Recently, while I was in the US, an Indian friend asked me to buy him an iPhone because they can be unlocked in India (or elsewhere, if you know how). I did some hunting and found out that this is quite a hot topic. There is a lot of speculation online and quite a few Made-for-Adsense sites with nothing other than the iPhone name in an article, but there are some gems in there.

iPhone India Edition – Hidden Features is quite a funny read. It has a PhotoShopped picture of an iPhone with features such as “GPMS – Gutter and Pothole Management System”.

There are some posts that allege to show how to unlock an iPhone – take them all with a pinch of salt, as you could end up with an expensive paperweight if something goes wrong:

• iPhone India
• iPhone Elite

Buying an Unlocked iPhone

If I were lusting after an unlocked iPhone, I’d be looking at Apple Germany or France, where Apple has been forced to sell unlocked units. T-Mobile has them for €399 on a plan, and unlocked units were selling for about $1480 for a while until the courts gave T-Mobile the right to sell only locked ones. In France, you can still get unlocked models for €749. But if you are in India, your current options are:

• Palika Bazaar or Sarojini Nagar in Delhi
• Heera Panna in Mumbai

The going grey-market price is about $650 (Rs 30,000).

Will an iPhone Work in India?

Locked or unlocked, the iPhone will work in India because it has four GSM bands, two of which work in India (900 and 1800 MHz). All you have to do is ensure that your carrier supports roaming in India. Unlocking also depends on the firmware supplied with the phone – the latest version apparently cannot be unlocked, so don’t upgrade an unlocked phone. Here is someone who got his phone working in India:

iPhone Unlocking Jargon

• iPhone Elite = A set of tools that can brick your iPhone if you don’t know what you are doing.
• iPhone SimFree = A GUI-based unlocking tool that worked with firmware 1.1.2 but the site hasn’t been updated since November 20.
• iBrickr = A ringtone management tool for older firmware – don’t try it on 1.1.1 or later.
• Unlocking = Allowing the phone to use a SIM from any carrier, not just the one that sold you the phone on a contract.
• Jailbreaking = Allowing you to access all parts of the SIM’s file system.
• Activating = Conversely, this means bypassing the activation step via iTunes.
• Re-virginizing = Restoring the iPhone’s lock table if damaged by an anySIM 1.0x unlocker.
• Turbo SIM = Czech company Bladox sells this SIM-sized chip that slips in with your SIM and does amazing things, including unlocking the iPhone (acc to Wikipedia, but contradicted by the website). Their site says that as of 17 December 2007, a tsunami hit their shop, so they are closed. This probably means that most of Western Europe is under water by now…

Unlocking Just Got Harder

Firmware 1.1.3 was confirmed at Macworld 2008. It can’t be unlocked with AnySIM, so life for users of unlocked iPhones just got harder.

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On Day 3, there was an early session with Matt Cutts in the hot chair. Matt said that when he was at university (in 1999) in North Carolina, he took a course on search engines and after applying to Google, he asked how much they would pay him. He then thought he might not hear from them, but they did, and the rest is history.

Matt was asked to explain about linking to a bad neighbourhood when you don’t know if it is bad. He said you needed to trust your instinct and if in doubt, use a nofollow link.

On paid links, Matt gave the example of a site with an article about Alzheimer’s Disease that linked to some organisation that wanted money from you instead of giving you information. This was a flag for a paid link, whereas the expected link should have gone to some authority information site. This is why all the search engines are clamping down on paid links and paid blog posts.

Google recently bought g.cn as it is short and easy to type for Chinese who cannot remember the word “Google”. He sees a lot of English-language spam on .cn domains where the backlinks come from Japan. This is clearly unnatural and flags a paid-link alert. You can buy a .cn domain for as little as 15 cents, so spammers are flocking there and getting backlinks from almost every country, which is also unnatural.

Matt was asked about sites sharing the same IP address, such as on a virtual private server (VPS). He said that spammers drop an IP address when it has been banned, but the new occupant need not worry. When a whole subnet in a C class is doing strange things, only then do innocent sites have something to worry about.

What about ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) used by newspapers to make articles available only to subscribers after a certain period? This is a very recent initiative that extends the robots exclusion protocol, so Matt is still studying it and doesn’t anticipate any issues for SEO.

How many 301 redirects can a site have? There is no limit. You can change them after two weeks if you wish, with no harmful effect, but don’t chain 301s in a loop.

Not surprisingly, someone asked about paid links and what was the borderline. Matt replied that if a link passes PageRank, it can come under suspicion. If a link manipulates search results, it is suspicious. But aren’t AdWords paid links? No – they do not pass PageRank, so they are not.

What is the best way to migrate a site to a new IP address?

1. Lower your DNS time-to-live (TTL) to something like 5 minutes and leave it like this for a day.

2. Bring up the site on the new IP address and wait a day or two.

3. Drop the files on the old IP address once you see Googlebot crawling the new address.

How can we report a scraper? This happens with AdSense sites. You should use the link in “Ads by Google” to report such a publisher by filling out a spam report.

How about directories that charge for a link? There is a detailed Googlewebmastercentral blog post about paid directories. Signs of a directory to avoid? No contact information, private registration, poor data in whois, expired domain redirected to the directory site, uncustomised phpLD script, requires a reciprocal list or takes only paid submissions, no quality links.

Should we buy a site with existing (good) links? No, they will not help with ranking.

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Todd Malicoat (stuntdubl.com) said that there are two main ways to get links through linkbait.

1. Identify and target the distribution channel, then get their attention. Use hooks such as ego, sex, humour, picture, resource, incentive, news, attack or a contrary hook. Use a combination of these for an added punch, e.g. an interview uses the ego hook and a resource hook if the interviewee has something useful to share.

2. Target webmasters by writing about their websites. They will gladly link to your article without asking. This keeps their attention. Todd encourages all to read the Cluetrain Manifesto (http://www.cluetrain.com/) particularly the 95 Theses.

For targeting Digg, Andy Hagans (domaindev.com) said that the audience seems to consist of sensitive 16-year-olds. Use catchy titles else they will bury you. Reddit attracts people interested in politics, tasers and conspiracy theories. Delicious is full of resource-hungry librarians and info junkies and easiest to spam manually. StumbleUpon attracts bored Ritalin users who are happy to be taken to some random site. If your main content is above the fold, you will do well with this audience. Tweako is for the “how to [anything]” nerds. Hugg is for greenies. DZone is for hard core developers and Sphinn is for targeting SEOs.

You should display social media “add this” buttons and target all SM communities at once. Some bait will fail and some will work.

Bill Hartzer of MarketNet recommends targeting sites that are known to link out. Use blogstorm.co.uk to to see which sites are using linkbait to their advantage and add your site to its Tracker tool. Here are the pathetic results for this site – all because you are not linking to me!  :sad:

Popularity: 25% [?]