ArJ.uNo

Scottish bazillionaire Brian Souter made headlines this week when he pointedly accused Google of censoring him because his site dropped in the SERPs. Said Sir Brian, “It’s not Google’s place to decide which sites we can see and those we can’t.”

These complaints happen every day, actually; stop by the Google Webmaster Forum and pick one of the dozens threads accusing Google of arbitrarily penalizing or deindexing a site. They surface daily. Most of these complaints don’t get this kind of exposure, though.

The common theme in the majority of the complaints seems to be that webmasters haven’t looked at their site objectively in an effort to determine what they might have done to cause the issue. Often, the problems are obvious and fixable.

Timing and Bite of the Evil Panda

Sir Brian fell back several pages in the SERPs on August 13. Souter claimed that his site had “mysteriously disappeared,” but he still had 46 pages indexed, so he hadn’t been removed by Google.

Is it any coincidence that Google officially launched Panda internationally on August 12, the day before Sir Souter’s ranking dropped? I think not.

Until yesterday, you could find an exact duplicate of Souter’s site at www.briansouter.com.14feb-youth.com/; it was removed sometime overnight.

Image Credit: Attach Media

Your Baby is Ugly

No one wants to hear it, I know, it’s cruel. But it is what it is. Souter’s site is clunky, old, and not user-friendly at all.

In the generation of me, what are you doing to attract me, your reader, to your site and make it easy for me to find what I’m looking for, Sir Brian?

You have all of this information about Stagecoach in different links within your Profile page, but I had no idea it was there until I actually visited the Profile page. A dropdown menu on the main navigation would give me some clue as to what your site contains and why I should want to stay and keep reading.

Few Backlinks & Social Presence Lacking

Your website isn’t a billboard; you can’t just stick it up and leave it for 10 years and hope for the best. Millions of others are making an effort to meet the needs of their audience and stay current.

The online landscape is constantly changing and webmasters have to make at least some semblance of an effort to keep up… even if they feel entitled because of who they are.

Rankings Dropped? What You Should Do First

If your ranking has suddenly dropped or you believe it might have been removed from Google’s index, do at least the following things before throwing on your tinfoil hat and assuming the Intrawebz are out to get you:

• Do a Google search for site:yourwebsite.com with your URL to see if your site is still indexed. If you get results, you haven’t been removed; your ranking has dropped for some reason. If you’ve been removed, you need to find out why and apply for re-inclusion at Webmaster Central once you’ve cleaned up your problem.
• Do a Google search for “yourwebsite.com” with your URL in quotations. You should be in the top 10 results. If your site appears back on page four or five, you have most likely been penalized by Google.
• Have you a bought or exchanged links?
• Have you hired or otherwise allowed someone else to make changes to your site, and do you understand what they did? If you were ranking really well for a time and suddenly dropped, you need to find out if they were using black hat tactics such as cloaking on your site.
• Look at your site objectively. Better yet, have someone else go over it for you. Are you giving Google the information it needs to crawl and rank your site for the terms you’re after? Is your site easy to navigate and user friendly? Be honest, the only person you’re hurting by wearing blinders is yourself.

Search Engine Manipulation?

Sir Brian Souter released a statement this morning asking webmasters to contact him if their sites have been blocked by Google, seemingly unaware that his own site, in fact, isn’t blocked at all. Is he ever in for a treat!

I suspect he’s about to get a flood of emails, 95 percent of which will be from webmasters whose sites were legitimately penalized or removed for things they could simply fix. It’s always easier to throw the problem in someone else’s lap than to admit that yes, your baby is, in fact, ugly.

How to not get caught in spam filters

Reliably sending email without getting caught in spam filters is a full-time job, for someone. Surely not for an end-user, but for every end-user email, there is an administrator somewhere who has to deal with daily occurrences of some user message not getting through because it got stuck in a spam filter on the other end.

At the enterprise level, this could easily be several people’s full-time jobs. Spam filtering is constantly evolving. This is partly due to new spam filtering initiatives that require administrators to configure something new, such as SPF or DKIM. A few years ago, SPF didn’t exist. Now, anyone who sends lots of email virtually has to implement it. It’s also partly due to other administrators; sometimes you just have to get on the phone with the recipient’s admin to figure out what’s going wrong.

This guide is not for those enterprise admins. It’s for the hapless developers pressed into Postfix config duty for a small start-up, or for the first time admin just getting into outbound mail. What follows is a quick and dirty guide to making sure 99% of your email is delivered.

Make sure you’re not on a DNS blacklist (aka RBL: Reverse Blacklist)

By far the most frequently used type of spam filter is the DNS blacklist. There are hundreds of free services out there that keep records of IP addresses they think send a lot of spam. Virtually every spam filtering product on the market comes pre-configured to look at a few of these every time they get a new connection. It’s fast due to extremely low over-head (DNS scales, baby), and relatively accurate.

You will need to know what IP you’re sending from. You can check many blacklists at once via various different sites.

If you are on a blacklist, you might be wondering how to get off it, and how you got on in the first place. Unfortunately, there is no single answer. Each blacklist has its own criteria for who it lists, and has its own process for removal. Indeed, many lists don’t allow removal at all. It’s the wild-west out there. If you find yourself unable to be removed from a popular blacklist, you may have no choice but to buy another IP address. Just make sure it’s clean first!

Some people think blacklists are the devil. If you have ever found yourself at the mercy of a popular, but totally non-responsive blacklist, you might agree. But in general, the problem is that some administrators outright block email that matches a single blacklist. If you’re an inbound admin, don’t do that! You want to weigh many factors, and multiple blacklists, before you decide to reject a message. Regardless, they are a reality of the modern Internet you need to just deal with.

Make sure you’re not an open relay

If you want to STAY off blacklists, you at the very least need to make sure you’re not an open relay. Basically, you should not accept and definitely not send out any mail that’s not destined for a domain you actually own. Testing can be done via telnet, or via a web-based tool.

Reverse DNS (aka PTR records)

Another very common check is whether your IP address is named, or unnamed. The idea here is that dynamic IPs, such as those given to home users by their ISP, generally don’t need to have names associated with them. A lot of spam these days comes from zombied home machines.

This is a simple DNS fix. You just need to create an PTR record for that IP address. You can check if your PTR is setup correctly with the following command.

MX Records, postmaster, root & abuse

While the standards RFCs don’t require you to receive mail just because you’re sending mail, in reality many anti-spam systems are biased against message from a domain that does not also accept mail. You don’t have to send and receive from the same server(s), but if you’re sending mail from @example.com, it’s a good idea to make sure some real human somewhere is getting any messages sent to [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected].

Postmaster IS strictly required by the RFC. Root is a legacy version of postmaster. Abuse is a relatively new “standard” that many administrators would try first to resolve a spam issue.

Inbound email is a whole other subject. But the basic gist is that you need an MX record for example.com, and it needs to point to a server that can accept mail for example.com. If you don’t have an existing inbound server, or don’t want to run your own, many hosted alternatives exists.

You should explicitly test postmaster, root & abuse manually via your regular email client to make sure they actually work.

HELO, I’m your mail server

Mail servers communicate via a protocol called SMTP. It’s actually a plain-text protocol, which you can easily emulate via telnet. The very first line of a SMTP handshake is the “HELO” command, where the sending server identifies itself. A typical example would be “HELO example.com”, meaning, “Hi, I’m the mail server for example.com”.

Many spammers set this to a bogus value, or try to use the recipient’s host name or IP address, which is nonsensical. In any case, the correct thing to do is for you to set it to your domain.

How you set this will vary by mailserver. In Postfix, it’s the myhostname parameter in /etc/postfix/main.cf. Checking it is easy; just send a message through the server, and look at the headers on the remote end. Your hostname will show up on the first “Received” header line:

SPF/DKIM

SPF and DKIM are newer standards that are slowly gaining popularity. The basic idea is that your DNS records can encode a list of rules about what IP addresses are allowed to send mail for your domain. It’s a whitelist, versus a blacklist. Typically, you can ignore these unless you’re sending a large volume of mail.

Monitoring

That just about covers anti-anti-spam 101. As mentioned, this will likely be an ongoing effort, and you need to keep on top of how it’s going. Ideally, there would be an administrator who would be alerted if emails are bouncing due to spam filters. For postfix, I would recommend pflogsumm.

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I love Infographics and these nice and funny set of pictures are trending like anything and I like them a lot. So heres a Angry Bird Infographics that I found on the web and would like to share.

Angry Birds is an absolute epidemic. To date there have been over 300 million downloads and gamers are spending over 200 million minutes per day hurling birds.

The Angry Birds rage is more than just a game,  there are Angry Birds T-shirts, plushies, and edibles ranging from cakes to bento boxes. Mattel has made an Angry Birds board game and Rovio is spreading rumors of a feature length film on the horizon.

Other game creators have tried to match the success of Angry Birds to no avail. For one reason or another, these perturbed birds have captured the hearts and minds of time-wasters everywhere; Angry Turds and/or Chicks’n’Vixens fail to glean much success. After all, Angry Birds did prompt a contemporary philosophical masterpiece, “Angry Birds™ Yoga – How to Eliminate the Green Pigs in Your Life” by Brazilian Hare Krishna,  Giridhari Dasa.

Now that Angry Birds has the Google+ seal of approval, there is no stopping it from gobbling free-time while simultaneously inciting addiction.

Why is Angry Birds more addicting than all those other games? According to psychologist Michael Chorost, PhD:

1. “It’s simple with no learning curve to get going.”
2. “It’s rewarding- we get a primitive pleasure from blowing $HIT up!”
3. “It’s realistic- the physics of the game are just as you’d expect.”
4. “It’s funny- the creatures’ sounds, laughing and backflips.”

Check out the infographic below, “The Global Appeal of Angry Birds, A Story of Psychology, Sociology, and Addiction” by aytm, and discover the psychological make-up of an Angry Birds addict, maybe you will find that you fit the bill.

Shout in the comments  if you love Angry Birds!

 

I found this page on this website. Hope you enjoyed.

Okay there are no doubt many reasons the iOS faithful out there will tell you why you need to purchase the iPhone 5, but what about any reasons not to purchase the next generation iPhone? Well what we have below is nine reasons not to shell out your hard earned dosh on the latest iOS smartphone when it appears at some point.

The nine reasons comes our way courtesy of the guys over at iDownload Blog and is basically a humorous look at the reasons people shouldn’t purchase the iPhone 5 done by the guys over at MacTrast, which can be viewed below.

The nine reasons include such things, as the iPhone 5 will not have a replicator to dispense hot beverages, the iPhone 5 cannot be used as a defibrillator in an emergency, and the iPhone 5 cannot transport you to any point in time and space.

All of which means of course is that Apple’s latest piece of iOS tech isn’t the ultimate futuristic technological marvel the iOS faithful would have you believe, and is basically just a smartphone doing things that smartphones do.

Of course it’s all done in the name of humour as obviously none of these nine reasons actually have any baring on whether you would purchase the iPhone 5 or not, but it does go to show that at least someone doesn’t take the iPhone 5 as seriously as others.

My favourite is “The iPhone 5 does not come equipped with a zombie killing laser,” which is a good thing as no doubt rather than targeting zombies which are in short supply, I figure users would target Android users in an attempt to get rid of the opposition…just joking folks.

As I said earlier, there is an abundance of reasons why people would purchase the iPhone 5, some through loyalty to Apple and no doubt some will defect from other platforms, but we’d love to know why you will pick up the iPhone 5 once it becomes available, so feel free to let us know your reasons by posting to our comments area below.

My personal reasons for not purchasing an iPhone 5 is, firstly I am one of the Android faithful, and secondly no doubt it will be way beyond my financial means.

Oh and if you feel you have another reason for not purchasing the iPhone 5 feel free to share that with us as well, and we’ll see what ingenious reasons our readership can come up with.

Well, I seen many people going carzy as to weather choose Google+ or Facebook, so I found this interesting image that distinguishes both of them.

Well, I said before that hostgator has launched Indian operations on this post. Which is actually good for all of the Indian users out there. But do you think that the services of the two are same? I would rather say they are not even comparable.

I review both of them as I have hosting accounts on Hostgator.com and Hostgator.in, one of my site i.e. MyWebStay.com and arj.uno are on the Indian servers and dotKB.com is on the Texas server. So here’s the differences i found which I would like to share with you.

1. Hostgator.in is expensive as you need to pay 10.3% extra as service tax. [1 point for Hostgator.com]
2. Hostgator.com is far so there is latency problem (means data will take more time to reach you), Hostgator.in is near and it is about 4x times faster [1 point to Hostgator.in]
3. Hostgator.com has a better technical support, the indian servers are expensive due to expensive network so Hostgator India has planned to cut cost by reducing their staff.[1 point to Hostgator.com]
4. You can pay your web host in Indian currency and there is no foreign exchange fluctuations for you. [1 point to Hostgator.in]
5. Hostgator.com is offering discounts upto 25% on their hosting plans and there are other coupons too, like First month for 1 cent. [1 point to Hostgator.com]
6. Hostgator.in gives discounts according to Indian festivals, so it gives you a feel of home. [1 point to Hostgator.in]
7. Hostgator.com has working affiliate system, whereas hostgator.in has no affiliate system. [1 point to Hostgator.com]

All the above points are what other peoples are discussing and there is nothing technicalities invloved in them. You can even check that out even if you don’t have a hosting account. But below is the comparison that provides things which you will probably came to know after buying. You should seriously consider them.

1. Hostgator.in will not give you adword credit
2. Hostgator.in is new.
3. Hostgator.in is not Green as Hostgator.com is.
4. Never go for a “Business Shared Plan”, as its of no use to you. Since won’t be getting a toll free number, its better to take the “Baby Plan” and put IP/SSL as addon, this would be cheaper and effective.
5. The system used as shared server on USA servers have 16 cores CPU, whereas the System used in Indian servers have 4 cores CPU.
6. Hostgator.in is not providing Windows Shared Hosting.
7. On bandwidth analysis I found that Hostgator USA servers give an average download rate of  4-5MBPS and peak is 8-9 MBPS that I have noticed. Whereas Hostgator.in servers gave average download speed of 300-400KBPS, however the peak level noticed by me was 5-6MBPS. I used wget tool in terminal to do that.
8. When it comes to dedicated servers you can see that Indian dedicated servers have a 1000GB-2000GB bandwidth, whereas USA dedicated servers have 10,000GB bandwidth.
9. Even number of IP’s assigned by Indian servers are less than USA servers.
10. Moreover the System spec of USA servers are far better than the Indian systems.
11. Indian servers are slow and sluggish, so as its support team. I was very happy with the support I got from Hostgator USA, means you just need to mail them and they use to reply within 15-20 min. Here even a very small and simple query takes 8-12 hours for reply.

Despite so many drawbacks why am I still using Hostgator India services, well here’s why:

1. My sites when working on Hostgator India servers are still fast (In terms of processing).
2. Even though it’s 10.3% expensive than american servers, its still it is cheaper than other Web Hosting companies in India.
3. The major reason is that one of my site wiz. CommentIndia.com uses Facebook Integration and there needs to be very less latency (in terms of ping time) to function it properly. This was not working well in the American servers as still in India many people use slow and poor quality networks (Edge, GPRS and High speed wireless internet are poor quality networks for me). Ping times on these network for USA servers is sometimes >1200ms, the same in Indian server is about ~400ms. And my Facebook intergation works well in that.
4. I had a good time with Hostgator with last couple of years and I believe that they will improve their services in Indian operations and make them usable for people those who had normal hosting requirements (Unlike specific hosting requirements like I had).

I still love Hostgator, if you are planning to get a Hostgator USA server use coupon code “25percentlower” to get 25% discount or use coupon “gatorfor1cent” to get First month for 1 cent. On the other hand if you are planning to go for Hostgator India server use coupon code “25percentlowerindia” to get 25% discount.

For further queries, feel free to contact me at [email protected]

Facebook lost nearly 6m users in the US last month, according to figures from Inside Facebook, sparking fresh concern that the social network’s growth is slowing.

Total monthly active users on the site still grew by 1.7 per cent between the beginning of May and early June, taking its total to 687m, according to Inside Facebook, part of the Inside Network, which provides news and analytics tools for social media, virtual goods and mobile apps.

But in the US there was a drop for the first time in a year, from 155.2m to 149.4m during the month of May. Canada also lost 1.52m users, while the UK, Norway and Russia lost “more than 100,000”.

That was all offset by big gains in Brazil, India, Mexico and Indonesia, Inside Facebook says, but “overall growth has been lower than normal for the second month straight, which is unusual”.

Although these are headline-grabbing statistics, they are just a couple of months’ data – it isn’t yet a trend. Inside Facebook itself gives a health warning on its figures, suggesting that seasonal factors and “bugs in the Facebook advertising tool” can distort the figures. Facebook has not commented on the report. (Updated: see end of post for Facebook’s response.)

This is not the first time that people have tried to suggest Facebook is losing momentum – and each of them has, so far, proven a blip in an otherwise frenetic growth rate.

It is almost exactly a year since an Inside Facebook interview with Mark Zuckerberg triggered the most recent fears that growth at the world’s largest social network might be running out of steam.

Just as Mr Zuckerberg was talking onstage in Cannes about the importance of Japan, Russia, South Korea and China for its next phase of growth, Inside Facebook published an article quoting him as saying: “We saw our exponential growth rate continue for a very long period of time, and it still does at a super-linear rate, though not quite 3 per cent a week any more.”

According to Inside Facebook’s latest stats, Facebook is “not quite” growing at 3 per cent a month any more, so it’s true to say that things have slowed down.

But back in June 2010, Facebook had around 500m users. Now it’s closing in on 700m. Its huge scale will inevitably affect its growth rate but from an international perspective, its dominance is greater than ever. Another set of data, from Cosenza, suggests that Facebook is now the leading social network in 119 out of 134 major markets.

As Facebook targets 1bn users, many have focused on China as its great untapped source of growth. But as Facebook’s investors target an initial public offering next year, the health of the network in more immediately profitable areas such as North America and Western Europe might be just as big a concern.

Source: shellypalmer.com

Well, recently Hostgator.com has expanded itself to join hands and partner with other companies to provide hosting facilities around the world. Very recently they announced the newest HostGator addition; the launch of HostGator India, http://www.hostgator.in!

I am sure that HostGator India will allow all, the opportunity to receive local hosting with servers in India, as well as localized support from their new office in India as well for HostGator India clients! Hostgator’s Indian operations have already started and their Indian office is located in Nashik, Maharashtra. The Indian office works 24×7 and provides technical as well as sales and billing support to all HostGator.in client base.

I have been one of their very first customers and have already got all my sites ported to Hostgator India.

Since day one, I have seen incredible change in the site speed due to very less latency and even my site’s ranking has also spiked up.

I recommend all users who are India based to look forward to this opportunity and use Hostgator India as their web host.

Who may use the coupon “25percentlower” and get additional discount on you hosting plan (for 1year or more).

Remember that you need to pay an additional amount of bucks as service tax @ 10.3%, but since you got a 25% discount coupon code, it’s still worth to get one.

Well I am one of those guys who get tons of mails everyday, but the main problem in my case is that I use to get many SPAM mails everyday. Well I thinks most of us have the same problem.
But today a miracle had happen its 11.26pm here and I have not received even a single unsolicited mail yet. And since its about half an hour left for the end of the day, I believe k wont get any more mails now. So I can confidently say that today is the day when I got not even a single spam mail in my inbox or even if I do its either trapped by Gmails spam assassin or has been automatically deleted by my own spam filtering method.
But what I want to share today is that why do we get spam mails and how to avoid it. If I start from scratch spam mail are basically promotional mails that we all receive everyday every-time, one good thought here is why do we get all such stuff? A one liner answer to this is because we all give our mail ids very easily to anyone and anywhere in the Internet and email spamming is considered as best and cheapest method to drive traffic on a website. Be cautious as spam mails contains various tricks like spoofing, phishing and spreading virus on your systems.
Although spamming is now considered as a very poor technique of website marketing (due to the great efforts done by Gmail/Yahoo/MS guys which makes them ineffective) still many folks try the same method to gather audience.
Well all I can say is follow these simple steps to make sure you wont get spammed anymore:
1) Create two email ids, one for handling your personal mails and other for giving it to websites all over the internet. Remember internet is a way good technology and you have to give your email ids for correspondence, separating personal mails and mails used for correspondence/contact purpose is a very nice method for managing your emails and is less irritating. One thing to consider is that every site won’t send you spam mails, only few will do. So don’t think that you should not give your email id to anyone.
2) Always mark spam to mails that are spam rather than just ignoring it, believe me you wont get at-least that kind of mail ever. And this will also block the source.
3) If you have your own domain or if you are planning to get one, make your mail id like [email protected] or [email protected], mails like this do not get even a single spam mail.
4) If you are publishing your email to your blog or any forum do write it like this yourmail [at] gmail [dot] com. This will avoid spam bots from capturing your mail. You may use your own method of writing your email on a forum page by editing the method given above.

And ya do change your password every 2 weeks and make it alphanumeric and add few special symbols to the same.

You may reach me via email at [email protected]