I recently came across a post by Loren Baker of SearchEngineJournal about Google Loves Transparent Links and Hit counter Spam.

It is shocking to see that Google has not been able to tackle such crude level of spam. We hear about site ageing, search engine saturation, quality one way link and latent semantic indexing as key factors that Google is using to improve search results. However what Loren has investigated in this case is absolutely shocking.

It shows how a million dollar keyword (i.e. payday loans made it to #1 in Google by using under-the-belt techniques like transparent links bundled in hit-counters offered by "free hit-counter website" in less than one year of existence and less than a dozen indexed pages with not-so-good quality content. It is really confusing.

We all presume that Google is very smart and to do well on this search engine, we have to be very smart. I just hope we do not need to be spam-smart

Read the complete research here – Google Loves Transparent Links and Hit counter Spam

Abhishek

Divya Narendra and his two other Harvard friends (Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss) have sued Facebook alleging that their founder, Mark Zuckerberg have stolen their business plan and source code. You can read the full story at rediff.com.

I was wondering if this is the case, why they didn't cried foul earlier.

In fact I doubt that Facebook has become so popular and valuable (not sure) because of the business plan and source code that was stolen (if at all it was stolen). In my experience business plan is just a starting point and then everything keeps changing and you have to adopt according to the situation. Above all ideas do not matter, execution does. Mark has executed the idea well and he deserves what he has achieved.

Anyways, it will be interesting to see the outcome of the lawsuit. Divya has almost nothing to loose, but everything to gain. He just might be able to make the kill. But I see very little probability of the same.

It all started with pixels. Alex Tew started selling pixels with milliondollarhomepage.com to earn some quick money. Public relation clicked and he became a success story with a wild frenzy among people to own a "piece of history". The "me too" crowd followed and we saw thousands of similar sites selling priceless pixels and few smart companies selling scripts to build such sites.

After one year came Joel Comm, who improvised the concept to link words instead of pixels, and launched 500words.com. This innovation was expected from an Internet marketing wizard like Joel, who is well known among Internet marketers and has a capacity to create a loud buzz. He sold the entire inventory and laughed his way to his bank with few hundred thousand dollars! Just like milliondollarhomepage.com, this improvisation triggered hundreds of similar website and scripts that can be installed to launch similar sites. In fact, I also launched software called wordsitebuilder with my friend Arun Agrawal, because I believe in selling spades when the gold rush is on.

Now, exactly after one year of the 500words.com gold rush, I came across another concept – Wordhugger.com & MillionDollarWiki. Now they have logically extended the legacy and moved on from words to a page dedicated to a given word / phrase. They have presented the concept in a much more lucrative way for prospective buyers. I was just wondering how is this different from squidoo.com? This seems to be picking up and I am watching the show .

So, overall, there has been a gradual transition from a pixel >> word >> page What's next? – A website / or a blog?

Let's watch the show!

Reliance's BigAdda, Rediff's iShare and Naurki's Brijj.com are the latest dotcoms to hit the Indian social networking marketplace. It may trigger the next dotcom explosion with many more mindless dotcoms in line with these me-too networking sites by public listed biggies of India. Soon, we will forget why the first dotcom boom wave came down crashing after showing colorful dreams to thousands of tech-entrepreneurs worldwide.

I will personally advise new startups to keep away from such me-too type projects unless they have a solid niche, a risk-managed business model and a proper revenue model.

In fact, I am not at all optimistic about success of any of these new ventures unless they offer a great reason to be a part of it. The market place is already saturated and people are finding it difficult to manage their multiple social networking accounts and commitments. Besides, most of these sites do not offer any value addition apart from entertainment. Gautam Ghosh, an avid blogger shares a simmilar view on the subject.

If I have to select a possible winner among these biggies, I will go for brijj.com, which can take a turn towards the business model adopted by yellowjobs.com of NDTV. Another reason for possible success of brijj.com is that it is designed to be a business networking portal. It offers you a reason to spend time and have a clearly marked revenue model. In comparison other sites, just like their global originals heavily depend upon a speculative value creation and are looking for a buy-out similar to youtube.com which will make them rich overnight.

Do check out how many times people are referring to "Internet advertising" as their business model for their social networking website. It is not that Internet advertising is not BIG business. But it will just not work for social media websites in long term. And it is a foolishness to bet on Internet advertising as a revenue channel. We know it from the Y2K dotcom meltdown. In fact I can see the same madness as Y2K. We are not yet there, but we know it can peak very quickly  

Do you think these sites will bloom?

Blogs have fueled the growth of peer-to-peer information flow in form of news, knowledge packets, ideas and individual point-of-views. However it has also resulted in "Information overload" which drives a normal person nut as he is at risk to wasting too much time reading the flesh before he reaches the crust.

Learning becomes more difficult as we face a situation where we have less time and most if it is wasted while absorbing the excess information and then an equal amount of effort (if not more) is required to skim the real message out of it.

A hot debate is going on at – http://guydz.com/moneypowerwisdom/?p=19

I personally think:

A summary can solve all the problem. There are people who understand the concept in few words. They hate to read through long articles to get that “dosage” of knowledge.

However, there are lots of people who might have difficulty in understanding the concept. There may be several people who might not accept a point of view unless backed with examples from real life.

Therefore both formats are required in my opinion.

Now the question is – On a media like blog, do we have enough time to summarize the ideas that we put together?

 What do you think?

I recently visited Hostorix.com. This is a new hosting company from an Internet marketing veteran – Armand Morin.

I was impressed how Armand has identified a pain that most webmasters feel – Downtime! Aren't we all worried about our website going down? I fail to understand how large hosting companies like Lunarpages, 1&1, Hostgator, GoDaddy etc. overlooked this aspect!

Hostorix hosts website in a Clustered Raid1 Hosting Environment. This kind of a setup distributes the traffic load across multiple servers to improve overall performance. Additionally, all data (web, email and database) are mirrored in real-time and in the event of a server failure our failover application will route all website traffic to the available server keeping your website online until the problem is resolved.

I found that they have all the standard features and the hosting is based on Linux O/S and powered by WHM/Cpanel (which is one of the most popular control panel software I see on the web). So all the standard features (including Fantistico) are there. And like most reseller accounts, they also allow unlimited account creation.

They are priced above normal reseller hosting accounts at around $27/mo. But I think this is worth it, since quality comes for a price and this is not a big price to pay for fail-safe hosting, since it will be easier for you to sell no-downtime hosting to your customers and recover the investment.

So, overall, I would consider this as a great offer. You can sign up for this here.

Please share your experience and feedback about this product here.