The short answer is a No,  Spam links to 404 pages or existing pages won’t have any effect on the rankings of your content. Google engineer John MU clarified this doubt in a Google webmaster help thread, saying:

I have never seen a case where bad links pointing to URLs that return 404 have ever caused a website any noticeable problem in web-search. 404s are a part of the internet, they’re expected to be seen when a non-existent URL is crawled, there’s no reason that I can think of where it would make sense to count 404s against a site.

The problem is more prevalent when link farms copy each and every post from your site, publish an excerpt and link back to the original story. A couple of years later, you delete a few hundred pages and suddenly, there is a storm of crawl errors in your Google webmaster tools account. What’s more daunting is that some of these pages never existed in your domain but Google webmaster tools continues to show a whole bunch of crawl errors and 404 not found errors.

Here is a brief FAQ about how to properly deal with 404 pages:

Should You Redirect 404 Pages To The Homepage?

Q: Is it a proper practice to 301 redirect 404 pages to the homepage of the same website? You don’t want users to see a dead end and hence it makes sense to redirect them to another useful resource section on the same domain or the index page.

A: Never redirect 404 pages to the homepage or any other page of your site, if their content is not similar.

A 301 redirect tells users and search engines that this page has moved to a new location and the older address is now invalid or outdated. When you 301 redirect a 404 page to the homepage of your site, you are passing a false message to users and search engines, as if the earlier page has something to do with the homepage of your domain. The worst case is when you redirect a bulk of pages to a particular page on your domain, whose content does not match with the content of the original page (now 404).

Instead, it is a far better idea to include a link of your site’s most important sections on the 404 page itself and make navigation a breeze.

Will Spam Links To 404 Pages Affect Rankings Of Existing Pages?

Q: A lot of spam sites have re-blogged or plagiarized content from your site, linking back to an old story which is no longer available. How will Google and other search engines treat links from spam sites? Will they have any affect on the rankings of your existing pages?

A: If an external site is linking to a non existent 404 page on your domain, there is nothing much you can do. In general, I wouldn’t worry about it at all because of the golden rule – external links that point to your domain can either help your site to get better ranks or they won’t have any effect whatsoever. In any case, no one can intentionally or unintentionally hurt your site’s reputation from spam link bombing.

In short, spam links to 404 pages do not have any negative impact on the rankings of your existing pages.Trying to get rid of junk links fro external sites or contacting the owner of the spam site is just a waste of time.

What Is The Correct Way to  Ensure That Google Removes 404 Pages From Its Index?

Q: You have used Google webmaster tools to fix crawl errors that occurred when you deleted a good amount of pages or blog posts from your domain. But these pages seem to be come back often in Google webmaster tool reports. What is the easiest way to ensure that Google will drop all the 404 pages from its index?

A: Google and other search engines crawl new and existing pages via hyperlinks. When a hyperlink to a page is not available, Google may sometimes refer to the XML sitemap.

Hence, in order to ensure that Google does not tries to recrawl your non existent pages, here are a few things you should do:

1. Use Xenu’s link sleuth or the excellent broken link checker plugin (WordPress only) to scan broken links on your entire domain. Fix these links first!

It is important to clean up your site and remove broken links periodically. This is because Google and other search bots will fetch those links whenever they see it and this would trigger a new crawl error in your Google Webmaster tools account. A large number of broken links is not a good user experience and might cause a drop in rankings for existing pages of your site.

2. Remove the reference of the older page from your XML sitemap. It is better to re-create or re-build a fresh sitemap of your entire website every six months.

3. Check the HTTP header of a 404 page and see whether the header returned is really 404 or something else.

And that will be all. Keep the non existent 404 pages as it is, Google will eventually drop them from its index after a given period of time.

Google Webmasters Tools Has A URL Removal Tool. Should You Use It To Fix Crawl Errors Occurring from 404 Pages?

No. Never!

Google’s URL removal tool is used to remove pages from Google search results and it has been designed to address urgent requests only. This tool should not be used to remove URL’s from your Google Webmaster tools account. Here is a useful FAQ by Google webmaster tools team which answers common questions about Google’s URL removal tool.

In general, you won’t need the URL removal tool at all. Honestly, I have wasted a good amount of time trying to fix crawl errors by removing 404 pages with the URL removal tool, which is nothing but a misconception.

When Can 404 Pages On My Website Have a Negative Impact?

The only possible scenario when 404 pages may have a negative impact is when a good number of internal links on the same site points to those 404 pages. These links would dilute the Google juice from your existing pages and might annoy the bots, who will face a dead end over and over again.

Otherwise, 404 pages is quite normal for any website and there is no need to panic over a thousand crawl errors in your Google webmaster tools account. Just take care of those broken links and you should be in pretty good shape.

Google: Spam Links To Non Existent 404 Pages On Your Site Won’t Hurt Rankings Of Existing Pages originally published on Ampercent

Don’t Display Popups Right at Startup

One of the really irritating moments is when a huge popup splashes right into your face even before you are given the chance to have a glimpse at the site. What is more, such a popup can make users leave your site altogether rather than subscribe for your newsletter and continue to the site itself. This is why you should avoid using popups at startup – frequently they simply scare your visitors (who could otherwise buy something from inside your site) away.

Select Proper Sizes

Size matters with popups. Obviously, too large is more obtrusive, so try to keep your popups small. Your options here vary depending on the abilities of the WordPress popup plugin you are using but a size of 200×300 (or less) should be more than sufficient.

Carefully Select the Display Schedule

The next most irritating thing after a popup at startup is a popup at each page refresh. Well, it is true that fewer visitors will experience the pain simply because they would leave in an instant without browsing more pages, but if you don’t want to scare all your visitors away, don’t even think of such a nag as a popup at each page refresh. A popup at each 5 or 10 pages, or that is displayed at predefined events, isn’t that obtrusive, so you’d better stick with a similar display schedule.

Include an Option Not to Display More Popups

For some users even a popup once in 5 or 10 pages might be too much. This is why, after you have displayed a popup once, give the user a choice not to see more of them.

Consider Popup Alternatives

Popups aren’t the only way to make your message visible. For instance, sidebar opt-in forms are a good alternative when you want to collect newsletter subscribers. In-content opt-in forms also work for the purpose. Gathering email addresses from comments (with the commenter’s consent, of course) is yet one more alternative for building a mailing list.

There are many more ways to make popups less obtrusive and more user-friendly in general. For instance, it goes without saying that a popup must have a Close button, so if the user doesn’t want to subscribe, he or she can continue to the site. It is all these small details that make or break a popup. As a result, it is better to fine-tune these details in order to maximize user experience and the efficiency of popups as a whole.

This is a guest post by Ada. Ada is the Blogger Relations Manager at WinkPress – a web resource about WordPress, its themes, and plugins. If you visit our site, you will learn more about WordPress popup plugins and many other WordPress plugins you can put to use on your site.

Image Credit: John Fischer

5 Thing To Remember Before Using Popups On WordPress originally published on Ampercent

Why?

The simple reason is that search engines are sometimes clueless on detecting the original content curator and might rank spam sites higher on search result pages. In those circumstances, you neither get any credit for writing that long blog post, nor you get any conversions. Worst part: search engines may consider you as a scraper and permanently remove your site from their index.

This is one of the reasons why I take duplicate content very seriously. I have set up Google Alerts for this domain and use a couple of online plagiarism checker to get email notification when someone rips off content from this website.

Check For Plagiarism In Word Documents, PDF’s And Text Files

But what about text files, word documents, PDF’s and other content which is not available under a website but as a file on your computer? How do you check for duplicate content in office documents, PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets?

One easy way to cross check a document for plagiarism issues is to copy a portion of the text and search for the same in Google or Yahoo. After completing your search, you will be able to quickly figure out whether the same text was directly lifted from another source.

This method, though universal in nature, has one disadvantage. You have to repeatedly copy text from the document and search it on Google. This can get really boring and hectic, considering the size and volume of documents you have to check on a regular basis.

A better alternative is to use Desktop Plagiarism checker – a free utility which can be used to find duplicate content in word document, PDF files, PowerPoint presentations and text files, without having to copy content from the document and paste it on Google, over and over again.

This is a great tool for students and teachers who have to frequently check project reports, homeworks, assignments and other textual material for duplicate content issues.

Once you have installed the desktop plagiarism checker on your computer (Windows only), remember to register a free account or the document import feature won’t work. Hit Control + O and drop the document you want to check in the program window. Next, choose the search engine (Google, Yahoo Or Bing) which you want to use and that will be all.

I must say that the results are pretty accurate and better than a usual Google search, which sometimes, depend on your Google account preferences (if you are not using an incognito window to search). The program will quickly find all the closest possible matches and will list them one by one, acording to the number of matching words, freshness and number of links.

You can export the list of all URL’s as an HTML file, so this will be handy when you want to keep a backup of all the plagiarized versions. The next step is to send a DMCA notice with their hosting provider or use the Google Adsense complaint form or the DMCA complaint form at Blogger (if the concerned website is using Blogger.com as its content management system).

Overall, this is surely one of the best duplicate content checker for Windows, which can be used to bulk check duplicate content in Word Documents, text files, Excel spreadsheets and PDF’s. If you run an educational organization and need an easy way to cross check research work, assignments or essays of students, who sometimes, copy paste all the stuff from Wikipedia and other websites.

Note: In order to make the maximum out of this tool, remember to use all the three search engines and select the “exact match” option.

Desktop Plagiarism Checker Lets You Cross Check Text Files, Word Documents And PDF’s For Copied Content originally published on Ampercent

Most Adsense publishers are too lazy to experiment with font types and font sizes, due to the myth that the selection of a font hardly affects its CTR. In general, Adsense publishers choose a specific font style for their Adsense units so that the text on the advertisement completely blends with the font style of their website’s HTML template. This is a safe practice and a good idea; the ads and the content compliment each other but here is another good option worth exploring.

If you are not sure about which font family you should use for an Adsense unit, the Adsense team offers some useful advice – use the default Adsense font family and stick to the default font size.

The Adsense team has rolled out a few improvements on how Adsense ads are shown to users, provided you have selected the default Adsense font family and font size for a specific Ad unit. Google says that their system will now automatically show the best performing font style and font size, which depends on a variety of factors such as operating system of the user, screen resolution, language, size of an ad unit and number of advertisements on any given page. Google says that they have thoroughly tested the new system and the goal of this update is to improve the performance of your ad units, without you having to do anything on your side.

This change will only affect those ad units where you have selected the default Adsense font family and the default Adsense font size. While it is always a good idea to split test ad units and see what works, you should give the default font family another chance to prove its worth.

From my own experiments, I have observed the following trends:

1. Bigger is better: Bigger font sizes always outperform their smaller counterparts. Never shy away to showcase your ad units with large fonts, there is no harm if the text size of your ads appear slightly bigger than the text size of your content.

2. Arial or Verdana, Times is not as good: Arial works great, Verdana is also good but the Times new roman font performs very poorly. The difference is not very large but you will hardly notice any Adsense publisher using the Times font.

3. Cycle:  It is a good idea to cycle through your color pallets and change the finer details every 3-4 months. This removes ad blindness for loyal readers who frequently pay a visit to your blog.

I am not very sure how much difference  it would make, should you switch to the default Adsense font family for some (if not all) of your Adsense ad units. But using this option would ensure a better user experience as the Adsense system will automatically gauge the visitors reading environment and deliver a matching ad style.

Tip: Improve the performance of Adsense link units.

Google’s Advice: Stick With The Default Font Family For Adsense Ads originally published on Ampercent

The images and media uploads can be further organized into nested sub-folders on the basis of month and year, this setting is available under Settings > Media within your WordPress administration area.

The default image upload folder works just fine, but there are situations when you may want to use a different folder for storing the images that are used in your blog posts and pages. Large websites, often use a sub-domain or a separate web server for storing and serving the images, while  Amazon S3, MaxCDN are some good services that can be used to fetch images and other static files via a content delivery network.

The Problem Of Moving All Images From One Directory To Another Directory In WordPress

Let’s say you have stored images, videos and all static files at files.domain.com instead of the default image upload location wp-content/uploads/, which ships out of the box with WordPress. This was your initial setting 2 years back and during these two years, you have written 2500 blog posts and uploaded 2000 images (just an example).

Now your website has a decent amount of traffic and you want to speed up the loading time by fetching images via a cached folder or an external content delivery network such as Amazon S3 or MaxCDN.

There are two problems with images that are stored in a sub domain of your website or in any other folder that is outside the default image upload directory:

1. WordPress caching plugins such as W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache can not cache files that are in a sub domain. These plugins will only cache internal files that are present within your WordPress media uploads folder ( the folder you have defined under Settings > Media).

2. You can surely download all the images from your image server and re-upload it to your external content delivery network. But the question is – how will you update all the image URL’s that is contained within all the old blog posts?

Move Images From One Directory To Another Without Breaking Your Blog Posts

Hence, moving all the images from one folder to another folder is just half the work done. You have to replace the older image URL’s with their newer counterparts, the following steps will tell you how to do that:

1. Use Filezilla or another FTP client to download the entire image upload directory on your computer.

2. Create the target folder and re-upload the entire image directory to its new target location on the same domain. It is advised to use the default image upload directory, if you are considering using caching plugins such as W3 Total cache.

For example: Lets say your older image folder is img.domain.com/images/ and you want to move all the images from this subdomain to wp-content/uploads/. Create a new folder at wp-content/uploads/old-images/ and upload the entire image directory here.

3. Be careful, you must preserve the file names of images and their corresponding folder structure. A single mistake in the name of any directory and the whole procedure will fail.

4. Take a back up of your WordPress database.

5. Install the Velvet Blues Update URL’s plugin. This script lets you perform a search and replace for URL’s in your WordPress database.

6. In the Old URL field, enter the base URL of your old media directory. In the new URL field, enter the base URL of your new media directory.

For example: http://img.domain.com/images/ will go in the old URL text field, while www.domain.com/wp-content/uploads/old-images/ will go in the new URL text field.

7. Click “Update URL’s Now” and its done. Load an old post and it should fetch the image from its new media directory.

If you find that the images are appearing broken and not loading at all, there is a high chance that you have messed up the image URL’s with a wrong address. In that case, restore the database backup and start the above procedure all over again.

The above technique can be used with external content delivery networks as well. All you have to do is get the newer base URL from the external CDN and replace it.

One word of caution: double check the folder structure in the target location. If its not a mirror copy of your older image server, updating the old image addresses to their newer counterparts won’t work.

Related tutorials:

1. How to migrate from one hosting provider to another
2. How to move core WordPress files to a different folder within your domain

How To Migrate WordPress Media Directory From One Folder To Another – A Guide originally published on Ampercent

• The webmaster himself copies content from different sources and uses the duplicate content on his website. This is called content scraping or online plagiarism, which is completely blindfold in nature.
• Technical issues regarding permalinks, theme, design and architecture of a site can also contribute towards duplicate content.

What do search engines do when they find duplicate content on a website?

When Googlebot detects the same content across multiple domains or web addresses, their algorithms determines the “cluster of content” and pick a representative URL to show in search results. Let’s take an example to understand the scenario.

Let’s say you wrote a blog post at example.com and someone copied the same content at xyz.com and abc.com. Google will crawl all the three pages from three different domains but it will index only one of the three sources.

Which source will get indexed first?

Noone knows but Google says that their algorithms do a reasonably good job in detecting the original source. When Google has processed the cluster of pages containing the same content, it will return only one URL in search results. All the other URL’s will never be shown on search results and they will be considered as duplicate content or shadow copies.

If your website has a substantial amount of duplicate content and Google continues to find duplicate content across different pages over a given period of time, your website will be penalized and might be completely removed from Google’s index.

Duplicate Content Reporting In Google Webmaster Tools

The good news is that Google will now report duplicate content issues within your Google webmaster tools dashboard. When Google detects duplicate content across several pages on your domain and chooses a representative URL on an external site, this situation is called “cross domain URL selection”.

What this means is that the content on your site is considered a duplicate copy of the content that is selected to be shown on search results.

Let us take an example to completely understand cross domain URL selection.

You wrote a blog post at abc.com but someone copied the entire article and published it on his aggregation channel at xyz.com. Due to varied circumstances, the page at xyz.com got indexed before Google indexed your page.

If the page at xyz.com is shown on search results and you don’t see your page indexed at all, be rest assured the page at xyz.com is considered a representative URL and your page has been flagged for duplicate content. In some situations, the spam site may rank higher

In the following video, Google Engineer Matt Cutts admits that search engines can sometimes be clueless in determining the original content curator and there is a thin chance that a shallow copy of your content might get indexed faster.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LsB19wTt0Q

Duplicate content reporting in Google Webmaster tools is available in the message center. It will show up only when Google finds duplicate content on your website. This is a great way to find out why some pages on your site are not showing up on Google.

If someone is ripping off your content and you see that Google and other search engines are indexing the spam source, here are a few ways you can tell Google that you are the original content curator:

• Go to whoishostingthis.com, find the web hosting provider of the spam site and file a DMCA complaint with the hosting provider.
• If the spam site is using Google Adsense to monetize his website, file a legal DMCA complaint using the Google Adsense DMCA complaint form.
• Login to your Google Webmaster tools account and submit a spam report.

Prevent Duplicate Content Issues On Your Website

As a responsible webmaster, you should ensure that your domain is free from technical glitches which may contribute towards duplicate content issues within your site.

Here are some tips and best practices for avoiding duplicate content within a single domain or across multiple TLD’s:

1. Use URL Canonicalization: Use the rel=”canonical” element within the <head> section of your page to point to the original base URL, which you want Google to index and show in search results. If the same content is accessible through multiple URL’s and you don’t want to delete the shadow copies, the rel=canonical element is often the best way to tell search engines that these pages are just a copy and should not be indexed.

Learn more about managing multilingual content across one domain or several TLD’s. In the following video, Google Engineer Matt Cutts tells how to deal with same content posted across multiple top level domains:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo

Note: Search engines reserve the right to ignore your canonicalization rules under severe circumstances and return the best suited match to the user. Algortihms!

2. 301 redirect: A 301 redirect is the best way to tell search engines that this page has moved or merged with this new page. If you find that several pages on your site have the same content, do a permanent 301 redirect from the old pages to the new page which you want Google to show in search results.

3. Permalinks: If you are using WordPress or another CMS to manage the content of your blog, check the structure of your URL. There are so many situations when your permalinks and post slugs may contribute towards duplicate content.

4. Check your Archive pages: Most content management systems e.g WordPress have category, tag, date, author and other archive pages which might show the entire post content on the archive page. This is not a good practice and you should ensure that the archive pages show only a portion of the content. Tip: use the_excerpt() instead of the_content()

5. Using Robots.txt: There can be situations when you might have to permanently block duplicate pages using a Robots.txt file. This is not full proof because if someone links to the duplicate page, Goglebot will crawl that link and find that duplicate page sooner or later. The solution ideal here is to use the rel=”canonical” element or do a 301 redirect to the original page.

6. Cross domain rel=canonical is a good idea: If you have multiple domains which has essentially the exact same content across multiple pages, it makes perfect sense to do cross domain rel canonicals. Google and other search engines support cross domain rel canonicals and this is just a secondary alternative of 301 redirects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI6L2N4A0hA

7. Using a Mobile optimized Theme? Are you using a mobile optimized theme for your website? Make sure the mobile optimized theme isn’t causing “cloaked” pages or creating duplicate content issues.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY9h3G8Lv4k

It is absolutely fine to use a different URL structure for the mobile version of your site but you should always implement the rel=canonical attribute and point back to the page which should be indexed.

My advice here is to not let Google index the mobile website at all. Let Google index your main website only, you can always detect the user agent of the user’s browser and fetch him the mobile version yourself.

Got tips or suggestions? Let’s hear them in the comments.

Google Webmaster Tools Will Now Report Duplicate Content Found Across Multiple Domains originally published on Ampercent

At first I thought the problem might be associated with my site’s theme and how the loop is made. So I logged into WordPress, only to discover that all my blog posts were deleted. The “Right now” section under WordPress dashboard showed 0 posts although all the comments were intact. Here is a screenshot

I felt terrible realizing the situation because the database was working fine and its just that all my posts have been deleted from the database. No Posts and pages were present in the Trash folder as well.

My initial reaction was that someone must have hacked into my WordPress administration area and he has deleted all the posts and pages. I quickly checked my WordPress user account and found that the username and passwords were not changed at all. Not to forget the fact that I use the very awesome WordPress Login lockdown plugin, so it was very unlikely that someone secretly logged into my site’s WordPress administration area.

If you ever come across a similar situation on your site, calm down. Your site and My SQL database are just fine and it is possible to restore all the posts within 5 minutes.

Solve WordPress 0 Posts Error

There is a high chance that the wp_posts table of your site’s MY SQL database needs a repair. Login to your web hosting account, go to phpmyadmin and select the MySQL database of your website. Next, select the wp_posts table, scroll down and hit “Repair” at the bottom

lt should take half a minute until the table is repaired. In my case, all the posts and pages were back just after I repaired the wp_posts table. Phew!

I use an automatic database backup plugin which emails me the database backup after every 3 days. So in my case, the last option would have been to restore a previous database backup to my existing WordPress installation. However, I decided to first post my concern at my Facebook profile and see what other bloggers and geeks recommend. Thankfully, I got this suggestion from RajuPP and it worked like a charm.

Lessons learned:

1. Do not panic when your site acts weird. Think and act!
2. Post your concern on your social profiles. There is a chance that someone knows how to fix the problem you are having at the moment.
3. Do not always listen to the tech support guys. They generally offer good advice but are sometimes clueless about the cause of a problem.

WordPress Dashboard Shows 0 Posts? Your Site Isn’t Hacked originally published on Ampercent

A new study from Chitika reveals some shocking results.

A team of engineers and data experts at Chitika decided to find out the relation between organic rankings at SERP’s and the click through rate of advertisements within the site. The general idea  is that the site which ranks higher should have a slightly more click through rate for advertisements, when compared to the site which ranks lower on search results. This is because the traffic you get for the first organic position is sort of more “hungry” and “targeted” so they are most likely to convert well and click the advertisements, embedded within your blog.

However, Chitika’s research and observation reveals something out of the track.

From the above graph, it looks like the CTR of advertisements is inversely proportional to the site’s position on Google search results. Which means, the lower you are ranked, the more is your click through rate for advertisements.

As an example, the page that is ranked at number 10 gets almost double click through rate for advertisements – when compared to the first ranked page on Google search results.

Why Is the Click Through Rate Different for Higher and Lower Ranked Pages?

The click through rate of any element on a webpage depends on two major factors:

• How you have devised your website and what you want your users to do.
• What kind of users you get.

Example: If you are dealing with an extremely geeky audience, you will have a tough time converting them using advertising programs like Google Adsense or other CPC ads. These users already know that the link on the leaderboard is nothing but an advertisement and they would think thrice before clicking it.

This type of audience will convert well with offers, coupon codes, downloads and subscriptions. The plain logic is that they know what value they will be getting by using your conversion funnel.

Now why is that the click through rate of advertisements is lower for pages with high Google rankings, when compared to the lower ranked pages? According to me, the following may just be the reason.

When a user clicks the top ranked link on a Google search result page, he is more focused and there is a high chance that he will find the answer for his query right from that page. Hence, the need for exploring other options on that given page is lowered, which results in a low click through rate for advertisements.

In case of a lower ranked page, the user is not as focused and he is desperately looking for an answer. He might have explored other top ranked pages, could not find his answer and falled back to the search result page by hitting the dreaded “back” button. He is spending more time on finding his answer and is willing to explore other options on any page that solves his query.

Hence, the higher click through rate for advertisements.

Of course, the revenue generated through advertisements is more likely to be greater for the higher ranked page than the lower one because the higher ranked page draws major proportion of the traffic. But if you are considering only the click through rate for advertisements, ranking lower might just inflate it.

There is another study which reveals that an Adwords ad that is placed lower gets more click through rate, when compared to another Adword ad placed right above it. Here is the diagram:

I know.

This is highly surprising and should not be the ideal user behavior but remember that you can neither predict nor prejudge the behavior of Internet audience. Most of the times, users react differently and things won’t go as you have planned.

The only way you can get your desirable results is by rigorous testing and experimenting different sets with real users and tracking what works and what doesn’t. Every website has a different audience and what works wonders for me, might be disastrous for you.

Lower Ranked Pages Get More CTR For Advertisements – Study originally published on Ampercent

Google is becoming very serious in their attempt to identify original authors and people who have trust and expertise. If Google thinks that your are a reputed person in your industry, your thumbnail image will be shown in search result pages. An example is shown below:

This is a win-win situation for both users and Google. After seeing the author thumbnail, users will consider your page as trustworthy and they are most likely to click that link and land into your page, looking for the answer they are looking for. Google wins, because their users can quickly find the best content.

Adding authorship markup across all the pages of your site is fairly easy. I have detailed all the steps in my previous tutorial here – Adding authorship markup rel=”author” in WordPress. Here is the pictorial representation of how the rel=”author” markup tag should be implemented on your website.

When you Can’t Edit Your Website’s Template – Add Authorship markup Using URL Parameters

In order to apply the correct syntax for Authorship markup, you have to modify some parts of  your site’s HTML code and add the desired rel=”author” and rel=”me” tags.

Now, how do you implement authorship markup on a site where you don’t have the permission to edit or modify the HTML template? What if your site is on a free blogging platform e.g Tumblr, Posterous, Google Sites – where you don’t have enough options to modify the HTML and add the desired author tags?

Luckily, Google has an alternative way to help you out. Here is what you have to do:

1. Open your Google Plus profile and copy your profile URL.

2. When you are publishing a new page on your site, use the following code at the bottom of your page

<a href=”Your Google Profile URL?rel=author”>+Your Google Profile Name</a>

3. This is important.

You must use the + before your Google profile name because this syntax tells Google that this anchor text points to the Google profile of the person and it is not linked accidentally or unintentionally.

4. If you don’t have enough permissions to edit the HTML source of your blog post, you can always write your name in plain text and add the rel=”author” URL parameter using the “Link” button on your site’s text editor.

5. One last step. Complete this form and let Google know that you are using URL parameters for author markup on your site.

The full markup is more bulletproof and recommended for users who can edit the HTML template of their sites. Do not use this alternative method, thinking that both of them are equally feasible. However, if you can’t implement the full markup, this is the only workaround to have authorship markup support on your site using special anchors and URL parameters.

Watch the following video where Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson talk about Authorship markup for sites who can’t edit the HTML source of their template.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG3Oh7Ues8A

Adding Authorship Markup On Your Website Using Special Anchors And URL Parameters originally published on Ampercent

Whenever you enter the address of a webpage in your browser’s address bar, the browser requests data from the server where the page is originally hosted. The web server returns the data but before the browser receives and renders the data at the clients end, an HTTP header is returned by the web server that has the status code of the given page.

In general, HTTP status codes are not meant for human visitors but both desktop and mobile browsers use this information to know more about the present condition of the webpage in question. If the page is in a healthy state, the HTTP status code returned should be a 200 OK. If the page has been moved to a new address, the HTTP status code should be 301 and so on.

There are lots of different HTTP status codes in place and the following table should explain what are the different types of HTTP header responses and their purpose in brief detail:

* This is the only way to tell search engines that your old page has moved to a new location and the newer URL should be re-crawled and re-indexed. Only this server header preserves link juice and Google Pagerank but remember that if the page is part of a redirect chain, a considerable portion of the PR may be lost overtime.

** This should be normally the HTTP status code returned by a webpage if it’s static in nature and needs no GET request from the user.

*** If any of your pages return a 403 HTTP status code, it means that your web server denied the request of the page to Googlebot and human visitors. A possible case is when your web host is facing downtimes or it is blocking spiders and search bots from accessing some parts of your website, so you should be careful about it.

# This is similar to a 404 error but the standard practice is to 301 redirect the missing page to it’s newer location. If the page has no new location, it is recommended to return a 410. If you have temporarily removed the page from the server, use a 503 instead.

How To Check the HTTP Status code of a Webpage?

To check the HTTP status code or the server headers returned by a webpage, go to this link, enter the complete web address of the page in the “check server headers” text box and hit the “check” button.

The site will process your webpage, check the HTTP server header and show it back to you. If you find that the server header returned is 200 OK, it means that the page in question is opening normally to all users and search engines or web crawlers can successfully parse it at their end.

Another good way to bulk check server headers is to use fetch as Googlebot in your your Google webmasters tools account. Go to site diagonostics > fetch as Googlebot and enter the URL of a page within your site to check its HTTP status code.

Also read: List of HTTP status codes

Different Types of HTTP Status Codes Explained In Layman’s Term originally published on Ampercent