Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Monday, January 22nd, 2007 |
Search Engine Journal confirms something I saw accidentally this weekend. All the external links from Wikipedia have now the nofollow attribute.
Well the ideea is that this is a pointless action in the fight against spam and it will only hurt the legit websites. Why is that so:
- After the nofollow agreement between Google/Yahoo/MSN, all the blogging platforms implemented it for the comments section. Result? Total failure. Blog spamming is a bigger issue than before
- On blogs, only legit websites were hurt because most of the spam comments are either caught in spam filters or manually removed
- Wikipedia, like DMOZ, is scraped by many other sites (some legit like Answers.com and some splogs). Don’t know if the nofollow atribute will be also included in those
Posted in General, Search Engine Optimization | 3 Comments »
Monday, January 22nd, 2007 |
Posted in General | No Comments »
Thursday, January 11th, 2007 |
As of today, the good old Performancing Metrics is no longer available to the public. I am eagerly waiting for the full package to go open source and install it on my server because the alternatives are simply horrible.
Measuremap:
- I have an account but I can add only one blog
- Since Google bought it it simply looks like the dev team is on a vacation in Haway (and it’s been almost a year)
- RSS Feeds not working properly
Feedburner Statistics
- I had high hopes on that but the usability sucks
- No RSS feeds
- Basically just top 10 items and the rest looks awful
My Blog Log
- It simply sucks and they charge for real time stats
Google Analytics
- Best tool in town but not for bloggers
- No RSS feeds
- No real time
There are other alternatives bunt not free.
So, Google would you mind cleaning the dust over the MeasureMap, enhance it and make it public? Please? Now???
Posted in General | No Comments »
Monday, January 8th, 2007 |
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Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 |
In the past few months I saw a disturbing trend on metal and rock music related websites. More and more adsense ads are on behalf of christian websites and organizations and of course are completly unrelated to the website’s content and theme. Some examples can be seen on Dark Lyrics and Metal Videos.
Beside the pragmatic fact that they provide a low user experience and a low CTR, the morality of this behavior is in the grey area. And the fact is that I am pretty sure that they don’t want to “save” souls but rather they are interested in financial gains.
And if that’s not enough, check the comments in this Techcrunch post to see christian fundamentalism in action.
Posted in General | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 |
After the yesterday announcement that the new blogger is out of beta (quite a surprise to hear that from Google), Google has start pushing it to the SERPS. Do any query with blog included and you’ll get a tip like that on the screenshot (blog, blogs, blogger, blogspot)
Posted in General, Google | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 |
Google Adsense Team just announced on their blog that the old trick of placing images near your Adsense units will no longer be tolerated. Yeah, that’s right, not even with a line between them.
Well…that’s it, back to more work on content now 
Posted in General, Google | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 |
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Saturday, October 14th, 2006 |
Andy Mitchell (creator of Bumble Search) was kind to give me last night a testdrive of the new release of GTDGmail (first review over here).
After a few small releases, this one is a leap forward on the right direction and focuses more on GUI and usability. Among the enhancements brought:
- Collapsable GTD Labels - my favourite. Now you can add more projects to your Gmail without the fear of having to scroll too much to locate a specific one
- Collapsable GTD Labels - for quick access now you have a dropdown menu on top of your mails that helps you select GTD items.
Perhaps an option to customize this menu would be great to see in a future release (show only projects for example)..is already implemented
- Conversation Notes - allows you to use at the maximum the threaded feature of Gmail and permits the user to add notes (reminders or to do lists for example) in a conversation. Useful for those that have reactions to some emails but just want to through in notes without actuall sending an email to the conversation partner(s)
- Now you have a button for composing tasks and you don’t have to hit compose. Useful for those that missed this neat feature on previous releases
- Keyboard shortcuts - even though I am not a big fan of those I’ll bet that there are lots of power users that will be happy to have them
More about this release on the GTDGmail blog.
Keep in mind that this powerful extension is donationware now and the developers really deserve your support for their great work.
The official release will be available to the public on 23rd October, but if you cannot resist the temptation you can have it if you become a suporter and donate. As for how much…I’ll quote Andy:
That is your choice! However, we would politely ask it is a ‘worthwhile’ amount to cover sundries like fees and handling (getting you setup for early release)
Note: GTDGmail works by default (no hacks needed) on both Firefox and Flock
Posted in General | No Comments »
Monday, October 2nd, 2006 |
If you have a blogspot blog and you post more than usual, a captcha will appear when you create a new post. If this happens, submit your blog to editorial review by clicking on the question mark near the captcha. Not doing this will cause your blog to be sent into google’s supplemental results and obviously you will loose significant traffic. Another side effect it will be that you will not receive (less significant this time) traffic from the “next blog” feature.
Obviously if you are a regular spammer (errrr SEO Black Hat for those who like titles) you can forget about it.
Question:
Is the “next blog” feature functioning like traffic exchange systems? I mean is there a direct relation between the number of persons that leave your blog through that and the number of persons coming from that? Has anybody tried to manipulate that?
Posted in General | No Comments »
