Archive for the ‘Google’ Category
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
Google Apps is combination of state of the art & innovative technologies by the Google Team of professionals. At the end of January, I wrote a post about the “Reasons to migrate your domain Email to Google Apps” and promised to write a post on how the migrate your custom domain email to Google.
The first thing you should do is to create an account on Google Apps. The Google Apps registration process is really quick and simple, and the actual migration part is just a handful of MX Record changes. I did all this in few minutes to my domain (including DNS change).
So here’s how you can migrate your domain email to Google’s innovative Technologies. (more…)
Tags: Google, How To, Technology
Posted in Google | 8 Comments »
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
For last few years, I had been managing my domains’ email addresses using outlook express or Mozilla Thunderbird. It’s really a very hectic task to manage all of them one by one for each domain. So, I decided to explore Google Apps to manage all my email addresses and contacts at one place right in my Gmail Account. (more…)
Tags: domain, email, Google, Internet
Posted in Google, Internet | 17 Comments »
Saturday, January 19th, 2008
In the start of 2008, Google penalized and dropped my site from the SERP. My site was found nowhere in Google search engine. I was not sure about the penality because it is almost impossible to determine whether or not your site does have a penalty. So, I decided to do some research work before taking some serious steps towards the reconsideration or reinclusion request. After spending some time on research I found the following possibilities which causes the penalty.
- Lot of outgoing links without rel=nofollw
- XHTML code was not upto standards
- Some missing urls (404 not found)
- Linking to bad neighborhoods in blogroll
I posted my problem to Google’s official webmaster group and got some very good advices. searchenginepenalties also helped me a lot to find the possible reasons about penalties.
I fixed all the mentioned problems and sent reconsideration request to google on 5th Jan, 2008 and acknowledged that my site is no longer violating Google’s quality guidelines & agreed that I will abide by all the quality guidelines.
I am very glad that they accepted my apologies and reconsider my site to SERP. You can see the effect in the stats graph.
Many Thanks to Google Team.
Tags: Google, Internet
Posted in Google, Internet | 6 Comments »
Sunday, January 6th, 2008
Traffic Chart for last 7 days
Google is no doubt the most popular search engine on the planet. It was the major source of traffic for my blog and I was getting more than 70% traffic from Google but for last few days, traffic is gradually decreasing due to unknown reason.
After doing some research on internet I figured it out that Google has changed its search algorithms for the country specific TLDs (e.g, .PK, .CO.UK etc). All the country specific TLDs will not be served on google.com global search until or unless there are not enough sites (.com, .net, .org etc) for the related search string.
I am seriously thinking about to shift my site from .PK to .com and looking for a good domain name. I will make a 301 redirection to new domain soon.
I think its a new year gift for me by Google 
Tags: Google, search
Posted in Google | 11 Comments »
Thursday, December 13th, 2007
Today I saw two arrows next to “Ads By Google” in one of my Adsense Ads. After spending some time on researching I found out that this is the Google’s upcoming feature in adsense for publishers. These ads are not activated yet on every publisher’s account because google engineers are testing it on different accounts.Clicking on these arrows, visitors can scroll up and down to see more contextual ads while staying on the same page. I think they are using AJAX Technology in these slider ads. Google is improving its ads technology day by day as we have seen lot of improvement in the Google Adsense in the year 2007.
Some of them are Optimization Tips, Rounded Corners, Ad Management & payments through Western Union.
I hope that publishers will get more and more $$$ with this cool feature once it is rolled out to production servers.
Tags: adsense, Ajaxified, Google, Money, Western Union
Posted in adsense, Google, Money | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
Google Adsense is no doubt the world’s best ad network in contextual advertising. You can generate more revenue than that you are currently earning with just few fine tunings. Google held a webinar for AdSense publishers in July, 2007. They gave out some great adsense optimization tips that they have gathered over the past few years. The original Webinar transcript is very lengthy, so here’s a quick summary:
- Ad Location – “the middle, above the fold location perform best.” Also “if you have an article page with a long body of text, the bottom of that article is actually pretty successful”
- Ad Formats – “the top three formats are the 336×280 that you see on the page; the 300×250 medium rectangle; and then the 160×600 wide skyscraper.” Additionally “the wider ad formats are doing better than the other ones and the reason is that they actually take up fewer lines. And so with every additional line, you have a chance of losing that interested user.”
- Ad Colors – Pick colors that blend well with the site. Matches the background color, and compliments the site. Make them feel like a part of the site. They give an example where a customer went from blended background to yellow, and clicks dropped 65%
- Ad Blindness – if the colors stick out too much, readers may immediatly identify them as ads and not even look at them. Also frequent readers may stop reading ads so you could alternate positioning and colors to get their attention. “The more you blend in with the site, the less chance that ad blindness will occur.”
- Experiment – this was a big theme in the webinar echoed by all experts. Use channels to test different colors, positioning, and formats to find out what works best. They show that you can more than double your revenue just by finding the right color, position, format combo.
- Image Ads – If you want to maximize revenue they recommend turning them on. I personally disable them in my account, because I find them too distracting/annoying to the user. Yes you may increase your CPC, but you will probably decrease impressions over time.
- Link Units – Don’t take up much space, and also “allows the user to refine what they’re interested in. So if they may not be interested in specific ads on your page, they might be interested in a particular topic, and by clicking on a link unit and a link in the link unit, they’ll be able to specify that they’re interested in that specific topic and get a lot more options and variety on the ads that might appear.” I also bet google remembers what they click on and then tries to generate better ads for the page… just my speculation.
- AdSense For Search – You can use this for your site search, and you get a percentage of ad clicks.
- Never click on your own ads – One of the callers asked the question “I was just noticing that someone asked about clicking on their own ads and it says you’re not supposed to. And I don’t remember reading that. And I occasionally do click on the ads… So is that detrimental in some way?” – I can’t believe they said that to google. Google’s response was: “Yes, that’s sort of chief among the terms and conditions”.
- Impression Counter – Google confirmed that Page Impressions are counted when a public service ad (or alternate ad url or color) is displayed.
- Your site is unique – all these things may not matter, the best location, format, and color is different for every site. So again, go experiment.
Haven’t signed up for AdSense Yet?
Tags: adsense, Advertising, Channel, Google, Money, search
Posted in adsense, Google, Money | 6 Comments »
Saturday, December 8th, 2007
Rapidshare is probably one of the top free file hoster on the planet. You can find almost everything on rapidshare but the problem is, rapidshare did not provided any search functionality for the hosted files. If you know how to search the hosted files on rapidhsare, you can rule the IT world.
What is Rapidshare: Rapidshare is the best among all the file hosting sites till date. Keeping in view that the web users have to go through a tedious process to send files as an attachment in emails and with some service providers not providing the option of sending large files, the idea of file uploading came into existence. Established in May, 2002 Rapidshare has nearly 84 sites which link to it and stores files on Rapidshare servers. The servers are located in Switzerland. Due to overwhelming response to the service, the problem of server overload started creeping in. So Rapidshare decided to start another subsidiary company by name Rapidshare.de
Top Search Engines: I think Google is the most powerful search engine capable of handling a number of advanced queries but you must have enough understanding on how to perform search. Searching in google is a very long story, I will cover it in later article.
Here I will guide you how to search the Rapidshare using google:
(more…)
Tags: General, Google, Internet, rapidshare, rapidshare search, search, searching
Posted in General, Google, Internet | 45 Comments »
Tuesday, December 4th, 2007
Google AdSense is probably one of the most popular and the best revenue generators in the planet to generate revenue from your blogs. You have already heard the stories about bloggers-genies, who manage to turn their blogs into cash machines overnight. To embed & manage adsense ads on your blog, you need a plugin to control ads on your articles globally.
There are lot of wordpress plugins out there to mange adsense ads into your articles, but I am writing about the most efficient and easy to mange plugin which is Adsense-Deluxe
About Adsense-Deluxe: AdSense-Deluxe is an easy-to-use plugin for WordPress 1.5+ (including WP 2.0) for quickly inserting Google or Yahoo! ads into your blog posts, and managing when and where those ads are displayed.
Features:
- Use simple HTML comments for embedding AdSense or Yahoo! Publisher Network ads in a WordPress post
- Choose from any number of ad styles and format on a post-by-post basis
- Globally change ad styles
- Selectively disable display of individual ad styles or all ads
- Integrated AdSense Preview tool (a sandbox) for seeing what ads will appear on a given page. (Stand-alone AdSense SandBox Tool also available)
- All settings configured through WordPress Options interface (no knowledge of plugins or PHP required)
- Easily test different ad formats and color styles across (all, or) a range of blog posts.
- (Optionally) Apply CSS formatting to the AdSense code.
- Does not display live ads when editing a page, instead placeholders are shown.
- Ads are EXCLUDED from RSS feeds — even if you have full-text feeds enabled. (new in v0.3)
- Preview your ad blocks from the AdSense-Deluxe options page (in case you forget what the ad style looks like), and ads can be clicked without penalty since they use a test account.
- Support for wp-tiger-admin plugin’s CSS in post/page editor QuickTags
More details at adsense-deluxe site
Tags: adsense, Google, Money, PHP, plugin, wordpress, Yahoo
Posted in adsense, Google, Money | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, November 27th, 2007
You will find a lot of eBooks for sale on the Internet with promises like “What Google Never Told You about AdSense!” or “Get rich fast with google adsense“. I’d like to call bullshit on that, since Google actually has a lot of quality information. If you look in the right places. Besides, the Internet is full of specialized snippets on the subject.
Truth is that you can get rich but it needs lot of hard work, tons of visitors to your site and better understanding of SEO (search engine optimization). I am a bit reluctant to promise you riches beyond belief, but a monthly payout of a couple of hundred dollars and up should be easily within reach with a modest amount of visitors.
What you want is to make more people click on google adsense ads, and here’s how to do it!
- Develop a content rich site/blog
- Get listed by the major search engines including google, yahoo and msn
- Select the right placement for your ads (in between your content)
- Select the right type of ads (square ads normally performs better)
- Blend your ads with your sites contents
- Track your performance with channels.
- Earn Money!
Stay tuned for more details 
Tags: adsense, Google, Internet, Money, Yahoo
Posted in adsense, Google, Money | 18 Comments »
Monday, November 12th, 2007
Google Launches OpenSocial to Spread Social Applications Across the Web. OpenSocial — a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web — for developers of social applications and websites that want to add social features.
OpenSocial will unleash more powerful and pervasive social capabilities for the web, empowering developers to build far-reaching applications that users can enjoy regardless of the websites, web applications, or social networks they use. The release of OpenSocial marks the first time that multiple social networks have been made accessible under a common API to make development and distribution easier and more efficient for developers.
The proliferation of unique APIs across dozens of social websites is forcing developers to choose which ones to write applications for – and then spend their time writing separately for each. OpenSocial gives developers of social applications a single set of APIs to learn for their application to run on any OpenSocial-enabled website. By providing these simple, standards-based technologies, OpenSocial will speed innovation and bring more social features to more places across the web. Users win too: they get more interesting, engaging, or useful features faster.
Three APIs available now
The OpenSocial APIs give developers access to the data needed to build social applications: access to a user’s profile, their friends, and the ability to let their friends know that activities have taken place. OpenSocial resources for developers and websites are available now at code.google.com/apis/opensocial.
Developers will have access to:
- Three JavaScript and Gdata APIs to access social functions
- A live developer sandbox on Orkut at sandbox.orkut.com
Websites will have access to:
- A tool to help OpenSocial-enable their websites
- A support forum for communicating with Google and other websites
Tags: Google, OpenSocial, Social
Posted in Google, Social | 2 Comments »
