Internet has been disrupted in India, Egypt and Gulf Arab countries. This is due to a ship accidently cutting down on the international undersea cable network on Wednesday near Alexandria, in Egypt’s north coast.

It is estimated that it could take several days to restore the network and as much as 60% of the Internet users in India could be affected.

Though the extent of impact cannot be determined on the IT industry, Egypt’s telecom ministry said 70% of the country’s Internet network is down.

Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers’ Association of India, informed Reuters that “There has been a 50 to 60% cut in bandwidth.” Read More »

Does buying multiple domains help improve search engine rankings? Link building being a major step in SEO companies and optimizers have sort after purchasing multiple domains to increase their rankings. Using this strategy they tend to quickly increase quality links from .org, .net and other domains useful for ranking.

However, claims are that “Google resets all backward links to a site once it knows that the domain has been expired or reset.”

Now, how about if the site expires when no one is aware or it happens accidentally? What if the domain is transfered? We do not have much information about this. However, Matt does mention not to register unrelated domains in an attempt to get those pre-existing links to your account.

Social Media Bookmarks are becoming largely popular amoung blog users. A lot of simple customizable plugins are available on the Internet. 

I did a research on some of the SMO plugins available. A review of the top social bookmarking plugins I found are listed here. I request you to read the descriptions carefully. Choice is solely yours. Read More »

Google / CPC reports were not being displayed on Google Analytics. May users reported that it had stopped working betweek 6th - 7th of January 2008. However, the reports are back from January 14th. Google had reported that it was a known issue and are working to resolve it. The reasons are still unknown.

Google pulled the most recent ODP RDF dump file and updated the Google Directory with that file. Because of this, PageRank scores are found on the left side of each listing in the Google directly.

These page rank scores in Google Directory scores are much higher than those shown on the Google Toolbar. This is because the Google Toolbar and the Google Directory have different methods of displaying PageRank scores. Google’s Toolbar is not an exact, nor recent value of the true Google PageRank score for a particular page. It might be possible that the Google Directory is using either a more recent or a version that is much older than what the toolbar is showing.

The last Google Directory update took place on September 25, 2007 and Google Toolbar PageRank update on January 9-10th of January 2008

More than 700 teams in U.S. have registered for the Google Online Marketing Challenge. Students would be provided $200 to spend on Google AdWords. Students have to work with various local businesses according to their preference and advertise online and track visitor trends and profit analysis.

Vice President of Product Marketing in Google, David Lawee informed that this challenge would give students great experience and help local businesses use the power of web to attract more customers. He also mentioned that, the organizers expected a participation of around 200 classes. However, they are amazed at having more than 700 university teams already signed up. Read More »

Google Analytics has stopped reporting Google / CPC campaings from 6-8th Jan 2008 on various websites. When contacted Google, they inform that they are aware of the issue.

This should be an issue from Google end as the server logs report a different analytical data. Google has also informed that about 5% of the Analytics users are affected by this issue and are diligently working to resolve this issue.

Google has informed that the Adsense referral program would expire by the end of January 2008. It has also requested the Adsense referral users to remove the referral ad unit and replace with another ad unit from Google or display any products or services. This has frustrated many web owners who display these referral programs.

A copy of its mail is displayed below:

Hello,

We are writing to share some important information with you about referrals to the AdSense product. As part of ongoing efforts to optimize revenue opportunities for our publishers, we’re
constantly experimenting with new revenue-enhancing features as well as tweaking those products already available to our publishers. This is the case for referral units directing visitors
to sign up for AdSense. After experimenting with this program over the past year, we’ve concluded that there are other products that are of higher value than this program to publishers in your region. As a result, referral units for the AdSense program will be retired in the coming weeks. Referrals to other products and services remain unaffected.

If you’re currently displaying referral units on your site directing users to sign up for AdSense, read on below for details about what to expect in the coming weeks.

In early January, the option to add referral units directing users to the AdSense product will no longer appear in your account. You will continue to accrue earnings for all existing referrals yet to
generate $100 until late January, at which point the program will be fully retired. Existing referral units will continue to appear on your pages.

By the end of January, you should remove all referral units directing users to AdSense from your pages. Referral units that you do not remove will continue to be displayed on your pages
as normal, but conversions will no longer be recorded. We suggest you replace the AdSense referrals with referrals to another product or service or an additional ad unit.

Thank you for referring users to AdSense in the past. We apologize for any inconvenience this news may cause.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important new AdSense features.

Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Digg arel sued by Sheldon F. Goldberg for patent infringement of US Patent 6,264,560.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls Sheldon Goldberg a wanted person who has crimes against the public domain for threatening small online gaming websites and claiming to own basic online gaming architecture. He has been using these patents to threaten many companies but has now actually filed lawsuits against Google, Yahoo, AOL, and even Digg. The patent covers playing games like solitaire online

Yahoo Overture Keyword Selector tool shows the statistical data upto Jan 2007. Yahoo is planning on a move from its old search marketing product the Overture to the new one. “Panama”. As a result Yahoo Overture data have been stopped from being analysed.

Overture was initially developed to assist Overture advertising partners find the list of competitive and sort after keywords to bid aution on the PPC. However, its popularity increased exceedingly and became one of the most popular keyword selection tool. This was further taken by 3rd party tools to reterive search volumes.