Verify your Google + page to get more exposure in search results

I spotted an interesting post in the AdSense blog just now.

It's actually been deleted from the blog (probably because it was supposed to be posted on the Google+ blog, not the AdSense one), but the original feed content is still available, for now, at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tuAm/~3/30qIWIcbTMk/social-fridays-gain-visibility-by.html

According to the feed, it's all about verifying Google + pages, ie making an official link between a page and a website.   They say

Verifying your +page confirms that the +page actually belongs to you. Once your +page is verified, it’ll appear with a checkmark designed to help our users find what they’re looking for.
and

Verified +pages that are popular and engaging may appear on the right side of relevant Google.com search results, for users who are logged in. .... Please keep in mind that to be eligible, the +page also needs to be active with regularly-updated content

To verify your page, you need to

1. Link your +page to your website: Fill out the ‘About’ section of your Google+ page, being sure to enter your site’s top-level URL.
2. Link your website to your +page: Add a Google+ badge or code snippet to your site, ...
3. Complete ... [the]  verification request form.
4. ... continue posting regularly to your +page ....

The verification form, at http://support.google.com/plus/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=page_verification&rd=1 states the conditions a little differently (boldness mine);

• Your Google+ page must be authorized by your commercial entity, organization, brand, or product.
• Your Google+ page’s profile must contain a link to your organization’s website.
• Your organization’s website must connect to your Google+ page, by adding the Google+ badge or by adding a snippet of code.
• A meaningful number of people must have added your Google+ page to their circles.

This will be simple enough for most of my sites - I own the website and the G+ page.   Though it should be a little more challenging for one or two community groups that I do things for, where the ownership is a little ore "vague".

My only decision is whether to start the verification process now, or to wait for this to be announced on the right blog!

Pinterest Twitter friend notification email messages

Google Blogger / Apps access to country-specific domains

Today, Google Apps announced that we can now purchase a wider range of global and country-specific domains through them - previously they only offered a more limited set of the global domains. And now they're cheaper, too: domains registration is $8/year instead if $10.

To do this, they've partnered with a new-to-them domain registrar http://www.domaindiscount24.com - instead of eNom and GoDaddy, who they used before

If you buy a domain via Google Apps, and DomainDiscount24.com is the registrar, then

• It comes pre-set up to work with Google's tools (mail, apps, sites, etc)
• You need to use DomainDiscount24.com's administration tools if you want to make any changes to the domain set-up
• You continue to use Google Apps domain management tools to manage the Google Services that are available to users in the domain (eg enabling/disabling Blogger)

Can we use one of these domains for Blogger?

I'd guess so: I'm pretty sure that Sites, like Blogger, requires that the domain-registrar provide DNS-hosting and the ability to edit CNAME and ANAME records.  You simply have to go through the same process that you need to use if you purchase a domain directly from any registrar.

(I'm going to test this very soon, there's a .co.nz domain that I've been thinking about for a while>

Will they work automatically with Blogger?

Not always: domain setup is a complex thing, and it's hard to predict if you will get the dreaded "Another blog is already hosted as this address" message:  I've purchased a domain via Google Apps before and and it work perfectly with Blogger - and I've had just the opposite experience, too.

If you get stuck, try either

• Use the information in this recent article from Chuck at Nitecruzr (he's one of the best for resolving custom domain issues)
• Going to the Blogger Product Forum: explain your problem and URL and ask the experts there to take a look.

Can we use this new registrar to buy country-specific domains inside Blogger?

Not at the moment, and - there's been no announcement from Blogger about it.

(Sideline:   I just tested it, and found that eNom is no longer offered as an option for domain-purchase under Blogger's switch-to-custom-domain track.   This means that GoDaddy, who not have a tool to make custom domain purchases easier, are now the only option inside Blogger - so I can see why Google might be looking to bring another registrar-partner on board.)

What domains are now available to purchase via Google Apps:

Global
.com    .info   .org    .net     .mobi     .biz     .name     .cc    .tv


Asia-Pacific
India: .in .co.in .org.in .net.in
New Zealand: .co.nz
Taiwan: .com.tw
Japan: .jp

Latin America
Colombia .co .com.co
Mexico:   .com.mx .mx

Europe
Belgium: .be
Switzerland: .ch
Czech Republic: .cz
Germany / Deutchland .de
Spain / Espana .es and .com.es
Republic of Montenegro: .me (though it has obvious wider appeal to English speakers!)
The Netherlands .nl
Poland .pl

Are domains for all countries available - why not?

There are still far more countries not on the list than on it.

I'm not surprised that there is no sign of Ireland (.ie) on the list -  these domains are hard to get.  I do manage one .ie site with Blogger:  the domain was obtained for a community group that doesn't have a company registration number, but which does have letterhead, a constitution and a well-connected chairman.   For it, I've found that LetsHost.ie provides the necessary domain management tools and their support people were helpful and didn't turn up their noses when I told them I was using it for a Blogger site.

Disappointing ommissions: Australia (.com.au) and England/Britain (.co.uk) - I'm not sure what the story is with these, or which registrars provide the tools needed to let you use a domain purchased from them with blogger.

Get ideas for your social media policy by reading other people's

Recently I posted a template for helping to work out and document how you use your blog vs Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.

This is mainly for bloggers who look after blogs-sites for companies, community groups, etc - basically any organisation.  It came about because I started using Blogger to do the website for a choir that I sing in, and I needed to think about all the issues shown.

If you are having difficulty figuring out how you should use these tools together in your own setting, it might be heplful to look at some of the example social media policies listed on the Social Media Governance website.   Some of these are from big companies and non-profits, but some are from far small outfits which might be like yours.

Remember, sometimes it doesn't matter what rules you follow - so long as everyone understands who does what, and acts consistently.   Most problems happen when people have different expectations about who should do what, when and how.

Chitika now supporting all countries

Chitika is one of the advertising programmes that is an alternative to Google AdSense.

Initially, their ads were only shown to website-visitors who were in the USA and Canada.   That list extended a while ago.   Now they say that they're available in all countries.

Actually, their post makes it sound like you can sign-up as a publisher no matter what country you are in.  But I was signed up while they were still limited to showing ads to USA/Canada visitors, despite not being in those countries.   So I'm pretty sure that they mean their ads will be shown in all countries.

Custom Search Engine improvements

Google have announced version 2 of the "custom search element" - this is the "thing" that lets you put a custom-search tool in your blog (and any other website).

Important features are:

• Search UI is rendered based on the settings stored on the Google CSE servers ... any configuration changes you make in the CSE control panel ...[are shown]  on your web pages the next time they reload. ...

• All element code is loaded asynchronously for reduced page load times.

• Client-side customization allows you to overwrite global CSE settings on a per-page basis ...

Faster load time is very welcome - I've been noticing that custom search gadgets take a long time to load, relative to other things on my blogs.

And the first feature seems very handy - it means not having to copy-and-paste new CSE code whenever you change a CSE using the control panel. But this has a price: the existing code (in the best option for Bloggers) had two parts - one for where the seach box goes, and one for where the search results go. In the new code, there are still these two parts, but each one has two sections: one section that needs to be added to the header and one to the place (usually a widget for Bloggers). That means:

• Four separate pieces of code to install
• Installing means editing the template as well as adding a gadget
• If you change your template, you need to remember to re-install the CSE code too. 

That said, I'm not sure if the first code sections need to go into the header, or whether they could beside the other parts, perhaps with a loss of speed - any advice is welcome.

Lastly, Google says that the existing CSE code will continue to be supported for now (although there's no way to get it from them any more, they are now only supplying the updated code) - but that this won't last forever.   So sooner or later, you will need to update any custom-search(es) on your blog.

Blogger and Analytics adjusted-bounce-rate

I've had interesting discussions with people about whether the bounce-rate in Google Analytics is worthwhile: one of my sites has information about local bus routes and neighbourhoods, and many visitors only need to look at one page (the one suggested by Google search) to get the information they need.  I've long believed that these people counted as a "bounce" (ie look at a page and leave), while friends assured me that Google is smarter than that and wouldn't count visits that last for a certain length of time as bounces.

I've just discovered that I was right after all: by default, Analytics counts all one-page-only visitors as bounces.

Google have now told us how to change this, and not count visitors as bounces if they stay on the site for a certain length of time (we can choose how long)

Unfortunately this option isn't fully available to Blogger users at the moment. We can either


1)  Install Analytics in a way that it works properly with dynamic and mobile templates,

Thsi approach will most likely be supported if Blogger invent any other types of templates in the future, so is what I recommend now.  GreenLava explains how to do this here. 


OR


2) Install the Analytics code in the same way it gets put into other websites.

This won't count visitors who view the blog using a dynamic template (either because you choose one or because they added a command to your URL in order to see your blog that way).
And if you have enabled a mobile template, it will only count visitors using mobile devices if you have:

• Installed the Analytics code using an HTML/Javascript gadget (I've explaiend how to do this here)
• Edited your template so that gadget is "shown" on mobile templates (by default, HTML/Javascript gadgets aren't - I've explained how to change this near the end of this article)

So at the moment, our options for Blogger are to either count visitors properly and not see the adjusted bounce-rate, or undercount the visitors but get the custom-adjusted bounce rate.

Have all your posts been added to Google search results yet?

How can you tell if Google has indexed your blog - or if it's indexed all your posts.

The quick way is to search for site:YOUR-BLOG-NAME and see how many results are returned.   If it's roughly the same as your number of published posts, then you're about right.   But what if it's not?

For example, if I google

site:blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com

I get

About 385 results (0.26 seconds)

However I've only 226 published posts in blogger-hints-and-tips.   That tells me there's a problem with content being indexed more than once.   Looking at the results, I can see the problem immediately:  my dynamic-views have been indexed (goodness only knows why) - but also, my archive pages appear to have been indexed.  

For a more in-depth analysis, though, Webmaster Tools now has an Index Status feature, which is particularly useful if there are less pages indexed than published posts, because it shows you if it's always been like that, or if there has been a change at some time which led to a lot of your posts being removed from Google's index.

To use it:

• Log in to Webmaster tools with the Google account that has administrator rights to the blog. 

• If you haven't verified the account before, you may need to do this.
  (Google have said before that blog-owners are automatically verified, but I've found a few times that this hasn't quite worked - I've had to manually verify by installing a meta-tag that they provide)

• Look under the Health tab for Index Status. It shows a graph of the number of pages indexed vs date for (up to) the last year.

Looking at the graph, if:

• the line is flat and you havn't made posts at that time, or
• you have been posting and the line is going upwards,

then it probably means that all your posts are being crawled and indexed (and so can be found in google searches).  

But if there's a different pattern, the advanced tab might be helpful.   It shows:

• the number of pages indexed
• the cumulative number of pages crawled,
• the number of pages that Google knows that it couldn't look at because they are blocked by robots.txt, and
• the number of pages that were not selected for inclusion in search results.

These numbers are point-in-time totals, not numbers of additions.

Note the important difference: the first graph shows pages indexed (ie added to Google). The advanced one shows pages crawled. If Google crawls a page and finds it hasn't changed since last time they looked at it, then they don't bother indexing it again.

If some of your posts aren't in Google anymore, and the graph of pages indexed has a sudden drop, then most likely a change that you made at that time has caused a problem with indexing or includign your results.

Of course just knowing when things happened doesn't tell you why they happened.  In my case, I remember adding the Archive gadget into Blogger-HAT's layout.   Obviously I didn't stop the pages from getting indexed (though it does make me bitter and twisted that Google doesn't just handle this for us!)

What this does point out, though, is that if you're serious about managing your site for maximum searchability (SEO-friendliness), you should keep a note of the date and time of any structural changes you make, so that you can compare this with diagnostic tools and see if there's a link between the changes and changes in your visits, indexing etc.

Stop AdSense showing you the ads you hate the most

A year ago, I planned a trip to New Zealand. I Googled "NZ camper vans" and similar things a few times, found a company and had a great trip (thanks, Jucy Vans)

For about three months after I got back, Google remembered that I'd looked for this and kept showing me ads from other van-hire companies. Not only were they irrelevant (since I wasn't looking for a hire-van anymore), they really reminded me that I in the office on the other side of the world in wintertime, instead of on the beach in the sun at home. This didn't exactly generate warm-fuzzy feelings towards the advertiser (NZ Van Hire, I hate you with a passion .. and you didn't even do anything!)

This was a lose-lose-lose-lost situation:

• The advertiser was wasting ad-impressions showing me ads even though I was no longer in the market to hire a camper-van. And they really annoyed me to the extent that they're unlikly to get my business next time I go home, because I've linked their brand to negaive feelings.
• The publisher - was wasting valuable screen-space showing me ads that there was no chance I would click - so they lost potential income.
• Google: there was no chance that I'd click those ads for something I didn't want any more, so they didn't get a cut of the revenue either.

To help address this, Google are introducing a “mute this ad” icon on AdSense ads. This will let us tell Google which ads we don't want to see.

How will it work:

• A small [x] will be put in the corner of some display ads on the Google Display Network.
• When a website-visitor clicks the [x], sees confirmation page shows, explaining that the advertisement has been "muted", and linking to the Ad Preferences Manager. And after that, ads from that campaign aren't shown to that person in future.

This is being rolled-out over the next few weeks, and won't be applied to all ads to start with. (And I'm describing it based on Google's description - haven't actually seen it myself yet.)

It's not a guarantee you won’t see that ad again -- the ad could be shown by a different company or in a separate campaign. But it's a start.

Google Video being retired - impact for Blogger?

Custom Search Engine ad block background color changes

Google's Custom Search Engine styles have been changed so the ad-blocks at the top/right of the search results have a different background colour. Ref:  http://googlecustomsearch.blogspot.ie/2012/06/ads-background-colors-in-custom-search.html

It looks like we cannot control this colour - it's been chosen to "contrast in a visually appealing way with the default [or user-selected] background color".

In at least one of my blogs, though, the contrast between the ad-background colour and the outer background color selected in blogger isn't quite so "appealing".   :-(

I'm still considering whether to change my outer background, or to experiment with different CSE custom styles to see if one is a better fit. Luckily most of my in-post features have been set up with CSS rules, so I can change them easily by adding a new CSS rule to my template.

Google Advertisers Network - now has UK advertisers

Google Affiliate Network (one of the alternatives to AdSense LINK, which lets you deal with specific, relevant, advertisers) has signed up 30+ UK based advertisers.  Ref:   http://googleaffiliatenetwork-blog.blogspot.ie/2012/06/announcing-new-uk-advertisers.html

(When you're looking for them, don't forget to set Relationship status to "available", instead of the default  "approved".)

Fingers crossed some of these will also be suitable for my Ireland-focussed blog!

Knowing about better pictures Google Maps & Earth

If you blog about geographic locations, or add Google custom maps to your blog, then it can be very helpful to know when the satellite photos for a certain area are updated. Among other things, this is a reminder to check your map for any details that have changed.

Google's new Follow Your World service tells you just that.

In short, you sign up with your google account, and register to get email alerts when new images for a specific point are availabe in Google Maps or Earth.

Unfortunately you need to select on specific point, not an area, so there's a risk that you might miss updated if you're just a few metres out. But it's beta at the moment, so this may change in future

I haven't seen an official announcement, but it's mentioned in this post on the latLong blog

More info in Google Trends Hot Searches lists

Bloggers who want to write about what's ultra-current in the USA might like the changes to Hot Searches list in Google Trends:

• The list of searches is more visual,
• Related rising search terms are grouped
• You can see more information about those searches

Even if you don't want to blog about these topics, you might like to check them before you post, in case you can associate your somewhat-related post to something that lots of people are looking for right now (which is what Google means by "hot"). Search traffic gained this way may or may not be useful for building long term readership, but can be a nice short-term boost.

Wordle tag clouds - a logo maker for hard-to-illustrate blogs?

One of my blogs is about some very abstract concepts, which are ever-so-slight difficult to illustrate in a way that's meaningful to the very wide range of readers.

Today I discovered Wordle - a tool that creates free-to-use graphic arrangements from lists of words - for example the words used in a website.   http://www.wordle.net/create

Here's one for Blogger-HAT, to give you an idea - but there are lots of options and customizations, so lots of looks that can be achieved.

After you've made a wordle, the easiest way (IMHO) to get it into your blog is to do a screenshot, then use Paintbrush (or some other very simple picture-editor) to save it as a PNG file).   The it can be loaded to your blog like any other picture.

Content Experiements in Analytics

Content Experiments is a new feature in Google Analytics.

It claims to

helps you optimize for goals you have already defined in your Google Analytics account, and can help you decide which page designs, layouts and content are most effective.

I'm not sure how possible it will be for Blogger users to use it - suspect that it may need some serious template editing at lease.

Translations - and better translations

The translations widget now offers you - and your readers - a way to make better translations.    More details here.   Key thing to remember:  if your readers offer suggestions, you have to approve them.    So if you're the sort of blog who encourages this, make sure you keep on top of the approvals.

I've also found that by getting the gadget code from Translate, I'm offered the chance to track translations using Analytics.   I'm not sure if this is an improvement over the standard widget or not, ie whether it perhaps picks up my code itself.  Suspect not though, 'cos part of installing the gadget-code from Google involved adding their meta-tag to my template.

Docs research panel beats Zemanta gadget

Google Docs now has a research pane available while you're writing.   Basically this is a quick way to access google-search results.

To use it:

• Select a word
• Right-click the word
• Choose Research from the tools menu.

Or just select the word and hit the key-combo ( Ctrl+Alt+R on Windows or Cmd+Alt+R on Mac) if you think mice are evil time-wasters.

This is a far better than the Zemanta gadget that was offered to Blogger users back in 2010; research is done only on the words you want researched, not everything that you're writing. My experience was that the latter approach  slowed my machine down horribly, and mostly added no value because it just distracted me from what I wanted to write. Other people seemed to feel the same way, and for a while How to disable Zemanata in blogger was popular reading.

Personally, I'm not sure research-pane will be enough to convince me to write my posts in Docs and load them to Blogger from there: a lot of my research is about "how does Blogger handle this", which I can only find out my testing it.  But it will be a very handy tool for bloggers in some niches.

A couple of things to be aware of:  the pane  offers you imagees that you can "drag into your document", and it add footnotes saying where the image has come from. But the last time I loooked, documents loaded from Docs to Blogger didn't maintain footnotes. And even so, if the image is copyright, you can't get permission to use it in your blog just by linking to the source.

Spam links can be invisibly embedded in comments

The pseudonymous John of Gordon's Tech reports that spammers have found a way to put links into comments so that they don't look like links when we're doing moderation.

Now he mentions it, I've been seeing a lot of comments lately that are something like  

"Nice info, thanks for sharing.   Facebook developers" 

all in plain text.  And the "signature" has often been something that's even less relevant than this.

I had been thinking that they were naive, and didn't know how to put links into comments, so was deleting them rather than marking as spam.   Time to change the comments moderation policy, I think, down the spam-shute they go.

Result-sorting and better filter queries in Google Custom Search Engines

Google's have added result-sorting and compact queries for filtering-by-attribute options to their Custom Search Engines (ref: Adding a custom search engine to your blog).

These are most relevant for people who use a CSE over their own blog/site, rather than over other sites which they don't control the markup.

Sorting:

If you have specificd PageMaps, rich-snippets or meta-tags for your posts, you can add them as an option that is available to people who use your custom-search-engine. Do this in CSE by

• Enable sorting (www.google.com/cse > Control Panel > Basics)
• Adding the key.

Compact-queries:

The language that is used to state a qeury against defined attributes now supports "and"-ing values together in a more compact way.