Top blogs

In December every year, we try to accommodate excellent new blogs or blogs that we missed during the directory updation in May of that year. This small list of top Indian English blogs is addition to the best Indian blogs' directory for 2018. If you visit the directory , you would notice that we have also removed some blogs that were not regularly updated after their inclusion in this edition of the directory. Here are the chosen new blogs from the Indian blogging scene: activelifeliving - Active Life Living allaboutthewoman - All About The Woman allgudthings - All Gud Things ashirespondingtolife - Ashi Responding To Life auraofthoughts - Aura of Thoughts bakewithshivesh - Bake with Sivesh blogsikka - Parenting While Traveling bookedforlife - Booked for Life bookishelf - The Bookish Elf bookscharming - Books Charming boomerangmoments - Boomerang Moments code2cook - Code2Cook cookbookjaleela - Cook Book Jaleela endlesselan - Epiphanic Mome...

What exactly constitutes undesirable actions in the eyes of different search engines is not fully documented. Yet, search engine optimization (SEO) experts have found out what is considered unethical/ undesirable. Some insights have also come also from people within Google, particularly Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Webspam unit.  By common sense, the SEO actions that are deceitful and excessive are not liked by search engines because these go against search engines' aim of serving the most appropriate results in response to search queries. We had earlier posted a summary of Google's website rating guidelines (discussed below in brief). These guidelines indirectly - but clearly - tell us what are good and bad actions relating to search optimization of websites.   We have talked of good SEO actions numerous times. In the present post, let us talk about the bad SEO actions - the ones known to invite penalties from search engines. Some of these actions look inn...

If you want to see the current list of best literary blogs in India, please see the update as of September 20 here: Topmost literature blogs in India The present post (below) is from archives of 2018.   We issued the list of best literary blogs in India last year and received good response from readers. The following list is that of best Indian English literary blogs in 2018. We have discussed our observations of Indian literary blogging scene in the last post linked here. They still hold good. In the present one, we just update the list. Hope you find the blogs rich in content. Blogs are arranged according to the operative part of their URL, in alphabetical order. Each entry contains the URL with link - blog title - short description. abhijitbhaduri - Abhijit Bhaduri - author of leadership books abhinavagarwal - Abhinav Agarwal - musings, book reviews akswrites - The Untold Stories - musings, short fiction anieshabrahma - Aniesha's Musings - musings, fiction, boo...

Updated: October 2020   In the last 6-7 years, a large number of bloggers have started blogs on beauty and fashion. A number of them have added other subjects related to urban lifestyle, and these include parenting, fitness, home decor, travel, reading, etc. and this genre is now well-recognized as lifestyle blogging .   Lifestyle blogs started late in India but have caught up with the west. A search for 'lifestyle blogs India' on Google shows up lists of 10 to 100 fashion blogs. Some lists give Instagram accounts of fashion bloggers. Some YouTube accounts also come up high.    As against other lists, Indian Top Blogs manually picks up blogs for their long-standing and quality of content. The blogs listed below are the chosen 15 among top lifestyle blogs in India. All these blogs are lifestyle blogs, not mere fashion blogs. Some of them have established themselves in the Indian lifestyle/ fashion blogging scene and a few are reported to be earning handsomely too. Th...

हिंदी में ब्लॉगिंग से पैसा कैसे कमाएं? How to earn from blogging in Hindi? यह प्रश्न बार-बार पूछा जाता है. हम इस प्रश्न का उत्तर दो हिस्सों में देना चाहेंगे. एक, क्या ब्लॉगिंग से पैसा कमाया जा सकता है, और हाँ तो कैसे. दूसरे, हिंदी में ब्लॉगिंग   क्या पैसा कमाने के मामले में अंग्रेज़ी में ब्लॉगिंग की तरह असरदार है? ब्लॉगिंग से धनार्जन (earning from blogging) के बारे में इंग्लिश में हज़ारों पोस्टें आपको वेबसाइटौं पर मिल जाएंगी. मिल तो हिंदी में भी जाएंगी, साथ में YouTube में वीडियो भी. हमने देखा है कि चूंकि ब्लॉग से धन कमाने की चाहत रखने वाले ब्लॉगर बहुत जल्दी में होते हैं, ये वेबसाइटें और वीडियो उनके सामने चारे की तरह ऐसे नुस्खे परोसते हैं कि बेचारे ब्लॉगर उनके भरोसे अनाप-शनाप कदम उठाते हैं और या तो छोटे समय के लिए कुछ पैसे कमा कर बैठ जाते हैं या फिर बिलकुल पैसे नहीं कमा पाते. यह स्पष्ट करना ज़रूरी है कि जब हम ब्लॉगिंग की बात करते हैं तो न केवल पारम्परिक ब्लॉग की बात होती है, बल्कि किसी भी तरह की पठन/ दृश्य सामग्री (content) को अपनी वेबसाइट पर डालना और उससे सम्बंधित काम ब्ल...

When you live in a country other than where you spent your young age, you observe everything with a curious mind. It leads to great human discoveries. When you share them with others, in person, those many people know about that country from a new perspective. When you run a blog or website where you share your insights, that becomes an invaluable resource. I share below three beautiful and resourceful blogs by expatriates in India. Indians as well as outsiders would find their worldview interesting. 1 The White Hindu is Ambaa's blog, in existence since 2012. In the last six years, she has written in her blog on Indian culture and society, and Hindu religion and philosophy. The blog is part of Patheos portal, which is devoted to religion and spirituality.  Ambaa describes herself and the blog thus: An American woman of European ancestry who practices Hinduism. She has been involved in Indian philosophy since 1982 and Indian culture since 2004. She loves to learn about...

Many of our visitors and followers are those who are scared of technology and have created a blog on a free host because it does not demand any tech know-how.  That leaves the blogger with many constraints. For example, the free Wordpress.com blog cannot have advertisements, cannot apply a new theme and cannot use plugins.   In most such cases, i.e. when the blogger is interested in just sharing his thoughts with the world, even the free blogs are good enough. The Blogger (=blogspot.com) blog even allows placing of ads and optimizing the blog for search engines.   But what the free blog on these platforms does not get is AN INDEPENDENT IDENTITY. The blog is seen as a casual or amateur blog and not as a professional one. In this post, let me tell you how you can shed that .wordpress or .blogspot easily and without spending much money. In case of .blogspot blog, the only money you spend is a small amount needed for buying the domain and annual charge for keeping i...

With a number of virtual assistants available on desktops/laptops, mobile phones and standalone devices (e.g. Google Home, Siri), people are going to search more and more by giving voice commands.  Voice search will take natural language search forward by leaps and bounds. Are present search engine optimization (SEO) actions geared towards this change? Will voice search ever be popular or is it just a hype? Talking is easier and less boring than typing. You need not be in a particular posture and tied to the device with fingers working on the keyboard. You can give the command while you are doing another task. Voice commands are unobtrusive and instant; you remember something suddenly or you need some help while doing a chore - and you speak to the device for an answer. The trend may take some time before it breaks out in full swing and then becomes the norm. 2020 could be the time when voice search would have started becoming mainstream and  2021 when it becomes th...

Update: This post has been retained as an archive of our past work. We no longer issue a category-wise version of the list of best blogs of India. Kindly click on the link, if you reached here while looking for the latest list of top Indian blogs .  ---------------------------------------- The eighth edition of the Directory of Best Indian Blogs was released on 1st June, 2018. We are glad to announce that the category-wise version of the list of top blogs is now out. This year, as discussed in the directory release post last year, we have added lifestyle as a new category. A large number of bloggers, mostly women bloggers, have come to this field. Considering that 'lifestyle' is now in vogue in blogging, we had earlier talked about lifestyle blogging in this post: Lifestyle blogs are highly professional . We would be grateful if lifestyle blogger friends engage in discussion around this theme so that those attracted by this niche have a clear understanding of where they stan...

After the GDPR regulations came into force on 25th May this year, there is a lot of concern among website owners about using cookies on websites and among users whether to accept cookies or not. In the present post, we have collected useful information from highly authoritative sites so that you, the blogger, can yourself take informed action on use of cookies and displaying your cookie policy on your blog.  What is a cookie? A cookie is a small piece of information that websites leave on the visitor's browser. It helps the website in many ways such as assessing the user behavior so as to give the user a better 'user experience' later on or tracking how he/ she has responded to an advertisement placed on the website. Typically, cookies are small text files with a small piece of information in characters and digits. They are not malware and do not contain viruses or malicious code.   A cookie can be session specific or permanent. The permanent cookie resides on...