Skip to main content

For DI Readers in China, Iran, Pakistan, Syria Where Blogspot is Blocked

Ken Wong writes - "I'm in China and can't access blogspot.com directly, so i use pkblogs.com to read your blog. Today the pkblogs or inblogs.net link says that DI is a banned blog. What happened ?"

Like Ken, a lot of our readers based in countries like China, Pakistan, etc (where blogspot.com is blocked by government) use the excellent pkblogs.com service to read this blog. The service has also been a big help during the blogspot ban in India last July.

But as some of you would have guessed, we recently requested the pkblogs.com developers to remove our blog from their system and they immediately acted.

Now if you are left wondering why we raised such a request when the service was actually helping people read this blog, here are the two main reasons:

Reason 1 - Search Engines Penalize Duplicate Content: For every article posted on Digital Inspiration, there were two mirror webpages created immediately - one on the pkblogs.com domain and the other on inblogs.net - both these duplicate pages were indexed by the search engines in the same way as our main webpage.

There was a risk involved since search engines generally penalize websites with duplicate content. Plus it was creating clutter on the web.

Reason 2 - Adsense Earnings Could be Affected: Since we monetize this blog via Adsense, Google Ads were shown to users even if the webpages were opened indirectly via the inblogs or pkblogs' hyperlink.

Now Google has this smart pricing algorithm meaning if you are displaying Google Ads on a number of websites, even one low-performing website can cause Google to lower the ad prices (CPM) of all sites in your account.

This was again a big risk to our revenue stream since pkblogs.com/labnol or inblogs.net/labnol were showing Google ads with our Publisher ID.

So what's the alternative for users in China or Pakistan ? We have now switched to full feeds meaning you can read the entire blog post in any of your RSS readers.

And if RSS is greek to you, just type this URL in the browser to read the blog. You will however miss the visitor comments.

Related: How to Access Blocked Webpages in School or At Work ?

Popular posts from this blog

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include
Read more

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by  Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include  Gmail Mail Merge  (send personalized emails with Gmail ),  Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and   File Upload Forms ( receive files  in Google Drive). Also see  Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.
Read more

Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts for Power Users

All features in Mozilla Firefox browser are accessible through the use of the keyboard. You can use shortcut keys to view and save Web pages, search the web, open new webpages, work with bookmarks, or find text on the current webpage. Some of the most common keyboard shortcuts in Mozilla Firefox are Ctrl+N (to open a new Firefox window), Ctrl+T (to open a new tab), Ctrl+F4 (to close the current tab) and Ctrl+S to save the current webpage. Mozilla Firefox supports many more powerful keyboard shortcuts. For instance, by pressing a simple key combination, you can manually delete autocomplete entries from the Firefox location bar or Web forms. I am sharing a list of my favorite Mozilla Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts that make web browsing with Firefox even more fun . And you also save your precious time as navigating through several layers of Firefox Toolbar menus is no longer necessary. 1. Web Search Ctrl+K moves the cursor to the Search Bar. You can then type in the terms you wish to fin
Read more