Google Blog Search blogroll detector algorithm has finally gone through a change. As a result bloggers may find the number of incoming links to their blogs getting reduced in the Google Blog Search. Here is what Googler Jeremy Hylton has to say about the change:
We have launched a ranking change that reduces the number of results
that are returned because of blogroll matches. There are still
problems to work out, but this change appears to be a big improvement
over our earlier fix. We had originally planned to launch an
experiment for link: queries, but decide more recently to release this
change first. We are still working on the link: change and expect to
have that ready in a few more weeks.
Those of you who have been keeping an eye on this long awaited change know the problem. For example, say your blog is listed in my blogroll. Now each new blog post that I make will give you a match to Google Blog Search even if I don’t mention your blog link in the post. But why? Because it considers blogroll as part of the post content. As a result, you will find some useless results in your link quiery. Now Google says that the issue has been fixed.
Google has just released Google Services for Websites – an all in one webmaster service package that can easily be implemented by the hosting providers in their own service. It is an enhanced version of the Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program that was released last year.
If you own a hosting company or web publishing service then you can sign up for it. It will enable your customers to access Google webmaster services from your control panel directly. It now includes:
Google Webmaster tools to drive traffic
Custom Search or Google Site Search to enhance search capabilities for the sites
Adsense to monetize sites
There is some incentive for you. You can earn referral fees when a customer creates an Adsense account that generates revenue or upgrades to Google Site Search.
Yes, I don’t mean adding PDF file, I mean embedding. Obviously you can easily hyperlink a PDF file. But the user has to download it or open it with Adobe Reader from the browser as a separate file. What about embedding a PDF widget where necessary? Readers can see the PDF directly from your site or blog post. They can even resize the widget to full screen to read it & come back again to your site. Also there is option for downloading the file. Acrobat just do that for you. Sign up for a free account there. Upload your PDF. Now copy the embed code & paste it where necessary. It’s quite simple. Here is an implementation.
Personally I don’t like to use widgets. They tend to make a site slow to load. But this widget really looks cool.
HyperWebEnable has become quite popular in recent times. It is quite obvious though. After all, it is hard to resist the temptation of free domain & free hosting at the same time. But take a note of these few points that I am about to mention.
Free domain & hosting service is not a easy thing to find out. I am just giving you an example. A few years back there was a website ihavefree.com offering both free domain & free hosting. But the service is there no more. Nothing to be surprised of. It’s hard to make profit that way & without profit you will be out of business pretty soon. That’s why I don’t have faith on this kind of service. They give too much away for free. But I have to admit that HyperWebEnable is still going strong.
Now come to the point of free domain. They will register the domain you requested & let you use that. But is the domain really yours? No, it isn’t. What does that mean? They will use their own contacts to register it. Practically they own them. And you are stuck with them. You can’t change DNS or don’t have necessary info to transfer it. You are building & promoting a site for someone else. Here you can find a recent interview with the CEO of HyperWebEnable. And this is what he has to say about domain registration:
18. Under Whose name will the domain be registered?
The domain will be registered under HyperWebEnable.
How does it feel? I have nothing against HyperWebEnable. It’s not possible to be so generous. The best thing you can do & you should do is to register your domain independantly & then use only the free hosting from HyperWebEnable if you wish.
Would you like to add a Yellow Pages like directory to your Wordpress blog? Then you can use a simple plugin from Business Directory for Wordpress. Install & activate it. Create a few pages. Add a few snippets of code there. You are done. Let your readers or advertisers use it to submit an advertising on your blog. Or you can use it for your link building purpose.
Today I received an email from Adsense about their new feature interest-based advertising. It sounds pretty cool. They are trying to serve ads on the basis of user interest. But how are they going to track individual interest? They will drop a cookie on the user’s browser when he clicks or views an Adsense ad in a site. This cookie will track his visits to that site & other sites. So it will know the trend of user & figure out a corresponding category to show ads that may interest the user. It’s pretty simple. you don’t have to change your ad code or account settings or anything. I am looking forward to it.
But as this DoubleClick DART cookie will store information from user, it requires a privacy policy to be implemented by the publisher.
By the way, you may opt out from showing ads that are based on user interest categories. Still Google will use user’s previous interaction with the advertiser to show ads. But I doubt if it is a good idea not to try this new feature.
Here is more from Google about interest-based advertising. And check this out for information that you need to use in your privacy policy. Update privacy policy by April 8, 2009.
It is a long standing method for webmasters to choose one url version, either www or non-www (for example: http://www.yourdomain.com & http://yourdomain.com) while link building. And there is a strong point to do so. Google gets confused with these two versions of the same url while crawling links. They can treat them as separate references to separate pages even if they point to same page actually. Here lies the danger of duplicate content. Besides it may take long time before Google merges these links. So your total number of backlinks gets reduced leaving you with a less PR score. So choose one version at the start & stick to it all the way to your link building.
But what about others who may link to your site? You can’t control what url they will use. But here comes Google Webmaster Tools to help you. Register your site there & verify it, if you haven’t done it already. Use Preferred domain option from the Settings page. Now whatever your link url may be, Google will treat & convert it to your preferred version if necessary while indexing. The current links that are already indexed will get modified when the pages containing them will get refreshed in Google search index. It may take a bit of time. But you don’t have to worry about it once you are done choosing. Let Google worry for you.
I am talking about a very popular theme. It’s UDB Moneymaker theme. Perhaps you have seen it in other blogs if not yours as thousands of bloggers use it. It’s a great theme no doubt. But do you know one thing? You can remove the credit link from the footer if you wish. Most of us don’t like to show it. Here is what it says in Usage Agreement:
This theme is free to download and use on as many sites as you would like. That being said, we would sincerely appreciate if you left the credits in the footer. Thank you. We hope you enjoy the theme!
So you can see it is not mandatory to keep it there. If you haven’t had a look at the theme before, here is a screenshot:
And check the theme. It has some great features. But there are two disadvantages that I have found. It is quite common. Even if you remove the link, most people will still know that it’s a free theme. Secondly, it is compatible with Wordpress 2.7 but at the same time hasn’t been updated to show reply & threaded comment features of 2.7.
By the way, I don’t mind giving away a credit link. As you can see now, I am using a free theme & quite happy with it.
There has been a talk on the increasing importance of branded search results in Google. I have found this useful video about Matt Cutts talking on this new discussion. Listen to this & you will have a clear idea about Google’s point of view on branding search results.
It’s pretty assuring to know that Google doesn’t rely on branding that much. Everyone of us cannot have brand. But what we can have is high quality content
When you try a new design you check your site on your favourite browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera. But what about other numerous browsers across differnt OSes? No doubt, the users of these browsers are small in number. But it is your duty as a webmaster to reach as many users as possible & give them statisfaction while browsing. Would you like to see how your site looks in different browsers of Windows, Linux, Mac OS or BSD? Don’t get afraid. I am not going to tell you to download & install all these broswer on your OS. Try BrowserShots instead. It will test your site on its server & upload the screenshots of your site on different browsers. You can see them easily by clicking the images. You can choose to check from about hundred of different browsers with very little effort.
