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Yahoo’s new site explorer vs Google webmaster central.

Post author By cafearjun
Post date October 7, 2008
No Comments on Yahoo’s new site explorer vs Google webmaster central.

Yahoo has recently revamped its site explorer. You will know what that is, if you own a website and use Yahoo to get stats like – number of incoming links, pages indexed by Yahoo, incoming links on particular urls or subdomains within your website and cached snapshots of your indexed pages. The new interface you’re taken to, when you type “link:www.yoursitename.com” is the Yahoo Explorer.

Yahoo’s new site explorer has the following new features: None. It’s just a design change as far as my exploration goes.

Yahoo's new site explorer layout — Yahoo's new site explorer design

Simliarities Google webmaster central and Yahoo site explorer

Just like Google Webmaster central, Yahoo Explorer provides more detailed/advanced information about your site after you authenticate. You’re required to either upload a file with a particular filename and a unique key (downloadable in your Yahoo site explorer login) or add some Yahoo meta tags, similar to Google WMC.

Boo Yahoo!

Your sites don’t get authentcated instantly on Yahoo Site Explorer, unlike Google Webmaster central, where all you do is upload a file and you have all the info you’ll ever require.

Before Google Webmaster Central

Before Google Webmaster Central came in, Yahoo! rocked. It gave you highly accrurate info about the number of incoming links to a site – any site, whether you owned it or not, which Google preferred to keep secret. After Google webmaster central, I realised that Google always had that info, only it was meant only for the website owner. Yahoo’s site explorer still is and will continue to be the destination for SEO specialists worldwide looking for detailed site linking information.

Advantage Yahoo

Although both have pretty much standard features. The biggest Yahoo advantage is that it’s open for all. You can go and see any site’s indexed pages and incoming links. Very useful for Search engine marketing/ Internet marketing companies and SEO professionals.

Advantage Google Webmaster Central

1. Diagnostics: Detailed info about web crawl – HTTP errors, not found, URLs not followed, restricted by robots.txt, URLs timed out, unreachable URLs.

2. Content Analysis: Very important for your Google rankings – Duplicate meta descriptions, long meta descriptions, short meta descriptions, missing title tags, duplicate title tags, long title tags, short title tags, non-informative title tags (new) and non indexable content issues.

3. Search statistics: Top search queries (both impressions and clicks) (highly inaccurate in my case), what Googlebot sees – external link anchor text (very important again for your SEO), crawl stats (when was the site last crawled, no of pages crawled, PageRank of pages crawled etc), subscriber stats (how many people have subscribed to your site’s feeds).

4. Other tools: Some advanced options like setting your web site’s geographic target (for regional sites), set preferred domain (how do you want your site to display on Google – with www or without), analyse and generate robots.txt (for selective indexing of your pages), set crawl rate (for big sites that incur bandwidth expenses when spiders crawl their sites), enhance 404 pages (Google offers custom 404 – page not found pages so your users see the 404 page with relevant links in stead of an error page), enhanced image search (for sites that want to be listed on Google image search) and finally URL removal (if you want some URLs not to be indexed by Google).

In brief, if you’re a webmaster and your site’s not authenticated on Google webmaster central, you’re probably losing out. Google’s webmaster central has all the tools you require to diagnose and get your site polished and up those search rankings.

Yahoo will continue to sustain because of its “open to all” poilcy.

Internet

Google Trends does an Alexa, only better..

Post author By cafearjun
Post date October 6, 2008
No Comments on Google Trends does an Alexa, only better..

Came across the Google website trends and couldn’t believe my eyes. Yes guys, it’s all in the open now and there no hiding from it and the good old Alexa “highly manipulable and inaccurate” ranking days are over. Or are they?

Alexa, although pretty accurate for very high traffic sites, often showed weird patterns for smaller sites. I personally have access to about 25 sites’ data and from various stat/analytical software I use (ya ok, its Google Analytics). I always knew which site was getting higher uniques, pageviews, contrary to Alexa, which almost always showed incorrect rankings. i guess it must’ve been me, hanging around my favourite “self owned” sites, thus improving their Alexa rankings.

Have been running the same tests with Google Trends for websites and Voila! they’re accurate. It’s just something you expect of Google – precision.

Never really got around to the third tier – sites like Compete.com and Quantcast.com. Now i know I wasn’t the only one who stuck to Alexa! Here’s proof.

I now know where to go for accurate site traffic analysis. It’s like an addictive game where you just can’t stop yourself from comparing sites of different genres, geographic locations, subjects etc. And once you’ve decided to stop, you remember another one and bingo! Google Trends is open on your Firefox again (yeah, I love open source and am sick of the bulky IE).

Advantage Alexa

Having said that, you still can’t get away from Alexa. If you’re used to checking the Alexa ranking of every site you visit (and then semi consciously upgrading or degrading that site in your mind respectively), I bet no matter how inaccurate or manipulable, Alexa will continue to rule people’s toolbars. In my case, it’s Sparky that sits on the lower right hand corner and right now, it’s showing me no ranking for my Blog.

a man's struggle

A man’s struggle

A man struggles – struggles to find his ground. He sees millions of people around him. He sees poor people on crowded streets, selling day to day commodities to sustain a living.. on the other hand he sees thousands of people living posh lives, with luxuries that the poor only dream to have. He wonders.. why this divide? Why this punishment for the poor? He ponders over the topic and strives to change the world where every human being would have equal privileges, a place where every human being would have the power to choose what they want to do.

He draws a path to do that.. and thinks to himself “What good can a man do to the poor unless he has dominance, a voice that has audability to reach all? What good can he do until he is successful, rich and has the power to actually change the world in a meaningful way?

On the other hand, he imagines a scenario where he’d walk down those streets, help the poor with whatever he can, but realises that the task is humongous. Giving up on that route, he tries to take up the responsibility by doing whatever he can to make money in a way that will help the masses anyway and then using it for the poor.

On his path of hardwork, attaining knowledge.. he eventually finds a way to make money. Once there, he realises that there are a thousand avenues open for him to make more money. He tries to make more to make more difference. He thinks what he has made is still not enough to make a difference. He continues on this drive, until he reaches a point where he finds himself on the verge of death, after living a long hard life, and asks himself – “How far will this money go in making those millions of poor lives better”?

At that point he looks back at his life and realises his money, although a lot for him, is no good use to make a larger difference.

He then realises – he always had what it takes to make a difference. He always had a vision, of a better community, he had power in his ideas and thats all he ever needed to change lives of the poor. He regrets not having taught every person he met to dream big, to believe “Nothing is impossible”.. and to tell the same thing to people they met.

He lives a life dedicated to this cause, not realising that his money is never enough. He realises that the only thing he could have done is spread a message of self empowerment and education.

Man is the most powerful machine ever, but it will always remain with a man; what he wants to make of his life.

business idea

Have an Internet Business Idea?

Post author By cafearjun
Post date October 1, 2008
No Comments on Have an Internet Business Idea?

Introduction:

We get ideas when we’re inspired, when we see things functioning around us. The most primitive, yet most effective business ideas involve improving an existing competitor’s product or service. Because then you don’t need to worry if it’ll work. It’s already working. In such cases you only rely on your ability to create a better, more advanced product or service and then perhaps the finance and expertise to market and distribute it, not chance.

But when you’re struck by that one innovative, out of the world yet simple, never tried before idea, you need to answer a few questions to find out whether it’s really sustainable, executable and profitable.

1. Is there a need in the market or is there a void? There being a demand in the market is one thing, but there being a complete void in the market is another. The greatest businesses are based on voids. A void that your product will fill. Something people always wanted, whether consciously or sub-consciously but it never existed. Good ideas make use of market demand, but best ideas make use of market voids. This means your customers might not always know that they need your service until they know about it. This obviously has higher marketing costs because your audience needs to be educated about your unique product and the demand has to be created from nothing.

Eg:
a. PeopleForever.org – We’ve conceptualised this website to fill a similar void. An emotional outlet that’s so desperately required. People pay their condolences on someone’s demise on newspapers’ comments sections. The rest who feel the need to express, don’t let it out at all. Where should they? PeopleForever.org aims to fill the void here. When you feel like letting your heart out, letting the world know how you felt about Ishmeet Singh (deceased Indian singer), where do you go? You come to PeopleForever, write about Ishmeet, pay condolences to his family, get encyclopedic information about his life and get in touch with people like you who loved him.

2. Do you have the finance to develop your product or service to marketable standards? Without a great product/service and a good budget to develop and market it, you’ll only expose your great idea, probably to be picked up by your competitors, who might be able to develop and market it better than you. Wait till you get the finance, leave no stones unturned to develop it to the highest standards and once that is done, make sure your clientèle knows where to find your product or service.

3. Does your idea have the ability to generate cash? A lot of it? What is your revenue model? You might have a great idea for people interested in “squid recipes”. It might be something that most people interested in squid recipes will want to buy. But will that ever make you enough money to sustain the production costs, salaries etc? Maybe not. However, an innovative idea that applies to millions of Italian food lovers, might be financially more viable.

When talking about online businesses, it’s very important that the revenue model is decided and very carefully gauged. If you have a web site, you’ll either sell a product or advertising space on it, or a service via it. Your revenue generation will depend on your product/service’s price competitiveness, profit margin, ability to convert onlookers into customers, your web site’s easy navigation and design.

If your revenue model is advertising only, then you will need to generate a lot of traffic to break even. Will your site ever be able to generate enough traffic to pay back the development costs, marketing and ongoing salaries? It should be calculated before-hand how many visitors will the site attract in the best case scenario; what’ll make them come back? what does it mean financially. Is it all worth investing so much time, money and effort?

Note: An online business idea with advertising as the only revenue model requires much greater conviction and innovation compared to e-commerce based sites. In the latter’s case, if you have a good margin to be made off your sales, then you can afford expensive pay per click advertising campaigns and work to improve your conversion rates, whereas an advertising revenue dependent site has to cover that in terms of bringing out a compelling innovative idea and generating user stickiness.

Make sure you’ve done your market research and again, have the money to market the idea to generate the quantity of sales you’re looking for to make profit. There’s nothing worse than investing months in developing a website based on “what you think is” a innovative idea and finding out that a top-class web site exists, doing exactly what you want to. Market research is imperative.

Once you know you’ve discovered a treasure chest (great idea), make sure you don’t let it pass lightly. Make the most of it, explore every venue and give it your 100%.

If you’re an online entrepreneur or have a great startup idea, the following sites may be of interest.
1. tradevibes.com
2. younoodle.com
3. killerstartups.com
4. crunchbase.com

Have I missed something? Feel free to comment.

Tags new business internet

Shabana Azmi

Shabana Azmi and the faces I like

Post author By cafearjun
Post date October 1, 2008
No Comments on Shabana Azmi and the faces I like

Its surprising, my brother and sister always told me that I like tall dark and handsome women. haha. Lemmi share a few faces I love and then you can figure out what you think about those. Shabana Azmi is my all time favourite, followed by a girl who lived in my neighbourhood and then by my present girlfriend. The three faces resemble I explore today. Here you go:

Can’t upload the other two I’m afraid. I’ll be killed, not so good for this blog. WHo thinks Shabana Azmi is the most beautiful woman that ever lived? I need comments.