One of the worries of site owners is whether duplicate contents will affect your site ranking on search engines, especially Google or will you get penalized by Google that brings negative impact to your site’s position in search results.

Fortunately, the recent comments by Google’s Matt Cutts says that scrapped content even has positive impact as scrapped site will normally have a link back to the original site or blog which will bring positive impact. And Google is good enough to identify which site has the original contents. Watch the video below.

But if you’ve been experiencing your site content is being scraped by many other sites or blogs, you’d have noticed some of them do NOT provide a link back to your original blog post or site. But you can have a little trick in your blog post to have these scraped sites to always have a backlink to your site by using one of the following two methods.

1. Always have internal link back to your older blog posts, category or tag When composing a new blog post, always have a few backlinks to your old blog posts, category or tag of blog posts that are relevant. Content scrappers will normally just copy everything, so once you have internal backlinks to your old blog posts, categories and tags, the backlinks will also appear on copied blog post on the scraped site.

2. Modify you RSS feed to always have the blog permanent URL stay at the bottom of each blog post If you use Wordpress, you can do this by modifying the file wp-includes/feed-rss2.php. Find where <content:encoded>…..<content:encoded> is and add in your site’s signature and also a hyperlink back to your original blog post such as follows:

After doing so, every new blog post will have the permanent link at the bottom on your RSS feed. And content scraper will normally extract your content from RSS feed and most of the time they will copy everything including the permanent link at the bottom of your blog post. But the downside is this method, a Wordpress upgrade will replace the wp-includes/feed-rss2.php, which you’ll need to edit the file again and put in the above. Feel free to let me know here if you have some other better ways of doing it.

If you’re one without invitation, you won’t get to play with Wave. Google Wave combines lots of interesting things in one, including email, instant messaging, blogging, document sharing, wikis, and multimedia content – a superb communication platform.

Many good things about Google Wave such as :

1. Single Point Of Access Just one common place i.e Google Wave, you get instant messaging, emails, blogging, office productivity and many of the features mentioned above.

2. Next gen communication channel It’s part email, part IM, part document, allowing you to share photos, text, videos and many more ….

Google Wave is definitely the potential competitor of Facebook and Twitter… It should be headed to be one of the online money makers, getting you to build your networks, promoting your products and services and businesses could turn out more easily using the Google Wave all-in-one communication and social networking platform.

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Bing is definitely a rising star, although it’s still far behind Google. But it’s catching up close to Yahoo. The most recent search figures released by Nielsen, Bing has managed to capture a total of 10.7% US searches in August 2009. This is a storing figure considering Bing is a new born, making Bing as one of the top 10 fastest growing search engines. Bing is almost ready to overtake Yahoo, which has dropped 4.2% to a total of only 16% of total US searches. Attached below show the full figures of the top 10 search engines. Google still stays at the top, capturing a total of 64.6%.

BTW, How to get your Blog or website into BING?

If you have lots of original and unique contents and consistently update your blog, it shall get on BING pretty soon. And it’s best to maintain a sitemap for your website or blog. If your blog runs Wordpress, then you just need to have the XML Sitemap Generator plugin, which it generates sitemap for any new contents or blog posts added and also includes BING/MSN in its notification/PING list once new contents added and a new sitemap is generated. And similarly, you can check out if your new blog posts have been included in Bing by typing “site:yourwebsite.com” on the Bing search box.

source

If you’ve tapped on the way of how to make money online and you’ve been making quite a lucrative income from the Internet, then you should have been safe from getting all the shit such as hectic lifestyle which you’re always on the run and traveling and the risk of getting infected with H1N1 Influenza A.

As bringing in a lucrative stream of income from Internet reduces the need to interact with people face to face and lower chance of getting infected with H1N1 virus. Yeah, you can stay at home if it isn’t too boring for you, what you need is a computer and a high-speed broadband connection.

Occasionally when you get little bored, you can go to StarBucks or CoffeeBean cafes to continue your work. The next topic of SmartBorneo here will cover how you can create a few or more niche blogs and how to make each of them to make at least USD $1,000 per month for you. Imagine if you have ten of these niche blogs or online stores and each makes about USD $1,000 a month for you, then you will get about USD $10,000 per month. This is either equivalent or much more than your current high-paying job which needs you to travel a lot; getting exposed to risk of getting infected with H1N1 and being away from your loved ones always.

Please note: Making money online is not instant, you’ve gotta be disciplined and strive through it over a couple of months and years, and you need patience and passion. But you can see a lucrative stream of income if you’ve managed through it. It guarantees the return is much better than your current job that always brings you hectic lifestyles. Stay tuned, will gradually feed you the ways on how to achieve it.

In 2007 the online ad growth showed a sequential 12.7 percent in the fourth quarter. But starting in 2008, the 1st quater only had a 2.8 percent and followed by a mere 1.1 percent in the second quarter. The report is based on the big four, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL. During the 4th quarter, the increase in combined ad revenues for the big four only by $50 million to $8.2 billion.

Here are the charts showing the ads revenue for the big 4. Although the growth is not as good as last year, at least it still sees a growth in each quarter. Q3 2008 only had a mere 0.61 % increase, total ads revenues of the big 4 only shows $50 million increase from Q2 to Q3.

source [techcrunch]

As the higher the page rank the higher organic traffic from Google. If your website carries ads like Google Adsense or Chitika Premium, it’s sure then you need high search engine organic traffic for your website. AdSense and Chitika Premium mostly get clicks from those who come from the search engines. In most cases are, some one searches for a something on the search engines such as Google or Yahoo, and it will lead to your website, and subsequently they’ll then click on the AdSense or Chitika Premium on your sites/blogs.

In order to rank well on search engine, you shall try to build up your site/blog’s Google Page Rank. We only focus on Google, as Google occupies more than 60% of the total search engine traffic. If you can capture Google, then you’re on the win-win situation.

These days, increasing Page Rank will not be as easy as the old days. In the old days, many seem to be crazy about exchanging links. But reciprocal link buildings seem to be no much use these days. As you’ll also need to have lots of outgoing links on your website/blog to other websites/blogs. And Google will mostly consider these outgoing links are like link farm and also you will face risks that certain outgoin links to certain websites will probably change to a spamming websites a few months or years later without your notice. And you’ll get punished by Google and your Page Rank will be lowered!

Today, the effective way of increasing your page rank is to build more one-way incoming links to your website/blog. If you have lots of quality websites linking to you without needing you to link back to them, then you’ll get lots of quality incoming links. And Google considers this very good and for sure you’ll then get higher pagerank for your website or blog.

Here are a few ways to build more incoming links to your website:

1. Write articles and submit them to article directories. You’ll be able to find lots of article directories by simply searching for “Article directory” on Google. Look for those with Page Rank 5 and above. And write your articles to submit to them. Be sure NOT to forget to add your signature that has a hyper link back to your website/blog. One little example is as follows, at the end of the article you’ll have:

Please note when you submit an article to article directory, it will not et published immediately. It may take 1-7 days or more. And some times it doesn’t even get published. But just keep continuing to submit more and quality article shall get published eventually. Basically they shall get published if they’re up to par or maybe after 2-3 of your submissions.

2. Be a guess blogger, if you intend to increase Page Rank of your blog. Look for those more popular blogs that want guess bloggers. So, you join them and start publishing your blog posts for them, and also do remember to add your signature at the bottom of your blog post as shown in the example one. And even some news site today also want guess writer, you can also do the same.

And of course, besides submitting to article directories, you’ll also have to keep your website’s or blog’s contents fresh so search engine will always come back in high frequency in visiting your site.

If you always bring a digital camera out with you, it’s always great to have a couple of snap shots, then upload it to Shutterstock.com. Shutterstock.com has lots of web designers, graphic artists, and magazine editors keeping a frequent eye on the photos uploaded here. So, when they buy and download your photos, you get $0.25 each time.

Imagine your photos are damn hot, and you get about 2,000 downloads or more a month, then you can easily make up $500 per month for easy money. Nice sceneries or the cute actions of your puppy, baby etc are hot photos that most designers want to spice up the designs of their web page, books, ads and mag etc.

Payment is made through Paypal or Moneybookers, and there is a min payout of $75. But you exceed $300 per month, then they’ll pay by paper check. Check out more about the payment FAQ here. By the way it’s not restricted for the American only. People from other countries can join too.

Meaning that doing so, they won’t have to host those images, and they’re stealing bandwidths from you. But you have a choice to control from being hot linked by others just to save some of your bandwidths. Or you’re simply pissed off as those original images that you’ve created by your own have simply been copied and pasted over. And they’ve even stolen the originality of your content.

To prevent from hot linking, you’ll just need to add some codes to your .htaccess, such as the following codes which I wanna prevent the four domains to hot link to my images.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?blogspot\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?wordpress\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?livejournal\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|gif|bmp|png|jpeg)$ /images/sorrynothotlinking.php [L]

The users will get redirected to my PHP page /images/sorrynothotlinking.php which I build using PHP function imagecreatefromjpeg() to output an image that shows the “No Hot Linking” messages. You’ll probably could make it to point to another image file with either a .gif or .jpg extension. But I’ve found somehow the redirection will keep looping as it seems to have confused the webserver. So, I’ve then made a PHP script to do so.

By the way, in the occasion you wanna block all others from hot linking to your images except with few domains that you wanna allow, (lets say mysite1.com and mysite2.com as follows), you can add the following codes to your .htaccess

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite1\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite2\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|gif|bmp|png|jpeg)$ /images/sorrynothotlinking.php [L]

Please note that if you only allow a few domains to be able to hot link to your images and block all the rest, will prevent those images to show up on email clients as well. As you’ll have lots of readers to subscribe your blog feed via FeedBlitz which delivers blog feed via emails. When they open up the feeds on the email clients they’ll see the “No Hot Link” images on each post and this is ugly.

The best way is to use method 1, just to block those sites or blogs or those you dislike which you’ve discovered that they hot link to you.

The x here could be 2,3,4 … and even 7, 8, 9. Imagine, if Liewcf is making more than $5,000 USD a month, it’ll be about more than RM15K a month, which is much more than an average guy working in the IT industry in Malaysia.

A programmer works in the IT company could get the salary from RM1,500 to RM7,000 or more, depending on which state you’re in. Those who work in the Kuala Lumpur MSC zone will most probably get in the range of RM3K to RM8K if you’re just a programmer.

If you’re unfortunate, happened to get attached to a China-man styled company, you’re getting worse and less wages. Due to the poor salary scales in Malaysia, and the weakness of the Malaysian government law, to protect intellectual property, many and more IT savvy guys or techies have switched from being an IT technical guy (such as a programmer, software developer) to a pro blogger. Liewcf is one of them. And the other that I know is hongkiat.

If I’m not mistaken Liewcf used to be a programmer and he quit in 2005 Sept 09 to become a fulltime pro blogger. The reasons behind are he wants more free time, which he dedicates more times to sleep, watching TV, reading newspaper and gaining weight.

Quiting a daytime job and becoming a pro-blogger might be the dream of many IT-savvy guys. This is due to the IT world might NOT be paying that well. Some more, you will always have to see the face of the boss while working as a white collar in the office. Perhaps, there are many reasons that will put you off, feeling non-spiritual working at today’s IT office in Malaysia.

In many smaller towns, programmers might be only used by business men to develop some software and they’re getting little pay, and eventually the business men own all the software as their own property and sell it to make more money. This definitely demotivates many IT savvy guys from continuously contributing to the IT world. And many hope to quit their day time job and cling on blogging. This really sounds very unhealthy to the IT industry in Malaysia. As, eventually the country will lose out many innovative and tech savvy guys, and we’ll fail to develop innovative and competitive products to show the world, to achieve the Mission 2020.

To opt blogging and quit your daytime job is definitely not an overnight dream or change. It takes many years to build up your blog as popular as Liewcf’s. I’m also a guy in the IT, and I’m also making money from blogging, which I make $X,000 a month from my other blog (Not this one, this is not meant for making money yet). But my x shall be much less than the x earned by Mr Liew.

But I’m not a fulltime blogger. I’m still in the IT world, leading a group of programmers and involved in some cool web applications development. Perhaps, if I become a fulltime, I’ll be able to make more x dollars from blogging. But for the time being, I only consider blogging is my side income or as a hobby of learning more from the techie world. I enjoy blogging but I love my job too. Maybe, I’m the lucky one, since I’m also the business owner and a director of the company, I get more flexible time. And I can manage my time well at night by posting 3-5 posts a day.

Frankly, it seems pretty hard to get good programmers or software developers these days. It’s most probably most of them have become fulltime bloggers or they’ve opened up their own business.

Update: Perhaps, the IT industry shall look into giving a much more secure and cozy environment for the programmers and techies to work. It’s best to be an environment secure in the sense of financial and time. And giving less stress to those techies. It’ll be best they can continuously contribute to the IT industry as well as making some bucks out of blogging as long as they can manage their own time. Increase your TQ (Time Quotient) is a must to get richer these days.

Various news sources are saying that the storm has high tendency to become a hurricane. Of course, many people in the States, are in the wait and see actions. In the mean time, it’s still uncertain what the storm will turn out to be. It’s best while you’re sitting at home and extremely worried what you could do next, then you make use of the Google Maps to track where the storm is heading to.

Other than the Google Maps-powered Hurricane tracking tool, there are couple of other tools that are also great to help learn more about the storm. The site hurricane.terrapin.com also provides lots of information. And it’s got the StormTrack system received information from the National Weather Service.

If you prefer to zoom from top down to the earth to trace the storm movement, National Hurricane Center also provides tons of satellite photos, forecasts and other information to help residents and business owners, so you’ll know what to do before it’s too late.