The title best describes Akismet and its work here at Siteguide. This site has been online since last April and till date Akismet has caught around 10,000 spam – 10321 to be precise. For those who don’t know about Akismet, here is a short intro.

Akismet or Automattic Kismet is an automated spam fighting tool that helps you keep your blog safe from spam everyday. It is evident that most bloggers would be knowing about Akismet. But of late, the question is if Akismet is enough for your blog in fighting spam?

Some bloggers have either switched to other spam fighting plugins namely Spam Karma or Bad Behavior citing reasons that

• Akismet doesn’t catch all spam on a blog
• It marks legit comments as spam and so on

With regards to my blog, I must say that Akismet has been highly efficient in stopping spam over the last 10 months. The only problem that I would say is that legit comments or trackbacks get stopped by Akismet. Also, comment moderation is by default switched off on my blog to enable more comments.

Overall however, I feel Akismet has more than a good job on my blog. I certainly wouldn’t consider switching to another spam catcher for some more time atleast.

What about you people? Do you simply run on Akismet? Do let me know your anti – spam techniques as well.. Thanks for reading!

Google has never failed to disappoint with Gmail and now its just been taken to the next level with the introduction of Colored Labels. The labels feature instead of folders in other mail providers was quite debated by most and disliked by a few as well. First, I too was apprehensive in using labels instead of the folders which I had been used to.

However, the labels actually proved more effective in organizing the mail without leaving the main inbox page. Now, the introduction of colored labels only means that the mails under each label now have a greater visibility. Though the multitude of colors against a gray background seems kind of odd, I certainly welcome this upgrade as identification of mails becomes easier for me.

 You can change the colors by selecting the boxes next to the labels in your right navigation menu of your Gmail inbox. Selecting a color auto updates all the labels with that color. A simple, but quite useful tool. Would these colored labels be useful for you? Leave your thoughts in the comments. Thanks for reading

PayPal is one of the most popular online services dealing with securely and easily sending and receiving funds online. However sending the money to your bank account was a difficult proposition. You could get a check for the funds in your account but you would be charged and taxed for processing the check and so on. Also, for the Non-U.S.A. users, cashing the check would be another prolonged affair taking around 4 weeks to complete.

PayPal introduced a feature to transfer funds to your credit card recently as well to help these customers. Now, it is good news for the Indian users of PayPal as they can avail free wire transfers to their accounts in 11 major Indian banks including SBI, HSBC, Canara Bank, Standard Chartered and ICICI. The free wire transfer applies only for transfers above Rs 7000 and a Rs 50 charge is levied for transfers less than that [pretty nominal as well]. Non-verified users can withdraw upto $500 a month.

How to add a bank account?

To add a bank account to your PayPal account, you need to do the following:

• Click the ‘Profile’ subtab on the Account Overview page.
• Click the ‘Bank Accounts’ link in the Financial Information column.
• Click Add.
• Fill out the Add Bank Account form.
• Click ‘Add Bank Account’ and you are done

The banks may charge a transfer fee for the wire and the process may take upto 5-7 days, pretty similar to the credit card transfer and I must say, worth the wait.

I am sure that people in India were waiting for something like this and PayPal hasn’t disappointed! I am yet to check out how good this works, so if anybody has already done this, do let me know. Also, do you think that this new feature is going to help you? Do leave your comments!

After being in the dark for more than a couple of months, the Pagerank Update has finally began taking place. Atleast, that is what I can deduce after noticing John Chow’s site today. Speculation has been rife in the Digital Point forums about the latest Pagerank Update. You can check your PR as its updating with the list of Top 7 places to check your live pagerank.

The Surprise

Also, the surprise here being that John Chow actually lost a PR on his blog seeing that it has gone down to four from five. The iWebtool Pagerank Prediction Tool, on which many webmasters seem to have had their eye on, also got its prediction wrong in case of John’s site. The tool clearly indicates that John Chow’s PR would go up to 6 and also displaying a backlink count of well over 25000. Then, where did it go wrong?

The Problem

Google, or atleast Matt Cutts, as far as I know has been clearly campaigning against the use of paid links on blogs and websites and has also recommended that people report paid links found on websites using the spam report form. Also taking into account the fact that John has extensive advertising on his site especially in the form of text links and banners which all fall under the paid advertising category, he shouldn’t be too surprised that the Pagerank has dropped on the site.

Of course, it is one of the biggest blogs on the web and that makes it just too easy to notice. On an approximate count, there are 16 text links and 8 banner links on the sidebar alone and it is quite evident that they are paid.

Does it affect John Chow?

A PR drop may be a momentary jolt for John, but rest assured that is not something I would worry about if I was John. The reason being that most advertisers pick the blog for the sheer amount of traffic it brings and not for the PR alone. Having an Alexa rank <2500 is certainly no mean achievement. Losing a single PR will most probably not affect the site in anyway, especially in terms of revenue. I’d love to hear John’s take on this.. This isn’t the first time that Google hates him though

How does it affect you?

For the average blogger however, this is a different story. The low traffic blogs try to sell text links based on their PageRank only. However, selling links may get you a rap from Google, leading to a drop in the PR. This means, you can’t command as much authority as before and your link sales may drop.

The average bloggers will be the most hit from this new strategy of Google. An alternate way to make money is certainly an option that such bloggers will have to explore, if they want to stand a chance of making money from their site without antagonising Google.

Have you had any impact on your PR with this update? And if the PR takes a beating, will it affect your income? Do give your opinions on this! Thanks for reading!

Edit:It seems that more than one top blog has taken a PR beating from Google and those include:

• Seroundtable.com
• Searchenginejournal.com
• Searchengineguide.com
• Problogger.net
• Copyblogger.com

Digital Point is really going nuts over this one!

Earlier I had talked about Kontactr and how you can create contact forms for your website in 2 easy steps. They also offer widgets for your site, so that people can contact you without leaving your site. Now Kontactr has come up with Kontactr Pop Up or KPU for short. Using KPU, you can use the contact form as a pop up. By pop up, not in a separate window, but in the same window using AJAX. The contact form loads in the foreground.

After filling it up and sending it, you can simply close the pop up window and you get back the old screen. This even ensures that the users don’t even navigate away from the page where they were. You can have a look at the demo. Would you use this as a contact method on your blog? Let me know!