Jerwin Pastoral Blog

Facebook Doppelganger & Facebook new layout

2010-02-06T01:53:00.001-08:00

New York: Facebook Doppelganger & Facebook new layout: Facebook begins rolling Facebook new homepage. Facebook is going for a makeover. Reports have surfaced that the internally-acclaimed social networking site is redesigning its home page. Also the site confirmed the report. Kathleen Loughlin, a spokeswoman for Facebook said computer experts are working overnight to introduce change so that users can easily access it different feature. However, till now the site has not released all the details about changes it's going to introduce. It is expected that Facebook will unveil redesign details of late. This is not the first time that the site is making effort to bring in some changes. The site had tried its hand last October. But it backtracked after hundreds of its users expressed their unhappiness over the changes. Besides, many were upset with the new changes and claimed they were having difficulties in using the site. That time too the officials at the popular site had made changes claiming that thing would become smoother. It would be interesting to see how the users react this time. However, Facebook must have learned lessons from its earlier goof-up. Computer mavens are of the opinion that this time the site would be extra-careful in its makeover. And everybody loves a more user friendly website. A Guide to Facebook's Home Page

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Multiply.com Moving Data Center

2009-11-09T16:36:00.001-08:00

"Although Multiply serves people from around the world, due to the way the internet works, all of our computers are physically located in a datacenter in New Jersey, USA, and have been for the last six years. We're excited to announce that we're going to be bringing our operation down to Miami, closer to where our technical team is. This should make things easier for us to manage, and also allow us to respond more quickly whenever there is a problem that requires our attention. Importantly, this will also provide us more space to grow as more and more people continue to use Multiply; something that we're very grateful of. Moving a datacenter the size of Multiply's is never an easy task, so there's a lot of work to do on our side. Our goal for the move is to have as little impact to your user experience as possible. So while I can't promise that you won't notice anything over the next few weeks, I can promise that our entire technical team is working overtime to make sure it's as little as possible. So what does this mean to you? Over the next few weeks as we prepare for the move, the site might feel a little slow. This is a temporary situation until we bring all of our hardware on-line in Miami. Once we have it all up and running, Multiply will be faster than it's ever been before. And that is something we're really excited about. We'll keep you informed as we work through this move, and ask for your patience while we make Multiply better and better for you. "

- Author: Peter , Multiply.com - http://pez.multiply.com

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Web marketer ordered to pay Facebook $711M damages

2009-10-30T02:57:00.000-07:00

LOS ANGELES - Facebook said Thursday a California court has awarded the social networking Web site $711 million in damages in an anti-spam case against Internet marketer Sanford Wallace. Facebook sued Wallace for accessing users' accounts without their permission and sending phony posts and messages. The company said on its blog that in addition to the damage award, the San Jose, Calif., court referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney's office for prosecution for criminal contempt of court — meaning he could face jail time. Wallace earned the monikers "Spam King" and "Spamford" as head of a company that sent as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s. In May 2008, the online hangout MySpace won a $230 million judgment over junk messages sent to its members when a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled against Wallace and his partner, Walter Rines, in another case brought under the federal anti-spam law known as CAN-SPAM. In 2006, Wallace was fined $4 million after the Federal Trade Commission accused him of running an operation that infected computers with software that caused flurries of pop-up ads, known as "spyware." "While we don't expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent against these criminals," said Sam O'Rourke, associate general counsel for Facebook, in a blog posting Thursday. "This is another important victory in our fight against spam." There was no phone number listed for Wallace in Las Vegas, where he is believed to be living, according to the ruling. The company said the judgment marks the second-largest anti-spam award ever. In November 2008, Facebook wo [...]

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Facebook users protest home page changes

2009-10-27T07:05:00.001-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - – Legions of Facebook users united in protest, demanding that the world's most popular social-networking service undo recent changes to its home page. A "Change Facebook Back to Normal" group at the website claimed slightly more than a million members as once again, Facebook's penchant for change triggered ire among users that prefer things remain the same. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," a Facebook user with the screen name Carlos Deleon wrote on a protest group chat page. On Friday, Facebook modified its news feed feature to let members of the world's leading social-networking service catch up on tidbits they may have missed while away from the website. Facebook now lets members switch between getting real time streams of news or activities taking place, and highlights of what friends have shared online in the preceding 24 hours. News Feed picks re-cap stories based on factors including how many friends have liked and commented on them. The Live Feed option funnels updates and news about online friends' activities to Facebook home pages as the information surfaces. "When we redesigned the Facebook home page last March, we heard from millions of users whose feedback was gathered and considered in developing News Feed and Live Feed," Facebook said in an email response to an AFP inquiry. "Whenever we launch new products, we listen carefully to our users about what specific changes we can make to improve their experiences on the site." Some Facebook users on Monday posted instructions describing a way to reset the former news feed mode to home pages by making "status updates" a default option. "We encourage people to continue to send us constructive, detailed feedback and are committed to using it to inform how we build and improve the site for everyone," Facebook said.

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YouTube Shows Video Info

2009-10-11T05:11:00.000-07:00

If you visit youtube.com, right-click on a YouTube video and you'll find a new option: "show video info". YouTube displays a lot of information about the current video: resolution, bitrate, frame rate, file size, the number of dropped frames, volume. There's also an option to copy information useful for debugging. In other YouTube news, Chad Hurley posts that the site serves more than one billion videos a day. "Three years after the acquisition, our platform and our business continue to grow and evolve. We are still committed to the same principles that informed the site early on, but we know things have changed. As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. (...) We're working hard to keep up with the fast pace of technology to bring you everything you would expect from the world's largest video site: better quality; a full spectrum of choices and tools for users, partners and advertisers; and ways to make the YouTube experience your own anywhere, anytime."

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Twitter Talking Separately to Microsoft and Google

2009-10-11T03:13:00.000-07:00

According to sources familiar with the situation–Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines. Sources said a number of scenarios are being discussed to compensate Twitter for its huge and potentially valuable trove of real-time and content-sharing information, generated from the data stream of billions of tweets from its 54 million monthly users. These include a number of structures, including a payment of several million dollars to Twitter, along with various revenue-sharing proposals that would give Twitter a piece of the revenue made from search results. The deals, stressed sources close to the situation, are nonexclusive, especially because Twitter's management is keen to remain independent and also nonpartisan in the growing search battle between Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT). This means Yahoo (YHOO)–which recently struck a search-technology and online-advertising partnership with Microsoft–could also license Twitter's feed to make its search results even more robust, although Boomtown could not determine if the company is in talks with the San Francisco start-up. Sources said it is also possible that no agreement would be reached with either company. And execs at Twitter, Microsoft and Google had no comment when asked about talks. But doing these kinds of data deals with big search players does make a lot of sense, since it would be hard for Twitter to turbocharge its own search engine without running into the big cash-laden guns at both Google and Microsoft, which recently launched its new Bing search service. Twitter is, instead, seeking to create a large open platform, which many could plug into, from search engines to marketers to publishers to developers. Twitter has also been considering offering pr [...]

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GIS - Flood Forecasting and Warning System inhancing in the Philippines

2009-10-07T22:21:00.001-07:00

Based on the article published on Philippine Government Website (gov.ph) , PGMA unveils the enhancement of flood forecasting and warning information system with more precise data on the extent and depth of inundation using its water runoff analysis software complimented by the Geographic Information System (GIS). What is GIS? A geographic information system (GIS) integrates hardware, software, and data for capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information. GIS allows us to view, understand, question, interpret, and visualize data in many ways that reveal relationships, patterns, and trends in the form of maps, globes, reports, and charts. GIS can integrate and relate any data with a spatial component, regardless of the source of the data. For example, you can combine the location of mobile workers, located in real-time by GPS devices, in relation to customers' homes, located by address and derived from your customer database. GIS maps this data, giving dispatchers a visual tool to plan the best routes for mobile staff or send the closest worker to a customer. This saves tremendous time and money. GIS Manages Geographic Information Sets GIS manages, analyzes, and displays geographic knowledge, which is represented using a series of information sets. These information sets can include:

Maps and Globes

Interactive views of geographic data with which to answer many questions, to present results, and to use as a dashboard for real work. Maps and globes provide advanced GIS applications for interacting with geographic data.

Geographic Datasets

[...]

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Dropico : Drag And Drop Media Across Social Networks

2009-10-05T09:30:00.000-07:00

Dropico is a brand new service that allows you to drag and drop pictures from multiple social networks rapidly and seamlessly, without the need to upload photos and other imagery to each of them separately. Have any pictures stored on your TwitPic account that you want to share with your Facebook Friends, or want to bring a couple of your Flickr shots to your MySpace account? Just log on to Dropico, log into the services you use and start dragging and dropping. Dropico is currently in private beta, but 1,000 TechCrunch readers can try out the service via this link. Dropico currently works with Facebook, MySpace, Photobucket, Bebo, Twitter, Flickr and Picasa. In the near future, the Israeli startup behind the service intends to add more services to the fray, and also make it easier for users to drag and drop other media like videos across social networks. There's also an API in the works Dropico designed to change that. With Dropico system, people can simply drag & drop pictures from one service to another without the upload time - it all happens in a single working environment. You can easily copy pictures from friends albums directly to your service account or any other service. Once you opened Dropico system, it enables you to manage all of your albums from a single interface. Beside the fact that you can drag & drop pictures across multiply platforms, you can create albums, copy or delete pictures, load your PC files, and import files from Internet addresses. Additionally, Dropico intend to backup all of your files so you won't have to be worried about losing them ever again. Dropico API- developer's platform Soon Dropico will allow anyone to join and benefit from a direct connection to the most popular services within Dropico API - developer's platform. This developer's platform will enable every webmaster to add his/hers Web service to Dropico's circle service. With more flexibility & user customizing, people will have the abil [...]

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Know your twitter statistics using Counter Twitter

2009-09-27T10:28:00.000-07:00

If you are interested in finding out your Twitter statistics then you should check out Twitter Counter. This is one of the most in depth descriptions of how you are perceived on Twitter. You will even have a chart available to show your growth over time and have the ability to add some Twitter objects to your blog or website. It's overall purpose is to give you what your expected followers will be in the future according to your present growth on the site. You can even compare your stats to someone else you are following. I think it's best if you check out the site for yourself to get a better understanding. Although, I can see some people who are not as active on Twitter, not wanting to use this tool. The reason for that would be because nobody wants to see that they aren't an active user. It could almost be a slap in the face saying, "why did you bother signing up for an account?" I guess you can say that Twitter tools can have two sides of the coin, whether it's a positive or negative thing.

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Create enhanced results on Yahoo! and Facebook with Share markup

2009-09-20T17:37:00.001-07:00

Yahoo! announced support for enhanced search results last week based on Facebook Share and RDFa markup. Website owners can add a few meta tags to their pages to boost click-throughs from a more visual Yahoo! Search result and ease the process of sharing a link on Facebook at the same time. In this post I will cover the major categories of enhanced share types -- audio, images, video, news, blogs, games, documents, and multimedia -- and walk through how site owners can stand out on shareable platforms. Yahoo! and Facebook are just the first two platforms to collaborate on this effort. Expect more announcements from a variety of activity stream and URL share providers in the future.

Why add special markup?

Shared pages and search results contain, at a minimum, a title and a description extracted from your site's <head>. You can enhance your search and share capabilities by explicitly specifying a thumbnail image or playback data you would like included directly alongside mentions of your pages.

<meta name="title" content="Apple iPhone 3G" />

<meta name="description" content="iPhone 3G combines   [...] 
 
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Understanding the facts about Adobe Flash and SEO
2009-09-19T07:45:00.000-07:00
There are plenty of rumors, myths, and semi-myths about Flash and SEO floating around on the web. The following are some facts about SWF content on the web.  Is SWF content searchable? Many, if not most, people in the world of web design think SWF content is not searchable. Are they right? It really depends on what you mean by "searchable." At the time of this writing, search engines Google and Yahoo! are able to index text compiled into a SWF, as well as any HTML code that is automatically generated by Flash. And although the SWF itself is not extremely searchable, any content inside a SWF can still be made very visible by using the right tactics.  Note: Google indexes SWF files on the web. In Google, you can search specifically for SWF files by searching for filetype:swf + "search example", and the results will search page URLs and static text in SWFs. The problem with using this method for Flash SEO is that users are unlikely to perform a search for a particular file type to find your site. Further, the pages found in a Google search are links to actual SWF files, not HTML pages, so you have significantly less control over what the user will see even if they do end up finding your SWF.  What about SWF metadata? In Flash, for a few versions now, you have been able to add metadata information like a title and description to your SWFs. This metadata gets embedded in your SWFs to make them potentially visible to search engines. Sadly, SEO in Flash isn't that easy, because search engines don't currently index this information.  Related Referrence :  Google learns to crawl Flash   Improved Flash Indexing 
 
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Blog.mu - Start your own Blog Network or Community
2009-09-17T12:38:00.001-07:00
It's all very well giving people blogs - there are great mainstream services like WordPress.com, Blogger, TypePad and niche ones like Edublogs, VGB and Harvard -  but what about giving people the ability to give other people blogs?  Using this site you can simply create your own blog hosting service - for any purpose you so wish to use it.  You could use it as a local news site (each reporter or topic could have a blog, strung together by a fancy homepage), a place where you can personally keep several blogs on different topics (and aggregate them together at your homepage), a community discussion site (where everyone had their own soapbox!) or a fanzine for your favorite sports club.  In short, you can use Blogs.mu to set up any kind of site that you like, which can consist of as many different blogs / areas as you want and where they take care of all the hard stuff.  And how do they know how to do that?  They are the one owned the first dedicated WordPress MU development firm on the web, Incsub, founders of WPMU install site WP.MU and operators of leading WordPress MU materials as support site WPMU DEV and WPMU DEV Premium they know a thing or two about muti-user blogging, and they want to make it easier for people to do. 
 
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Skype Closes Its Extras Program for Developers
2009-09-14T22:18:00.000-07:00
  Skype is shutting down Extras, the most important part of its program for outside developers, saying that demand for these third-party plug-ins has been weak.  "Despite the incredible breadth of Extras developed for Skype, simply not enough people were using them to justify our continued support of the Extras programme," Skype official Antoine Bertout wrote Friday in an official blog.  Extras applications are installed within the Skype system so that end users can execute them from within Skype's user interface. Extras are both free and fee-based.  While Skype will no longer accept new Extras, it will continue offering the existing ones via the Extras Manager interface in Skype for Windows and in the Skype shop. Skype also plans to continue to maintain all public API (application programming interface) documents and API tools.  The decision to discontinue the Extras program was tough, but it doesn't mean the end of the Skype developer program, according to Bertout.  "While the Extras program didn't work as well as we'd hoped, we still believe there are opportunities for third-party developers to enhance the Skype experience. We'll keep you posted," he wrote.  Skype, eBay's Internet telephony, video conferencing and instant messaging unit, is in the process of changing owners. EBay, which paid $2.6 billion to buy Skype in October 2005, has reached an agreement to sell a 65 percent stake in Skype for $1.9 billion in cash to an investor group led by Silver Lake.
 
 
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Twitter: Your 'Tweets' Belong to You
2009-09-13T21:45:00.000-07:00
Twitter has modified the terms of service that govern the proper user of the microblogging and social-networking site to state unequivocally that messages posted belong to their authors and not to the company.  "Twitter is allowed to 'use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute' your tweets because that's what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you," wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in a blog post Thursday announcing the modifications.  There has been controversy over the question of who owns the messages, photos, videos and other material that people post to social media and social-networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. For example, Google and Facebook got into hot water when critics complained about what they perceived as terms of service that claimed ownership of the data end users store in Google Apps and Facebook profiles.  The revised Twitter terms also state that end users allow Twitter to make posted messages available to external applications that use the Twitter API (application programming interface). However, Twitter is still hammering out a set of guidelines for developers on the proper use of the API.  The API guidelines are still in draft form and require that developers identify the authors of "tweets," maintain the integrity of the text and obtain permission to send messages on end users' behalf or turn their message into a commercial product, like a poster.  Twitter is also keeping mum on details about the display of advertising on the site, an issue of much discussion among pundits who follow the company and have raised questio  [...] 
 
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How do I create a CNAME record for my custom domain?
2009-02-18T05:22:00.000-08:00

A CNAME, or Canonical Name, record is an entry within the Domain Name System (DNS) that specifies where a user can find your web pages, or any other URL. You'll use this to associate your custom domain with your blog.
 After registering your domain, decide if you want to use a particular subdomain for your blog. E.g. instead of www.mydomain.com you could use something like blog.mydomain.com, if you want. Then you'll create a corresponding CNAME record for that address, associating it with ghs.google.com. Keep in mind that changes to DNS records make take up to 48 hours to take effect.
  Each hosting service has slightly different ways to create CNAME records. Guidelines are provided here for some of the common services. When in doubt, check with the particular company you're using for additional help or instructions.
GoDaddy.com
 Log in to your account at www.godaddy.com.
Open the Domains tab and select My Domain Names. You'll be directed to the Domain Manager page.
Click the domain that you'd like to use with your blog.
Click the Total DNS Control And MX Records link at the bottom of the section entitled Total DNS.
Click Add New CNAME Record in the box labelled CNAMES (aliases). If you've already created a CNAME record for your blog's address, click the pencil icon next to the existing CNAME record.
For the Name, enter only the subdomain of the address you want to use for your blog. For example, if you picked www.mydomain.com as your address, enter www here.
Enter ghs.google.com as the Host Name. Specify a TTL or use the default setting of 1 hour.
Click OK, and then click OK again.

ix web hosting
 Log in to your account at ix web hosting.
Click Manage below the Hosting Account section.
On the left side, click the domain you'd like to use with your blog.
Next to DNS Configuration, click EDIT.
Click Add DNS CNAME Record.
Under Name, enter only the subdomain you want to use. For example, if you picked www.mydomain.com as your blog's address, just enter www as the entry under Name.
Enter ghs.google.com under Data.
Click Submit. 

1and1
 Log in to your account at https://admin.1and1.com
If it's not already selected, click the Administration tab.
Click Domains. The Domain Overview page appears.
From the New drop-down menu, select Create Subdomain. (If you've already created a subdomain for your blog's address, skip to step six.)
Enter only the subdomain you want to use, and click OK. For example, if you chose www.mydomain.com for your blog's address, you should enter www here.
Select the checkbox next to the subdomain that you will be using. (Example: www.mydomain.com)
From the DNS menu, select Edit DNS Settings.
Click the radio button next to CNAME.
Enter ghs.google.com next to Alias.
Click OK.

EveryDNS.net
 Log in to your account at EveryDNS.net.
On the left side, click the domain you'd like to use with your blog.
Since EveryDNS.net is your hosting service, and not your domain registrar, be sure that your domain points to EveryDNS.net's nameservers. This will allow your CNAME record configuration to take effect.
Below Add a Record:, you can create your CNAME record.
Next to Fully Qualified Domain Name, enter only the subdomain you want to use. For example, if you picked www.mydomain.com as your blog's address, just enter www as the entry next to Fully Qualified Domain Name.
Select CNAME as the Record Type.
Enter ghs.google.com as the Record Value.
Click Add Record. 

Yahoo!SmallBusiness
 Log in to your account at smallbusiness.yahoo.com.
Click Domain Control Panel below the domain you'd like to use with your blog.
Click Manage Advanced DNS Settings.
Click Add Record.
In the Source field, enter only the subdomain you want to use. For example, if you designated www.mydomain.com as the address of your blog, enter www in the Source field.
Enter ghs.google.com in the Destination field.
Click Submit.

No-IP
 Log in to your account at No-IP.
On the left side, click Host/Redirects.
Click Manage underneath Host/Redirects.
Click Add for a new entry, or click Modify and skip to step six for an existing entry.
Enter the host name (example: www from www.mydomain.com), and select your domain name.
Select DNS alias CNAME at the host type.
Enter ghs.google.com as the Target Host and click Modify. 

DNS Park
 Log in to your account at DNS Park.
On the left side, click DNS Hosting.
Click the domain you'd like to use with your blog.
Since DNS Park is your hosting service, and not your domain registrar, be sure that your domain points to DNS Park's nameservers. This will allow your MX record configuration to take effect.
Click Alias Records.
Under Host Name, enter only the subdomain you want to use. If you picked www.mydomain.com as your blog's address, enter www.
Under Destination Name, enter ghs.google.com.
Click Add Alias. 

Other hosting services
 Log in to your account on your hosting service's website, and go to the DNS management page.
Since CNAME records are special Domain Name Service (DNS) records, they may be in sections such as DNS Management or Name Server Management. It's possible that you will have to enable advanced settings to create a CNAME record.
Delete existing CNAME entries for the address you want to use with your blog.
Before entering a new CNAME record to point to Google, you should first delete any existing entries for the same alias. If you plan to transfer an existing web address to Blogger, you may want to copy any content currently at that address elsewhere first.
Use the information in the following table when you create your CNAME record.
If your service requires you to enter server information directly into the DNS tables, the entry below needs to have a type CNAME associated with them.  
      Host Name/Alias    Value/Destination    
      www    ghs.google.com    
   * This is the part of your website's address that you designated. For instance, if you chose www.mydomain.com as the address, www is the host name. 



Get More Traffic to Your Site Using Google Images
2009-02-13T21:18:00.000-08:00
One way to get more search engine traffic is to optimize your website for Google Image Search, a tool which allows users to easily find images by typing in specific search terms, phrases and keywords. Many people utilize Google Image search to find images for a wide variety of topics, which can range from pictures of cars to celebrities and furniture. 
 Images can not only make your website visually attractive: they can help you to gain more daily search engine traffic.
 Highly relevant image results show up at the top of Google’s search results page when one searches for specific topics. Getting listed in this prime position can possibly send a great deal of traffic to your website.
 
 Introduction to Google Image Search Optimization
 Google Image Search optimization is not a difficult process and only requires that you pay attention to how you label and use your images within the regular framework of your website. A lot of image optimization involves basic search optimization factors such as the inclusion of relevant keywords in the content, title and meta tags.
 All of the articles I’ve read on the topic of Google Images optimization seem to be in common agreement and they offer similar suggestions, although a few of them do highlight some different methods of utilizing Google Image Search.
 19 Ways to Get More Traffic Using Google Image Search
 I’ve made a full list of all the methods I’ve come across so that all of you can have an accessible reference point, should you decide to use Google Images as a method to drive more traffic to your website.
 Also added are a few points of my own, specifically dealing with how targeting specific image topics and integrating them within your webpages can help to attract a great deal more traffic through Google images.
 Depending on your niche and images used, you’ll be able to attract a great deal of extra visitors easily with very little additional work. I highly recommending putting at least a few of these points into practice on your own website.
 Here is the list of Google image optimization tips in full:
 1. Insert keywords into your Alt Text. 
  This is the most important part of image optimization and you should include a keyword or phrase that is relevant to the image and your webpage. The alt text should be inserted in the code for your image file. 
 2. Name your Images with Descriptive Titles. 
  If you have an image of Lindsay Lohan, you could use the term ‘lindsay-lohan.jpg’ to name your image, instead of simply going with the original file name which could be something like ‘b473.jpg’. I usually name my images exactly the same way as my alt text. 
 3. Use relevant text around your images. 
 It is recommended that descriptive text with your targeted keywords be placed immediately before or after the image itself. If you do a search for any term on Google Image, you’ll find that a short description of 20+ characters beneath every image. You’ll probably notice that the keyword is listed in bold as well. 
 4. Use Adsense to assess overall content relevance. 
 Insert an Adsense unit on the page where your googe images are placed and see what type of Adsense ads show up. This will tell you how Google thinks the overall theme of what your page is about. Change your content until the Adsense units reflect the keywords you want to target. In my opinion, this is not only applies to Google images but is a generally helpful method as it improves your overall latent semantic indexing score and makes your site appear more relevant to Google for targeted key phrases or words. 
 5. Optimize Your Title and Meta tags. 
  This should already be part of your overall optimization strategy and it purportedly helps your site to rank better in image searches as well. Like the use of Adsense for testing, paying attention to this point will help you to have better visibility in Google’s main search engine as well. 
 6. Use anchor text keywords in links to images.
  When you link to a specific image, use keywords instead of a generic phrase. For example, instead of using “See here” or “Click for Full Size“, try something like “Lindsay Lohan Picture” or “Lindsay Lohan in Rehab“. 
 7. Use Internal and Social Site Tags for your Images
 If you are using images with little or no textual content, it might be helpful to tag your images using internal tagging functions or social tags like Technorati. This may add more weight to your image and help it to rank better. If you are uploading your images using Flickr, remember to use the appropriate keyword tags as well. 
 8. Use Broad Categories of Images to Get a Larger Audience
 If you’re running a gadget website, you don’t have to only upload pictures of gadgets. Try upload pictures of web 2.0 sites, web applications and pictures of items related to your gadgets. For example, you can upload pictures of living rooms instead, if the gadget was designed to complement residential space. 
 9. Make Your Image folder accessible to search engines
 Ensure that your robots.txt file does not limit search engines from accessing your image files. This is essential if you want your images to be ranked on Google Image Search. Try not to use javascript links on image files as well as it will limit search engine access as well. 
 10. Re-upload your pictures to maintain search freshness
 If you have a picture that focuses on highly popular keywords, you can try to remove and re-upload another version of your image because freshness might affect relevancy and may rejuvenate your ranking on the Google Image Search engine. 
 11. Make your Google Images Standards-compliant.
 One way of making your images fully standards complaint requires you to include not only the alt tag but also the width, height and title tag for the image as well. Here’s an example of a fully compliant image reference you can follow. 
 12. Enable Google Image Search in Webmaster Central. 
  Visit Google Webmaster Tools and click on the Diagnostic tab on the menu bar. After which, select enhanced image search on the left sidebar and click on the checkbox to opt into image search for your website. This can only be done after you verify your website with Google so do that before proceeding further. 
 13. Try out Google Image Labeler.
  Apparently, the Google Image Labeler is some sort of a online game which allows you and others to write tags for images that show up. These tags are then taken into consideration and may influence the Google Image search results.
 14. Use Javascript to prevent framing of your webpages
  By adding a piece of javascript code, you can prevent your images from being framed when users click on the image within Google Image Search. Visitors will not see the Google image frame but the full site and this may encourage more pageviews for your site as well. This practice may not entirely be endorsed by Google so try at your own risk.
 15. HotLink Images from Google Search 
  This involves going to Google Image Search and to do a search query for the image you want. Visit the original webpage and copy the image location to hotlink it on your own website. This helps your website to show up high among the image search ranks. For an example, check out these search results for Jessica Alba (slightly NSFW).  Most of the images in the top row are hotlinked and actually rank better than the original image source. You should probably note that hotlinking is frowned upon by most webmasters because it leeches their bandwidth, not to mention that you might be violating copyrights as well.
An alternative method of hotlinking is to hotlink Google’s cache itself. This short tutorial gives clear indication of how to do it but this method only allows you to use thumbnails, not to mention that some webmasters have reported seeing no results after trying this method. 
 16. Use Image Sizing to Target a Search Term. 
 The size of your image may determine the amount of visits you receive from Google Image Search. Some people use Google Image to search for wallpapers and if you’re targeting a specific keyword, try creating it in the form of a wallpaper or in the form of an icon, depending on how much competition there is for the specific image.
 17. Use Images about ‘Hot’ Topics.
  One easy way to get more visitors from Google images involves the deliberate use of images to catch visitors who are searching for ‘hot’ topics, some of which can be easily found through the use of Google Trends. For example, screenshots of popular ongoing TV shows could be integrated in some way in some webpages. Note that for maximum effect, your content should be relevant to the image used as well.
 18. Create a separate page and link to the page and image
  This process involves adding an optimized page webpage on your website along and link the image to that specific page which visitors can access via the ‘back’ anchor on the new page whenever they find your page through Google Image Search. I have not personally tried this but some have claimed that it helps both the regular search rank as well as the Image Search rank. See this page for the method in full.
 19. Monitor the Number of Google Images Indexed 
  An important part of Google Image Search optimization is to monitor how many images on your website are indexed by Google Image Search to see if you are taking the right steps to optimize your images. The easiest way to do this is to use a site search operator. For example, here is a list of images indexed on Boing Boing. Simply change boingboing.net to your url: http://images.google.com/images?q=site:boingboing.net



What is a sign-in seal?
2009-02-13T21:13:00.000-08:00
    A sign-in seal is a secret message or image that you create to help protect your Yahoo! account from phishing. Phishing — a play on the word "fishing" — is an attempt to steal your password and private account information. 
    Phishers create fake web sites that look like those of legitimate companies like Yahoo! to trick you into disclosing your user name and password. These pages often look identical to the real thing, so it can be hard to tell that you are on a phony, or "spoofed," site. 
    Creating a Yahoo! sign-in seal for your computer will help you ensure that you're on a legitimate Yahoo! sign-in page each time you use that computer to sign in to Yahoo!. Just look for the custom text or image you set up on the computer. If it's not there, you might have landed on a "spoofed" site.
        Your Yahoo! sign-in seal is saved on the computer you created it on. If you use more than one computer or browser, you should create a sign-in seal for each one. So if you create a Yahoo! sign-in seal on your computer at work, we suggest you create one on your home computer, too.
    Important: Don't create a Yahoo! sign-in seal on a computer you share with strangers, such as those in libraries, Internet cafes, and other public places.
    Creating a sign-in seal is fast and easy: Once you do, look for it every time you sign in to make sure you're on a genuine Yahoo! site. 
    If your seal does not appear, beware: You could be on a fraudulent site, although there may be other reasons you're not seeing it.
  



Blocking Google
2009-02-13T21:11:00.000-08:00
If you have pages or other content that you don't want to appear in Google's search results, you have a number of options.
 If you need to keep confidential content on your server, save it in a password-protected directory. Googlebot and other spiders won't be able to access the content. This is the simplest and most effective way to prevent Googlebot and other spiders from crawling and indexing content on your site. If you're using Apache Web Server, you can edit your .htaccess file to password-protect the directory on your server. There are a lot of tools on the web that will let you do this easily.
Use a robots.txt to control access to files and directories on your server. The robots.txt file is like an electronic No Trespassing sign. It tells Googlebot and other crawlers which files and directories on your server should not be crawled. In order to use a robots.txt file, you'll need to have access to the root of your host (if you're not sure, check with your web hoster). If you don't have access to the root of your domain, you can restrict access using the robots meta tag on individual pages.
 It's important to note that even if you use a robots.txt file to block spiders from crawling content on your site, other sites may still link to it. As a result, the URL of the page and, potentially, other publicly available information such as anchor text in links to the site, or the title from the Open Directory Project, can appear in Google search results. In addition, while all respectable robots will respect the directives in a robots.txt file, some may interpret them differently. However, a robots.txt is not enforceable, and some spammers and other troublemakers may ignore it. For this reason, we recommend password-protecting confidential information (see above).
 You can use the Generate robots.txt tool in Webmaster Tools to create a robots.txt file, and test it using the Analyze robots.txt tool.
 About using robots.txt to control access to your site 
Use a noindex meta tag to prevent content from appearing in our search results. When we see a noindex meta tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it. If the content is currently in our index, we will remove it after the next time we crawl it. (To expedite removal, use the Remove URLs tool in Google Webmaster Tools.) Other search engines, however, may interpret this directive differently. As a result, a link to the page can still appear in their search results. Because we have to crawl your page in order to see the noindex tag, there's a small chance that Googlebot won't see and respect the noindex meta tag (for example, if we haven't crawled the page since you added the tag).
 About using meta tags to control access to your site



Google-friendly sites
2009-02-13T21:05:00.000-08:00
Things to do
 Our webmaster guidelines provide general design, technical, and quality guidelines. Below are more detailed tips for creating a Google-friendly site.
 Give visitors the information they're looking for
Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.
 Make sure that other sites link to yours
Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines PageRank (our view of a page's importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google counts the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
 Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines. Some of these types of links (such as link schemes and doorway pages) are covered in our webmaster guidelines.
 Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site. 
Make your site easily accessible
Build your site with a logical link structure. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. 
 Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to examine your site. Most spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Macromedia Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then spiders may have trouble crawling it.
 Things to avoid
 Don't fill your page with lists of keywords, attempt to "cloak" pages, or put up "crawler only" pages. If your site contains pages, links, or text that you don't intend visitors to see, Google considers those links and pages deceptive and may ignore your site.
 Don't feel obligated to purchase a search engine optimization service. Some companies claim to "guarantee" high ranking for your site in Google's search results. While legitimate consulting firms can improve your site's flow and content, others employ deceptive tactics in an attempt to fool search engines. Be careful; if your domain is affiliated with one of these deceptive services, it could be banned from our index. 
 Don't use images to display important names, content, or links. Our crawler doesn't recognize text contained in graphics. Use ALT attributes if the main content and keywords on your page can't be formatted in regular HTML.
 Don't create multiple copies of a page under different URLs. Many sites offer text-only or printer-friendly versions of pages that contain the same content as the corresponding graphic-rich pages. To ensure that your preferred page is included in our search results, you'll need to block duplicates from our spiders using a robots.txt file. For information about using a robots.txt file, please visit our information on blocking Googlebot.



Creating a Sitemap
2009-02-13T20:59:00.000-08:00
In general, there are two types of sitemaps. The first type of sitemap is a HTML page listing the pages of your site - often by section - and is meant to help users find the information they need. While this type of sitemap can help both visitors and search engines navigate your site, it's different from an XML Sitemap that can be submitted to Google using Webmaster Tools.
 XML Sitemaps - usually called Sitemaps, with a capital S - are a way for you to give Google information about your site. This is the type of Sitemap we'll be discussing in this article.
 If you've created and verified a site using Google Sites, we've already created a Sitemap for you. All you need do is submit it in the normal way.
 If you have a blog with an RSS or Atom feed, you can easily submit that feed as a Sitemap.

Using an RSS / Atom feed as a Sitemap
Google accepts RSS (Real Simple Syndication) 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds. If you have a blog with an RSS or Atom feed, you submit the feed's URL as a Sitemap. Most blog software creates your feed for you. If your site doesn't have a feed, you can use Feedburner to create and publish one. Note that the feed may only provide information on recent URLs.
Creating a Sitemap based on a text file
A Sitemap should contain a list of your site's URLs - up to 50,000 of them. If you have a large site with more than 50,000 URLs, you should create multiple Sitemaps and submit a Sitemap index file <>.
 You can provide Google with a simple text file that contains one URL per line. For example:
 http://www.example.com/file1.html

http://www.example.com/file2.html
 For best results, follow these guidelines:
  You must fully specify URLs as Google attempts to crawl them exactly as provided. 
 Each text file can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs. If you site includes more than 50,000 URLs, you can separate the list into multiple text files and add each one separately. 
 The text file must use UTF-8 encoding. You can specify this when you save the file (for instance, in Notepad, this is listed in the Encoding menu of the Save As dialog box). 
 The text file should contain no information other than the list of URLs. 
 The text file should contain no header or footer information. 
 You can name the text file anything you wish. Google recommends giving the file a .txt extension to identify it as a text file (for instance, sitemap.txt). 
 You should upload the text file to your server, generally to the highest-level directory you want search engines to crawl. Once you've created this file, you can submit it as a Sitemap. This process, while manual, is the simplest and is probably best if you're not familiar with scripting or managing your web server.
If you have multiple websites, you can simplify the process of creating and submitting Sitemaps by creating one or more Sitemaps that includes URLs for all your verified sites, and saving the Sitemap(s) to a single location. All sites must be verified in Webmaster Tools. More information.
Creating a Sitemap based on the Sitemap protocol   
Google can accept Sitemaps in a number of formats, but we recommend creating a Sitemap based on the Sitemap protocol because the same file can be submitted to the other search engines, such as MSN and Yahoo!, that are members of sitemaps.org. 
 You can create a Sitemap in a number of different ways:
 Manually create a Sitemap based on the Sitemap protocol
Use the Sitemap Generator. If you have access to your webserver and it has Python installed, you can use our script to create a Sitemap that uses the Sitemap protocol. The Google Sitemap Generator is a Python script that creates a Sitemap for your site using the Sitemap Protocol. This script can create Sitemaps from URL lists, web server directories, or from access logs.
Use a third-party tool. A number of third parties offer tools you can use to create a valid Sitemap.
Other available formats
In addition to regular Sitemaps, you can also create Sitemaps designed to give Google information about specialized URLs. These include:
 Video Sitemaps 
Mobile Sitemaps
News Sitemaps
Code Search Sitemaps



Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2009-02-13T20:54:00.000-08:00
SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer." Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:
 Review of your site content or structure
Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
Content development
Management of online business development campaigns
Keyword research
SEO training
Expertise in specific markets and geographies.
 Keep in mind that the Google search results page includes organic search results and often paid advertisement (denoted by the heading "Sponsored Links") as well. Advertising with Google won't have any effect on your site's presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results. Free resources such as Webmaster Tools, the official Webmaster Central blog, and our discussion forum can provide you with a great deal of information about how to optimize your site for organic search. Many of these free sources, as well as information on paid search, can be found on Google Webmaster Central. 
  Before beginning your search for an SEO, it's a great idea to become an educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work. We recommend starting here:
 Google Webmaster Guidelines
Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes and serves the web.
 If you're thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you're considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.
 Some useful questions to ask an SEO include:
 Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
What's your experience in my industry?
What's your experience in my country/city?
What's your experience developing international sites?
What are your most important SEO techniques?
How long have you been in business?
How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?
 While SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. Practices that violate our guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your site's presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index. Here are some things to consider:
  Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.  Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:
      "Dear google.com,
I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."   
   Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night"   diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.
 
 No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.
 
Be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do. Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or "throwaway" domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to "help" you.
 
You should never have to link to an SEO.Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of "free-for-all" links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don't affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines -- at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.
 
Choose wisely. While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that, of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/... While Google doesn't comment on specific companies, we've encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.
 
Be sure to understand where the money goes.While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they "control" other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn't work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you're considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.
 
What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?
One common scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client's behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor's domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.
Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content. 
What are some other things to look out for?
There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It's far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:
owns shadow domains
puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
offers to sell keywords in the address bar
doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages
guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware
has had domains removed from Google's index or is not itself listed in Google
requests your FTP account information or root access to your server
If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.
In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on "File a Complaint Online," call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to:
   Federal Trade Commission
CRC-240
Washington, D.C. 20580   
If your complaint is against a company in a country other than the United States, please file it at http://www.econsumer.gov/.



Ranking
2009-02-13T20:53:00.001-08:00
Sites' positions in our search results are determined based on a number of factors designed to provide end-users with helpful, accurate search results. These factors are explained in more detail at http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html. 
 In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages. For more information about improving your site's visibility in the Google search results, we recommend reviewing our webmaster guidelines. They outline core concepts for maintaining a Google-friendly website.



Adding a site to Google
2009-02-13T20:23:00.001-08:00
Inclusion in Google's search results is free and easy; you don't even need to submit your site to Google. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as "spiders" to crawl the web on a regular basis and find sites to add to our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in our results aren't manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our spiders crawl the web.
 However, if your site offers specialized products, content, or services (for example, video content, local business info, or product listings), you can reach out to the world by distributing it on Google Web Search. For more information, visit Google Content Central.
 To determine whether your site is currently included in Google's index, do a site: search for your site's URL. For example, a search for [ site:google.com ] returns the following results: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agoogle.com .
 Although Google crawls billions of pages, it's inevitable that some sites will be missed. When our spiders miss a site, it's frequently for one of the following reasons:
 The site isn't well connected through multiple links from other sites on the web.
The site launched after Google's most recent crawl was completed.
The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to effectively crawl its content. 
The site was temporarily unavailable when we tried to crawl it or we received an error when we tried to crawl it. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to see if we received errors when trying to crawl your site.
 Our intent is to represent the content of the internet fairly and accurately. To help make this goal a reality, we offer guidelines as well as tips for building a crawler-friendly site. While there's no guarantee that our spiders will find a particular site, following these guidelines should increase your site's chances of showing up in our search results.
 Consider creating and submitting a detailed Sitemap of your pages.  Sitemaps are an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. With Sitemaps, you can automatically keep us informed of all of your current pages and any updates you make to those pages. Please note that submitting a Sitemap doesn't guarantee that all pages of your site will be crawled or included in our search results.



How Google crawls, indexes, and serves the web
2009-02-11T06:44:00.000-08:00
When you sit down at your computer and do a Google search, you're almost instantly presented with a list of results from all over the web। How does Google find web pages matching your query, and determine the order of search results?

Crawling

Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.  We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or "crawl") billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site. 
 Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits of each these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index. 
 Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we keep the search side of our business separate from our revenue-generating AdWords service.
Indexing

Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page। In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

Serving results

When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.

Host Name/Alias	Value/Destination
www	ghs.google.com
* This is the part of your website's address that you designated. For instance, if you chose `www.mydomain.com` as the address, `www` is the host name.