Today, Google announced that it had made a “big algorithmic improvement” that, unlike other changes, could be noticeable to its users. Usually, any algorithm changes made by this search engine giant go unnoticed by most netizens. However, this time Google has launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to their ranking–a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of its queries.

This announcement was made by Google Fellow Amit Singhal and principal engineer Matt Cutts. The reason for this change as told by Matt Cutts was -

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites–sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites–sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on“

This is definitely some great news for hard working webmasters and bloggers who were affected by websites that contained plagiarized content and yet, attracted more search engine traffic. Google definitely has a responsibility in keeping the web eco-system healthy and this change in the algorithm could be one of the most effective steps towards achieving the goal.

Further reading:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_announces_big_algorithmic_improvement.php

There are many interesting, surprising and bizarre incidents that took place in the lives of our celebrated internet entrepreneurs and internet companies. This post is a quick compilation of interesting incidents in 2010 related to internet entrepreneurs.

Kanye West Performs At Twitter Headquarters

This one takes the cake away for being among the most amusing things that happened in 2010. When people set up a Twitter account or create a new Facebook fan page – they begin to belt out their updates. Kanye West went a step ahead in the July of 2010 when he performed at the Twitter headquarters.  The mammothly successful internet company also put up photographs of Kanye West’s visit on its company Twitter Office Flickr page.

This was no big deal for him though. Earlier, Kanye West also stopped by the offices of Facebook in Palo Alto, California, to preview several brand-new tracks for a roomful of rather awestruck Facebook employees.

Google Releases List Of Strangest Searches By American Users

Google tabulated a funny list of the strangest searches of the year, based on its American users.

They are:

— Can a horse have OCD?

— Am I bipolar or overachiever?

— Why are Americans afraid of dragons?

— Ninjas are better than pirates

— Why is a raven like a writing desk?

— Why does Brian Wilson dye his beard?

— Should I marry him?

— I wish I could speak whale

— Why couldn’t you stand on the sun’s surface?

— Why does my baby grunt?

Italian Woman Places Charges Against Virtual Facebook Burglar

Do you call yourself a Facebook addict? Well, then you might be in for some tough competition. In a bizarre case, Paola Letizia has filed charges against an unknown user for breaking and robbing a house, the one which exists not in the domain of physical reality but inside a Facebook game in the virtual world. The hacker had cracked her password and stripped the virtual house inside the game “Pet Society”. Paola Letizia had decorated the home for her virtual cat, which to her relief has been left behind, and the list of stolen items indicate a loss of $140. The case has been handed to the National Post Office for investigation.

Steve Jobs Proves He’s Human

Photos posted on  the popular tech blog – TechCrunch created ruffle when Apple demi-god, CEO Steve Jobs was spotted in San Francisco hotspot Flour + Water over the weekend. Soon there were many parodical stories that did the rounds of the internet. One of the best that I found was that of – eSarcasm. They are a must read if you have a good sense of humor!

Mark Zuckerberg’s Girlfriend Demands A Contract

After graduating in spring 2007, Priscillia Chan finally took the Facebook job in July 2010 and moved to California. Not that she was an easy hire: Zuckerberg’s long-distance sweetheart demanded a contract specifying one date per week and 100 minutes of alone time, minimum, before agreeing to move out West.

Hope you enjoyed the post!

If you ever plan to begin a business, you will realize the desperate need for funds right from Day one. You need the initial cash to setup the basic requirements for your startup.  This is where pre-angel funding comes into play.

Before I get into the concept of pre-angel funding let me talk Angel Funding. Angel funding is also known as Angel investment.

Angel Investment

What is Angel Funding?

Angel funding is the capital that is provided to a start-up for kick starting its business. There are angel investors who provide capital to start ups based on their business plan. If the business plan is quite strong and seems to be a profit making venture then an investor would be ready to invest in the startup.

In return, the angel investor receives a part-ownership or share in the company. Thereby, he earns profits via startup investment.

A  prime example of this kind of funding can be seen with the start of Facebook. When Facebook hit a brick wall with its expansion plans it was Peter Thiel (Founder of Paypal) who came to their rescue by offering them millions of dollars of funds for expansion.

Why are these investors called as Angels?

These investors are no less than angels. More often than not, these investors pump money into a startup at a time when they are low on funds or need to expand rapidly to capture a market. The Facebook story is a prime example. Another good example is that of Google, the first funding for Google as a company was secured on August 1998 in the form of a $100,000USD contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Back then Google was not even yet incorporated. So we can see here that these are two companies that are standing where they are today because of the belief of their Angel investors.

What is Pre-Angel Funding?

This brings us back to Pre-angel funding. Before an angel investor actually begins to trust your business startup you need to show some progress. Unfortunately, even the “some progress” of a startup needs money. This money comes from pre-angel funding and this comes from your family and friends.

The pre-angel funding is more of loaned out money and you need to pay it back to them. Unlike, angel investors who acquire  a stake or part-ownership to your company.

Let me know any questions or views below. Thanks!

Google is waving good bye to Google Wave which was dubbed as the next generation messenger. Collegefallout had covered about this revolutionary product which Google claimed would transform the way people communicate online.

You can read the earlier post on Google Wave here.

Google has stopped the Google Wave service due to lack of users. When Google Wave was launched by Google it was proving to be a big hit with high-profile scientists working within top institutions including MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Cambridge and the University of Michigan. And the whole internet was looking for Google Wave “invites”.

The product was created by two brothers Jens and Lars Rasmussen, who were also behind Google Maps.

“Wave has not seen the adoption we would have liked,” said Urs Holzle from Google in a blog post.

Google claimed that although they are discontinuing Wave due to its failure to be popular among internet users it was still a clever product. Adding that sometimes, it is very difficult to objectify why a product did not take off.

Link building is an important step for your SEO campaign. But it is important that you do not make a few dangerous mistakes while building links as it can cost you the site’s reputation in the eyes of search engines. A few link building mistakes can cause your site to be banned by search engines or get penalized in your Google Pagerank.

Here I have discussed 3 dangerous back linking mistakes that you may be prone to make:

Getting Linked From Bad Neighborhoods: This point is much similar to having contacts with the underworld. Like, your image would be tarnished if you kept links Dawood Ibrahim or Osama Bin Laden similarly, on the web, Google will automatically blacklist your site if it has links from link farms, pornographic sites etc. Basically, if you are linked from any site that already has been blacklisted by Google then your site will suffer as well. So be careful while purchasing links and getting backlinks blindly.

Selling Text Links: This is another very dangerous stunt you can pull off with your blog. A year back many webmasters who sold text-link-ads on their site were penalized seriously. Most sites that sold text links were brought right back to Page rank 0. The site which brokered the advertisers and publishers of text-link-ads was also penalized as it was blacklisted from the Google search engine. So make sure that your drive to make money online through selling text links is not at the cost of your site’s reputation.

Too many backlinks, too little time: We have been seeing websites getting penalized seriously whenever a webmaster has got too many backlinks  in a very short span of time. Due to this, there are many sincere webmasters who have built there backlinks naturally quickly who have suffered as well. But generally, those are in pretty rare cases. So if you plan to boost your number of backlinks by sponsoring a theme or something, then you should be careful.

Link building and getting backlinks is very important part of any site’s success. However, you should make sure that you do not make this 3 dangerous back linking mistakes otherwise it will waste your hardwork needlessly.

The Indian Government has issued a 15-days notice to Google, Skype and RIM (BlackBerry) over making their data readable. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) of Government has issued a notice stating that these internet companies should make all their data available to the security agencies and the format should be readable.

This deadline comes from the DoT to improve the security situation in India due to increasing threats of terrorism. Skype provides terrorists a perfect platform to communicate at long distances clandestinely – since their data is encrypted.

“DoT will call the representatives of Research In Motion (manufacturer of Blackberry devices) and Skype and ask them to ensure that the content going through the telecom service providers is in readable format. They have to ensure that this is implemented within 15 days failing which services that do not allow lawful interception on a real-time basis would be blocked/banned.”

- Government of India Notice

It is important to take note that RIM (Research In Motion) denied requests from the Government of India to track data from the 26/11 terrorists Blackberry. This seems an action to improve internet security, which I wonder- it will help or not.

If Govt. of India bans Google for even 5 minutes I expect a huge uproar from the masses, so I doubt if the companies would bend to work with the new procedures of the Government.

Google did a pretty interesting April Fools Day  prank today. Google stated in its official blog that the mayor of a city named Topeka, Kansas had changed the name of the city to ‘Google’. And Google stated that in order to return the “moving” gesture Google had changed its name to Topeka.

Google is Now Topeka

“Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google Topeka also wrote that the decision was reached after a lot of thought with all the brand value attached to the previous name.”

Google also stated in the post that they were in a co-venture with Richard Branson’s Virgin named Project Vireka (Virgin+Topeka) to start a human colony on Mars. LOL!

Anyways, most netizens were very much aware that Google was trying to pull an April Fools prank on them as most of them were in fact, very curious on how Google would try and fool them. In the end, the final prank was very humorous and many people enjoyed it.

We all know that the main way to search optimization (SEO) is through keywords and there is no point blogging for money unless you have SEO clear in the back of your mind. In the internet, as the number of websites and blogs grew there became a fierce competition to rank in the top 10 of Google’s or any search engine results. Webmasters began applying all ways to get to the top and thus, there was born Longtail SEO. Longtail SEO is a boon for small blogs like mine – because it is a great way to get traffic even if you do not have a very big presence on the internet.

SEO is done with keywords. There are two kinds of keywords, longtail keywords and short keywords. Using longtail keywords for SEO is called Longtail SEO. The basic concept of Longtail keywords started when blogs/websites with no authority began to rank in the number 1 of Google and other Search Engine results. These websites did not rank for major keywords but instead longer keywords that were not searched that commonly.

To state an example of longtail keywords, suppose you have a website on Dan Brown (popular author of The Da Vinci Code and more lately, The Lost Symbol). So you may choose to search engine optimize it by inserting the keyword as “Dan Brown”. But it will be very difficult for you to rank in the top 10 of Google’s search results when someone searches for the term “Dan Brown”, especially if you have a new site. On the other hand if you choose your SEO keyword as “Facts about Dan Brown”, then you are sure to get a good position in Google’s search results.

The main reason for the success of Longtail keywords in small and new websites is that most major and big websites will always target the main keywords since they are authority sites.You, on the other hand can enter the market and the dog-eat-dog world of blogging by optimizing the advantages posed by Longtail SEO.

So what will be the type of traffic that you get from Short Term SEO and Longtail SEO? As you can guess, if you are using Longtail SEO you are sure to get high conversion (if you sell), however, the traffic that you may generate will be much lesser than what you might expect from a main keyword.

On the other hand, if your website is ranked well for a main keyword (short term SEO) then you are sure to get a high amount of traffic to your website. However, don’t expect that your conversions will be proportional to the traffic that you get.

This article is like a crash course on Longtail SEO. Longtail SEO is in fact quite an exhaustive Search Engine Optimization technique. I will be covering more topic on Longtail SEO in future posts.

Let me know Your thoughts below.

One of the most common misconceptions by bloggers is that linking out will reduce your page rank. There is no truth in this fact. It is the right of a webmaster to link out to blogs or websites that he finds worthy. There are examples of many blogs and websites in the internet that link out to many sites and yet have a PR 7 or PR 6.

This myth initially started when Google started hitting hard on blogs that linked out to blacklisted and poor websites (Adult, Malware, Blackhat SEO etc.). These sites were called link farms, since, they simply linked out to a huge number of websites without any relation to their own niche. Neither did the website linking out have any quality content. So these linkfarms began to get blacklisted in Google’s index.

Another controversy that promoted this myth was when Google started punishing those who sold static html links on their blogs. This helped the publisher gain money and advertiser generate link juice for his website. Google did not like this manipulation and screwed the Page-rank of many good blogger. Although, most of them did get back their pagerank at the next Google PR update.

But when bloggers like us who create content that is good there shoudl be absolutely no fear of linking out. In fact, linking out is very important to create a give and take community. And to provide more information to readers.

Have you any idea how many blogs and websites pro-bloggers like Daniel Scocco and Darren Rowse have linked out? Thousands of them. So don’t worry about linking out.  Spread link love and let your website grow.

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Google is obsessed with Advertising start-ups. It has been taking over start-ups faster than a croc snapping its prey.Take a look at the take overs by Google in the last month:

Teracent Display Advertising Start-Up

A week back Google brought display advertising technology start-up Teracent. Display ads are different from text ads (which are content related), display ads are banner ads that are often used as branding tools by corporations.

The speciality of Teracent ad technology is that it customizes graphic advertisements based on who is watching them. These ads modify themselves according to the time of the day of the viewer and also the pre-dominant language. It is like a whole new level of advertising.

Google has not mentioned the money involved in the Teracent deal but Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said this summer that display advertising is likely to be “the next billion dollar business” at Google.

AdMob Mobile Advertising Start-up

Google brought out AdMob with a click of its fingers for $750 million in stocks. AdMob is one of the top sellers of banner ads on iPhone applications and Web pages that can be retrieved from mobile phones. Mobile phone advertising is small but rapidly evolving online business. Google seems to be smart enough to take a early dive in to accrue the early-bird advantage.

DoubleClick Acquisition

Microsoft and Google fought for acquiring DoubleClick like business rivals in mafia movies. Anyways, I doubt if anyone was abducted or murdered. In the end, Google God managed to snap DoubleClick for $3.1 billion (shocked? “Hah, its just pocket change babe!” – Google).

DoubleClick is also a jumpstart for Google in its display advertising business (like Teracent).

What does this mean to small scale advertisers like us?

Essentially, the small-time advertiser or business can now buy targeted display ads on thousands of DoubleClick ad-serving websites. Currently, Yahoo holds 14% of the Display ad network and Google only 2%. This will mean that advertisers will get highly targeted ad spots to market themselves. Implying they will pay more to Google, which in turn makes Google richer.

So lets see if Google acquirement spree will make blogging more profitable for us.