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tells users and search engines that this page has moved to a new location and the older address is now invalid or outdated.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

Logging into your Google account on a public computer is a risky affair, thanks to keyloggers and scripts that can track every keystroke when you type in the username and password of your Google account in a web browser. We have earlier discussed some ways to bypass this problem but here is a simple solution which requires only an Android phone to get the job done.

If you have an Android smartphone, you can use a simple QR code to login to your Google account on any computer, directly from your Android phone. You don’t have to use the computer’s keyboard at all, as you can type your Gmail account credentials from the phone itself and Google’s QR code login system will log you in the computer’s web browser.

Here is how it works.

1. Go to the Android market and install a barcode scanner application. I use this one, its free!

2. When you want to login to your Gmail, Google Reader or the generic Google account from a public computer, refrain from using the regular sign in page. Go to http://goto.google.com/login instead

4. You will see a simple webpage containing only a QR code. Now open up the barcode scanner application on your Android phone and scan the QR code

5. When the app has scanned the QR code from the computer’s web browser, hit the “Open Browser” button. This will open up the Google account sign in page on your Android device, where all you have to do is type in the username and password of your Google account and hit “Sign in”.

6. The web browser of your Android device will show a big notification

“Stop! Only proceed if you arrived at this page by scanning a login barcode at Google.com”

Ignore this message and hit the “Start with Gmail” button.

As soon as you hit the “Start with Gmail” button, the web browser of your computer will refresh and you will be signed into your Google account. Turns out, this is a really smart way to bypass typing the username and password of your Google account on a public computer which you don’t trust. Pull out your Android, scan the QR code and you’re signed into your Google account on the computer’s web browser.

There are other geeky workarounds e.g the two step Google authentication system is ideal for low end phones which do not have a barcode scanner application installed. Thank you Martin.

Use Google’s QR Code Login System For Logging Into Your Google Account On Public Computers [Android] 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

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

Warning: We believe your account was recently accessed from Canada (IP address).

I use a Google Apps account as my work email and the first thing I did after seeing this message was to change the password of my email account from Google Apps email management panel. The security of an email account is critical because this email address is tied with majority of my online accounts which includes Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.

Imagine the situation when someone else gets access to your email inbox and downloads all email messages using POP /IMAP. That would mean disaster because the hacker would then be able to read all your archived email conversations and may leak out confidential data anytime.

Since this email is hosted on Google Apps, I was in a way sure that this is not the case of any human being accessing my Gmail inbox from another computer. I said “sure” because of the following reasons:

1. Google Apps users can never change their email password on their own. They must contact the domain administrator and get the email account password reset.

2. My Gmail address is not the domain administrator for this domain. I use a separate username as domain administrator and I never use that email address in any other website  – it’s just made for the purpose of managing this domain and nothing else.

3. I never use someone else’s computer for checking email and neither I remember any username or passwords in my head. I don’t even save passwords in my browser, so chances of getting hacked by a keylogger program or someone sniffing my Gmail account username and password through the network is ruled out. This is because I never type the passwords in the first place, my password manager performs an autotype which cannot be tracked by any third party malicious software.

Be A Detective – Find Who Is Accessing Your Gmail Account

Before finding out the reason of third party activity on your Gmail account, be sure to take the following measures:

1. Reset your Gmail account password immediately.

2. Open your Gmail inbox, scroll to the bottom and click the “Details” link at the bottom of the page. This will open a new browser window with a list of IP addresses and computers that have recently accessed your Gmail account. Click “Signout of all other sessions” to ensure that no one else is logged into your Gmail account from any other computer. [#]

3. Go to Gmail settings > Filters and look for any suspicious filters being added to your Gmail account. Do not ignore this step because some Gmail filters may forward email to another account or trash them without your consent.

After doing all the above steps, you are sure that no one else has access to your Gmail account and it is safe from potential hackers and data theft. But my case was a little different.

I was again shown the same notification when I logged into my Gmail account this morning. This is highly suspicious!

Find Third Party Websites That Have Access To Your Gmail Account

There is one thing I missed – third party sites whom I have authorized to access data from my Google account.

There are a lot of websites who support creating an account with them using your Google account or with another service provider that supports open ID. I prefer creating accounts with OPENID as I don’t have to receive email notifications and neither I have to create another set of username and passwords.

Now the problem is that when these companies switch hosts or they are acquired by another company – they begin a new verification system for all their users. Either the domain name of the company had changed or they have migrated hosts, which may be one of the reasons why I was continuously getting the Gmail notification –“Your account is being accessed from another computer”

To find which websites are authorized to access your Gmail account, follow these simple steps:

1. Login to your Google account and click your username  at the top right corner of the page. Then select “Account settings”

2. In the next page, click on “authorizing applications and sites” under personal settings.

3. Find the list of sites that are authorized to access your Gmail account. See whether these were the same sites whom you have authorized and if you find any site whom you haven’t authorized, click “Revoke access”

It is very much possible that the website with whom you had registered an account at an earlier point of time has been bought by another company and the new system has started account verification on all user accounts registered with them.

When you revoke the third party access, your account will be destroyed at that website so you should backup important stuff or change user account credentials at the third party site before revoking third party access from your Gmail.

Related: Gmail security checklist

Find Websites That Are Authorized to Access your Gmail Or Google Account originally published on Ampercent

Sitelinks for a website are generated automatically and their order and visibility changes with time. Google analyzes the structure of a website and determines some key pages which might help users find the information they are looking for.

Here is how sitelinks of this website appears on Google search:

In general, Google shows 8-10 links as sitelinks on search result pages.Note that sitelinks appear only when you search for a site name, URL or something which is exclusively related to the site (name of author, for example). The size of Google sitelinks is also smaller when compared to the size of title links on search result pages.

Looks like Google is going to drastically increase the size and number of sitelinks shown on search result pages, as reported by a Webmaster world user Suzukik. Here is the example screenshot Suzukik provides:

Just look at the font size of these sitelinks – their size is so large that the entire sitelinks section of the first result occupies the region that appears above the fold in a browser. The second and third results are nowhere to be seen above the fold and the number of sitelinks have also increased from 8 to 12. Additionally, a meta description snippet for sitelinks is also shown beneath each link but its really very short in length (30-40 characters).

These mega sitelinks on Google search might be a part of Google’s usability testing but looking at the screenshot, I don’t think this will create an enjoyable user experience. Sitelinks help users jump to a specific section of a website but covering the whole search result page with sitelinks of a particular site doesn’t look like a very good idea. Google has been heavily experimenting with the layout and usability of Google search for a couple of months. First they launched a redesigned Google search with a black navigation menu bar across all Google services. Next, they are also planning to make that navigation bar sticky, so that users can access the menu links when they have scrolled to the bottom of a search result page.

Now consider the situation when both these changes will be made live globally. The navigation menu bar sticks up on top while the whole first page is occupied by huge mega sitelinks, when someone is performing a site specific query or looking to find a particular section of a specific website.

Google Testing Bigger Sitelinks On Search Result Pages? originally published on Ampercent

The widget page generates a simple HTML code which on embedding shows only a G+ icon but not your Google Plus profile image. Further, neither your follower count is shown and nor there is any option for readers to add you to their Google Plus circles.

However, you can create a much better Google Plus follow widget for your Google Plus profile and add it to your website. Go to widgetsplus.com, enter your Google Plus profile ID and you are done. The site will immediately generate the embed code for your Google Plus profile widget, now all you have to do is paste the code to the source of your website template and make the widget live for everyone. And since the widget uses javaScript, it will support all blogging platforms and content management systems e.g WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Drupal, vBulletin and Posterous.

Here is a preview of how my Google Plus profile widget looks like:

Visitors and readers coming to this page can add me to their Google Plus circles by clicking the “Add to Circles” button. This is quite similar to Twitter follow buttons and Facebook fan boxes, the only difference is that this is not an official tool from Google.

The above widget can be customized according to your requirements. You can choose a preferred font type, background color, width and title settings to blend with your site’s design or theme. Here is how the settings panel of widgetplus looks like:

Another cool thing about widgetplus is that you can also include your public Google Plus posts just inside the widget. This will allow your site visitors to read your Google Plus posts and updates without leaving your site.

Statistics For Your Google Plus Profile

The embed code uses JavaScript and thus, it can track how many followers were received from the widget and how many people clicked the “Add to circles” button and added you to their Google Plus circles. This is very cool, given the fact that the site requires no registrations or signups and never asks you to create an account with them.

If you want more followers on Google Plus, it would be a good idea to embed this widget on your website or blog and let your site visitors convert into loyal fans. Thanks Mayur for the tip.

Recommended reading: Google Plus tips: Your guide to everything Google Plus

Get A Google Plus Profile Widget For Your Website originally published on Ampercent

Googlebot (Google’s web spider) crawls billions of websites on a regular basis to crawl and chew textual content, images, videos and other document formats (e.g PDF, DOC) embedded in websites. This process can be extremely fast for popular sites who post a lot of unique content on a regular basis. Big media publications are indexed within 10 seconds while crawling a new story on this blog takes around a minute or so.

But how do you make sure Google’s crawler indexes your site’s recently updated pages in a matter of few seconds? How do you tell Google that there are a few pages on your site which needs immediate crawling and deeper indexing?

Google maintains a public page where anyone can request their site URL’s to be crawled and indexed. This page was built quite a while ago and it’s no longer considered a viable way to get your pages crawled and indexed faster.

The good news is that Google has recently introduced a better and faster way to index your website’s internal and recently updated pages. If you have a Google Webmasters tools account, you can fetch the pages and tell Google that these pages need immediate crawling.

Let Google Crawl Your Important Pages Really Fast

Login to your Google Webmasters tools account and go to the “Fetch as Googlebot” page. Add the page of your site which you want Google to index and click “Fetch”. When Google has successfully fetched the given page, you will see a link to submit that page in Google’s index

After submitting the URL to Google’s index, you have two options

1. Tell Google to index only this page
2. Tell Google to index this page and all the pages that are linked from the current page.

Here is the option which will be shown:

Generally, I would go with the first option but in case you have severely changed your site’s structure, you should go ahead and choose the “URL and all linked pages” option.

Google does not guarantee that they will index your pages and process all the requests right away. However, this method can improve the indexing of older pages which have been updated recently. You can test this feature with pages that have no backlinks and takes a long time to get crawled, normally.

When You Should Use The Fetch As GoogleBot Feature In Google Webmaster Tools?

There are a couple of situations when the fetch as Googlebot feature in Google webmaster tools can come in handy. Some examples:

1. You are live blogging an event and breaking a news story on a media event. Chances are that your competitor sites are also writing about the same story at that very moment, so it is important to get your page indexed faster and as early as possible.

2. You are running a contest on your site and the content of a page is changing every hour because of user generated content being added and deleted by moderators. If you want Google to rank your page for relevant queries, requesting a fresh crawl of that page can help.

3. Your site is fairly new and it has no backlinks. You want Google to crawl your site as fast as possible because you want to rank for some keywords which are time critical in nature.

4. You have added a few pages to a directory of your site which was previously disallowed using the robots.txt file. This directory is fairly deeper within your site’s architecture and you want to ping Googlebot and say “hey, here are a few pages on my site which is placed on a very deep level directory. Please crawl and index it, if you will”.

Please note that using Google’s fetch as Googlebot feature is not mandatory and should be done sparingly. Don’t go around and start fetching each and every page of your site, this wont help as far as indexing or rankings are concerned. You should use this feature only when a few pages require urgent indexing and better crawling.

If you are having issues with slow crawling, I highly recommend fixing the crawl errors first and ensure your content is crawlable. Fetching the page in Google Webmaster tools wont help repetitive crawling, if you have blocked the page using a robots.txt file or using a meta noindex tag in the head section.

Improve the Crawling And Indexing Of Your Website: Some Tips You Should Consider

If you want to improve the crawl rate of your website and ensure that your pages are indexed faster, here are a few tips you should know;

1. Create a Google Webmaster tools account and add your site to Google webmaster tools. Routinely monitor your Google webmaster tools account for crawl errors, site specific issues and redirections. Fix them as early as possible.

2. Create an XML sitemap of your website and submit it on your Google webmaster tools account. If possible, create a separate sitemap for Google news, videos and a different sitemap for images.

3. If your website does not offer an RSS feed, create one. Google uses RSS feeds for discovering new and fresh pages of your website.

4. Whenever you create a new page or publish a new blog post, tweet a link of the page on your Twitter account. If that page gets a fair amount of retweets, Google will notice it.

5. Use Pubsubhubbub on your site. It’s an asynchronous way to tell Google when you have new content waiting to be crawled and indexed.

6. Produce content on a daily basis. Google loves sources who produce original and interesting content daily.

7. Check your Robots.txt file and your meta tags used in the head section. Have you blocked specific pages of your site from getting crawled? Did you by mistake added a noindex,follow tag on any of the page?

8. Add a link of the new page to the homepage of your site. In general, the homepage  of a site gets the maximum PageRank and link juice from external sites, so Google will frequently visit your homepage multiple times a day.

9. If you get a backlink to the page, it will be crawled right away. But be careful with this approach, don’t start spamming forums and blog directories to get backlinks for every other page of your site. This approach won’t help but hurt you in the longer run.

If you ask me, I would leave it up to Google to index the content of newer pages on this site. I would check the technical aspects and architecture of my site and won’t obsess about how frequently Google crawls the newer pages or recently updated posts of this blog.

Turns out they do a really fine job, this page got indexed within 1 minute.

Improve The Indexing Of Your Website’s Recently Updated Pages Using Fetch As GoogleBot In Google Webmaster Tools originally published on Ampercent

If you are already active on Facebook and Twitter, you know how difficult it is to manage both the social streams concurrently. Both Facebook and Twitter are so real time in nature that you just can’t afford to remain offline and check them at the end of the day, much like email. You have to participate in real time discussions, comment on posts, mentions, retweet stuff, and engage in the conversation.

Now here is another social network, which is also real time in nature and getting a lot of love from early adopters. You have already created your Google Plus profile but you are finding it extremely difficult to monitor these social sites and carry on with your routine workflow. There is no desktop client which lets you manage Facebook, Twitter, Google plus and other social sites, all at one place and neither there is an easy way to share posts on Google Plus, Facebook and Twitter – all from one place.

The problem is not with Facebook or Twitter.

In fact, the problem lies with Google Plus. The social site has not allowed support for any API’s which external applications or websites can use. Since Google Plus is still learning it’s baby steps, there seems to be no application which can migrate your entire Google Plus stream on a desktop app or third party online tool (TweetDeck for example).

However, here is a useful workaround that will let you use Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, all from one place.

Using Google Plus, Facebook and Twitter – All From One Place

The idea is neat.

We can’t move our Google Plus stream and access it from a third party application or a desktop client. However, we can surely move our Facebook news feed and Twitter timeline using their API’s.

You have got it – a simple browser extension called startgoogleplus lets you use Facebook and Twitter directly from your Google Plus account. You can post status updates on Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter all from the same page and save yourself from the frustration of updating multiple social sites, recursively.

Following are the steps involved:

1. Go to StartGooglePlus.com and download their Chrome extension. Firefox users can grab the add-on here.

2. Click the extension button and login to your Facebook and Twitter accounts one by one. Next, grant all the necessary permissions to Facebook and Twitter that you want to use this extension to integrate your Facebook and Twitter accounts within your Google Plus account.

3. All done. Your Twitter and Facebook accounts will be directly accessible from your Google Plus account and you can read the updates of these social sites from your Google Plus stream. There is more, you can post status updates on Facebook and Twitter from Google Plus, without having to open your Facebook or Twitter account at all.

Reading Your Facebook News Feed And Twitter Timeline from Google Plus

Login to Google Plus and you should see two new links in the left sidebar –  Facebook and Twitter.

Clicking them will load the respective timelines directly into Google Plus, so now you can check Facebook and Twitter updates directly from your Google Plus account. Your Facebook news feed and Twitter timeline will automatically load in the background and reading the updates on these social sites is now just a click away.

Here is how my Facebook news feed looks inside my Google Plus account:

And here goes my Twitter timeline in Google Plus

From the above two screenshots, observe that you can also comment on status updates or mention someone on Twitter directly from your Google Plus account. The only catch here is that unlike Twitter, the extension won’t be able to show you mention, retweets or direct messages.

Post Status Updates On Facebook And Twitter From Google Plus

Previously, we have discussed an automatic way to sync status updates from Google Plus to your Facebook account using Facebook mobile email address. While this method works great for all the updates, it might not be convenient on specific occasions.

On the other hand, the start Google Plus extension gives you much more control on how your Google Plus posts get shared on your Facebook and Twitter profiles. Whenever you want to share a specific post from Google Plus to Facebook or Twitter, all you have to do is choose the corresponding icons in the “compose message” box.

When you have posted your update on Google Plus, the same post will also be posted on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. This is a lifesaver and I have been searching for something like this since Google Plus was released. I can choose whether a specific link or update from Google Plus gets shared on my Facebook account but not on my Twitter profile.

Wait There Is More! You Can Also Check Your Gmail Account From Google Plus

This is icing on the cake.

Start Google Plus lets you check Gmail mails from Google Plus, without having to open your Gmail account in a new browser tab. The extension adds a sleek Gmail notification column at the left top of Google’s navigation menu bar, as shown below:

Whenever, you receive a new email on your Gmail account that’s tied to your Google Plus profile, the Gmail icon will turn red and will show an unread count of Gmail emails. Clicking the icon will pull down a menu with the subject line and a brief preview of the message body. You cannot compose an email from Google Plus but the real time notifications are definitely going after.

All in all, this extension is by far one of the best utilities on Google Plus and we highly recommend giving Start Google Plus a spin. Tell us your thoughts and ideas in the comments below and be sure to read our Google Plus tips collection.

Using Facebook, Twitter And Google Plus From A Single Browser Tab – A Complete Guide originally published on Ampercent

Let’s say you are reading an article on a blog during office hours and you have a lot of browser tabs open. Accessing internet is allowed in your office as long as you don’t cross the limits and disturb the office environment. Now when you are half way down to reading the article, one of the ads start auto playing and you find that your computer is making a very loud sound. Worst case is when your computer is connected to an external speaker and the audio jack is behind the CPU panel, stored on top of the office cubicle.

You want to stop the audio as soon as possible but can’t find the browser tab responsible for producing the sound. Feeling helpless, you mute your computer’s sound from Windows system tray and close all browser tabs one by one. By that time, your office colleagues are already aware that you were reading a webpage that had a Gillett advertisement in it.

To save yourself from these embarrassing situations, here is a browser extension which you can use.

Mute Browser Tabs That Auto Play Audio Or Video

Mute Tabs is a Google Chrome extension which lets you instantly mute the sound coming from any browser tab without having to figure out which browser tab is making that noise. The extension makes it easy to control sounds produced by different tabs in Google Chrome by displaying a list of websites that are playing sound, right at this moment.

Whenever you want to stop sound produced in the browser, pull down the extension options from Google Chrome’s right click context menu and mute the browser tab which is playing an audio advertisement, YouTube video or an audio podcast. Optionally, the extension also lets you mute all background tabs in Google Chrome so that no sound is ever produced from the browser.

There are handy options to pause, play or stop the sound and you can mute sounds on specific tabs without muting all tabs in Google Chrome. This is useful when you are watching a YouTube video and suddenly another tab starts making playing an audio advertisement . In such situations, you can quickly mute all other browser tabs while play the sound coming from the current tab, without leaving it altogether.

MuteTabs is a free download, works wherever Google Chrome does. Read the FAQ here

Mute The Browser Tab Which Is Making Noise – Chrome Extension originally published on Ampercent