zevWorks

Last week, Google published an official statement about quality links and their effect on your website rankings. In the statement, Google wants to explain their viewpoint on earning quality links.

Backlinks

Google recommends that you do the following to get more links to your website:

1. Get involved in the community around your topic
You should interact and contribute on forums and blogs that are related to your website. Building a good reputation can drive people to your website. If these people like your website, they will link to it.

2. Offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content
This is a no-brainer. The more compelling your website is, the more people will link to it. In addition to unique articles, you can offer useful tools on your website.

3. Solve the problems of your target group
If your website offers solutions to common problems of your target group, your website visitors are likely to link to your site. Publish tutorials or videos on your website or offer practical tools.

Surveys and original research can also attract links. According to Google, both methods grow your credibility in the community and increase visibility.

4. Humor can help
Entertaining content is shared more than ever before. If your website offers something funny (a humorous downtime message, amusing content, etc.), chances are that people will link to your site.

However, these short-lived link-bait tactics usually wear off quickly and they do not contribute much to a long-term linking strategy.

5. Directories help you to get links
According to Google, there are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. However, there are also a lot of low quality directories.

When you submit your website to a directory, make sure it’s on topic, moderated, and well structured. Do not bulk-submit your website and make sure that your website will be added to the right category.

6. Avoid spamming methods
Any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort. There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site’s reputation.

Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time.

If your site’s visibility in the Google index is important to you it’s best to avoid them!

Bing web crawler is soon going to have a new name. From October this year you won’t see msnbot 2.0b showing in your server logs. Instead you will see bingbot. Microsoft is going to drop beta designation for Bing crawler on October 1st and with that they are dropping the old name. It sounds kind a good with the new brand for search
By the way, the webmasters wouldn’t have to worry too much. The new crawler will still obey the robots.txt written for old msnbot. But if you declare separate set of directives for bingbot, then the new directives will take precedence.
There’s a simple example on the Bing Community Blog:
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /folder1/

User-agent: msnbot
isallow: /folder1/
Disallow: /folder2/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
In that case Bing crawler will be able to crawl all the hosts except folder /folder1/. Pretty straight-forward, isn’t it?

I was just going through the new products in Google Labs. And that’s where I stumbled on to this project called Follow Finder. Now when Google has introduced it’s own microblogging platform called Google Buzz, it’s a bit refreshing to see that some guys in Google have tried their hands in Twitter experiment. This service is meant to find out new people whom you most likely to follow.

But anything from Google doesn’t necessarily mean great. But I am not going say it is bad either. It is a simple application for a user. Just enter your Twitter username and it will analyze your public social graph that includes your follower and following list. So like they will find out the guys who are following the same people as you. In most cases you are likely to have some common interests and that means you might follow them.

There are lots of Twitter directories and lists categorized by topics and interests. And this application doesn’t do anything out of blue. But as a Google product you most likely have a look at it

WordPress 3.0 got released just yesterday. And now, at 4.15 in the morning I got some time to upgrade my WordPress and have a look around to this latest update.

The most important change in this version was to merge WordPress MU with  normal WordPress. So if you have multiple blogs, you can use WordPress 3.0 to run all your blogs from a single WordPress installation. But just like MU, you can only install blogs in sub-domains under a domain name( like example.anirbanroy.info and blog.anirbanroy.info under my domain name). Most likely you are using different domain names for your WordPress blogs. Then you need to use the WordPress MU Domain Mapping Plugin to map your WordPress blogs under a single installation to separate domain names.

Another very important feature is that WordPress team has released a whole new default theme called Twenty Ten that will support all the features of the current WordPress version. You can use custom menus, backgrounds and page headers with this new theme. And custom means custom! You can practically handcraft your navigation using custom menus. And you can even choose to show different header images for each of your blog post! By the way, don’t worry, Kubrick theme is still there if you are a legacy fan

Admin dashboard colour has gone lighter and currently as I can see you will get any update notifications like for plugins and themes also in Dashboard settings in the left sidebar. There you can bulk update all those from a single page. Get Shortlink option has been added to the blog post to ease url shortening through WordPress without need of any third-party url-shortening services.

I thought of adding some screenshots of these new features. But when you find a more than decent video from WordPress official site, it is better to just embed it