Does PageRank work?

On October 6, 2011 PageRank in 3rd party tool SeoToolbar Firefox add-on on my PC stopped working. Many people start to asking does Google PageRank is dead? The answer is that Google did make a change, they changed the lookup URL for the PageRank value. So 3rd party tools stopped to work correctly.

How to find Google PageRank today?

To find PageRank today you can install Google toolbar add-on. It will work immediately.

For SeoQuake add-on you can find instructions how to fix SEO PageRank following this link: Google PageRank is not dead.

If you have patience you can wait for updates of various 3rd party tools which showing Google PageRank.

Google plus games

On August 10 2011 Google added games to Google Plus. In this way Google challenged facebook with its games.

Difference between Google plus and Facebook games

Google plus games have separated game-related messages on games section. Contrary Facebook users share messages with all their friend and this have side effect, Facebook users didn't like anybody see their game notifications. For example what if a user have boss as a facebook friend and boss see game notificatio issude during work?

Google said:

The Games page is also where your game accomplishments will appear. So you can comfortably share your latest high score—your circles will only see the updates when they’re interested in playing games too.



If you’re not interested in games, it’s easy to ignore them. Your stream will remain focused on conversations with the people you care about.

Quality of Google plus games

Google claim:



Because we want to provide both a great user experience and a great developer experience, we’re focusing on quality before quantity

In this moment games on g+ already exists on facebook. So, Google plus choosed games from facebook and payed developer teams to make a version for g+.

Let's comment best of them:

• EdgeWorld - in my opinion best of Google plus games for now. Be careful, it is extremely addictive. It is SF strategic game where you build a base, defend from other players, join alliances, make research ...
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

















• Dragon Age Legends - online RPG adventure game with lots of options. Players take on quests, earn loot and grow their kingdom as they customize and upgrade their characters. The game includes both cooperative and competitive modes. Battles are strategic as the good guys and bad guys take turns attacking on a small grid.




• Angry birds - it is very popular game where players use a slingshot to launch birds at pigs stationed on or within various structures, with the intent of destroying all the pigs on the playfield. As players advance through the game, new birds appear, some with special abilities that can be activated by the player.

Find more followers for Google plus circle

How to increase number of your followers on Google plus one network?. More followers more social power, new social network appeared: Google plus one (some call it just "g+"). And battle for followers is started. This article will discuss about few methods to extend your google circles. How to convince people to step in your google circle?

Make your profile noticable

Profile picture

Ask yourself what possible G+ follower first see when he come in touch with your Google plus profile?

First thing G+ member will see is your Google profile photo. So, you must find a photo that will grab G+ user attention. Someone once said that one picture is more powerful than thousand words, let's see example.

Take a quick look on picture above and say who is most popular. In my opinion most of the people will first notice picture of Seth Godin. And yes, he is very popular and have most followers (not just on Google plus network). One of reasons of his popularity is his appearance, he is standing out. Standing put is a key of success on various social networks.

Conclusion is to choose profile picture wisely.

Posts

Posts are very important when someone make decision does he will follow your Google plus profile. If your posts cover Google plus member interests then you have good chance to get one more Google plus follower. Try to make smart and (or) funny posts and follower will come one by one.

When you have some really good post use extended circles. Extended cicrcles mean that you will share your post with everyone in your circles plus all the people in their circles (only first level).

About section and subtitle bar

Fill About section. There people watch when they want to learn some basic information about you. For example I always take a look at Introduction line under About section.

Under your user name there is one subtitle line where you can write short line of text. My advice is to use it.

Follow people with many followers

This is a rule for any social network. If you follow some person bigger chance is that this person will follow you. If that person is influential you will get more followers. Very simple, in language of numbers it is better to have follower who have 10000 followers than follower who have 15 followers.

To find Google plus influential people like celebrities and hottest Google plus posts in last 24 hours visit: Google + Statistics.

Invite people you already know

Google plus offer you to get in circles people who are in your gmail contacts. Also, under Find people there are options for invite Yahoo contacts, Hotmail contacts and option for upload address book. So, you can add all your contacts (or maybe not all) in Google circles and hope they will add you to their circles.

You can try to establish connection with your connections in other Social networks (like Twitter, Digg...) but you must find them by their gmail address or their name.

Add Google plus profile button

If you have web site or blog you can add Google plus profile button on your site. In case your site or blog have good traffic there are good chance to get some more Google plus follower.

This is how G+ profile button look like:

Guide to add Google plus profile button

• Go to Google profile button page




• enter your Google plus profile URL - you can find your profile URL in URL bar when your Google profile page is opened




• Chose Google profile button size




• Copy Google + button code and paste it on your site or blog

Try to find new Google plus followers using various groups

With time there will be various places on web where you could take an opportunity to get more Google plus followers like forums, facebook pages, internet sites, social networks...

For example take a look at this facebook page: Google Plus Add List - Get More Followers and Bigger Circles.

Do not count my visits in GA - cookies

Here is a guide how to exclude your visits from GA (Google Analytics) statistics with help of cookies. If you have static IP address you can learn how to exclude your IP address in google analytics by clicking this link. In linked article you can also find do you have static or dynamic IP address.

This tutorial for excluding your visits in GA is simpler than most other tutorials you can find on Internet about same topic. Main goal of this article is to help blogger users to count off their visits from GA records.

Exclude your own traffic from GA records with cookies

• First go to web page you track with Google Analytics


• copy code below and paste this code in address bar of you browser (don't forget to click enter)
  
  

  javascript:pageTracker._setVar('DoNotCount');alert('Cookie has been created')

  
  


• With this line of code in browser address bar you will create cookie for visited site with content "DoNotCount" or other if you change colored text. If you want to check created cookie visit my article Check cookies on my computer



• now you need to create filter



• In your Google Analytics click Edit
  
  
  


• Click Add filter in the Filters Applied to Profile box
  
  
  



• enter filter name, for filter type choose Custom filter, choose Exclude. For filter field choose User defined. For field pattern enter same text you set in javascript we paste in address bar (colored text, in our example: DoNotCount)
  
  


• now you need to wait few days and GA (Google analytics) will no more count your visits. This guide was tested on my blog and it works.

How to use Google Sidewiki

In this article you can learn what is Sidewiki, how to install and use Sidewiki, how Google Sidewiki work and Sidewiki features, how to block Sidewiki and some (controversy) impressions about Sidewiki. I discover Sidewiki two days ago after after updating my Google toolbar. Sidewiki was launched in September 2009.

What is Sidewiki and how it is functioning

Google Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where users can read and write comments about current web page. Sidewiki allows web surfers to leave comments about pages as they surf the web and to read Sidewiki comments leaved by other surfers. So if you have Sidewiki enabled you can view Sidewiki entries posted by surfers who visit web page before you.

Now with help of Sidewiki every web page can be commented in one unique comment system. To see Sidewiki entries or add your own Sidewiki entrie you must have Sidewiki installed on your browser (Google toolbar or Sidewiki bookmarklet) and Google account. Sidewiki users can also rate Sidewiki entries. This rating is visible when a user click on more hypelink of some Sidewiki entry (Useful? yes, no)

To summarize, Google Sidewiki user can:

• view Sidewiki entries (comments) entered by others Sidewiki users for current web page


• write his own Sidewiki entry about web site


• rate existing Sidewiki entries


• write Sidewiki entry about selected area of text

Install GoogleSidewiki

Prerequisites to use GoogleSidewiki:

• you must have Google account


• to use Sidewiki you need to install Google toolbar. Sidewiki is integrated in Google toolbar


• if you don't want to install Google toolbar (privacy issue or any other issue) or your internet browser don't support Google toolbar you can use Sidewiki bookmarklet

How to use Google Sidewiki

To see Sidewiki entries visit some web page and click on Sidewiki icon on your Google toolbar or click on Open Sidewiki icon on left side of page.

If you have signed up with google account you can write your own entries or rate entries of other Sidewiki users. If you are page owner, you can write a special entry that will remain the top entry for this page.

Very interesting feature is to write Sidewiki entry for selected area of text on web page. Select some text and click on the write entry icon and you will write Sidewiki comment about selected text.

How Sidewiki order comments

The key factor in ordering Sidewiki entries are:

• Use of sophisticated language


• Sidewiki user’s reputation: Are user's comments being voted up or down, or reported as abuse?


• Siedwiki user’s history

Profile rank is very important. Similar to PageRank that reflects web page authority, Google Profile have its own Profile rank which is important when Sidewiki ranking comments.

HTML in Sidewiki entries

You can ask yourself : Can I make hyperlinks in Google Sidewiki entries? Yes, you can.

Sidewiki support

• font formatting tags such as bold tag - <b> tag


• italicize tag - <i> tag


• hyperlink tag - <a> tag


• paragraph tag - <p> tag


• break line tag <br /> tag

For complete list of supported HTML tags visit Using HTML in Sidewiki entries

Don't like Sidewiki and want to block Sidewiki on your page

For those who think Sidewiki is not welcome on their web site there is javascript code you can implement and Sidewiki entries will not be accessible.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.sidewikispam.com/sidewikispam.js"></script>

With this code snippet you can stop side wiki spam (if you think that way). I found this code on sidewikispam blog. I make test on blogger and it works. In my opinion Sidewiki is welcome on my blog.

Thoughts about Siedwiki

• Sidewiki, enables anyone to comment on any web page


• Page owner can't control Sidewiki entries about his page, what if a page owner do not want anyone put comments about his web page?


• Google have its own system to rate Sidewiki comments and order those comments (entries)


• good rated Sidewiki entries are on the top of comment for web page, Sidewiki entries with bad rate will be buried and visitor will not see those entries, so Google decide which comment will stay for some web site


• what if some inappropriate entry is on the top? Web owner can't delete it.


• some bloggers claims that Google takes comments away from web sites and puts them on Google


• what if someone in Google doesn't like some site and decide to show only negative comments for that site, yes they say it is a algorithm, but algorithms are written by people and can be used for manipulation


• are Google capable to stop spammers who will try to use Sidewiki for their spam

Google analytics - exclude your traffic

You can't resist to click and inspect your own blog? Problem is that your actions influence your Google analytic statistics. Your internal traffic have impact on your google analytics reports and this is a reason you can't quality analyze trends on your blog. For example I just put awesome menu bar on my blog and want to see how my Page/Visit is going. But while I implementing and testing menu bar on my blog I clicked many times on it and because my Google analytics reports are not accurate.

In this article you will find:

• how to learn your external IP address


• does you have dynamic or static IP address


• excluding your IP address in google analytics


• exclude your traffic in google analytics with cookies (guide to exclude traffic in GA you can find in second part of article)

The most simplest way to exclude you internal traffic in google analytics is to exclude your IP address with filters. Excluding your IP address in google analytics works if you have fixed IP address.
Those who have dynamic IP address can find how to exclude their own internal traffic with cookies.

Find your external IP address

To learn your IP address go to whatismyip.com and you will see your IP addres on the top of a page.

Does you have static or dynamic IP address

Static IP address is fixed and therefore never changes. Dynamic external IP address can change when you connect to the internet. So you can check your external IP address with help of whatismyip.com, disconnect from Internet, connect to Internet and check again your external IP address with whatismyip.com. If IP addresses are same you have static external IP address, if IP addresses are different you have dynamic external IP address.

Exclude your IP address in google analytics

• In your Google Analytics click Edit
  
  
  


• Click Add filter in the Filters Applied to Profile box
  
  
  


• now enter filter name, under filter type chose traffic from the IP addresses and Save Changes
  
  


• on the end all traffic coming from your IP address (if it is static) will be excluded from google analytics reports (after 24 to 48 hours)

Exclude your traffic in google analytics with cookies

More about this topic find in my article Exclude my own visits in GA records with cookies.

Google search operators and SEO

Do you know you can use Google search operators to gather useful information for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google search operators allows you to pull out specific data from google search engine. In this article you can find most useful google search operators with examples and explanations for SEO.

What are google search operators?

Google search operators also called advanced operators are query words that have special meaning to Google. Google search operators allows advanced functionality of Google’s Advanced Search Form in a regular search box query. Some of google search operators are site: inanchor:, inurl:, intext:, intitle: ...

Discover pages on the site indexed by Google

site: operator

site: operator in your query will restrict your search results to the site you specify.

Example:

• site:interestingwebs.blogspot.com
  

  returns all web pages indexed by Google on interestingwebs.blogspot.com



• site:interestingwebs.blogspot.com tips
  

  return all web pages indexed by Google on interestingwebs.blogspot.com with keyword "tips"

SEO usage: with site: operator you can find which web pages on the selected site are indexed by google. Not indexed web pages does not appear in search result page.

Results by anchor text

allinanchor: operator

allinanchor: operator return results containing query terms specified in the anchor text on links to the page. Anchor text is clickable text part of a hyperlink.

Example:

• allinanchor:interesting webs
  

  returns all web pages which have terms "interesting" and "web" in anchor text. Result Selina's Wing Blog have one anchor text "interesting webs" and it is a reason why it is in resutls

SEO usage: number of returned results with allinanchor: operator is used by some SEO experts. Number of returned results with allinanchor: operator can be compared to number of google searches for chosen search terms. To find number of google searches use Google adwords: Keyword tool. Smaller number of returned results with allinanchor:, less competition for chosen keywords and better chance to succeed (but don't forget to include number of google searches in formula).

Search title only

intitle: operator

intitle: operator returns all web pages which have query term in title

Example:

• intitle:SEO
  

  return all web pages with keyword "SEO" inside tag title



• expert intitle:SEO
  

  return all web pages with "SEO" in title and keyword "expert" anywhere in the document

SEO usage: The title tag is a very important part of SEO. With this operator you can estimate the approximate number of competitors for specific keyword.

Search URL

allinurl: operator

allinurl: operator search tells Google to return web pages that have query terms inside URL. The searched term can be in the domain name or in the filename.

Example:

• allinurl:SEO expert
  

  return web pages containig keywords "SEO" and "expert" inside URL

SEO usage:text inside URL are very influential in SEO, so it is imperative to find more information about competition.

Further information and resources:

List of all google operators
8 Google Advanced Search Operators for SEO

Force google reindex of site

You want to google reindex your web site as soon as possible? In this artcile you can found how google works, how do you know did google indexed your web page, how often does google reindex, how to tell google to (re)index your web page or site.

How google works

Googlebot is a web crawler that finds and crawl web pages. Googlebot sending a request to a web server for a specific web page, downloading the entire page, then handing it off to Google’s indexer. It request many different web pages simultaneously. When Googlebot fetches a web page, it collect all the hyperlinks appearing on the page and adds them to a queue for subsequent crawling. Those hyperlinks are crawled later, and hyperlinks from those pages are collected too. This technique is called deep crawling. Deep crawling allows Googlebot to probe deep within individual web sites.

Googlebot gives the indexer the full text of the web pages it finds. These pages are stored in Google’s index database. When user submit a query to Google Google's index database is used to return best web pages in google's result page.

How to know did Google indexed web page

To check did google (re)index a web page use "site:" search operator:

• site:[URLOfWebPage]

Examples for checking did google re(index) a web site:

• site:interestingwebs.blogspot.com


• this Google query will return all pages on interestingwebs site which are indexed


• in case you can't find some web page in result list, it can be concluded that this page is not indexed

Examples for checking did google re(index) a web page:

• site:http://interestingwebs.blogspot.com/2009/06/tips-for-html-link-code.html
  
  
  


• in case google return result you know web page is indexed


• with this method you know if page is reindex only if title of web page is changed, for example if I changed title to "HTML code tips" and Google return "Tips for HTML code" I can know that web page is not yet reindexed (yet)

How often does google crawl

It depends on the web page. Some pages be crawled every hour, some pages every day and some pages every few weeks or months. Generally if it is consistently adding new content to web site or page have a lot of backlinks (links pointing to web page) google crawler will probably come back more often. Google don't index sites, Google index pages. So on same site one page can be crawled on daily basis while other on can be crawled once in the month. If you submit sitemaps regularly you can most likely speed up the Google crawling for your site.

Force google to reindex site

You can add your url on Google add url page and wait. When your URL is submitted, it is in google queue and google will index your site when it find appropriate. Unfortunately you can't force Google to crawl your site now and index the content.

How to create online survey

Believe or not, making survey on internet is very easy. Here you will find brief step by step tutorial how to create your own web survey (poll) with help of Google docs forms. After online survey is make and published visitors can fill poll and their responses are automatically added to your online spreadsheet. Google docs are really useful and easy to use tool. Here you can see example of online survey.

Sample Google Docs online survey:



Creating online survey

• First go to Google docs and log in


• to successfully log in you must have Google Account


• in case you do not have Google Account go to Google Accounts


• Go to menu "New" and click on "Form"
  
  
  


• In the form template that opens, you can add any questions and options you'd like


• Enter title and description


• Enter Question title


• Choose question type

Question type can be:


• Text


• Paragraph text


• Multiple Choice
  
  
  
  


• Checkboxes


• Choose from a list


• Scale




• Choose whether or not to make it a required question


• Now you can add new question, (to get a new question, click the “Add Question” button at the top left of the page) or save and publish your survey


• You can change Theme if you like


• You can email the form (survey) to people, which allows them to fill it out and submit it right from their email, embed survey into your site or blog (it didn't work on my blog) or place a link to survey on your site


• You can review responses as:


• summary
  
  
  


• spreadsheet
  
  
  

You can use summary to display results or process data in spreadsheet. It is your choice. I find this Google tool very impressive and user friendly. My recommendation to everyone is to take a look at Google Docs and explore their functionality.

Step by step guide to create sample online survey:

• In Google Docs go to menu "New" and click on "Form"


• Enter title "Test survey"


• Enter description "This survey is for testing and demonstrating purpose"


• Enter Question title "1. Enter your name?"


• Click on Add question button and choose "Paragraph text"


• Enter Question title "2. Please tell us your opinion about this tutorial"


• Click on Add question button and choose "Multiple choice"


• Enter Question title "3. Do you find this tutorial useful?"


• In Option 1 enter "Yes"


• In Option 2 enter "No"


• Click on Done


• Click Save