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Team Building Activity

September 25, 2008 – 6:28 am by Gurinder Kaur

On 24 Sept evening, HR organized the Team Building Activity for all the employees in the organization. We had kept two games for the event. One was Frog Relay Race, where a field was set and four people were made to sit on four corners of the hall. A person has to hop like a frog and reach the other end where his other team member is waiting for him to start the second lap and so on till the fourth person making a relay race. It was so much fun watching the participants hopping from one corner to other like a frog! Out of five teams (Link Building Team, D-Company Team, NumeroUno Team, Spiders Team and Admin Team) Link Building Team stood as a proud winner completing the race in just 23.5 secs. The other game was Make a Pyramid; A pyramid was made on the table using thermacol glasses. Teams have to make a similar pyramid on the other table lying close to the first one. Only four members could participate in this game. Team members were provided with a rubber band with four ribbons tied to it, they were asked to hold the rubber band with the help of ribbon only and use the rubber band to pick the glasses one by one to make the pyramid. Sounds interesting!!! It became tough for the teams to actually do it…..and that was not all the game master told them to make it in 2 minutes only! All except one team got disqualified and NumeroUno was the only team who stood as winner in this game. Catch the glimpse of the event in the pictures below.

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Google enters the war of Browsers with new Google Chrome

September 19, 2008 – 6:13 am by Pulkit Rastogi

Is your website Google Chrome compatible? Do you know Google has launched its brand new browser - Google Chrome and its user base is spreading like wild fire?

Google has jumped in the browser battle going on between MS Internet Explorer & Mozilla Firefox with the launch of Google Chrome. Google Chrome is indeed a wonderful and highly secured browser and gives some advanced functionality to users. I have tried Chrome and I think it’s ideal for people who are basic surfers. It’s free and you can also download it from here -
http://www.google.com/chrome

Checkout this cool article on Search Engine Land that compares Google Chrome with IE & Firefox: http://searchengineland.com/080903-130137.php

No doubt, Chrome is hot and comes with some really cool new features but sadly it doesn’t yet supports my favorite plugins. So guess I’ll wait till Chrome grows up and till then I would continue firefoxing…!! :)


Blood Donation & HIV/AIDS Awareness Programme at RedAlkemi

September 18, 2008 – 11:51 pm by Gurinder Kaur

RedAlkemi in association with the CII Chandigarh Council organized a one hour thirty minutes infotainment session on Blood Donation and AIDS Awareness for its employees. As a main speaker for this session, we had with us Dr Suvir Saxena, Deputy Director, Chandigarh State AIDS Control Society and member secretary, Blood Transfusion Council Chandigarh. The session began with a 30 minutes documentary on the importance of Blood Donation followed by an insightful presentation on HIV/AIDS by Dr. Suvir Saxena, which enabled us to understand the magnitude of the problem in better light and help us gear up more effectively to combat the pandemic together.

RedAlkemi, being a Socially Responsible Organization is sensitive to the interests of the society and makes a positive difference by organizing initiatives like Blood Donation Camps etc. and creating awareness among masses about the issues, which are affecting our community and the environment. It is our endeavor at RedAlkemi to further plan more CSR Programmes, which will benefit the community as a whole.

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RACE 2008: RedAlkemi Cultural Event 2008

August 25, 2008 – 11:20 pm by Gurinder Kaur

On the eve of 31st July 2008 the HR Team organized a Cultural Event for the organization wherein each team gave a fun filled performance infused with lots of enthusiasm and energy. Preeti, Rahul & I hosted the show with our titbits of PJs, interesting one-liners and the works.

The Link Building Team opened the show with a zestful Bhangra followed by a bollywood dance number. It was a fantastic start of a great event. Then came the sensational NumeroUno Team with a satire on the Punjab Police which set the stage on fire as we had everyone rolling in laughter. This was followed by a lovely Punjabi folk song by Nishant Midha also from NumeroUno.

D Company performed next. They put forth three interesting performances, a dance on a medley of the latest Bollywood hits sequenced to narrate a tale, a “jabardast” Bhangra which on public demand had to be repeated and a song by Manoj Kandwal.

Next in line we had PDME team members, with three performances, a dance number, a funny skit and solo performance by Varunjit. The dance number on Pappu can’t dance was loved by all and we had a repeat performance for that as well. Their funny skit also was liked by all and for Varunjit’s performance; all one can say is he is a great comedian.

Additionally, Jagdip from Spiders Team sang a sentimental hindi song in his melodious voice. Then HR & Admin Team presented a musical skit on an old number which was liked too.

Last but not the least we had a spontaneous performance by Chandan from our Technical Team who tickled everybodys funny bone with his non-stop Punjabi Joke!

The entire show was a huge hit with the dazzling performances by all Teams. Words of appreciation and encouragement from our CEO, Mr. Atul Gupta wrapped up the occasion along with some goodies and a dance party which helped us RACE our adrenalin!! :)

LB Bhangra TeamRACE AudiencePDME TeamPDME’s Funny skitNumeroUno Team performing SkitD-Company’s Bhangra TeamD-Company TeamChandan from Tech TeamHR & Admin TeamVarun from PDME Team


Celebrating Friendship Week with The Maa Sharanam Orphanage

August 22, 2008 – 3:45 am by Gurinder Kaur

At RedAlkemi we decided to celebrate Friendship Week this year in a special and unique way by contributing in kind to the Maa Sharanam Orphanage. The entire staff participated in the donation drive held for a duration of one week from 28th July - 1st Aug ‘08. Everybody displayed a high enthusiasm level towards this productive activity and we collected loads of goodies like Stationary, Eatables, Clothes, Books, and much more!

Thereafter the Redalkemi HR Team delivered the collectibles to the Maa Sharanam Orphanage at Mohali Sector 70 where Mrs. Kalpana Ghai an active member of Maa Sharanam informed us about the place being temporary and given by a volunteer till they could collect sufficient funds to arrange for a home for the homeless kids.

The children were thrilled and gazed at us in amazement while we offloaded the stuff from our car. They all gathered in a big hall where we placed the three big donation boxes.

For one of the kids, Neeraj it was a very special occasion being his birthday. So there we were, singing the Birthady Song in chorus for the little one, whose excitement knew no bounds! Pictures were clicked to capture all the fun and excitement on the smiling faces. All the kids were so cute especially the two adorable 4yr olds, Muskaan and Kaajal who completely stole our hearts.

We ended the day with a thanksgiving bhajan from the children…that lingered on in our hearts as we left the orphanage with cherished memories and a sense of fulfillment of having done something really worthwhile.

Maa SharanamMaa SharanamMaa Sharanam


Miss you Ishmeet…

July 30, 2008 – 2:23 am by Manoj

ishmit3.jpgAs the day went by into nite,
The voice of India faded into eternal light.
Leaving so many eyes teary and moist,
Hearts crying for more, souls so frost.

Ishmeet left us a treasure of his voice,
Resounding his youth n nature so alive,
Making a place in million hearts n fans,
He became a star in heavens lands.

Shine wherever you are, dear one
You are eternal, you are our icon.


Sitemap.xml - The most Overrated Search Engine Indexing factor

July 1, 2008 – 4:23 am by Pulkit Rastogi

sitemap.xmlAsk an SEO next door to tell you reason for the poor ranking and indexing of your website of your website, the first statement he will come up is - “Cmmon, how will your website rank, when it doesn’t even have a sitmep.xml file”. Yes, we all know that sitemap.xml helps to improve indexing of a website, but is it actually as important as the most community hypes about it? Certainly not. Infact, I think that XML sitemaps is the most overrated SEO tactic ever. Sitemaps don’t really solve the problems (I mean all the problems) where indexing and crawlability are concerned. What I mean here is that if you have a website that has 150 pages and the Search Engines can only access 30 of them, don’t think that uploading a sitemap.xml is a sure shot way to index 100% of your pages. It’s very much like applying a 2 inch band aid after open heart surgery.

By now, you must be wondering - “If not sitemap.xml, then what’s the cure?” - I believe instead of just spoon feeding the Search Engines with pages with the help of a sitemap.xml file in a hope that it will pick all the listed pages one day, you must rather focus on making the un-indexed pages better and worthy in the eyes of Search Engines by improving the content, acquiring better/more links to them, and so forth. When Google, doesn’t indexes some pages on your website, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the Search Engines had trouble finding the page, but actually the Search Engines never found those pages worthy of keeping them in its main index. Just because a website doesn’t has a sitemap.xml doesn’t mean search engines wont crawl it unless the website has weak internal linking and information architecture.

Please don’t get me wrong here. I am not against the use of sitemap.xml file but what I want to say is that if your website has indexing problem, don’t just rely on the sitemap.xml as the sole indexing factor. Consolidate the internal linking of your website, use nofollow to control the link juice flow and most important – add quality content on the pages and get quality back links for those pages.


The Code looks Good, but is it Search Engine Friendly too?

June 4, 2008 – 6:00 am by Pulkit Rastogi

Search Engine Friedly HTMLNo matter how good a developer is, each one makes few mistake while writing HTML code. And I am talking precisely about mistakes which the Search Engines don’t like - some small ones and some fatal search engine disasters. These mistakes happen not because we don’t know how to write an HTML code but because after we are done writing the code, we say to our selves, it’s done and it’s looking fine; why bother change it now for Search Engines. Not every developer is a Search Engine guru and very few know (or bother to know) that couple of such coding mistakes here and there might cause the site to choke to death. But don’t panic yet, it’s easy to avoid these mistakes - just consider the following while you code a website next time:

  • Make it a thumb rule to avoid repeating yourself. If it’s a commonly used object property, place it in CSS. If it’s a repeated Javascript, store it in an external file and call where ever required.

  • Don’t mess up the code with unused or unclosed DIV’s. If a DIV opens, it should close as well and if it doesn’t, it shouldn’t open. It’s as simple as that.

  • The most common web developer mistake - every page has it’s own unique title and description, please do not put the title and description tag in the include files.

  • Please make all links and references to images, CSS and JavaScript root relative by starting them with a slash, “/”. Dreamweaver users, please set the “Links relative” option to “Site root” in the Site Definition wizard. This is handy because root relative links don’t break when files are moved from one directory to another.

  • Don’t put too many files in a single directory. Keep the heirachy going and manage the files in different directories.

  • Use Validator to keep the code and CSS clean. Clean code is easier to manage then something that’s messed up.

  • Don’t use <br> for <p> tag as it’s unprofessional and results in inconsistent layout in different browsers.

  • Avoid spacer graphics and nested tables. Use heading tags, unordered lists and numbered lists to organize content instead.

  • Make it a habit to put a forward back slash ‘/’ at the end of every URL.

Image credit:Flickr



Widget Bait for Link Love

May 28, 2008 – 5:39 am by Pulkit Rastogi

amazing amazon norah jones widgetThe recent launch of an amazing MP3 widget by Amazon, made me do a little research on some very interesting widget ideas in the market and the role such widgets can play in a successful link building campaign. For those of you, who are unaware of the term widget, widget is nothing but a small stand alone web applications that can be installed and executed in web page without installing extra plugins. Check out these cool widgets Apple & Amazon. Even Yahoo! has a dedicated widget gallery featuring some really cool widgets for free download.

The Power of Widgets
The god of widgets as I call him, Mathew Inman (why god? Check out his widget gallery) generated thousands of links for his website Justsayhi with widgets like this and this, just untill when Google decided to ban Justsayhi. But wait, why would Google ban a website for distributing widgets? Actually Justsayhi wasn’t baned for distributing Widgets for link building but for cross-promoting a spammy website network with its widget & quizzes. If you still doubt the power of a widget, go and ask Zillow, how much money and links did they raised from Zestimate (property evaluation widget ) and out of the famous Zillow-Yahoo teamup.

Widget Bait for Link Love:

Generating server crashing traffic and links requires four things – good idea, designer, programmer and a crystal marketing channel to promote the widget (Email Marketing rocks). After you develop your widget, insert URL link in the interface and showcase it on your website for a free download. People use it and if they find it cool, they embed it in their own website for free with the help of the simple instructions on your website. But make sure you use different keywords in links otherwise same anchor text may go against you on Google. Here are two smart ways how you can generate links for your website and make your green bar go dancing.

  • Create some rocking Wordpress themes and showcase them on your website as free ware with back link to your website.
  • This one is too good. Create a contact form widget that uses Google Docs as database.

If you are creative and have good understanding about your industry, you can also come up with hundreds of such widget bait ideas. But remember, for the success of your widget, it’s important that an average non-techie user should be able to understand and use the widget application and it must be really easy to implement/install.

There are many powerful widgets that can help you to control the web around you. Here are few of them:

1. Bookmark This
2. Email Subscription Widget
3. Picture Badge
4. Recent Visitor
5. Search Blog
6. Snapshot widget
7. Twitter Update
8. Playlist Video Widget
9. Web Poll Widget
10. What I am Listening


Google Empowers Your Competitors To Destroy Your Search Engine Rankings

May 12, 2008 – 3:54 am by Pulkit Rastogi

evil googleNo matter how smart you are, with the current Google algorithms, you can never run away from the possibility of your competitors destroying your presence on the Search Engines by using Google’s savvy algorithms against you. There are variety of ways, how your evil competitors can do this:

  1. Google proxy hacking
  2. Automated Comment spamming your website’s URL on explicit websites.
  3. Automated directory submission of your website in crap directories (your ranking on Yahoo may jump but Google will surely bury you for links from such directories).
  4. Your competitor might generate hundreds of links with same anchor text from single IP address.
  5. Your competitors might use content scrapping scripts to replicate your entire website. So many times, I have seen Google penalizing the original website and ranking the content scrappers.
  6. 301/302/Javascript redirect hijacking.

The consequence of such attacks are not always fatal but even a drop of 5 places can hurt your website’s traffic badly. I know that if you have strong immunity (Google trust rank) you can survive such competitor attacks but it takes time and efforts to build such a strong immunity and not every websites is blessed with it. I don’t think Google should allow website’s competitor destroy its ranking just because it has a weak immunity.

Solutions

  • Block the IP address of the websites scrapping your content.
  • There are many ways to fight Google proxy hacking like mod rewrite from .htacceess file, reverse cloaking & other PHP scrips.
  • Use honeypots.

Additionally, what I feel Google can do here is to let the webmasters drop the the links manually from their webmaster central account which they think might harm their website’s ranking and immunity. Search Engines need to evolve…big time!!!
Image credit: flickr


Highlights from the RedAlkemi party bash

May 4, 2008 – 10:05 pm by Pulkit Rastogi

On the evening of 30th April, RedAlkemists (all dressed up in blue and white) were all set to rock the party which started at 6.30 PM at our very own Entertainment Center. It was an absolute blast as we all danced our souls out to the groove of Music (with a hint of vodka). What do I say, thumping music, yummy food, high spirits and people dancing like crazy. To add to the funk, a tattoo artist was called who did every thing to bring us as close to the species of real party animals (just look at the pictures below and you will understand what I mean).
RedAlkemi party picsRedAlkemi party picsRedAlkemi party picsRedAlkemi party picsRedAlkemi party pics
RedAlkemi party picsRedAlkemi party picsRedAlkemi party picsRedAlkemi party picsRedAlkemi party pics

In the end, I think it was a much needed party for all of us as it helped us rejuvenate and restore our energy levels back to optimum. We all had a terrific time. Cheers! :)


The dilemma of Page Rank Sculpting, follow or nofollow

April 19, 2008 – 2:17 am by Pulkit Rastogi

While every one around the SEO corner is busy hoarding the page rank of their site using nofollow attribute in quest to rank the important pages of a website, I am quite sure this practice (page rank sculpting) is just an accident waiting to happen as webmasters will abuse it up to an extent that Google will do what they have done to ‘keyword meta tag’ – start ignoring it. After the public announcements and claims done by Rand Fishkin, Stephen Spencer, Danny Sullivan and even Matt Cutts, that directing the link juice to the important pages of a website improves the Search Engine Ranking of a website, the SEO community is using nofollow on anything they don’t want to rank for, claiming it a ‘wastage of link juice’ otherwise. But I personally believe that this nofollow practice is taking the SEO community no where, as webmasters have a license to get away to rank their websites even with a poor internal navigation and hence poor user experience. So obviously the nofollow era is facilitating more spammy websites making it to the top of the Search Engine lists. It’s just matter of time, when Google will take an evasive action.

SMX RedAlkemi page rank sculpting

If we have a look at the origin of a nofollow attribute, we find that nofollow attribute was made with the primary motto to combat comment spam (which it has failed miserably as comment spammers are still employed). Further Google found that nofollow can also help Google bots to firstly determine the most important pages out of huge websites with complex blog categories in little time and secondly the webmasters could use nofollow while linking to some website content which they don’t want to get associated with and vote to. Here is a recent precise statement made by Matt Cutts on use of nofollow attribute:

“The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.”

Now getting back to my anti-nofollow visionary, the nofollow tags also facilitate a fake information architecture. As we know Google ranks the sites with solid internal navigational architecture higher on SERP as these are the sites which provide rich user experience to the Google users as the important content is just 3 clicks away, nofollow isn’t helping to their cause. Coz what most webmasters are doing at the moment is hoarding the page rank and shooting it on the targeted pages even when the target page is nothing but pure crap and weakly linked from other pages of the site.

Having said that, please don’t take me wrong, as I am not questioning the effectiveness of page rank sculpting, because it’s working great at the moment, but I am not too sure how long will this nofollow rampage last: I am afraid not too long. So I have a simple advise to give – use nofollow but only after you have crystallized your internal navigation and don’t rely 100% on this nofollow ploy as you might soon see Google derank the websites with weak internal structure indulging in page rank sculpting. I am looking forward to SMX Advanced and hopeful that it might clear up the mounted clouds over rank sculpting dilemma.


We are now offering ‘Deep Indexing Service’

April 15, 2008 – 3:03 am by Pulkit Rastogi

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Are you still wondering if all the pages of your website, indexed in Search Engines or not? Leave your worries to us as now we are offering a unique SEO service - Deep Indexing Solution. Our robots will crawl your website, will find the un-indexed pages and will force the pages from the supplemental index to the main index. Yes, our robots can determine which of your pages are lying in the Supplemental Index. Our deep-indexing campaign not only improves your site’s deep-indexing but also improves search engine ranking for your keyword phrases. Please click here for more information about our premiere service.


HR organizes Team building Activity – Sequel 2

April 10, 2008 – 4:11 am by Pulkit Rastogi

Howdy everyone! Last monday, the RedAlkemi HR department organized yet another fun filled team building activity for us. We all had lot of fun and exchange of many bugups & boo’s while every team (including Spartans, D-company, Invincible, PDME, Technicals & the Link Building team) fought really hard to win the titles. The first game was Spoon Ball Relay Race, in which 4 members of each team had to walk with a ball in a spoon held by his/her mouth in minimum time and fouls. Sound’s easy? Well.. actually it’s not ! :) The Technical team won this game, thanks to Mehar for giving them an excellent start. In the other game one team had to hide 10 things in the venue (Entertainment Center) and the other team had to search those items in minimum time. In this Treasure Hunt game, D-Company won and took away the box of chocolates. Enjoy the pictures:

 

spoon race redalkemisoon race redalkemiteam redalkemispoon race redalkemi teamteam building anuradha


The SEO war of redirects: 301 vs 302 vs meta-refresh tag

April 10, 2008 – 1:56 am by Pulkit Rastogi

With this post, let’s discuss the much talked about 301 vs 302 vs Meta-refresh tags to understand which one in the most ideal one to use from the Search Engine Optimization point of view and in which situation? First, let’s have a look oni this small cartoon I’ve made for a general idea about redirects, then we will go into details so that the whole information is easy for you to digest :)

301 302 RedAlkemi redirect

301 Redirects
301 redirect is undoubtedly the safest way to redirect a website as all Search Engines treat a ‘301 redirect’ in same way ie. They simply pass all the link value, juice, ranking etc to the redirected page. A 301 redirect tells a search engine that the requested page has permanently been shifted to a different location so search engines simply ignore the original URL and index the destination URL foreg. If we 301 redirect a website that is about watches (let’s say - awesome-watches.com) which is ranking for keyword ‘wrist watches’ to another website – cool-watches.com, the search engines will simply ignore awesome-watches.com and will index and rank cool-watches.com for the keyword ‘wrist watches’. 301 redirect is also the most handy tool to handle canonical URLs. The most common cases when we use 301 redirects are:

  • If the page is deleted or permanently moved.

  • You want a new top level domain for your website without damaging your link value and rankings. To serve either of the version of www vs non-www. This is done with a combination of 301 redirect and mod-rewrite.

  • Content duplication. For example you may 301 redirect www.yoursite.com/index.htm to www.yourwebsite.com

    If you have many topically relevant but outdated websites which your are not willing to maintain anymore, you may slowly redirecting the outdated websites to the most current website. But beware, if there are many websites, redirect them one by one slowly as otherwise you might end up getting flagged for being a spammer. Please take a note that At SMX, all the engineers from all the search engines made a statement that 301 redirect will not carry the full effect if the content of the redirecting website is topically not the same. We should avoid redirecting our website to a site which is topically irrelevant to our website. For e.g. if you are planning to redirect (301) your website about cars, then you should not redirect it to a website selling watches. An inappropriate redirect will not lead to any benefit to your website.

302 Redirects
302 redirect, also known as temporary redirect tell search engines that the content of the requested URL is temporarily available at a different URL location but will be soon restore to the original URL. So in case of a 301 redirect, the search engines will index the original URL, but they will extract the content content from the 301 redirected URL. This is the the most dicey redirect that you can use on your website as all the search engines tend to treat a 302 redirect differently with lots of exceptions to what they claim. Here is a link for any budding 302 hijacker :)
Mattcutts has explained here with simple examples, how Google, MSN and yahoo handle a 302 redirect. You may consider using a 302 redirect within your website pages (ie. Onsite redirect), when you want to serve search engines a simple version of a URL and the content from a different page with a complex URL, since simple and short URL’s look more click-enticing in the Search Engine result pages foreg www.yourwebsite.com can be 302 redirected to www.yourwebsite.com/userdata?user=12xc2?id=crap
However you must never try a cross domain 302-redirect.
MSN treats a 302 redirect exactly how it treats a 301 permanent redirect, that is, it will always ignore the original URL and instead index the destination URL. Same is the case with Yahoo, but yahoo reserves the right to make exceptions to this declaration (which they do at many occasions). You must be very careful as 302 redirects are often the default redirect in host control panels and JavaScript. Many meta redirects produce the same 302 redirect effect.

Meta-refresh Redirects
Actually a meta-refresh is not a redirect but it is s simple instruction to the browser to refresh the page after a certain period of time (content in seconds, with or with out a new supplied URL instead of the current one). It is situated in the head of the HTML page and looks something like this: <meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.anotherdomain.com/category/shoes.htm”>
All search engines understand a meta-redirect but again, tend to react differently depending on the content figure. If the content time is 0 or 1 second, most search engines take it as a permanent 301 redierct; anything more than 1 is normally considered a 302 redirect. Use meta-refresh only if you your current hosting provider doesn’t allow a 301, primarily because the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (7.4) discourage the creation of auto-refreshing pages, since most web browsers do not allow the user to disable or control the refresh rate and secondly Spammers use a meta-refresh to refresh the page after every 5 seconds to save themselves from any type of ranking punishment. I am sure you don’t want to look like a spammer. If you want get into details here are some really useful threads on meta-refresh tags

Javascript Redirects
Don’t use Javascript redirect as search engines simply don’t understand it or tend to confuse it as a 302 redirect.