If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or email alerts. Thanks for visiting!
Over the past month, I was surprised to see one particular post on DesiPundit attract an inordinate amount of page views [see image]. The post ranked third in the list of top content i.e. only below the homepage and the contributors page which have been traditionally the top content since DesiPundit launched. This particular post was in the Hindi section and after adjusting for the recency variable in Google Analytics, it remained so over the past couple of months. At first, I didn’t pay particular attention to it but only recently after determining to find its source, I finally traced its referral path - to the Google India’s iGoogle page.
First, a little bit about iGoogle. iGoogle is your personalized startpage that you can customize to populate with widgets of site feeds. If you haven’t customized your iGoogle page [after signing in], then Google presents you with few default sites whose top stories are displayed. You can keep them or replace them with other site feeds. Most users in my experience tend to keep the default ones since they are Google-approved and are of popular if not reputable standards in terms of content and updates.
For e.g. the Google India’s iGoogle page has feeds from Google News, Economic Times, Times of India, Funtoosh (jokes), and Glamsham (entertainment). But if you look closer, Google also offers the iGoogle page in Hindi. When you click on it, the page turns to Hindi content and the default feeds change accordingly. So there amidst Navbharat Times, BBC Hindi, Money Control Hindi, and Shunya was our very own DesiPundit’s Hindi section. See screenshot below [bottom-right]:
I am immensely pleased that DesiPundit is thought worthy enough of such attention. We have been receiving significant traffic from that placement. It also underscores my belief that blogs in Indic languages will eventually grow and am glad that Google is pushing forward the Indic content through its regional language emphasis. Currently, the iGoogle option is offered only for English and Hindi although the primary search engine is offered in Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, and Tamil which incidentally are also languages that are covered on DesiPundit. We hope when the iGoogle option is offered for these language, Google will include our other Indic feeds. Breaking into the English iGoogle page is going to be an uphill task though. Note that eventually the blogs that we link to win because we send the incoming visitors away onward to your content which has always been the primary aim of DesiPundit. But it certainly feels special when Google offers a permanent link to your blog :)
Congrats to Vinay for keeping the Hindi section of DesiPundit alive and for posting regularly. He is definitely read by more people than we had imagined :) It was almost after great reluctance that we separated out Indic posts from the main feed but as I elaborated, we had to do so to avoid inundating people with content that they didn’t want to read. Special thanks to Debashish for spearheading the Hindi blogosphere and assisting DesiPundit. He is also working with IndiCast, our ‘brother-concern’ to produce Hindi podcasts.
On a side note, why the link love for that particular Hindi post mentioned right at the top? Well, I openly admit that it was my fault at not checking the redirection behavior for www-URLs. Earlier, I had added couple of lines of code to enable the www-redirect for this blog and had done so for DesiPundit as well i.e. in plain English to redirect any request for desipundit.com to www.desipundit.com. It wasn’t working as expected and hence the feed wasn’t refreshing correctly. I have fixed it now [see update] and so now you see the latest Hindi post on iGoogle. All those who worry about their blog’s PageRank should adopt the above mentioned fix.
by Patrix | on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 2:16 pm | 
Weblogs, World Wide Web . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
June 6th, 2007 at 4:58 pm reply
I am not sure if this helps but the following lines in your .htaccess should redirect users to the correct site (with www) without any plug-ins…
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^ipatrix\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.ipatrix.com/1 [R=301,L]
June 6th, 2007 at 6:11 pm reply
indianpad, I was using the exact same code for the past few months until I realized it doesn’t work for individual URLs. See the update link in the post.
June 7th, 2007 at 4:32 am reply
I guess congratulations are in order…are n’t they? Go DP!
June 7th, 2007 at 11:59 am reply
curiouscat, all credit to contributors who keep the wheels turning.
June 7th, 2007 at 2:01 pm reply
Modesty and ploitical correctness, thy name is Ptrix! :))
June 7th, 2007 at 2:16 pm reply
curiouscat, modesty (not all agree) I can understand but how was it PC? :)