the first 5 pages of google.

The reason we took offence to this expert review is that our site http://www.bangaloreschools.net has been ranking in top 10 on google.com, google.co.in, yahoo.com for over 6-8 months now.

We immediately put a comment on our profile refuting this message which was sent out by the expert. We also sent a mail to info@hotteststartups.in on 5th Nov, 2008 and then on 14th Nov 2008 but nobody responded to it.

What makes me wonder is how easy it is to lose track of quality review when there are so many companies to review. But for everyone out there, their company is important to them. Things like this need to go through a quality check and facts need to be corroborated with the startups before posting it as an expert comment on the company profile and misguiding general audience. What is worse is the way our requests for change in the expert comments were handled. No one even got back to us!

Our company is important to us and we are privileged to be part of the TATA NEN content but it might have done us more harm then good, all due to some expert not having enough time to check Google results properly before commenting on our site. Who should be held accountable for this mistake and what can remedy this situation for us?

I would like to hear what the contest organizers have to say about this.

UPDATE:

After this blog post, I got calls from NEN inquiring about this situation. But here is what they had to say":

“The expert reviewer has agreed to withdraw his line but he does not agree that he posted it by mistake.”

I was amazed at the response and told them in clear terms that there are two things which I do not like about your statement:

1. The very day we received expert comments, I had replied to hotteststartups about it being wrong so there is no way the expert did not do a mistake. He may be an expert in your view but such carelessness on a company review is highly unacceptable.
2. I told that lady that you are not doing me a favor by editing the comment. You did a mistake publicly so why don’t you apologize publicly. She said she would get back to me and then I never heard from her.

The point is, it is easy to call in person and apologize (which I think they did not do at all but made me feel as if they are doing a favor by fixing that comment) but if you did a mistake publicly why not apologize publicly?

The comment has been fixed on the website now so I have attached a snapshot of the controversial comment here (in red box on the image, click on image to enlarge):

(click on the image to enlarge)

Let us wait and see what NEN does to take care of this mistake.

Bookmark to:

Here is a snapshot view of the client with some themes:

(Source: Gmail Blog Post)

From Gmail help pages:

In some cases, you can also customize by location. Some themes change during the day, and we use the location information you provide to correctly time these changes with your local sunrise, sunset, and/or weather. If you select one of these themes, you’ll see a Country/Region drop-down menu appear. Select the country you want, and then enter a city in the field provided. If you don’t enter a city, or enter an invalid one, we’ll set your location to the capital city of the country you selected. When you’re done, click Save.

To read more about this announcement head over to this blog post.

Bookmark to:

The coupon code is SAVE25 (valid for March 2009 only) [Avail Discount]

The way to use the code is to paste it during the stage 2 of your web site submission (it asks for promo code if any)

BOTW is also offering free internet advertising for 60 days wherein you can sponsor a category on BOTW thus enhancing your online visibility.

Bookmark to:

The recent improvements are:

• Real time quality score calculation, at the time of each query
• Keywords would not longer be marked “inactive for search”
• ‘Minimum bid’ to be replaced by ”First page bid”

Some features which were already being used to calculate the quality score are:

• Quality of the ads
• Landing page quality
• Landing page load time

Bookmark to:

• Price
• Converts file?
• Download files?
• Max upload size
• Storage space
• Privacy
• Time Limit
• Revenue sharing
• Ease of account creation
• Ease of Uploading a video
• Video quality
• Recording tools
• Editing tools
• ….

you can find it here: http://www.blogtechguy.com/video_ebook/video_comparison_matrix.html

Bookmark to:

Paid options always exists and provide you much more features but if you are looking for free web directory software scripts, here are some choices:

• http://www.freephpdirectoryscript.com/: Runs using PHP4 and MySQL. Free to use but ofcource you have to have the “Powered by..” on all pages.
• http://www.freephpdirectoryscript.com/ODP/: if you are looking to create a complete directory from ODP/DMOZ then this is a good script to have.
• http://www.dataspheric.com/services/software/ls/” LinkSpheric is absolutely advertisement free and needs PHP, MySQL to run.
• http://scripts.site-sift.com/: Site Sift Listings is another free web directory software. The script is integrated for Paypal and 2Checkout.
• http://www.hotwebtools.com/TopSite/: Web Directory Script best suited for small and medium-sized Web portals. It allows visitors to vote on sites as well.
• http://www.alectang.com/wordpress-link-directory/: Wordpress Link Directory plugin
• http://www.nicecoder.com/indexu_whatis.php: IndexU has a free version but the free version only allows for 100 links. Uses PHP 5.1 or above and MySQL 4.0 and above.
• Sigsiu Online Business Index 2 (SOBI 2): SOBI 2 - Sigsiu Online Business Index 2 is a directory component for the WCMS Mambo and Joomla! to show entries of companies, clubs, persons, shops, products.

If you know of any other free directory script please leave a comment and we will check it out to include it here.

Bookmark to:

The widget shows all IPL Live Scores and is very easy to use.

Here is how it appears:

One can see it live on http://www.themahendrasinghdhoni.com/ 

Some of the places you can use it on your blog are: on the sidebar or on a dedicated post page.

Bookmark to:

It is quiet easy to compose and post using Windows Live Writer and I have been doing that for sometime for my WordPress blogs. But for one new site I am using Drupal for the first time and I wanted to configure Windows Live Writer to post “stories”, “pages”, “forum topics” and “blog posts” but there are several small little details which made it a trial and error exercise to configure Drupal to allow me to post all the above mentioned items.

In this post I will document step by step process to go about configuring Windows Live Writer (WLW) to post to Drupal.

This post assumes that you have admin level privileges to the Drupal system.

In order to use this XMLRPC mechanism to post, you need to enable Blog API. Go to Home » Administer » Site configuration and enable Blog APIs:

You can get Windows Live Writer from here. Once you have downloaded Windows Live Writer, go through these series of steps to configure it to post various content types to Drupal. For this illustration I am going to use India SEO Consultants domain.

Step 1:

Do not enter the default domain name but enter the url in the following format: http://<domainname>/node/add/story, replace domain name with your own domain.

Step 2:

Select WordPress 2.2+ from the “Type of weblog that you are using” and in the “Remote posting URL for your weblog” enter http://<domainname>/xmlrpc.php and hit next.

Step 3:

Select what content type you want to add (if you want to add multiple content types from Drupal then you have to carry these steps those many times and they will appear as separate weblog entries in your Windows Live Writer.

Step 4:

It will ask you if it can do a temporary post to check style. Say yes.

Step 5:

Enter a name for your weblog and click “Finish” and you are all set.

Happy drupaling!

Bookmark to:

Tamar Weinberg at techipedia has published an article which lists about 250+ best internet marketing posts of 2007 nicely laid out in different categories:

• Social Media Sites: General
• Facebook
• Digg
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Mixx
• del.icio.us
• Sphinn
• Social Media and Social Media Marketing
• General Internet Marketing
• Viral Strategies
• Link Resources
• Blogging: General
• Blogging: Inspiration
• Blogging: Promotion
• Content Generation
• Reputation Management
• Video Articles
• Business
• Search Engine Optimization
• Search Engine Stuff
• Web Development
• Search Marketing Tools
• Paid Search
• Recommended Books
• Affiliate Sites
• Domaining
• Techipedia’s Best Posts for 2007

Goodluck reading all those articles.

Bookmark to: