AdesBlog.com

more miniposts | twitter posts  

Google and Breadcrumbs

Implement breadcrumbs navigation in your website and Google will reflect it on its Search Results, instead of the URL path that it normally shows (see below).

And the links in the breadcrumbs actually point to different sections of the website, just like the navigation on actual website. That’s cool.

I didn’t know they did that. Looks very user friendly to me. So, if you can, try implementing breadcrumbs in your online projects.

Breadcrumbs and Usability: www.useit.com/alertbox/breadcrumbs.html

       

Related Posts UseIt.com: Breadcrumb Navigation Increasingly Useful Usability in One Easy Step WP Plugin: Breadcrumbs Usability Expert? Google search “by date”, why so difficult?

21 Comments

Track Number of Clicks on Your Bitly Links in Your Tweeter

Bit.ly, the popular URL shortening service has an extension for Chrome and Firefox browsers, which allows you to see number of clicks on your bit.ly links in a tooltip (see below screenshot from my twitter).

Clicking on “More information” link will take you to the details page for that particular link on bit.ly. I have been using it for a week now and find it very useful.

       

Related Posts Get your own heatmaps for your sites Keeping track of your blog on the web through Google Alerts Making Money with Twitter Google lets advertisers see invalid click reports AdSense: Accidental clicks -> Possible account termination

28 Comments

Google Invites Giveaway

I have some (25) Google Wave invites. If you need one, just drop a comment on this post and I will send you. It will be sent to the first 25 commenters.

screenshot:

       

Related Posts 3D Wall Pro Contest Winners Winner of the Premium WP Theme Giveaway Contest, week 2 Winner of “3D Wall Pro Giveaway Contest” Contest: Book “Blog Blazers” Giveaway - week 5 Google algorithm update and its effects on search results

41 Comments

Google and Your Privacy

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google has this to say about the Privacy issue on his interview with CNBC:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities. watch the video

This statement from Schmidt has caused quite an uproar on the net, Mozilla’s Director of Community Development Asa Dotzler even pointed out that Bing has a better privacy policy than Google and encouraged people to change the default search engine in Firefox to Bing.

This kind of comment from Schmidt definitely won’t go well with their to-be-launched Operating System Google Chrome.

       

Related Posts Google Alerts should get it’s own domain? Google News Timeline US officially in recession? Why Google Analytics might be bad for your PageRank online backup tools

20 Comments

Rupert Murdoch to Use Robot.txt to Block Google

Rupert Murdoch the founder and CEO of the world’s second largest media conglomerate News Corp. has said in his latest interview with Sky News that they will be blocking Google from indexing their sites.

This he said will be their strategic move to increase the profitability of their online versions of their newspapers. Somehow he believes that Google is doing more harm by sending tons of traffic to their websites because he thinks that it’s better to have small number of people who pay (paid subscribers) rather than tons of people who do not pay and read his (News Corp) news from Google News for free (even if Google provides a link back).

News Corp. own tons of newspapers, magazines, tv and radio stations worldwide. Newspapers like The Sun (UK), The New York Times (US), and The Wall Street Journal (US) are owned by News Corp. (full list here)

That’s an interesting strategy indeed. He is the only person I heard on internet who doesn’t want traffic and Google’s indexing of his sites :) Normally everyone is after traffic and always trying to improve their SEO to better rank in major Search Engines.

I personally think this strategy of R.Murdoch will do more harm to his websites’ profitability if he indeed will block all search engines from indexing his sites. Sure, he might have loyal customers who will read WSJ and New York times everyday, but any product and website needs advertising. And free advertising like what Google is doing for them is the best thing that any website can get. He only needs to tweak the website to make it free section and paid section. Perhaps free section could only have some brief news and full articles could be accessed only by paid members etc.

Bad for Google?

In his private mailing list, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo suggested that, this move by News Corp might be bad for Google and good for Google’s competitors. Because he believes, now is the time for Bing and Yahoo to approach News Corp directly and be the exclusive provider of News Corp’s news on their search engines. Obviously this would affect Google’s reach and Google’s competitors could effectively snatch some Search Engine Share from Google. (read his article here).

What is your opinion on this issue? Do you think R.Murdoch is doing a right move by blocking Search Engines? Do you think his move is a loss for Google? (R.Murdoch’s interview on YouTube after the jump) Read more »

       

Related Posts Some people don’t like backlinks Rollyo - Create your own search engine Google algorithm update and its effects on search results SearchCommands.com Showing ads only to people who came from Search Engines

21 Comments

Google News Timeline

Want to read Google News like a newspaper? Go to newly launched Google News Timeline by Google.

Google News Timeline is a web application that organizes search results chronologically. It allows users to view news and other data sources on a browsable, graphical timeline. Available data sources include recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and information about various types of media, like music albums and movies.

URL: newstimeline.googlelabs.com/

       

Related Posts google image swirl

28 Comments

TinEye - Searching for images the other way

TinEye is an image search engine that employs image identification technology rather than keywords - you upload sample image (or give URL of the image) and the search engine will find for you images that has the similar shapes, concepts, characteristics.

The results can be the same image, modified version of the image or a different image altogether as seen below. Also, the naming of the images do not really matter in this case as long as they match in appearance.

If you want to see more examples of search results, see cool searches page.

Additionally they have iPhone app which allows you to search for products using your mobile phone’s camera. Just take a picture of the product to start searching for product info and reviews. Cool Stuff!

Website: tineye.com

       

Related Posts Myths about Google Image Ads clarified Google Image Search: Advertising on images anyone? Pixsy - Image Search Engine google image swirl WP Hack: Showing Only Images in Search Results

20 Comments

How to share Google Analytics reports with others

Google Analytics is a great service and it’s used by many. One of the features that I like about Google Analytics is - sharing your reports with others.

Sometimes advertisers or potential partners would ask for your blog’s/website’s traffic statistics. And in this time of fraud and forgery, screenshots won’t simply do it (perhaps this might do). They want to see the real, live statistics. So, in this kind of situations G.Analytics’ “share reports” feature is a great solution.

Sharing your reports is easy, can be done in 3 simple steps.

1. Login to your G.Analytics account and go to your overview page of your reports. At the end of the page you will see a link “User Manager”, click it.

---

---

.
2. Next page will show you the list of emails (people) who have access to your reports. If it is your first time, you will only see your own email. Click on the “Add User” link.
.

---

---

.
3. Enter the person’s Gmail, yes it should be gmail and not any other email. And select the access type, you can either make the person “admin” or “view only”. After that, choose the report of the site(s) for him to view, in case if you have more than one site being tracked by G.Analytics.

Note: Be careful when making strangers admin of your reports.
.

---

---

.
That’s it. Now the person can login to his Google Account (Analytics) and see your reports inside his account. You can remove the person from your reports anytime.

       

Related Posts WP Plugin: Feedburner and Google Analytics stats Why Google Analytics might be bad for your PageRank Urchin is now Google.Analytics Levi’s next strategic move? Google lets advertisers see invalid click reports

16 Comments

Google FriendConnect Toolbar Widget

Google FriendConnect added a toolbar widget. Now you can display it on top of your blog or at the bottom of it for your members to join and communicate with each other.

Unlike Yahoo’s MyBlogLog, Google FriendConnect is a bit vague in its positioning. I am still not very clear what its real objective is? How about you?

Do you use it on your blog? If yes, how it has benefited your blog? Share with us your experiences and success stories so to speak.

Here is its description on Wikipedia:

Google Friend Connect is an online service by Google that allows users on the internet to connect with their friends on different websites.

Google Friend Connect is an Open Social application offered by Google that started in May 2008. Google Friend Connect main focus is to simplify the connection between social and non-social websites and standardize the handling and presentation of social applications and content. It uses a blend of open standards, such as OpenID for signin, oAuth to control data, and Open Social for applications.

Google Friend Connect is free but requires approval of the website using it. It requires no knowledge of web programming and enables any website to offer social applications and content from Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, MySpace, Google Talk and other social networks.

At the time the interface is in English and there’s no option to choose other languages. Google didn’t announce any plans to translate it and most words can’t be translated by the site that implements it.

Examples of use are:

1. E-commerce site: Allow users to check whether friends purchased or review the product you are interested in on the product web page.
2. News sites: Allow users insert comments and opinions with their real profile.
3. Organization Sites: Increase marketing and communication within members of the organization.
4. Blogs and Personal Websites: Increase communication within author friends.

Source: Wikipedia

Now after reading that, it makes some sense. Join my FriendConnect by clicking at the toolbar below, let’s get connected!

Website: www.google.com/friendconnect/

       

Related Posts Google Toolbar for FireFox Netcraft Anti-Phishing Toolbar is a Success Netcraft Toolbar’s Firefox version is launched. Conduit.com - create your own browser toolbar Firefox Plugin: SEOtoolbar from Aaron Wall

7 Comments

Monitor site-hacking with Google Alerts

Google Alerts is great in keeping track of keywords. But it can also be used to monitor your websites if anyone has hacked them (hopefully it won’t be the case), if it does happen Google would send you a notification. Google team blogged about it on their blog saying:

… Try a site: search on your site to see if anything unfamiliar shows up in Google’s results for your site. You can add words to the query that are unlikely to appear in your content, such as commercial terms or adult language. If the query [site:example.com viagra] isn’t supposed to return any pages on your site and it does, that could be a problem. You can even automate these searches with Google Alerts.

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/01/open-redir…

       

Related Posts sarah palin’s email hacked Google had a DNS problem, not hacked… WordPress 2.1.1 had been compromised on WP download server how to hack feedburner Developments on the gCard

6 Comments