If you’re an avid Google Calendar user, it would probably make your life easier if you could access it easily all the time. BNET describes a really easy way to get your Google Calendar to appear in your Firefox sidebar at all times.
This type allows you to put any website in your sidebar, which is really really handy.
Add Google Calendar to Your Firefox Sidebar on BNET
A lot of bloggers talk about the danger of placing all of your “eggs” in the Google basket, whether it’s for search results or for advertising revenue.
IncrediMail, an Israeli company that has mysteriously made lots of money by adding smiley faces to email, has just announced via a press release that they received a “notice” from Google that they have “decided to stop the AdSense partnership with the Company and therefore [they are] disabling ads to search result pages displayed through the Company’s account, and in addition that the Company’s AdSense account has been disabled.” This is a blow to IncrediMail since “in 2006 and 2007, search revenues powered by Google’s AdSense program made a significant contribution to the Company’s results.”
Google’s hand is swift and ruthless.
IncrediMail Receives Notice from Google Regarding AdSense Program
When developing blogs or sites on WordPress, we often have to search for information or need help solving a problem, and in those times many of us turn to Google. Did you know that Google has zillions of ways that you can focus your searches and make them even better? The major drawback is that you have to remember zillions of queries in order to do that, and in the end it’s just so much easier to do a regular search and see what you get.
That’s when Advanced Dork Firefox Add-on comes to the rescue! All you have to do is right-click it in Firefox, and you get a whole myriad of Google search options.
Here’s what the download page says about the Add-on:
Advanced Dork: Main Functions:
Sound good? Visit the Advanced Dork download page to learn more and get the Add-on.
I just noticed that WordPressGarage finally has a Google PageRank! For many many months, this blog has had no PageRank, for reasons I don’t completely understand. It seems that Google sweeps the web very infrequently, doling out page ranks as they go along. These PageRanks stick until the next time around, and if you start a blog or site in between sweeps, you are stuck with a PageRank of non-existent (you don’t even get a rank of 0) until Google sweeps again.
I check PageRank with a very handy Firefox Add-on called SearchStatus. It adds a little toolbar at the bottom of the browser that indicates PageRank, Alexa, and Compete rankings.
I just checked all of my sites, and they all were awarded a PageRank of 4/10. Is that good? Is that bad? I don’t know, but at least now they have a rank of some kind and I have something to tell people when they ask. It’s like they didn’t exist until Google benevolently bestowed upon them their rank.
What is PageRank? Well, Wikipedia has the following to say about it:
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.
We care about it because if Google gives a site a higher PageRank, it means they see it as more important and it will probably do better in search results.
Interesting, but here’s the really important stuff:
PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank[1]) and later Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine.
It’s named after Larry Page! It worked out so well for him that his last name isn’t Wolfsonbergerstein. WolfsonbergersteinRank just wouldn’t have the same ring to it.
After blogging for a while and building up a decent readership, I’ve decided to test out the whole monetization thing. I figured “why not?” - I’ve got nothing to lose, and if I make a few bucks, then I can kind of justify the time I spend (waste?) blogging.
So I’ve decided to give Adsense a serious go here at wordpressgarage. I read up on it a bit, and took some time to choose certain ad types for certain locations on the page.
So far so good. And I can see that people are clicking.
But here’s where it gets really frustrating: my stats program shows that people are clicking on ads, but these clicks aren’t showing up in the Google Adsense reports. And the few clicks that are showing up in the reports aren’t making any money!
This is annoying, but even worse it strengthens my suspicion that Google can basically do whatever they want and we’d never know. Google could be charging the advertisers for the clicks on their ads without fairly paying me for providing the advertising real estate!
So some questions:
I can see this monetization thing is not going to be so easy…
As mentioned in a previous post, Google penalizes sites for duplicate content. One way of solving this is modifying the robots.txt file. Daily Blog Tips describes another way to prevent Google from finding duplicate content on your site: by using excerpts:
In order to make sure that you are not incurring any penalty for duplicated content you should make all those pages display only post excerpts instead of full posts. You could even display post excerpts on the Homepage…
This method involves modifying the theme files so that only specific pages will display excerpts.
Use Post Excerpts Everywhere>>
A standard WordPress site has the same content displayed in numerous places, such as Archives, Categories, Feeds and so forth. Blog Rambler says that this can damage your Google ranking since Google penalizes duplicate content:
When a crawler visits the site it must decide which of these pages is most relevant, and the majority of time it does not pick the one you would. I have tested this on several sites and found that the Category pages usually get listed ahead or in place of the actual post.
Read the solution at WordPress Duplicate Content on Blog Rambler>>
As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t like AdSense. I think that most of the time it’s tacky. Here are two more opposing opinions on this issue:
The question is, do those of us in the anti-AdSense camp dislike it because we don’t know how to use it properly, or is it truly an eyesore?
Quick Online Tips explains that beyond installing a sitemap on your site, you can help search engines find your sitemap more efficiently:
Ask.com, Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! have announced support of “autodiscovery” of Sitemaps. The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their Sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately.
This step is very useful as webmasters can easily submit their content to the search engines and benefit from reduced unnecessary traffic by the crawlers. The search engines get information with regards to pages to index as well as metadata with clues about which pages are newly updated and which pages are identified as the most important and search users get more fresh content.
Complete details as to how to modify your robots.txt file in order to implement this feature is in the post.
Add Sitemaps Autodiscovery in Robots.txt File>>
Better Business Blogging has put together an amazing list of 52 ways to promote your blog. I have seen many lists out there that address this issue, but I’ve never seen one that is so comprehensive, and has so many tips that I have never come across before. If you want some really good tips on effectively promoting your blog, you need to read this post.
52 of the Best Ways to Promote your Blog and your Business>>
