Monday, June 29, 2009

Getting Kicked Off Facebook - 10 Things to Avoid

Every day we hear of more and more people from the world over complaining about Facebook shutting down their accounts without any prior notice. While Facebook clearly reserves the right to shut down any account they find 'suspicious', some of you will be surprised to know that one of the strangest reason for why your account might be shut down is 'excessive use of the site'.

They say that Facebook is "purposefully obscuring their processes, making it harder for spammers to get into their system". Unfortunately, by doing so they are also creating trouble for many innocent Facebook users out there who get caught, every now and then, in this web nightmare.

While many people do receive warning notices before their accounts are shut down, some are not even given that honor. Most complains against Facebook these day revolve around accounts being 'permanently disabled' without any notification. Sad part is that those who complain to Facebook or write to them on any of their help address are not getting any answers from the FB authorities.

We ponder as to why that is? Although Facebook supposedly provides a help center, apparently it's either not sufficient enough to deal with all the emails they get on a regular basis or they just plain ignore these requests (or so it seems).

Anyways, all that said, if you are one of those people whose Facebook account has been disabled all of a sudden without any prior notice, here's a list that you might want to consider.

10 Things that can get you Kicked Off Facebook... Permanently:

1. Using Fake Name or Persona: Turns out that FB authorities can find out if you don't use your real name and use a nickname or initials instead. Also those who show themselves as something other than a human... Dogs, cats and things are so not welcome by Facebook:s

2. Too many Friends: Think about it... you don't need to add just about everyone as a friend. Keep under the maximum limit of 5000 friends.

3. Posting too many Messages: Be it your wall or someone else's, if you're sending out too many messages you can translate as a spammer. Beware!

4. Joining too many Groups: Apparently that is an offense. Maximum limit is 200 groups per user, crossing this number will get you in trouble for sure.

5. Poking too many People: Avoid this! Especially if there are applications that poke people on your behalf. That's counted as spam and you will have your account shut down!

6. Under 18?: If you are under 18, chances are that your account might get suspended without prior notice.

7. Creating Offensive Content: Posting offensive content on your or anyone else's wall or in a group will have your account permanently disabled and perhaps without any prior notice too.

8. Using Duplicate text in Multiple Messages: Don't copy/paste one message for several people. This is an offense!

9. Plagiarizing off Facebook: Turns out that Facebook has a zero tolerance policy. If you copy anything from their pages you are likely to get kicked off FB. Although they don't have a reliable way of proving it's you who's doing the scraping, an IP matching is probably good enough for them. So be very careful!

10. Advertising applications on Wall Posts: This isn't taken as self promotion, it's down right annoying and definitely considered a good enough reason for disabling your account.

If your Facebook account has been disabled for any strange reason you must email to the FB authorities on one of the following addresses:

- disabled@facebook.com
- appeals@facebook.com
- info@facebook.com

We're hoping you'd get an answer. *Fingers Crossed*

Thursday, June 25, 2009

SEO Basics for Google - Past, Present & Future

There are a few basic functions that SEOs around the globe have been doing for past several years and are still required to do. These constitute the basis of the new personalized search launched by Google. And whether we like it or not, these have quite a good chance of remaining just as important in the future too.

So if you are an SEO, here are the SEO Basics you must still do for a website:

1) Tiresome Keyword Research
2) Tedious Industry Analysis
3) Boring Competition Research
4) Creating Meta Tags (page titles, descriptions and keywords)
5) Producing a Website Usability Methodology


Can the SEO Basics go Stale for Google any time soon?
With the latest developments many have started to question the significance of these SEO basics. Most wonder if it's time to throw the traditional search out of the window. I'd say, not yet and I'd give you 3 reasons as to why...

First, because you need to go through these basics if you want people to believe that your site is authentic.
Second, because it still helps to get your site in the search results where users notice.
And Last and most importantly Google has worked too hard and too long to instill these basics in their search algorithm. They've made an empire out of these basics, so to say and there is no way that they are letting go of this any time soon. So all this said and done, there is really no need to worry, at the present or in the near future, about the SEO basics going stale ;)

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Website Essentials - 3 Must Haves

When implementing tricks of the trade on your website there are 3 things you just can't ever go wrong with. Big or small, every website deserves these 3 essentials:

Implement SEO >> Upgrading your website or working on launching a new one from scratch, consider SEO. It's never too late to implement SEO and the sooner you do it, the better. So start today!

Creating Quality Content >> Whether you own a website or just a blog, you can never be too big or too little for quality content ever. No matter how much traffic you get (or don't get), no matter what business you're running, you would always need good content. Even when you think that your visitors don't read it or your services aren't popular enough... Quality content on your webpages can just never be enough. So keep updating good content every now and then!

Link Sharing >> Link sharing is good. Distribute some of the content from your website to others on a free-reprint basis. This helps in not just earning links but will also increase your visibility chances and bring more traffic to your website.

Easy, isn't it? ;)