TATA NEN Awards has more hiccups
In one of my earlier post, I had mentioned about my site KidsandBibs.com being nominated for TATA NEN Awards. And I was equally excited about the same, however after a few days only, the excitemnet died and there are more questions and queries.
On top of that, the emails from the NEN team really makes us wonder, if the awards are going to be fair or not.
Here is the email from the NEN Team which highlights how they just started without any planning, allowing people to register without verifying email addresses and letting them vote for the companies. Now also if they hire auditors, and engage them to look into the suspicious data, are they going to send emails to each and every registered user to make sure that the user really exists and the votes are valid.. ?? A big question mark 
“Thank you for your interest in TATA NEN Hottest Startups.
It’s come to our attention that some people – a small minority – are cheating to get votes.
Hottest Startups is designed to be a fair, healthy and effective platform to showcase startups in India. Therefore, unethical behaviour cannot be allowed. And only by dealing with such behaviour can we preserve and build the value of what we are creating together.What is unethical behaviour?
Unethical behaviour includes but is not limited to the following:
• Putting false information on your Nomination Form
• Voting on someone’s behalf
• Causing someone to vote without them knowing that they are voting
• Buying votes
What’s included in buying votes? Let’s make this black and white: no one should get an incentive for voting for a specific company. This means: no Rs. 100 coupons; no prizes for voting for a particular startup; no give-aways.
• Hiring individuals or firms that engage in any of the above behaviours.No Nominee may engage in the above behaviour either directly or indirectly.
Ultimately, a voter must be:
• Voting on his/her own behalf
• Informed about the contest and making a conscious choice to vote for a company
• Not getting “paid” to vote for a company
Breaching any of these requirements in order to get votes is unethical and therefore unacceptable.Auditing Processes
As of now, we are putting the following processes in place:
• Identifying and purging false id’s from the system, along with all their votes
• Verifying new registrations before allowing voting
• Researching IP addresses for unexplained spikes or other suspicious voting patterns
• Researching questionable practices that have come to our attention
• Engaging an external auditor to verify the selection processes, and verify information provided by short-listed Nominees.We plan to work with an External Auditor on an ongoing basis, so that, together, we all can continue to build a strong platform for entrepreneurs.
What are the consequences of cheating?
Disqualification from Hottest Startups.
At this point:
Because we had not posted these rules on ethical conduct earlier (frankly, we thought it was obvious), we will contact those companies whose practices are questionable, and see if we can find a solution that includes eliminating votes, rather than barring the companies.However, going forward, anyone found to be violating the Ethical Conduct Rules will be barred from competing.
We once again thank you for your participation, and look forward to your feedback and suggestions.Regards,
NEN Team “
I hope that the external auditors should do a good job.Read about TATA NEN Awards early hiccups.
Frustrated with Net4India
For the first time, I tried hosting a website on net4india and I am so frustrated with their support system. There is an online chat system, which is offline for 24 hours. Maybe the image of online help looks cute on their website, so they have put up the Online Chat system.
I have requested them to give write permission to one of my folders and the request was sent on 25th September, today is 28th; so many support requests I have put, so many calls made; but nothing has been done so far. However they are quick to close your ticket and reply in a standard format “This is in reference to your query, we would like to confirm you that the appropriate measures have been undertaken. For any further assistance do contact us, on 39891414 (from Landline), from Mobile phone dial city code as prefix. ” It will be so good if they really knew what was the appropriate measure. I am not sure if their Support managers do look into the Support Ticket history and the call logs made by customer.
I am really doubting the technical capabilities of the support staff and the most funny thing is when you call to the support staff through phone and ask to countercheck their claim, the girl sitting there says “my tools are not working at the moment“. I wonder what tools she is talking about. I am still waiting for my query to be resolved. Will post about the progress.
The Google PR Update
It has been quiet some time that I have not really logged into those webmaster and SEO forums, so I missed all the excitement and discussions of those long threads regarding “Predict your Google PR” and how everyone used to keep a count on days..while Google used to enjuoy all the attention it gets during those days.
Yesterday, while updating one of my new sites, I saw a faint glimpse of that green bar on my toolbar and I was like.. Oh, so this one got a PR now, it was just 1 so as I said, it was not really visible 
And then I went onto check all my other sites and see what is the outcome of the recent update. As predicted most of the had lost its earlier high PR and lost 1 or 2 rank. It ddin’t really bother me also as I am seeing so much increase in my traffic and earnings. So the PR update was not really something I was looking forward to and was not too keen about getting high values.
I do agree, having a high PR certainly helps when you are selling ad space and trying to sell your website, but as we all know, PR is most importantly dependent on web page linking and with website owners buying links on high PR sites and making sure that they have links from all corners, the real authenticity and the importance of GOOGLE PR (as it used to be) is somewhat compromised these days. If you have money to spend on buying links, you certainly can get high PR. So my main aim is to work on the rankings of my keywords rather than getting high PR. I hope it does not become like the Alexa Rank, which you can increase double fold in just 1-2 days
January was a good month
January 2008 was the best month for me in terms of Google Adsense earnings. It was my highest so far and I also did break the record of highest earnings on a single day.I am seeing that my keywords are getting more paid compartively, the CPC has increased and also the CTR has increased.
It is amazing to note that how a slight change in your ad placement can do the trick. The same ad unit was getting clicked 5 times more, soon after it’s position was changed. I must start writing a book on Money Making using Google Adsense, but this book of mine will be different from all the other books I have come across. Well it’s just a thought and I don’t see the possibility of turning it into a reality atleast in the near future. At the moment, I don’t have time to implement my own findings in the other pages of the same website and also on other sites as I am so busy and tied up with projects and office work.
Oh yes, in January I finally… yes finally reached the 100USD benchmark in Kontera after 4 months. I had written to Kontera earlier how their ads are not helping much and that I am getting much more clicks in Google Adsense comparatively. They had written to me that they will optmize the keywords for my sites, but it never helped me. Well I like Google Adsense because, you yourself can optimize your keywords, your sites and try to get the desired ads you want and you can place it on any website you own, provided you know that you are following their Terms and Conditions. I will check out Kontera for another month or so and see if there is any difference. Else it will be more beneficial for me to sell my ad spots and links to other sponsors.
So the year 2008 was a good start for me. I hope it continues and by the end of this year, I do break some more records of mine. Yes I always compete with myself
PPC Advertising on Popular Keywords
PPC advertising is pay per click advertising. The advertisers pay for the clicks. You might have often noticed those sponsored results on the top bar and side bar on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alexa etc. I have tried using Google Adwords 2-3 times but I run the campaign for just 10-15 days and then when I see no result, I just stop the campaign. I just don’t have patience to wait and watch. For me, the result should be quick. I often noticed that the times, when I run a campaign on Google Adwords, my Adsense earnings drops. It might be just co-incidence or maybe Google has a policy not to drive traffic from Adwords and then use it for Adsense as they have to protect themselves with so many new MFA sites coming up everyday, with no content but just to make money.
For PPC, you should exactly know what you are targeting, what are the right keywords to aim for. The goal of finding good keywords is to build a table of keywords that can bring targeted traffic to your Web site and keywords that are often searched for, but still not so competitive as to make a top ranking next to impossible.
There are many ways to find a good related keyword. I am listing the ones, I use very often and they are good tools all free of cost.
1. Google Adwords Keyword tool to check out the related and most searched - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2. WordTracker – You can check out the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
3. Overture - http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
4. Keyword Tool from SEO book - http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/
So when an advertiser is putting money on keywords, it is better to do some research and then aim for those keywords. Well it is interesting, but this baby site called babycenter(I love that website and it really is a good site for baby related stuff), must have also done some research and they have actually bided on my domain name as one of their targeted keywords both on Google as well as Alexa. So if you search for the term “kidsandbibs” or “kidsandbibs.com”, it shows the sponsored result from babycenter. So this shows that my site is indeed a popular one. Here are some screenshots from Google and Alexa.
World Wide Web Robots
Let’s first start with Robots, what exactly are Robots and how does this web robots work which we call as spiders, crawlers, bots etc.
“A robot is a program that automatically traverses the Web’s hypertext structure by retrieving a document, and recursively retrieving all documents that are referenced.Note that “recursive” here doesn’t limit the definition to any specific traversal algorithm; even if a robot applies some heuristic to the selection and order of documents to visit and spaces out requests over a long space of time, it is still a robot.Normal Web browsers are not robots, because they are operated by a human, and don’t automatically retrieve referenced documents (other than inline images).Web robots are sometimes referred to as Web Wanderers, Web Crawlers, or Spiders. These names are a bit misleading as they give the impression the software itself moves between sites like a virus; this not the case, a robot simply visits sites by requesting documents from them.”
For more details on WWW Robots, check here at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html
Today I was browsing through my Parenting Forum and I see that there are currently 5 active users, when I checked further to see the 4 other guest members to my forum, there they were all browsing along with me, two googlebots, one MSNbot and one Yahoo Slurp!. Well I think, they do love my site and they are my forum’s regular visitors always on the lookout of a new post and content to spider it. See the attached screenshot.
Now, let’s see how useful these Robots are.
The web robots reach out and grab pages from the Internet and if it’s a new page or a page that has been updated since the last time that they visited they will take a copy of the data. They find these pages either because the web author has gone to a search engine and asked for their site to be indexed, or the robot has found their site by following a link from another page. As a result, if the author doesn’t tell the engines about a particular page, and doesn’t have any links to it, it’s highly unlikely that the page will be found.
Robots are working all the time; the ones employed by AltaVista for example will spider about 10,000,000 pages a day. If your website has been indexed by a search engine, you can be assured that at some point a robot has visited your site and by following all your links, will have copied all the pages that it can find. So it is entirely upto the webmaster whether to allow indexing of the pages or not and accordingly write the instructions in robots.txt file. For more details on robots.txt content, check out Robots FAQ.
If a webmaster wants to restrict the visits of these robots, then they can add directions in their robots.txt file and all the well behaved robots follow the directions specified in your robots.txt file.
If you have noticed, I mentioned well behaved, which means there are also, some not well behaved robots out there and as MSN has pointed out that web master can check if the spiders, bots coming to their site are authentic or not. As mentioned in the Live search blog
“But what about crawlers that aren’t so well-behaved? After all, anyone could call themselves ‘MSNBot’, and proceed to be as rude and aggressive as they like. Fortunately, there is a way you can catch these impersonators. Here is how it works:
1. When you get a page view request, it specifies a user-agent and an IP address. As I described above, all requests from Live Search use a user agent starting with the word ‘MSNBot’.
2. If you see the MSNBot user-agent, it’s time to check the identity of the bot. Starting with the IP address (i.e. 207.46.98.149), you can use reverse DNS lookup to find out the registered name of the machine.
3. Once you have the host name (in this case, livebot-207-46-98-149.search.live.com), you can check that it really is coming from Live Search. The name of all live search crawlers will end with ‘search.live.com’. If the name doesn’t end with ‘search.live.com’, you know it’s not really our crawler.
4. Finally, you need to verify that the name is accurate. In order to do this, you can use Forward DNS to see the IP address associated with the host name. This should match the IP address you used in Step 2 – if it doesn’t, it means the name was fake.”
So this gives a fair idea on how to check if the crawlers visiting your webpages are fake or for real. You might have often seen those CAPTCHA images on web forms ( to fight spam), just to test if the person filling up the form is a human being or a robot. We will discuss about CAPTCHA in another post.
