Google Hot Trends that started somewhere in 2007, 15th May to be precise, has been inspiration to a large number of blogs and sites who created content taking hot keywords from the ones listed in it. While some sites produced remarkable content from it, many took to create brainless content mashing up the keywords and nothing else. Some even took to replicate the Hot Trends site when they could not think of ideas.

Google index is full of pages that are nothing but the copy of the contents of Google Hot Trends site (some are owned by Google itself). Here is a glimpse

• m.blogger.com/trends/hottrends
• pro.blogger.com/trends/hottrends
• www.freesc.com/trends/hottrends
• m.googlearth.de/trends/hottrends
• www.rechargeit.org/trends/hottrends
• www.ggoogle.com/trends/hottrends
• www.blogger.ae/trends/hottrends
• pro1.blogger.com/trends/hottrends
• www.gppglr.com/trends/hottrends
• www.gmail.fr/trends/hottrends
• www.heima021.com/trends/hottrends
• www.janinaordmann.com/trends/hottrends
• m.googlearth.de/trends/hottrends
• www.nihilisme.ca/trends/hottrends
• www.ngauthier.com/trends/hottrends
• www.googleanalytics.ru/trends/hottrends
• www.sharesigns.com/trends/hottrends
• www.ciecet.net/trends/hottrends
• wireless.blogger.com/trends/hottrends
• pro2.blogger.com/trends/hottrends

While intentions of other site owners behind replication of pages can be understood, that is getting traffic, it’s beyond imagination that why would Google want to replicate its own data that too with different subdomains of same domain as m.blogger.com, pro.blogger.com, pro1.blogger.com, pro2.blogger.com and wireless.blogger.com

Anyways, Google now seem to have decided to remove these pages from index and, to effect it, have included exclusion rules in its robots.txt. This change seem to have been done on 2nd of July. You must be wondering that this step may stop Google owned sites to get indexed but what about other sites which are not under Google’s control? Well they will succeed in that too, as the sites replicating the Google Hot Trends page are replicating the robots.txt too

Let’s see how much time it takes to get all these pages removed from the index.

Here is the rest the list.

• www.gmail.fr/trends/hottrends
• 64.233.189.100/trends/hottrends
• www.dancrone.com/trends/hottrends
• www.ciecet.net/trends/hottrends
• www.worx.biz/trends/hottrends
• www.非主流服装.com/trends/hottrends
• www.familiekoret.com/trends/hottrends
• www.387groep.nl/trends/hottrends
• www.ggoogle.com/trends/hottrends
• tonder.hveruge.dk/trends/hottrends
• www.antesoft.com/trends/hottrends
• www.googlemaps.it/trends/hottrends
• www.algianviaggi.com/trends/hottrends
• googleimageads.com/trends/hottrends
• bassboutique.com/trends/hottrends
• 64.233.179.104/trends/hottrends
• 72.14.221.104/trends/hottrends
• www.blogger.se/trends/hottrends
• images.wwwgoogle.de/trends/hottrends
• www.nihilisme.ca/trends/hottrends
• tonder.hveruge.dk/trends/hottrends
• www.rechargeit.org/trends/hottrends
• www.bsp-zt.at/trends/hottrends

and on… and on…

Some times back I had carried a post where I showed how, for a particular term, Google and Yahoo both failed to give relevant result and surprisingly Live Search pointed to the correct site as the first result.

This incidence showed me that definition for a Good search engine is relative and depends on the keyword you are searching for. While I always use Google for search, it was the first time I realized that live.com was not bad after all.

Since then, Live.com has given way to Bing.com, a new search engine from Microsoft which promises improvement not only in result quality but also in user experience. And now that today I got to read  Webmaster Tools Give “Live” a Second Life, I achieved another realization, that definition for a Good search engine is also relative to and depends on the people. Let me expand this statement with more explanation as under

The are two type of people using a search engine. First is the Researcher, as we all know, who searches for information that he needs using the search engine. Second one is the Webmaster, who makes all his efforts to make sure that his site is the one which is visited by researcher, even if there is a lot of competition out there. We all now this process as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). At one point of time Google became synonym to SEO by providing webmasters with all the tools that webmasters could use to rate and improve their sites. After this no webmaster cared for other search engines as they could improve themselves to suit Google and get the extra traffic that others could not have generated easily.

Yahoo was next to understand this secret and thus it came up with Site Explorer. While Webmasters started giving importance to Yahoo, Live.com was looked at with hatred as it never cared to provide webmasters with similar tools.

Better late than never, Bing the new search engine by Microsoft includes a Webmaster Center and already we have Webmasters who have started praising Bing. After all, at the end of the day it’s only traffic that matters!

How do ‘They’ make money from Google adsense? Well there are a lot of people who genuinely work hard to make money from Google Adsense in a fair way. What they earn is what they really deserve.

This post is regarding ‘them’ who work the other way. They work hard but the other way. They work hard to turn a movie lover visitor to a potential customer for Motor Insurance companies (not really, as the customer turns back after clicking the ad) .

This post is a case study of a particular site (group of site in reality) using Black Hat Adsense searning techniques.

So here we start. Check the pic on the right. A Google user searches for a site providing Bollywood movies download. And he don’t need to search more as it seems to him that the first result titled ‘Bollywood Movies Download Center’ would be sufficient for him. He follows the link.

Hey that’s the movie I would like to watch, he thinks and so he clicks on the download link.

Hey but that’s a forum. Never mind let’s check for the link in forum posts. And… hey found that and there are the links. (note from editor: pardon me for my laziness, for I am changing the movie title for I don’t want to waste time searching the forum)

Wasn’t I trying to download a movie? I am now at a Auto Car Insurance site!! There is yet another link in there.

On my God!! The link led me to a Global Financial site!! Amazing!!! Anyways there’s the link.

Hey what’s that? Clicking on the link shows ‘Authentication required’. Did I miss something?

Oh! Yes!! There was a Username & Password link in one of the pages I viewed earlier!!! Never mind Let’s get back to the username/ password.

God! another link and this time on an image. “click”

Hey again to Global Financial site! and again a link!!

What’s this? This page tells that you need to go to two different pages and click on Advertisements there. More work. “Film ke liye saala kuchh bhi karega” (will do anything for the movie).

First link opens a page with Autocar insurance advertisement. Though there is no mention that the ad is served by Google Adsense, IT IS. “click” and back.

Now that’s getting frustrating. The other site again! Similar advertisement. anyways “click” and back.

Now that the required two clicks have been made let’s click the buttom that leads to user/password. No man! again the site changes and still no info but just a link.

Wow! there’s the username but alas no password and link instead. let move ahead as can’t do without it!

Again the site changed! and at last the password is there. It’s showtime!!

Well now that they guy must be watching the movie, I am falling asleep having taken so many screenshots of so many boring pages. But before I retire let me summarize.

The prime object of this group of sites was to earn money through Adsense and that required clicks by visitors. While the visitors could have straight away clicked the links without having been taken to so many pages, this was a precautionary measure to keep the click-through-ratio low, as high ratio can raise an alarm making Google and advertiser probe into this affair.

That’s where we end.

For quite sometime I had virtually no posts on this blog. And today when I sat down to write something, I was greeted by a parking page. Seems like I mis-spelt my domain name. But no, I did not. It was indeed a parking page on my own domain name. Oh God! I forgot to renew the domain!! It was due for expiry on 24th and today is 26th (in fact 27th as I am writing this at 12:40 am IST)

So, next thing I did was go back to my registrar page and renew the domain, and next went to wordpress.com to renew the domain upgrade there too…

Now when all should have started up normal again nothing was. I went back to registrar and checked the dns settings and there I saw the mess. The DNS entries that I had built there since first registering the domain, two years back, were all gone due to not renewing before expiry, and I had no records for what went where! Though I succeeded in starting up the blog again, there is more work to do to get back to normal.

And now what was that, that I wanted to write today on the blog? I forgot !!

Heet, is the name that we decided for our son. Since the name was to be decided according to zodiac sign, we had very few names to choose from. I initially had decided that whatever name we finalize should have corresponding .net domain available (after all each one us in my family have a name.net domain) but later dropped the idea as there was nothing that I could serve on the domain and that dwij.net and bhumika.net are still not in use, even in the second year of registration. So we decided on Heet which translates to ‘Best Wishing’ (ref) even though heet.net was already taken.

Name ceremony (called Jhori) was done yesterday on his 12th day of birth. Adhering to our traditions we had not taken a single photograph until yesterday. The pic on the right has our elder son Dwij holding little Heet. More photographs are here.

Time moves so fast! Just a few years ago (precisely 7) we had an infant Dwij with us. His smile made us smile, the scar on his right eye-brow made us cry, we witnessed his first walk, his first day controlling the computer at age of 23 months, his first spoken words. I wish I had started blogging earlier to note all those things. Then on second thought it’s never late to do so. And thus starts today my small family blog heet.dwij.net where I will write about Dwij and Dwij will write about Heet, may be. Well in fact four of us would be there to write, sooner or later.

Me and my wife Bhumika have been blessed with a baby boy on 3rd April. While we all are happy, my son Dwij sees no limit to happiness as now he is Big brother. Though in 3rd grade now, he has learnt the Theory of Relativity and that to be called ‘big’ you don’t need to be grown up, a little one in the family will do.

Coincidence of 15:

Dwij was born exactly 15 days before my wife’s date of birth, and the new born (we name a new born in a ceremony on the 12th day after birth) was born exactly 15 days after my date of birth. Now the gap of 15 days was a coincidence for both children as it is same as that between birth dates of me and my wife. So, from 17th Feb to 3rd April our family will be celebrating a birthday every 15 days (exception: leap year).

I hate forwarded mails that are sent without checking the correctness of the information supplied in it. Today I got an email forward which made me hate the thought of possibility of it being true. The mail said that the roadside vendors selling Nimbu Pani (Lemon Juice) procure ice from morgues! Attached news clip image from a Marathi language newspaper reported this and ends with “Now! Coming for a Nimbu Pani drink?’ Read the mail text below

Dear Friends,

Please read attachment (marathi-newspaper cutting) or this mail carefully and forward it to everybody you know.

It bewares us about the Nimboo Paani available from road side vendors. May be we might not drink from them, but there are many who do whom we care for. This attachment says that the – ice this vendors use for Nimboo Paani might have been sourced from Morgue.

In Government hospitals, dead bodies are preserved in ice until further procession. Daily morning this hospitals disposes this ice. There is crowd of this vendors outside hospitals to buy this ice, just because this ice is available very cheap and increases their profit margin.

PLEASE MAKE AWARE ALL YOUR KNOWN FRIENDS, RELATIVES AND ALSO OTHER PEOPLE WHO YOU KNOW.

Circulate this attachment (marathi-newspaper cutting) and my mail for English copy.

Thanks.
Take care

Ever since I came to Mumbai, I have on number of occasions drank nimbo pani from these roadside vendors. You can find them at nearly every important streets and around the local railway stations The mail though could make anyone hate drinking nimbu pani in future, I decided to give it another thought and came up with below conclusions

• A glass of Nimbo Pani already has a good profit margin when they are sold at Rs.3 per glass, while each glass costs just half lemon, and little quantity of sugar, ice and water. Is it possible that these vendors will get ice from morgues just for a little more profit margin?
• A few road side vendors also sell ice laddoo or gola, and a number of vendors comparable to number of nimu pani vendors sell sugar cane juice too. And you can find a number of vendors selling Fruit juices for as low as Rs.5 around railway stations when restaurants sell them for Rs.30-40. These vendors too use a lot of ice. Then how did it happen that only Nimbu Pani vendors got involved in such possibilities and not others?

Aren’t these point something that you should think of? Right?? Now I noticed another news that may or may not have something to do with this Nimbu Pani episode.

PepsiCo India has introduced Nimbu Paani variant of 7Up called ‘Nimbooz by 7Up’

Want me to write anything more?