...i'm a Webmaster

Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Unite On “Canonical Tag” To Reduce Duplicate Content Clutter

2009-02-17T09:44:00.000+07:00

This can be a problem for a couple of reasons.

* Less of the site may get crawled. Search engine crawlers use a limited amount of bandwidth on each site (based on numerous factors). If the crawler only is able to crawl 100 pages of your site in a single visit, you want it to be 100 unique pages, not 10 pages 10 times each.
* Each page may not get full link credit. If a page has 10 URLs that point to it, then other sites can link to it 10 different ways. One link to each URL dilutes the value the page could have if all 10 links pointed to a single URL.

Using the new canonical tag

Specify the canonical version using a tag in the head section of the page as follows:

< link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish">

That’s it!

* You can only use the tag on pages within a single site (subdomains and subfolders are fine).
* You can use relative or absolute links, but the search engines recommend absolute links.

This tag will operate in a similar way to a 301 redirect for all URLs that display the page with this tag.

* Links to all URLs will be consolidated to the one specified as canonical.
* Search engines will consider this URL a “strong hint” as to the one to crawl and index.

Canonical URL best practices

The search engines use this as a hint, not as a directive, (Google calls it a “suggestion that we honor strongly”) but are more likely to use it if the URLs use best practices, such as:

* The content rendered for each URL is very similar or exact
* The canonical URL is the shortest version
* The URL uses easy to understand parameter patterns (such as using ? and %)

Can this be abused by spammers? They might try, but Matt Cutts of Google told me that the same safeguards that prevent abuse by other methods (such as redirects) are in place here as well, and that Google reserves the right to take action on sites that are using the tag to manipulate search engines and violate search engine guidelines.

For instance, this tag will only work with very similar or identical content, so you can’t use it to send all of the link value from the less important pages of your site to the more important ones.

If tags conflict (such as pages point to each other as canonical, the URL specified as canonical redirects to a non-canonical version, or the page specified as canonical doesn’t exist), search engines will sort things out just as they do now, and will determine which URL they think is the best canonical version.

The tag in action

This tag will most often be useful in the case of multiple URLs pointing at the same page, but might also be used when multiple versions of a page exist. For instance, wikia.com is using the tag for previous revisions of a page. Both http://watchmen.wikia.com/index.php?title=Comedian%27s_badge&diff=4901&oldid=4819 and http://watchmen.wikia.com/index.php?title=Comedian%27s_badge&diff=5401&oldid=4901reference the latest version of the article (http://watchmen.wikia.com/wiki/Comedian%27s_badge) as the canonical.

The search engines stress that it’s still important to build good URL structure and also note that if you aren’t able to implement this tag, they’ll still keep the processes they have now to determine the canonical. For instance, at SMX West on Tuesday, Maile Ohye of Google explained how Google can detect patterns in URLs if they use standard parameters. For instance, with these URLs:

* http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike
* http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike&sort=evil
* http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike&sort=good

Maile explained that Google can detect (particularly when looking at patterns across the site) that the sort parameter may order the page differently, but that the URLs with the sort parameter display the same content as the shorter URL (http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike).

While it’s rare for the search engines to join forces, this isn’t the first time they’ve come together on a standard. In November 2006, they came together to support sitemaps.org. And in June 2008 they announced a standard set of robots.txt directives. Matt Cutts of Google and Nathan Buggia of Microsoft told me that they want to help reduce the clutter on the web, and make things easier for searchers as well as site owners.

This new tag won’t completely solve duplicate issues on the web, but it should help make things quite a bit easier particuarly for ecommerce sites, who likely need all the help they can get in the current economic conditions. Site owners have been asking for help with these issues for a really long time so this should be a greatly welcomed addition.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz:

The search engines will be talking about this news at the Ask the Search Engines panel at SMX West. We will be blogging this panel live at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Google "Directory Submission" Update

2008-10-06T00:29:00.000+07:00

While Google has condemned buying and selling links that pass PageRank, they’ve encouraged listing in paid directories like Yahoo for years. It seems that era may have come to an end earlier today. The following bullet points have been removed from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines Webmaster Help Center*

“Have other relevant sites link to yours.”
“Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.”

Does this recent move reflect a renewed emphasis on rooting out paid links passing PageRank and/or low quality links by Google?

*As mentioned, the bullet points above have been removed from the US version of Google’s Webmaster Help Center. Other versions may not yet reflect this change.

Overdoing Search Engine Optimization

2008-08-14T23:17:00.000+07:00

Search engine optimization is not a bad thing. In deed, SEO is a good thing because, at least in theory, doing SEO helps the cream rise to the top.

However, if you overdo SEO for your website, your website will be crowded with SEO friendly design only such as webpages are full with text links, text, text, text, text links, alt meta tags, alt meta tags, alt meta tags, alt meta tags, and more.

Your website will get the good results for search engines for sure. But what you need from those search engine search results are “potential visitors and customers” or not?

Yes, visitors will like the easy navigated websites which are friendly to their eyed too. Don’t amaze them and chase them out of your websites with overdoing search engine optimization (Overdo SEO) because you will be the loser instead.

Great tips to ranking in Google for a HIGHLY competitive keyword

2008-07-25T15:06:00.004+07:00

Every one of us wants to rank high in Google. You must focus on backlink building to have good serps. But backlink building has to be done with great care - not to get penalized.

Here are some simple tips which will definetely help:

1. Don't buy (or sell) sitewide links for serps. Buy links from individual pages*.

2. Don't look for high PR links only - start your campaign for a new site with PR 0-1 and slowly move up each week as you see your rankings improve.

3. Control link placement speed. Remember of "Too many links at once" Google filter.

4. Control the number of outbound links on your pages and on pages where you place your links, avoid link-farms, links to gambling, pills, etc.

5. A link from a relevant website is excellent, but a link from a quality site of other niche or other language can also boost your ranking - so don't ignore such links.

6. Make links look natural. Use different link anchors, promote not only your main page, but your deep pages too.

7. Don't do reciprocal linkexchange.

* - Links from individual pages are far more effective when speaking of improving serps, not PR. They are more natural and organic. Sitewide links can easily be filtered.
Selling sitewide links also means loosing lots of money - if your site has 1000 of PR2-3 pages, you could earn hundreds of $$$ a month just from selling ONE outbound link per page, compared to some $20-30 for selling a sitewide link (now, when it has become possible). What do you think?

Using this simple technique, many our sites has received an excellent rank in Google in just 1 month for HIGHLY competitive keywords. If you are interested, I can tell how we did it.

Just remember, that your site's ranking depends on your efforts and skills, it doesn't depend on your site's PR etc. (see our PR if you don't believe it).

If you are too stupid to use a computer you might try giving SEO advice

2008-07-18T09:39:00.001+07:00

Now that everybody and their uncle is an expert in search engine optimization you get to read some really off the wall advice. I have collected a few gems that had me laughing and reproduced them below. Most of these are from Yahoo Answers and Live QnA but you can find answers like these almost everywhere.

These are all from the last few months and I have corrected the spelling, grammar and replaced any links with .

Q. What is cloaking in SEO?
A. Cloaking is the speed process for your cpu. You can over cloak your cpu but be aware of the overheating, the biggest problem of over cloaking is that it overheats the cpu.

Q. Seo stuff, what are some basic pointers?
A. My friend I have the perfect website for you. It includes over 1000 links to free advertising websites including free directories, free search engine submissions, free viral marketing, free top keywords and much, much more also investing in the big daddy search engine and program hoppers will prove very profitable.

Q. If your site is a cooking site but you add your site as a link to sports related forums, would your site be penalized or banned from the search engines?
A. It is legal to point from one topic to other, you will just get a lower rank but it is better than nothing.

Q. Can someone explain how sub-domains can impact search engine optimization?
A. If you want top ranking in MSN just spam with sub-domains.

Q. Why does page rank fall?
A. The number of hits you get and the frequency that your site is updated changes your ratings.

Q. What does “omitted results” mean e.g. “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 103 already displayed”?
A. It means that there are search results that have been left out.

Q. What is SEO?
A. South East Organization.

Q. Can an expert tell me why Google is not updating our website?
A. No it doesn’t update, you have to resubmit it.

Q. Why are SEO Consultants too expensive for webmasters?
A. I personally used a firm that did a 250,000 site submissions for my site, it worked great.

Q. What are SEO and SEM and how do they differ?
A. SEO typically includes keyword research, density balancing, tagging, linking strategy and website submission. With SEM you can buy advertising to get to the top.

Q. Can any of you SEO experts recommend a good link exchange site that works?
A. I’ve found 45 different link exchange services and the two that I think work the best are and .

Q. Can anyone suggest any SEO tips for my website?
A. I checked your website and one thing is missing, a Visitor’s Guest Book where visitors can insert a message describing their business and website.

Q. What are some SEO tips?
A. The most important item is meta tags, very good keywords and keyword density.

Q. What is the best way to get a website to appear on the first page of search engines, can I do it myself?
A. My experience is that trying to do it yourself does not give the best results. My website has been online for about 5 years now and on average I get about 11 unique hits per day and my meta tags are in order.

Q. How do you get removed from a search result?
A. You don’t. Whatever embarrassing thing you may have committed in a public forum is indelibly etched.

How do I add my website to search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL?
A. From my understanding, your website will pop up in search engines based on how many people visit your website but how people visit your website if it’s not in a search engine, ironic right?

Finding a New Domain Name With Bustaname.com

2008-07-18T09:37:00.001+07:00

Ryan Stout has built a great tool to help in that increasingly difficult task of finding a suitable domain name for a new site.

Called Bust a Name it has a nice JavaScript interface with a rails, MySQL and lighttpd backend.

Primarily a word combiner, once you have entered your words you can select similar words from a drop down list. You can sort available domains by length, readability or alphabetically. A really useful feature is that you can group keywords so that keywords in the same group are not combined. Other options allow a limited number of suffixes and prefixes with an additional checkbox to pluralize or drop the last vowel.

Using this tool I have found that augmenting the similar word feature with a thesaurus and finding additional keywords to input with Google’s Keyword Tool helps a lot in finding usable domain names.

Building Links for Geo Targeting

2008-06-26T16:08:00.001+07:00

ncoming links are considered to be a major factor that forms Google’s opinion about your site. Naturally, country specific links are also very important to make sure Google understands your geographic targeting efforts.

That’s not a big deal if you have only one site targeting one specific location. But what if you have numerous websites all meant to target different countries? In this case you may end up targeting a foreign country you have not much knowledge about.

Here is a short helpful list of tips on how to pursue country-specific backlinks:

find your competitors’ country specific backlinks and follow their example:
- search for places to drop a link in Google using country specific TLDs and site: command.
Examples: [site:.co.uk donors], [site:.co.uk forums], etc
- take advantage of this handy Yahoo search operator to find pages of different geographic location (available country options: europe, africa, asia, centralamerica, downunder, mediterranean, mideast, northamerica, southamerica, southeastasia).
Example: [linkdomain:YourCompetitorSite.com region:europe]
search for your potential promoters using this Google Global FireFox extension allowing you to see local search results for 5 locations: USA, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia.

Example: find Canada-specific results for [inurl:forums keyword]

let the country specific links come on their own: dedicate a few prominent sections of your site to the country you are trying to target and list there the country’s most bizarre history or culture facts.

Example: if your site is all about cars and you want British auto enthusiasts to link to it, list most weird British superstitions related to cars or most interesting history facts about British autos, etc

Searchenginejournal

has Google banned your website?

2008-05-21T10:19:00.003+07:00

This is one question we get very often. There are few bigger problems for an Internet business or search engine marketer than to find that their website has disappeared from Google's search rankings. Sometimes their website doesn't even rank for their own web site's name. How did this happen? Read below to find out some of the reasons why a site may have been banned from Google and what to do to get back in the rankings.

1. Robots and Meta Tags

The first and simplest solution many be that your robot.txt file has been changed to prevent search engines from entering your site. Or your meta tags could be directing the search engine robots to exclude your site. While this would be highly unlikely, it is best to rule this out. So check your robot.txt file (if you have one) and your meta tags. Unless you want your site hidden, you should never read this in your meta tags: meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX". If you see this, you are blocking your site from Google.

You can also ban your own site by having a robots.txt with the wrong code. Two examples of robots.txt code are below.

This example allows all robots to visit all files because the wildcard "*" specifies all robots.

User-agent: *
Disallow:

This example keeps all robots out:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Read more about this at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

2. Cloaking (A Big Google No-No)

Straight from Google's website: "The term "cloaking" is used to describe a website that returns altered web pages to search engines crawling the site. In other words, the web server is programmed to return different content to Google than it returns to regular users, usually in an attempt to distort search engine rankings. This can mislead users about what they'll find when they click on a search result. To preserve the accuracy and quality of our search results, Google may permanently ban from our index any sites or site authors that engage in cloaking to distort their search rankings."

If your website or web pages are set up to display different information for a search engine spider versus a real person, then you are cloaking. Cloaking delivers one version of a page to an Internet user and a different version to a search engine. The cloaked page is packed with keyword and terms that the site wants to be highly rank for so, in essence, they are cheating. There are good reasons for cloaking as well, such as targeted advertising, but if you are trying to manipulate your rankings you should put an end to this immediately.

3. Duplicate Content or Websites

If Google finds multiple web pages have the same content they may penalize each website for this. Of course, someone may have copied your content and Google banned you even though it was your original content that was taken. Make sure no other site is using your content. You can do this by performing a Google search using some of your text with quotation marks (") around it. If you do find someone is using your original copy visit here to learn more about copyright infringement: http://www.google.com/dmca.html.

You can check here to see if your site has been duplicated unbeknowst to you: http://www.copyscape.com

4. Hidden Text and or Links

How can text been hidden? Well, there are a variety of ways - some are more sneaky than others. But is boils down to this: it is considered hidden if the text or link is invisible to the website visitor but can be seen by search engine spiders. This used to be done quite often, such as making your text white on a white background or using cascading style sheets (CSS) to hide your text, but search engines can easily spot this today so it is best to avoid it altogether.

5. Keyword Spam and Keyword Stuffing

Ever seen a web page with a very awkwardly written first paragraph where a certain word is repeated ad nauseam? Here's an example:

"We sell the best father's day gifts for father's day. If you like to celebrate father's day we can help with the best father's day gifts for father's day."

Care to guess which keywords are being targeted? This is keyword spamming or stuffing but it is just the tip of the SEO iceberg. This is just the content on the page, there is probably keyword stuffing happening in the code: in the meta tags, invisible text, alt tags, title tags and comment tags. etc. If the word or phrase is repeated too often Google can place a filter to reduce the site's rankings or simply ban the site. Keyword density can be tricky but, as a general rule, Big Oak shoots for 1% to 5% of all text on a page to be our targeted keywords. Ultimately you must write for the reader not the search engine. Be sure the keywords flow naturally.

6. Doorway Pages

Defining a doorway page can be difficult so here is our definition that could potentially ban your site in Google: pages that are created in order to attract search engine spiders and be ranked highly for their targeted keywords. Real visitors find this page and then continue to the "real" website from there. Hence the name "doorway page". These pages aren't in the navigation most of the time. If you come across a page where much of the information is duplicated from other pages on the site but it is different in terms of keywords only, this is most likely a doorway page.

As you can see this can be a gray area. Some pages on a website may focus on a particular subject and be innocent of trying to lure search engine spiders only for high rankings. Err on the side of caution and make sure the page is useful and part of the your site's navigation.

7. Redirect Pages

Sneaky redirection pages are set up in groups from 5 to hundreds. They all target similar and related keywords or phrases. Usually, the only links on these pages are links to other pages in the same family creating a false sense of related linking.

These pages don't necessarily contain content that any human would be interested in. These pages may show up high in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), but when you click on one of these pages from the SERPS, you will be redirected to another page. In other words, the page you click to see is not the page you actually get to read.

The redirect can be automatic, done with a meta refresh command or through other means such as a the mouse moving while on the redirect page.

8. Buying Links

While buying links may not get you banned, they can certainly hurt your page rank. Google has slowly been catching on to this fad and has measures in place to put your site in limbo for 6-8 months (known as the "sandbox effect") so you can't instantly benefit from buying links to your website. Many sites that sell links are being devalued by Google, making an investment in this strategy a waste of money and time. Ultimately, stay away from buying links to increase your ranking.

9. Linking to Bad Neighborhoods

Link campaigns are good thing when done correctly; we would say they are a necessity in today's SEO world. But linking to bad neighborhoods are a sure way to lose your rank in Google. If you aren't careful about who you are linking to you can easily disappear overnight. Basically, while you may be ethical and do everything right linking to someone who isn't can be considered guilt by association. Always verify your links to other sites. Make sure they have page rank in Google and are indexed by Google. Try searching for their URL to see if they are indexed. Avoid linking to any sites that use spamming techniques to increase their search engine rankings. Regularly checking outbound links from your site and removing any offenders is a good idea.

A few site types to avoid:

Free-for-all link farms
Adult sites
Gambling sites

10. Code swapping

Optimizing a page for top ranking, then swapping another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved.

What does Google say?

"Don't deceive your users, or present different content to search engines than you display to users," Google says, and they list some bullet points on avoiding being banned.

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Don't send automated queries to Google.
Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

Google also states:

"Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, 'Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?'"

While creating a page without a thought to search engines is probably going a little too far, optimizing your site for an organic search, as long as it conforms to their standards, is perfectly acceptable.

How to get back into Google

Visiting this old link I used to reccommend http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py shows no option for “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website” any longer which allowed you to request reinstation.

However, logging in to Google Sitemaps now shows a direct link at the bottom of your main account page to “Submit a reinclusuion request” which takes you here - https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/reinclusion?hl=en

This means you will have to register your site to do.

From there you get to check boxes that let you admit guilt, acknowledge modification, agree not to do it again, and even a box to explain yourself.

You don't have to contact Google but it can't hurt. They will eventually spider your site again and see that you have cleaned up your website. You may have to wait a few months for Google to re-index your site so be patient and don't tinker with your website too much unless dictated by your site's products or content needs.

The worst case scenario is to start a new site. Sometimes this can be necessary but only in the most extreme cases.

Google Devaluing Sitewide Links

2008-04-28T22:09:00.005+07:00

I was reading through the blog of Matt Cutts, one of the head engineer’s at google and a very adamant blogger. He talks a lot about SEO and changes to Google’s algorithms along with the normal personal blog topics like personal info and video games.

I was doing some SEO research for a new client’s website and I was looking into evidence for the devaluation of sitewide links. A sitewide link is a link on every page of a single website. In the past sidewide links were great for SEO, still are, but they are becoming less effective on Google. Matt particularly comments on google’s devaluing of sitewide links in a few posts. From my experience, on older sites if you have a large amount of other links, and you get say a link on 50% of pages on another websites Google will count them all as links and this will be a bit more valuable then say a single link, but for a new website, avoid sitewide links on Google. If you go from having a few links to having a bunch of links all from one website it’s appears that Google will completely devalue those links because they appear to have been paid for and one of Google’s current crusades is to cut down the power of paid links.

Currently buying and selling links on the “black market” is one of the major and very important tactics of modern SEO. You build a good site, optimize for the search engines, be creative, try to get as many links as possible and then buy the rest to give you that “push” above the competition. Although Matt talks about how they won’t help you, I believe a lot of this is wishful thinking, or a prediction of the near future. Currently as long as the advertiser doesn’t label your link with a title link “advertisement, sponsor, link partner” etc, the link will still count, especially if they include it in the body of their content with normal anchor text. Of course you’d better be ready to pay a pretty price for that service, because they’ll actually be sending you some of their traffic and promoting your product as opposed to just providing a link for SEO

Some tricks on devaluing links

The short list below highlights ways of diminishing or nullifying the value of a link to your site from another Web page.

Meta Tag Masking

This old trick simply used CGI codes to hide the Meta tags from browsers while allowing search engines to actually see the Meta tags.

Robots Meta Instructions

Using noindex and nofollow attributes let's the novice link partner see the visible page with their link while telling the search engines to ignore the page and the links found on the page. Nofollow can be used while allowing the page to be indexed which gives the impression that the search engines will eventually count the link.

Rel=nofollow Attributes

This is not a real attribute based upon HTML standards, but rather it is an attribute approved by the search engines to help identify which links should not be followed. This attribute is often used with blogs to prevent comment and link spam. The link will appear on the Web page and in the search engine's cache, but never be counted.

Dynamic Listing

Dynamic listing is a result of having links appear randomly across a series of pages. Each time the link is found on a new page, the search engines count consider the freshness of the link. It is extremely possible that the link won't be on the same page upon the next search engine visitation. So, the link from a partner displaying rotating, dynamic link listings rarely helps.

Floating List

This can be easily missed when checking link partners. Essentially, your link could be number one today, but as new link partners are added your link is moved down the list. This is harmful because the values of the links near the bottom of the list are considered to be of lesser value than the links at the top. With the floating list, it is possible to have your link moved to a new page whose PR value is significantly less or non-existent and the new page may not be visited and indexed for months.

Old Cache

The caching date provided by Google indicates the last time the page was cached. Pages with lower PR values tend to be visited and cached less often than pages that have medium to high PR values. If the cache is more than six months old, it can be surmised that Google has little or no desire to revisit the page.

Denver Pages

While Denver, CO is a nice place to visit, Denver Pages are not a place you want to find your link in a trade. Denver Pages typically have a large amount of links grouped into categories on the same page. Some people call this the mile high list. These types of pages do not have any true value in the search engines and are not topically matched to your site.

Muddy Water Pages

These are dangerous and easy to spot. Your link will be piled in with non-topically matched links with no sense of order. It's like someone took all the links and threw them in the air to see where they land. These are worse than the Denver Pages.

Cloaking

Cloaking is the process of providing a page to people while providing a different page to search engines. You could be seeing your link on the Web page, but the search engines could possibly nevër see the link because they are provided with a different copy. Checking Google's cache is the only way to catch this ploy.

Dancing Robots

This can be easily performed with server-side scripting like PHP and is rarely easy to catch. In this situation people that attempt to view the robots.txt file receive a copy of the robots.txt file that does not include exclusion instructions for the search engines. However, when the search engines request the robots.txt file they receive the exclusion instructions. With this situation the links pages will never be linked and you'll never know why without expert assistance.

Meta Tags and Robots.txt Confusion

Which instructions have the most weight? Don't know the answer? Shame. Search engines do. If they conflict, the page Meta tags are typically considered the rule to follow.

Link the Head

While these links do not count in the search engines and do not show up on the Web page, they do get counted by scripts or programs designed to verify the links exist. These programs only look for the URL within the source codes for the Web page.

Empty Anchors

This is a nasty trick, but can be an honest mistake. The links exist and are counted by the search engines, but unfortunately are neither visible nor clickable on the Web page. So, there are no traffic values from the link.

The goal of trading links is to trade them for equal value. Understanding the ways people will attempt to prevent passing a quality value from their Web page to your Web page can help you avoid these useless links. If your link partner pulls under-handed tricks the links they trade you are useless.

While you may never be an expert in knowing all the latest tricks, traps and tests, you can now become an expert in knowing the thirteen mentioned above. Ensuring your link partners are not following or using these tactics can help improve the quality of links you gain from other Web pages. By having quality links pointing to your Web page you will gain additional traffïc through organic search engine results and visitors driven directly from your linking partners.

Final

It's the search engines that drive spam because good results for carefully tuned phrases is the pot of gold spammers lust after. With link nullifiers in place, Google will need to look at alternative methods to rank sites, perhaps in the mould of services Clive mentions which offer a good measure of human interaction of sites. I can still see a potential for abusing the mechanisms though.

Perhaps the future of the web and a good rank is unique, informative and genuinely good content ;)

What is the Ad Review Center?

2008-04-24T19:57:00.002+07:00

The Ad Review Center is a new publisher tool that enables you to review placement-targeted ads that may appear on your pages. The Ad Review Center provides publishers with more transparency and control over placement-targeted ads appearing on their sites. You can allow or block individual ad groups and advertisers, as well as filter ads by type: text or image.

If you choose to block ads in the Ad Review Center, you'll need to provide your reason for blocking the ad group or advertiser. This feedback, which we provide to advertisers, gives the advertisers more insight on how to adjust their ad quality, content, and relevance in order to appear on more sites.

Learn more about opting in to the Ad Review Center, the ad review options available to you, and how decisions you make in the Ad Review Center can have a revenue impact for you.

AdSense Roll out Ad Review Center to All Publishers

AdSense have today rolled out their new(ish) Ad Review Center for all AdSense publishers. I’m happy about this as I was in this last batch of publishers to see it.

The idea behind the Ad Review Center is that when advertisers target your specific blog you now can see that they’re targeting it and can approve or ban and ad depending on whether you want it to appear on your site or not. This gives you more control over the ads that appear on your site.

Note - this is only for ads targeted to your site (ie general AdSense ads that are contextually placed on your site are not included).

Also keep in mind that when you remove an ad you could be decreasing the profitability of your site as it removes the ad from the ‘auction’ that happens between Advertisers to have their ad appear on your blog.

To find the Ad Review Center log into the ‘Setup’ area of AdSense, then click the ‘Competitive Ad Filter’ area and opt into the Ad Review Center program (it should be highlighted in a little green box).

Ways to Remove Negative Search Engine Listings

2008-04-12T12:49:00.003+07:00

Just as there are countless "credit repair" companies who claim they can erase past debts, there are now a multitude of reputation management firms claiming they can "remove negative search engine listings."
negative results can sometimes be permanently changed or removed with persistence, tact and savvy. Here's how:

8 Ways to Remove Negative Results from the Google

1. Ask Nicely
I've gotten nasty information removed by calling the blogger and having a nice long "blogger to blogger" talk with them. Appeal to their conscience. Explain why it's good for them to change the information, and explain why hosting negative or defamatory info might reflect poorly on their own website. Don't accuse them of bad journalism or insult them - respect the effort they took to make the content but urge them to consider an alternate headline, tone, etc. Ask if there's anything you could do to help them out in exchange (write a review, give a link, do SEO for their site, send them a "thank you" gift, etc.).

2. Ask the moderator to remove the offending thread or post
Sometimes the author of the information won't budge, but a forum or social site moderator will want to avoid conflict and will be more receptive to removing defamatory or misleading information. It usually doesn't hurt to ask.

3. Audit the site for Google Webmaster Guidelines violation, and report them
Check to see if the site is buying or selling any paid links, keyword stuffing, hiding text, cloaking content, or doing anything else in direct violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If you find anything spammy, report the site to Google or report paid links inside of Google Webmaster Tools console.

4. File a DMCA Takedown Notice
If the site is infringing on your trademarks or copying your content, and they are located or hosted in the USA, you can file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice with the OSP (online service provider) and if that fails, you can file it with the search engines. Check out this excellent guide to enforcing copyrights.

5. Offer a Cash Payment / Settlement
Some people have successfully offered a cash settlement to have negative information down. A lot of online bloggers are in it for the money, and so are most of the reputation extortionists (Web publishers, like the RipoffReport, who encourage and directly profit from anonymous complaint content). It could be cheaper and easier to "pay to make it go away" than to pay for months of reputation management, content and link building efforts. Beware, though, of opening yourself up to ongoing extortion. And be careful of what you put in writing. You might want to contact the webmaster anonymously, by telephone, to test their response to such an offer, rather than send them a written letter or e-mail that they could reprint on their website.

6. Threaten a Lawsuit
You can send an official-looking letter threatening to sue people for defamation, and that could be enough to scare people into taking down content. Beware: if you threaten to sue someone, make sure you have a case and actually plan on following through with it, if necessary. Many times, I've seen legal threats backfire and make the situation flare up much worse. Threats of litigation bring out a harsh and unforgiving side in people, and it can prompt your defamer to want to "stick it to you" even worse.

For more detailed legal information on some of these suggestions, ChillingEffects.org or any of the excellent posts of SEOmoz's legal expert Sarah Bird are great places to start.

Blackhat Reputation Management Tactics:
It's important to be aware of some of the more heavy-handed tactics, even if you don't practice them yourself:

7. Negative SEO
For a long time, people believed that "nothing another Webmaster can do will be able to harm your websites' rankings." According to some black hat SEO experts, that is not true anymore. Negative SEO techniques, such as link spamming or buying penalized sites in a similar niche and 301 redirecting them to to your competitor's pages, are "enough to have a relatively dramatic impact on rankings." This Forbes article on negative SEO is pretty well-done and interesting.

8. Counter-Attack the Reputation of Your Critic
Some people have successfully counter-attacked their defamer, by anonymously exposing "fabricated" details of their past, making a YourDefamerSucks.com site, or filing a ripoff report about their business. This would theoretically give you a stronger bargaining position to suggest that you mutually withdraw the negative information - by kicking some empathy into your defamer. I haven't done this, as I am not really a "digital hitman" for hire - but I've heard others have done it successfully.

The Importance of Making Good Web Karma

In the social media era, we all live in very transparent, digital "glass houses." And throwing stones is as easy as a few clicks on the keyboard.

Remember that defaming others on the Web can have a profoundly destructive impact on their business, career and life.

Interact with kindness, humanity and positivity and start creating positive content now to build a spotless reputation on the Web. Monitor your reputation, and quickly and tactfully respond to grievances and to make sure they don't escalate or get cemented into the search results.

idea of Brett Borders

Google Fills Out Forms & Crawls Results

2008-04-12T12:42:00.002+07:00

One of the biggest search challenges has long been that the major search engines like Google cannot crawl material that can only be retrieved through the use of forms. Now Google is filling out those form to obtain the information previously hidden, the company has announced.

Google says that for the past few months, it has been filling in forms on a "small number" of "high-quality" web sites to get back information. What words has it been entering into those forms? Words automatically selected that occur on the site, with check boxes and drop-down menus also being selected:

In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn't find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML.

Results returned are then crawled. Ironically, it was just over a year ago that Google warned against getting search results like these indexed. Now it's actually generating and crawling those results itself.

Don't want Google doing this to your site? Google says that if your form is blocked through robots.txt or meta robots instructions, those forms won't be accessed. In addition, some other forms won't be touched if they fit certain technical criteria:

We only retrieve GET forms and avoid forms that require any kind of user information. For example, we omit any forms that have a password input or that use terms commonly associated with personal information such as logins, userids, contacts, etc.

The move is potentially good for searchers, in that it will open up material often referred to being part of the "deep web" or "invisible web" as it was hidden behind forms. Search Engine Land executive editor Chris Sherman actually co-authored a book on the topic. He and fellow author Gary Price didn't coin the term invisible web but they certainly help popularize it.

It should be noted that Google's not the first to do something like this. Companies like Quigo, BrightPlanet and WhizBang Labs were doing this type of work years ago. But it never translated over to the major search engines. Now chapter two of surfacing deep web material is opening, this time with a major search player -- in that, Google is being a pionee

Eastern by Danny Sullivan

Yahoo to test running Google ads

2008-04-12T12:39:00.001+07:00

In what appears to be a very carefully considered, strategically phrased statement this afternoon, Yahoo said it will actually test carrying Google's ads on its own pages, calling the test a "strategic alternative." Microsoft isn't happy and quickly responded.

For an upcoming two-week period, the date of which was not announced, Yahoo said that it will imbue up to three percent of readers' search queries with ads generated using Google's AdSense for Search service. That service was intentionally created to give other Web sites a mechanism for its users to search the Web using Google, with AdSense ads appearing next to the results, and with sites sharing in Google's revenue.

As it appears now based on Yahoo's limited description, some users will notice AdSense ads accompanying Yahoo search results -- which is not exactly what Google intended. Yahoo did not state whether it would claim a share of ad revenue like any other AdSense for Search customer, nor did it say what role, if any, that Google is playing in the test. For its part, Google has yet to comment.

However, this afternoon's statement was accompanied by this paragraph that, despite its lack of direct information, remains so telling:

"As previously announced, Yahoo's board of directors is exploring strategic alternatives to maximize stockholder value, including exploration of potential commercial business arrangements. The Company noted that the testing does not necessarily mean that Yahoo will join the AdSense for Search program or that any further commercial relationship with Google will result. The Company further stated that it would not comment on the nature or timing of any potential relationship."

The paragraph did not have to state alternatives to what, or to even invoke the word "Microsoft," so it's obvious that this sentence was added to serve as an indicator that the test could lead to an extension of the relationship between Yahoo and Google.

The statement purposefully says the company can say no more, thus giving analysts and observers all the tools they need to begin rampant speculation -- as they have already done.

Microsoft quickly issued a response to the news, calling into question Google's control of the advertising search market if such an agreement with Yahoo were to happen.

"Any definitive agreement between Yahoo! and Google would consolidate over 90% of the search advertising market in Google's hands. This would make the market far less competitive, in sharp contrast to our own proposal to acquire Yahoo! We will assess closely all of our options," said the statement attributed to Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith. "Our proposal remains the only alternative put forward that offers Yahoo! shareholders full and fair value for their shares, gives every shareholder a vote on the future of the company, and enhances choice for content creators, advertisers, and consumers."
By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

Google Ads Manager - Easier Way To Handle Web Ads

2008-03-25T23:13:00.006+07:00

Official Google Blog recently announced a new service - Google Ads Manager. In a nutshell, it is a control center for all the ads have in your website, or blog. If you need to edit the HTML, templates or blog widgets to get a new ads reflected on the website, this is definitely what you are looking for. It helps you to manage all ads in one central place. Also with Google AdSense the biggest player in the ad network industry, it’s pretty convincing that publishers will want a Google Ads Manager account.

Google Ads Manager is currently on invitation only, why not request for an invitation? I’ve submitted mine.

How to access Google Ad Manager - Features and Invitation Apply link
As a reported Google Ad Manager is alive and kicking and available at bellow:
It says -

” it is a hosted ad management solution which is free that can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your directly-sold and network-based inventory.

Decrease training time and trafficking steps with simplified tagging and inventory management.
Ensure quicker ad delivery and fewer reporting discrepancies.
Pay nothing for ad serving, feature upgrades, or system maintenance.

Here are the most important features -

Inventory management

Inventory levels: Define inventory at granular levels for more efficient line item creation and trafficking. Use ad slots to generate Ad Manager tags for your pages, ad placements to group related ad slots, and ad products to bundle and sell inventory packages with the same cost and targeting criteria.

Inventory availability tracking: Easily confirm whether ad impressions are available for specific dates, placements, and targeting criteria. Avoid overbooking and underselling.

Simple ad tag generation and management: Copy and paste tags directly into your HTML. Avoid the need to re-tag your site when you change the way you sell your inventory. (Available upon request: iframe tags.)

Yield optimization

Optional AdSense Integration: Use AdSense to fill unsold inventory or compete on price against other ad networks.

Ad targeting

Built-in targeting options: Target ads to your site visitors’ geography, bandwidth, browser, browser language, operating system, and domain.

Customizable targeting criteria: Target ad impressions by passing your own custom key-value pairs to Ad Manager.

Trafficking, ad delivery, and order booking

Delivery options: Choose one of five delivery types (exclusive, priority, standard, remnant, or house) to determine, automatically, how ads may be delivered.

Frequency capping: Set multiple levels of frequency capping, which limit the number of ads the same visitor sees over a minute, hour, day, week, month, or lifetime.

Proven Google infrastructure: Enjoy fast, reliable ad delivery and load time.

Support for various ad pricing models: Choose from cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM), cost-per-click (CPC), and cost-per-day (CPD).

AdSense integration (optional):Consistently deliver the highest-paying ad by enabling AdSense.

Creatives and rich media management

Rich media support: Use tags from a variety of rich media providers.
Free ad creatives hosting: Save bandwidth and costs.
Redirect creatives support: Easily track ads from a third-party network, affiliate provider, or other URL you provide.

Reporting

Multiple reporting options: Run reports on order delivery, inventory performance, or overall sales.

Detailed reporting: Break down reports by date, line item, placement, advertiser, and other categories.

Fast report generation: Create reports in seconds.

Interactive views: Sort data, add or remove columns, review different data subsets, and make other edits without having to leave the page or run a new report.

Media Rating Council (MRC) accredited: Feel confident in Google Ad Manager’s ad impression measurement process, accredited by the Media Rating Council to be fully compliant with Interactive Advertising Bureau standards.

User interface

Search functionality: Locate order, inventory, or advertiser data from any page in Ad Manager.

Intuitive workflows: Quickly and easily create orders, approve orders, and review status of orders. Decrease training time and trafficking steps.
AdSense channels integration: Import your existing AdSense channels into Ad Manager (optional).
Browser session support: Use your browser’s ‘Back’ button and other built-in navigation without losing data.

Administration

Access controls: Set various viewing and editing permissions for your team. Define individual workflows for sales managers, sales reps, administrators, and traffickers.

Contacts organization: Store and manage advertiser and agency company information.

Link to obtain invitation for Google Ad Manager

Blog Privacy Policy

2008-03-25T13:49:00.001+07:00

We respect your privacy and we are committed to safeguarding your privacy while online at our site The following discloses the information gathering and dissemination practices for this Web site.

Log Files
Like most standard Web site servers we use log files. This includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, platform type, date/time stamp, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user’s movement in the aggregate, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. IP addresses, etc. are not linked to personally identifiable information.

Cookies
A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user’s computer tied to information about the user. Our site don’t use cookies. However, Some of our business partners use cookies on our site (for example, advertisers). However, we have no access to or control over these cookies, once we have given permission for them to set cookies for advertising.

Links
This Web site contains links to other sites. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every Web site that collects personally identifiable information. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by this Web site.

Advertisers
We use outside ad companies to display ads on our site. These ads may contain cookies and are collected by our ad companies, and we do not have access to this information. We work with the ad companies: Google Adsense. Please check their websites for respective privacy policies.

Contact Information
If users have any questions or suggestions regarding our privacy policy, please contact me through my contact form or send me an email to: info@strongwind89.com.

New Google AJAX Language API - Tools for translation and language detection

2008-03-24T10:52:00.000+07:00

The main goal of our AJAX APIs team is to provide developers with the tools needed to create the next generation of great web applications. Our 20% goal is world peace. What better way to help further both objectives than to launch a Language API? :)

The API helps developers automatically translate content in their applications. Users on these sites will have an easier time communicating across lingual boundaries.

The Language API provides both translation and language detection. Here's an example of the translation tool in action:

You can play around with the language detection capabilities via this example widget:

For more information on how to use the Language API in your code, please refer to the documentation here.

How to get your posts indexed by Google in 2 minutes?

2008-03-12T22:08:00.004+07:00

I am really surprised to read the article about "Indexed by Google in 2 Minutes!" posted on the Quick Online Tips blog. This is the article:

To record my observations, I kept searching Google and refreshing for the last article I posted, and truly within 2 minutes it was added in the Google index.

I guess the Google pagerank 6 has a lot to do with faster indexing, however, the site has been PR6 for over a year now (unless you count the PR3 penalty and the PR6 rebound) and I have never witnessed such fast indexing by Google. I guess they are tweaking the Google algorithms and somehow integrating it to get latest links with the Google blogsearch engine which is usually pinged when a blog post goes live.

I checked and other search engines like Yahoo! still have not indexed the post. Also note that in Google Webmaster tools, Googlebot is set at normal crawling speed since the last month (after I had slowed Googlebot down) and is not set on the faster crawling mode (will that mean instant indexing by Google!).

Getting a backlink from a high PR site is a SEO tip often suggested to webmasters for getting a new site indexed by Google within a day. Check how fast Google is indexing your site by pasting the latest article permalink url in Google search. Are you getting Google indexed in minutes?

Using Directories For Building Links

2008-02-17T22:01:00.002+07:00

Building quality links back to your website is crucial for high rankings in the SERPS. To get your link building started it is a good idea to submit your site for inclusion in directories.

What is a directory?

A directory is a sorted, classified collection of resources, and a web directory has the added benefit of linking directly to the resource. A web directory is divided into categories and subcategories, placing an individual entry in an area with other similar and relevant entries.

The most important directories

DMOZ, the Open Directory Project is the single most important directory. It carries the extra weight due to several factors.

No paid inclusions; inclusion is based on quality
Submissions are reviewed by a human editor
The directory is frequently copied and used by other directory sites. The most important DMOZ clones are Google Directory and Alexa.
No guaranteed inclusions

The Yahoo! Directory is another important directory. Much like DMOZ submissions are reviewed by humans, and web sites wishing to be included must meet some quality guidelines. A review for inclusion costs US$299 (nonrefundable), with a recurring annual fee of US$299 to maintain the listing. Inclusion is not guaranteed.

Other directories

Beside these there are thousands upon thousands of directory sites, with different rules for inclusion. Some are completely free, some require a reciprocal link back, and some are fee based. Some are general, and others are focused on some particular topic. The quality of these directory sites vary. When chosing which directories to submit to remember that no links to your site can hurt you in the search engines (if that wasn't the case a company could bomb its competitor with "bad links" to hurt their rankings). So the only potential loss when submitting to a bad quality directory is your time, valuable as it may be.

Example directories

Ad Alta

Are directories the be all-end all of link building?

No. Directories should be a part of your link bulding strategy, but they should not be your main focus. Go for the most important ones, and then pick a few quality directories focused on your topic.

Why is PageRank important?

2008-02-17T21:58:00.003+07:00

While it is argued that PageRank is no longer as important as it once was, it still plays an important part of Google's algorithm that determines where in the search engine results a certain page is displayed for a given query.

A high PR page will usually rank higher in Google's search results, and better results means more organic traffic to your website.

You can increase your PageRank by increasing the number of links to your website. Quality links from quality websites with high PR and the same theme as yours influence PageRank the most.

PageRank tools

Below are links to some PageRank tools. If you know of a tool that is not listed here, let us know!

Buy Marketing Pages Hosted On Great Authority Domains

2008-02-17T21:54:00.001+07:00

Any seasoned SEO expert will tell you, natural links are the best links. What makes a natural link look natural is that it is embedded in content related to the link target. What if you could mimic this natural look, and still control the content?

Presell pages

Enter the concept of presell pages, also known as hosted marketing pages (HMP). Pre sell pages are essentially paid article placements. Instead of paying for a text link on another website you pay for having an presell article with your sales copy hosted on that website. Embedded in the presell page are natural, deep links to your site.

Presell pages are not like placing an ad on a website; the articles are generally informative and have something valuable to offer to the reader. They are to get the reader in a pre-sold mode, hence the name, PRE SELL PAGES - the visitor shall get into the right mood and click through to the client's site.

Presell pages have been around for approximately two years, and is still a somewhat unknown marketing technique. It is a concept that is bound to explode in the coming years as search engines are getting smarter at filtering paid text links.

Hosted marketing content on .edu domains

The concept of trust has been introduced in a Google patent titled "System and method for supporting editorial opinion in the ranking of search results". The short story on this is that web sites give and receive a trust ranking based on their authority. Naturally sites hosted on the .edu and .gov domains are considered trusted based on them being hard to come by.

Getting .edu text links would be beneficial due to the trust these often old and well linked domains propagate. Imagine having a whole page with your sales copy on it, with 3-5 links pointing to your site, and with several .edu marketing pages you could really move up in the SERPs. With the advent of .edu content hosting, Internet marketing just took a big step.

Writing presell pages

Pre sell pages require a lot more effort than just choosing a suitable anchor text for a link. Hosted marketing pages are generally 300-600 words. Having someone professional write the article does not only offload the client, but also makes sure the article blends well with the writing style of the host. Presellpageman not only offers to broker pre sell pages to you, but also has staff writers that will happily provide the service of writing the actual copy for you.

Earning money by hosting marketing pages

As a webmaster you can offer to host presell pages on your web site. If your site meets the requirements you will be placed in the inventory with a description of your site, along with some statistics like backlinks and age, for buyers to consider. Notice that under no circumstances will the URL of your site be disclosed until buyer has paid, article has been written and the page has been successfully placed. This process is necessary to make sure the inventory is protected from possible blacklisting in the search engines. It is also important that the seller does not disclose the fact that he is selling presell pages or hosted marketing pages, for the same reason.

Using Google Trends To Track The Most Successful Super Bowl Commercials

2008-02-15T14:05:00.000+07:00

This morning I've been having some fun with Google trends. It occurred to me last night while I was watching the Super Bowl that it would be cool if there were a clear way to identify the most successful Super Bowl ad in a manner other than voting (which is totally unscientific).

The cool thing about search is that it reflects people's memories. People search on things they can recall. And a good advertisement will lodge itself in people's memories.

The problem with Super Bowl ad voting is that it doesn't take the phenomenon of memory or brand recall into consideration. If a person watches an ad, they might like it, but they might also forget it. The advertisers don't care if people like the ad. They care if people remember the ad and then make purchases based on the ad.

So, this morning when I was looking at Google Trends it occurred to me that this might very well be the best indication of Super Bowl ad success. So according to Google trends, the most successful Super Bowl ads at this point have been:

The NFL itself (Chester Pitts)
cadillac escalade hybrid
GoDaddy.com
hyundai genesis
audi r8

11 Power Tips for Gmail

2008-02-15T13:58:00.000+07:00

Wow, I can’t believe how many people commented on my late-Friday night post about desired features for Gmail. If you want to suggest something for Gmail, that thread is the better place to do it. But looking through the comments, I saw a few requests that can already be done today. Considering that real Gmail users didn’t know about these options, I’m going to call them power tips.

Wayne Schulz said “I want to be able to paste images into the email.” Wayne, it’s not quite the same as pasting images into emails, but one thing that makes image attachments easier is the dragdropupload Firefox extension. You know how you can click “Attach a file” and then you’ll see the familiar “enter a file location or Browse..” form appear? With dragdropupload, you can drag any file (e.g. from your Desktop) and drop it in that text box. It’s a fantastic extension that makes it much faster to include attachments or upload files, and I use it all the time.
Jason Bartholme asked about “A sort that would allow for my unread messages to be at the top.” Jason, trying doing a search for label:unread label:inbox . That should show only unread messages that are currently in your inbox. By the way, did you like how I shared a search with you? That was a tip from the Gmail blog. There are other cool labels you can use as well.
Julian says
I would like to have a feature for inserting prepared text blocks, so I dont have to write some things over and over again.

Julian, if you use Firefox, check out the Signature firefox extension to insert text macros. That might work for you.
Daniel asked
Crazy feature: I’d like to be able to have an easy way to migrate my entire Google account to a different gmail address, because I can’t find a step-by-step guide or anything to help me switch emails without losing various things.

According to this post you can enable POP on your old account (look under Settings, then “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”), then import the emails (also using POP) into the new account. I think you could use Gmail’s Mail Fetcher utility to do this. To configure Mail Fetcher on the newer account, click on Gmail’s Settings link, then “Accounts” and then “Add another mail account.” Google Operating System (an unofficial blog that discusses Google often) has a couple relevant posts with a walkthough of using Gmail’s Mail Fetcher and a write-up on how to back up your Google account.
Sankarananad asked a related question:
I would love to integrate my google apps account with my default gmail account. Although right now google allows to associate email address there is no way to integrate or link two google accounts (say one @gmail.com and another yourdomain.com powered by google apps).

Right now the only solution is to forward mails from one box to another! If google makes integration possible we can use a single inbox to check mails from all those email address

I’m not as familiar with the interaction of regular Gmail versus Gmail on Google Apps. This post described a scary-looking way that might work. If there’s a better way, maybe someone will stop by and let me know?
Search Engines Web asked:
The ability to open Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF without going to another page and using another software

S.E.W, this post from Lifehacker mentions that Gmail can offer HTML view or Google Doc options for Word and Excel.
Easton Ellsworth mentioned
I’d love to be able to resize the email composition box on the default page - so instead of having to click the icon to open the whole draft in a new resizable window, I’d be able to click and drag to make the draft box bigger (especially vertically).

Easton, check out the Resizeable text area extension for Firefox. It lets you click on the border of any form textarea and drag the border so the textarea expands. I haven’t checked how it works on the latest version of Gmail though.
1001 noisy cameras said “I think the ability to open emails in new windows would be great - it would help those users who are always multi-tasking.” If you’re looking at an email look at the top-right of the page and click on “New window” to open that email in a separate email.
Diego asked
I don’t know if this would be possible, but how about, when clicking on the compose link (or reply etc) if I hold some key as I click on Compose, it opens the new email in its own window? Same thing could go for Replies etc.

Diego, instead of using ‘c’ to compose a new email, type ‘C’ and you’ll open a new window to compose your email. It looks like using ‘R’ instead of ‘r’ to reply will open a new email for replies too.
jonathon asked “Is it me or does the pop3 server sometimes stop working when downloading email from gmail?” I’ve been using getmail to back up my Gmail, and I’ve noticed that Google will only let you download a few hundred emails in one batch. If you fetch again, you’ll often catch up. So usually it’s just a matter of being patient.

I heard a lot of great suggestions that I wouldn’t even have thought of. For example, I liked the idea of a “bounce” option for unwanted emails to make it look as if your email address didn’t exist. Oh, and since so many people asked for cool features, let me add one more feature I want: let me set a different vacation message for co-workers compared to people outside Google. Maybe in Google Apps for Gmail, if you are managing example.com, let people on example.com set a different vacation message for people on example.com vs. other domains?

By the way, what was the funniest suggestion I saw? Jeff Hall won with “A USB breathalyzer kit for a friend who forgets how embarrassing her e-mails are when she gets drunk. The e-mails could be delayed until she provides a negative sample.”

And here’s your bonus tip. If you’re a Gmail power user, three links to check out are the Gmail tag on Lifehacker, the official Gmail blog, and Google Operating System. Lifehacker does so many posts per day that limiting to the Gmail tag will narrow down the posts you see. The Gmail blog is the best place to get official Gmail news first. And Google OS seems to have Gmail-related posts pretty often.

MattCutts

When Google Consistently Misidentifies The Article Source...

2008-02-15T13:57:00.000+07:00

It's like your local government failing to tell you why they've set up a work-zone boundary around your local business, preventing customers from entering your door, unless the customer climbs the fence.

On October 8th, 2007 Debng of Performancing wrote the following linkbait:
66 Celebrities that Blog.

On October 9th, 2007 the article went popular (front page) on Digg:
http://digg.com/celebrity/66_Celebrities_that_Blog

According to Yahoo's Site Explorer, the article has 1,984 backlinks:
Page specific results from site explorer

A Google search for the title of that article (66 Celebrities that Blog) completely and utterly misidentifies the source:
http://www.google.com/search?q=66+celebrities+that+blog

In fact, if you follow the above link, you will see that the source is not listed on the front page (at least not at the time of this writing). The problem is compounded by the fact that the vast majority of sites on the first page of SERPs link to the source on Celebrity Cowboy.

This problem is not isolated. Time and again, I've seen Google misidentify the source for an extremely popular article.

So what can you do about it? Well, Google would have you believe that you can simply file a Dissatisfied? Help us improve quality report. But let me tell you, this does not work. I've been filing the report once each month since October when I first noticed the issue. And although the issue was temporarily resolved for about one week in November, it has since permanently returned.

So what's the problem? Well, there are many possibilities. The problem is that Google's words speak louder than their actions. There is clearly some penalty or buffer that's being applied to the source article in this case, for whatever reason. The problem is that I have no recourse (other than the remote possibility that Matt Cutts takes notice and institutes an non-scalable solution).

I personally don't want Matt Cutts to take action specific to my personal issues. I want Google to truly be committed to a policy of openness for webmasters who take the time to try to play by the book, even putting their sites into Webmaster Tools. I want Google to seriously work to clamp down on false positives in their penalty buffering algorithm, or to at least come up with a truly scalable solution for working with well-intentioned publishers to fix problems in a timely manner.

As it stands right now, there are thousands of good websites that are being unjustly damned to SERP hell, and publishers are left feeling helpless because, although they've completely cleaned up and consented to work on Google's terms, Google continues to ignore them, not even acknowledging that there is an issue.

Quite honestly, it's like your local government failing to tell you why they set up a work-zone boundary around your local business, preventing customers from entering your door, unless they climb the fence. That's what it feels like. I wish Google would realize the enormity of the issue.

Security update your WordPress to 2.3.3

2008-02-15T13:50:00.000+07:00

Unless you want registered users to be able to edit your blog posts, you should update your WordPress installation to version 2.3.3. It’s a small change, and if you want to you can just replace your xmlrpc.php file with a newer version.

By the way, if you followed the advice in my recent security tips for WordPress post, you wouldn’t have to read about the update on my blog. Instead, you would already be subscribed to the WordPress security/developers’ feed (Atom feed link) that is suitable for subscribing in Google Reader or your favorite feed reader. I highly recommend subscribing to that feed so that you’re less likely to be caught by surprise when there’s a security issue with WordPress.

Matt Cutts

Google Android: Hands-on with the Google mobile goodness

2008-02-13T20:41:00.005+07:00

Today we managed to spend some quality time with a prototype handset running Google's highly anticipated mobile operating system, Google Android. Texas Instruments was showing it off at its stand to promote the prototype handset's processor, the OMAP850 -- but it's not the processor we were interested in.
Although this handset isn't supposedly going to be commercially released, we were impressed with its design. Not only is it light but it's well laid-out. The screen is wide and sharp, the navigation keys are large, making them easy to press, and the Qwerty keypad is well designed -- with each key raised so it's easy to distinguish between them.
Similar to the handset itself, the Android running here isn't the final version, but it does work and we've had a good play with it. So what's it like to use? Well, it's simple and it works -- if Google made phones... That's the thing with Android: it's very Google, and that's why we think we've fallen in love.
Symbian sceptics can sneer all they like, but when this thing comes out on a commercial phone, we think even they might change their mind. As you can see in this picture, everything is accessible via a horizontal menu you can click through using the navigation key -- it's not as clever as some other systems, but it makes much more sense than most of them.
Click through for more pictures of the Google prototype handset and find out what we stumbled on when we were poking about in Android's settings. -Andrew Lim

We don't want to get you too excited, but we thought we'd take you on a 360 degree tour of Google's prototype handset, as we think they should actually release it as it is -- seriously, it's very cool. Here you can see the raised profile of the keys on the keypad, which helps to distinguish between them.

On the back there's a camera on the top left and a speaker. It's a little HTC meets Apple, but that wouldn't be a bad partnership, would it? Keeping things simple on the inside and outside is what really attracts us to the idea of Android and gives us a sense of anticipation that matches what we expected from the iPhone. Could phones like this be the real iPhone killers?

If you look closely at the phone's screen, you'll notice that we ventured into Android's settings and there's an option called GTalk. Could it be that Google wants us to instant message each other instead of texting, and make cheap calls using VoIP instead of minutes? We imagine network operators will have something to say about that.