What are Blogs good for if not comments and discussion . Yes , that is a thought … I have blogged about personal musings , php scripts, open source and commercial applications such as Wordpress, vBulletin, Magento , my life as a Dmoz editor, my web development company and it’s clients and sometimes even SEO. All this time, I have not written just for making sure i get pageviews, even though I do like to get client queries. But I typically don’t have time to write for every damn thing on the internet .

But sometimes, it does make you feel that talking to yourself alone does not justify writing – I wont deny that. Battling with that frame of mind against being stuck moderating thousands of junk posts every day – i used to keep all comments in the typical Wordpress scenario . But I want to give this DoFollow idea a try.  I don’t know wether this will incite more people to initiate a discussion or dialogue , wether my musings are more boring or wether this will bring only incerasing amount of viagra and casino commenters.

But it is fixed that I have made this Blog a DoFollow blog as long as it makes sense.

I am sure most people are by now aware of Microsoft’s hostile offer to buy out the internet portal Yahoo! A lot of people have discussed about their views on the same . If Yahoo’s board of directors do accept to be taken over by MS there might be several changes to the company, it’s employees, culture, the portal , the services etc. Since Yahoo! has not yet given any proper response except the typical “we are looking at the benefits of the offer and those of our shareholders”. Instead of posting what I think could go or stay , I have put up a poll cum survey ( made free by Polldaddy), for the visitors like you to participate in. You can have your say which of the services of Yahoo you like , which stand a chance to be replaced by a MSN venture and so forth. Enjoy .

Shocking the search industry, Microsoft has officially submitted it’s bid to acquire the search and internet giant Yahoo! for a stunning 44.5 Billion USD. I do say , a shocking news, but many would easily say that such a bid was forthcoming, following Yahoo!’s recent downfall in share prices, clubbed with its sacking of near 1000 employees. Openly inviting the press in a conference call, the software giant’s CEO Steve Balmer spoke to Jerry Yang and the board of directors of the most popular website / portal of the world and express their interest in furthering the expansion and synergis-ing their resources and efforts to counter the search #1 , the big G.

Microsoft has proposed to Yahoo’s Board Of Directors that Microsoft acquire all Yahoo shares for $31, which is currently estimated to be worth $44.6 billion. Yahoo shareholders would get either cash or Microsoft shares (0.9509 of shares per 1 Yahoo share)

As a follow up , Yahoo! inc. accepted :

Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today said that it has received an unsolicited proposal from Microsoft to acquire the Company. The Company said that its Board of Directors will evaluate this proposal carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo!’s strategic plans and pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders.

This would probably be too early to analyze what this means, what the repercussions would be on the search industry along with the internet / web in general. However, it would not be out of place to mention a few points i can think of :

This is not the first time MS has submitted a bid to acquire Yahoo! , the last time they did was in previous year almost 10-11 months back, when Yahoo! board of directors openly refused saying , it was no time for such offers.
Even with the current low Yahoo has hit , Yahoo.com is still the website with highest traffic in all internet – in every metrics available on the internet, and Yahoo! also has several important acquisitions which fare highly in the current social web – namely, Del.icio.us , Yahoo Answers, Alibaba, Flickr , Facebook to mention a few. Yahoo email, Yahoo finance rates pretty highly on the radar of very many users , ranking over Gmail and similar applications.

On the other hand , Yahoo! has lost lots of ground on the search front , where Google has grown by leaps and bounds and truly a synergy of Yahoo and MSN could be the only force which might even come close. Microsoft on the other hand might gain a good deal by coming close with the Yahoo Publisher Network users and advertisers – which does have a sufficient base and development.

My personal feeling : I always liked Yahoo as a site , as a brand ( which Microsoft does as well, as Steve Balmer said in his note – intelligent minds think alike ), and a place to be. Google never had that and even less in Microsoft . As a person who has been on the net since 1997, i somehow would not feel impressed by a MSFT-YHOO clubbing. But then , it might be in the best of interest of the shareholders of Yahoo – What do you think ?

As i mentioned in my previous post , that I have been reading extensively about search engine marketing , and also watching various videos – one of the best videos i saw was a seminar by Avinash Kaushik – the from Google Analytics team . The full session was full of various insights on quite a few topics such data analysis , creating a data driven culture in a organization, checking ones web site’s bounce rate, and internal site search analysis and visitor intent . I spent the whole of sunday afternoon watching the videos , which were as i said before fascinating and insightful.
I have decided to using Web Analytics to the most , as possible .
And to start with that , I have have been toying with the idea of using either Google Site Search , which has the free and paid versions or creating our own custom internal search.

The pro’s of using Google’s Site Search is that
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After the recent catastrophe, things are settling down and i have decided to start reading more seo blogs. Not just seo blogs, i have also been using as much free time i am getting to read seo books, watch seo videos and catch up on the numerous webmaster and seo blogs , by subscribing to their feeds. Every day you learn something new – and it is necessary to keep one’s self updated with the industry. I am currently subscribed to Matt Cutts, Jill Whalen, Danny Sullivan , SeoMoz, Bill Slawski , Aaron Wall to name a few. I was truly not this organized in my reading before , even though i definitely checked those before too.
When i started thinking that i will do this, i wondered if I could do it with Outlook 2007 as thats something i use regularly to check for emails , so i might be able to check on these from time to time as well and not really have to open “any” site whatsoever for reading up.
MS @#!%^^# is hardly ever so rosy , that it will allow you to do what you want when you want it … ( and I am usually not a MS hater) . The first time added the feeds for seobook and mattcutts google only feed, i got
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CaRP is a free program which helps you get automated content for your website from RSS feeds on external websites. I have been using it for the past 2 years now – mostly to get blogs feeds or even directory rss on my website’s homepages.

RSS feeds are data feeds that usually contain headlines and excerpts from news stories, blog posts, etc., and a link to the full content.

It is , as the owner Antonne Roundy says, a script which converts RSS headlines and brief description / content into nice looking HTML to fit on your website, which could be made of HTML , PHP etc. I have also used it on the web design website, recently , but there i came across an odd situation.
Initially when i had used CaRP – the free version, which i downloaded when i had much less php knowledge, I could install it myself and configure it as well, without any hitch. Before CaRP , I had also used Magpie RSS feed parser for converting blog feeds at DiscussTV. Carp has provided somewhat much more functionality, includes good documentation along with a Video for help . Yet , even then if you can’t get it to work for your site, let me know – I can help out for a fee. Anyway, after enjoying a free software, I recently went back to the website , after receiving several of it’s subscribed email newsletter. The site , which nicely showcases all the various other scripts and services made me eager to try out their paid Jawfish service – which provides RSS to Javascript conversion.

Why I wanted that ? because even though I want to display external blog feed, i did not want to use any framed page – as i felt , it could be unhelpful for my seo attempts. So the only option was to get the feed via javascript . CaRP website said, the only way i could get this was by subscribing to Jawfish – and here is something I DONT recommend from GeckoTribe.
Why : Because they will provide you with a snippet of code , including their javascript source , and more often than not , there is a lack connection between your server and geckotribe’s server . Quoting the owner , Antonne :

I can only guess that the problem you’re seeing with Jawfish is caused by some recurring temporary internet problem somewhere between your server and mine.

The problem with Jawfish i faced : I had paid them for 1 year of the service and it specifically mentioned that there won’t be any refund .
The solution : As i did not receive any sayable service – I emailed the owner ( as their support ticket section was not manned , and only after waiting for 10 days i understood ), and I received his reply . He promised to refund the money ,

Current Status : I have not yet received the refund yet , but I am hopeful i will.

Current Status with my requirement : I am using free and friendly Carp which i have got working with iframe with the customizations i wanted . Google does successfully crawl iframes / frames , as I found by doing a site:www.websys.co.in.

Google has updated the toolbar / pagerank again on 11th January 2008 . Interestingly i came to know in about it in the least expected place . Normally i get to know it either from the Digitalpoint forums or at Sitepoint , or even by looking at the toolbar while surfing my own websites – but this time i was notified of the fact by some co-editors at the ODP IRC . Nevertheless, hearing about it i had to go to DP once to confirm about the rest of the various webmasters, and also checked my sites.
Happy to say I have had some increase – on this blog : PR3 , at my web design website : PR4 , and also on our web hosting site – back to PR5. Backlinks have also improved , but mostly for Websys. This is quite a quicker update considering the last time during October was almost after a 7 months or 9 months gap. Hope this update also brings some better search engine positioning at the same time …. considering the backlinks have increased substantially.

2 days back , i received a call from a girl , who introduced herself as from Yahoo India. Almost before i slapped down the phone, as I was almost fed up with tele-callers from various credit card companies and financial institutions, i heard the name Yahoo luckily . I have never worked in the tele-calling department / industry, but most of the tele callers i have faced never do any level of necessary homework . I understand that most times that is not a possibility, for all i know, these people may get paid by the number of persons called up and not by the numbers of accounts bagged . But in my opinion it would go a long way making the sale …. at least to know the business of the person they call up.
In this case, the girl did not even know that I am into web development , even though she knew the name of my company’s website , which is “websys.co.in” . Nevertheless , she was quite bent on explaining me all about PPC , Yahoo and similar topics, which i did not have any interest of hearing. I was already ready to take the account, as I was also reading about the same topic on Sitepoint’s Search Engine Marketing Kit . Anyway , finally she gave the phone to her senior .
Her senior was little more to the point , and was able to help me sign up quite quickly and activate my account , setup a first campaign , add keyword to it etc. I now have 2 ads running . but here comes the not-so-happy part .
Yahoo Search Marketing India , probably because it is newer than its parent , left much to be desired. It does not even have half the options I was reading about , which is obvious from just by looking at the FAQ , which I should have earlier – feature wise, the “Senior” person who was helping me was not even fully knowledgeable about his own product . I had asked him ” Ok, thanks so I now have my Ad running on your network but what is my reach … is it on Yahoo or Yahoo India ” and the guy went like ” Don’t worry , your ad is now running on Yahoo.com, MSN.com , and various of our other partners because you used “Content Match , Advance Match” etc . But i was little uncertain , so I asked him to run a search for web hosting , on both Search.Yahoo.co.in and Search.Yahoo.com, which demonstrated totally different ads on the sponsored listings box. So the guy then requested to call me back with more info , which he did within 15 minutes and confirmed my fear . Well , I wont say fear as I didn’t really expect to pay a 0.50 p CPC and get my ad on top at Yahoo.com or MSN.com lol . But , just so you know , Yahoo Search Marketing does have partners like MSN , but it is Msn.co.in and similar .
When the person was also demonstrating me the Keyword Selector Tool i had queried whether i can save my current searches – online or download for analysis / future – i also had a extremely difficult time explaining what i was trying to do , and “WHY – i would need to do that ”
Nevertheless, i am currently receiving daily reports of my first paid campaign , at a very low cost and I was able to learn / gather / answer some of my own queries, so overall i would say i am somewhat satisfied . What remains to be seen is what this experimental project goes , and then i will venture to bigger pond of international Search Engine Marketing .

Following the lead of google , MSN / Live now has a webmaster central . If you have been a webmaster for the past 2-3 years , you would be finding it very limited as compared to google webmaster central, but it is surely looking similar – with options to submit your xml sitemap , robots.txt checker for your domain etc.
It does require a existing LIVE account …. but not necessarily a Hotmail account . I login to MSN Messenger using my work email id , which i had long back associated using passport , so i could easily use the same here as well.
It does require you to have an XML sitemap for your website , which should be created using the same sitemaps protocol as google and yahoo. Once you do so , it shows your websites listed pages and links, provided you already have been indexed . If not , this would help them follow up your website at some point of time. Going by the way LIVE / MSN is trying to improve , this will surely help i can safely say .
However , in my experience i found their options too limited , as i said before … as well their results also pretty poor . It gives you results on which of your websites pages are ranking good and for which terms , but if you try to check back on it , it is no where the same.
Some people probably has termed it as another pagerank , but MSN has coined it as Domain Rank.
Sign up at this link : http://webmaster.live.com/

Yesterday around almost 10:36 in the night i received a certain email from a reputed organization, which I had myself applied to. This would be something i will thoroughly enjoy, as i have my personal agenda in mind for the job.
Like the many jobs in today’s world , this one also does not have any targets set by my superiors yet allows one to learn a great deal just by participation itself. Even though I consider myself to be quite good in English , I expect this to better it by one more level. It is an honor to be a part of The Internet and this certainly is one of its building blocks .