Like how Google started with GMail as an invite only system, you need to get a Google+ Invite to join. On first look at the videos that Google released on the Google+ user interface, it looks very different from the previous attempts of Google in the social networking space. The main reason why Google Buzz didn’t take off is because it annoyed people by assuming all their GMail contacts as friends. Unlike Google Buzz and Facebook the ways to create and categorize friends is very interesting in Google+.

Its called Google+ Circles. By the view of it, you can just drag and drop the names of friends into these circles which is actually synonymous to the groups that you could have experienced in any social network earlier. And when you share stuff, you can choose to share it only to specific circles so that you don’t have to convey unnecessary information to friends. In the same time, you don;t also receive unnecessary information.

People are kind of fed up with the status message stuff that’s been happening for ever in Facebook. And recent surveys even revealed that the excitement on the status messages has gone down in Facebook.

Another interesting feature is the Google+ hangouts, which basically is a group video chat feature. You might see messages like “John is hanging out with 3 other people – Join Hangout”. And if you join, what you will see is a group of videos of friends in the hangout, very similar to Skype. This is very interesting as this feature hasn’t been implemented on a large scale in any social network.

Google+ has a feature called Huddle, which actually is group chat that help friends discuss stuff in a group. More like a broadcast message to a specific set of people who can reply and build conversations inside the Huddle. This can help in small time event management and decision making. Like when you want to sell your bike and you want to ask your friends before putting an open Ad for it, you can start a Google+ Huddle.

There is also the sharing feature that Google+ calls Sparks. This is a common feature that is there in all the social networks. It is because of the simple fact that if people find something awesome, the first thing they would want to do it to talk about it.

If you ask me to present it in a simple way, here is how the Google+ project is feature-d.

Google+ Circles               -    Groups
Google+ Sparks               -    Text Sharing
Google+ Instant Upload    -    Video Sharing
Google+ Hangouts           -    Group Video Chat
Google+ Huddle               -    Group Text Chat

“Is that all to it?” is the question that comes into my mind now. Well, we have to wait for it to be released to everyone. I only hope Google+ will be a very successful if they are thinking it right this time. I am actually very impressed with the way the UI is being shown in the videos. It can drastically take a large chunk of people away from Facebook.

I had a chance to discuss about this with one such victim. He said “It was the 24th of February that my site was affected and the website traffic went down from 50,000 US visitors to 24,000 US Visitors per day, which is like 60% less traffic. I was in panic mode as less traffic means less business and less earnings. After some research, I found out that it was because of the Google Panda update. I went crazy when I read that Google was actually targeting content farms. I didn’t know how they categorized my website as a content farm.”

What could be the possible reasons if your website went down in ranking because of the Google panda update though you think you are not a content farm ?  Here are some of the reasons that might have contributed to it.

1. If you had provided RSS feeds for your website and if many other website have syndicated them in their pages. When Google finds the same content in many web sites, it tries to rank the original site in the top position. What if the syndicated content in other websites got indexed before your website ? There is a high chance that many of the syndicating webstites got penalized and as a result you lost the link value from those web sites.

2. If you had a tag cloud on your website. if you have a blog, the tag cloud would have grown in size over time. Say 100 Keywords and relevant to each other. The tag cloud might have been conveyed a keyword stuffing message to the spider.  One Remedy would be to keep as less tags as possible which would increase load time also.

3. If you had a search results page in you website and the search results in your website got indexed. these pages might give an impression for duplicate content within your website. You could use the no-index and no-follow tags extensively to avoid this.

4. In the process of building links if you had submitted one article to many article directories. These article pages from where you had the links back to your main site would have straight away communicated that it was a clear marketing effort and that it was not a user generated back link.

There are many more things that affected websites that are not content farms, however its for good and made us understand the ranking algorithm. In my discussions with a few victims who lost ranking, what I hear is that though they have lost ranking the number of visitors have not gone down. Google’s panda update had definitely improved the quality of search results. Many webmasters shared to me that though they have lost ranking on certain keywords, they have gained ranking on other keywords for which they really had quality content on their website. Some website owners who lost ranking said that just by removing the duplicate content pages and improving the page load time increased their ranking.

www.copyscape.com Provides a free plagiarism checker of URLs. When you enter the web page URL that you want to check for plagiarism, you get a report of all the occurrences of copied content from the web. There is a premium version and they charge 5c per search.

www.duplichecker.com Provides searching text for plagiarism. There are options to insert a .txt file for checking. You can search for with quotes and without quotes. There are options to check plagiarism from three major search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN.

www.articlechecker.com A free online plagiarism checker that provides both text and URL checking options. No MSN search available. You can check for plagiarism from Google and Yahoo searches. I am surprised that they only have one page and not other links. I can not find any other links other than the google text and display ads that I can click. There is a checker.php page that returns the results. Am wondering if this this one of those plagiarism checker major’s proxy site.

www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker Clean layout. Intented to check student’s paper, homework assignments, essays and other works. Hence there is only a text search that is available. A premium version is available at $8 a month which has features like ignoring text in quotes and uploading Microsoft word files. Not a competitive feature as these are available for free from the competitors.

www.plagiarisma.net This free online plagiarism checker has all three types of checking, text, URL and file upload. One clear difference that I can see is that the plagiarism text search is supporting 190+ languages. Also there are many formats of files that are accepted for checking plagiarism .txt, .html, .rtf, .doc, .odt and .docx. I don’t see any ads or paid subscriptions. That makes me wonder how they are making money. May be there is one when you sign up.

www.plagiarismchecker.com What a nice domain name these guys have bought. This keyword “plagiarism checker” has close to 1,00,000 searches. Anyways this is again an online plagiarism checker that has all the options. You can check documents and web pages for plagiarism. They have some out dated news and articles on the website, but on the first sight they seem useful.

www.scanmyessay.com Provide a free download of a desktop plagiarism checker software called Viper. They promise that viper will be a free alternative to the famous turnitin plagiarism checker. Interestingly viper is free. Once downloaded, check to see if there is a request to renew or upgrade for a premium version.

How to report plagiarism ?

When browsing through the information on plagiarism checkers that are available for free in the market, i found some ways with which you can report plagiarism. It would be frustrating to see a web page that copied content from you page to come on top of your page in the search results. While you are fuming with that, you have a choice to report it to search engines like google. You just need to fill out a form and the necessary steps will be taken. Here is the form that google accepts to check reports on plagiarism and other such mischievous activities over the Internet.  Google Plagiarism Report Form

All this is what we know already. Here are the more interesting facts about them. We are using smart phones almost everywhere.

39% use it while going to the bathroom
33% use it while watching TV
22% use it while reading the newspaper

Smart phone are becoming important in influencing the shopping habits too. Smart phone are becoming the ultimate shopping companion transforming us into more savvy consumers. 79% use the smart phone to help with shopping.

70% of the consumers use the smart phone while in a store.
54% use it to find a retailer.
49% use it to compare prices.
48% use it to get coupons and vouchers.
44% use it to find product reviews.
74% make a purchase based on a smart phone search.

A large number, in fact 95% use their smart phone to look for local information like pizza places, movie show times and 88% of them use the browsed information to take a decision on the same day.  They either call or visit the local business place. The search trends are also greatly influenced by smart phones. 43% search after seeing a TV Ad. 17% search after seeing a display ad on a mobile device. 9 out of 10 mobile users have taken action using a smart phone search. The simple fact is mobile ads work. 82% of people browsing through their smart phones notice an ad and yet 72% of website owners don’t have a mobile optimized website. This is why its important to provide a mobile optimized website.

42% click on the mobile ads.
35% visit the advertisers site.
49% make a purchase.
29% call the business.

We are using smart phone to stay connected, to keep us entertained, to search for information on the go and to make us smarter shoppers and we are going to make a lot more of this, creating more opportunities for marketers to connect with their customers. This is why marketers should pull up their socks to take their share of their pie in the mobile marketing movement.

The whole presentation from Google Mobile Ads can be watched from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjUcq_E4I-s&feature=player_embedded

The last time these big search giants came together for a common cause was to create sitemap.org in 2006. Which did help webmasters and site owners to avoid a lot of confusion in submitting content to the search engines. This time around, its not going to be easy for webmasters and site owners as they have to add more markup code for each of their pages. Its going to take more time and effort. But, its definitely going to be useful.

Schema.org provides a collection of html tags [schema] that site owners and webmasters can use to markup their content in such a way that helps the search engines to display the content to users in a richer and useful way. Sites that are dynamic and those that are structured will be highly benefited by implementing a relevant schema from the available set of schema. For example a movie rental website owner can use the movie schema to give details of a movie to the search engines that can index them in a meaningful way. These parameters might include, actors, director, duration, musicBy and other parameters. Currently there are hundreds of schema that are available in schema.org, however they plan to add as many as possible from feedback.

There are also schema available for primitive data types such as number and text. Below is a simple such markup code snippet that includes two schema, Movie and Person. Movie Schema has the parameters director and genre. Person schema includes parameters name and birth date.

More information of documention of these schema can be applied to your content can be seen here http://schema.org/docs/documents.html

1. Impressions per person will decrease by 25%.
2. Use Engagement on the display ads will increase by 50%.
3. Users will have a control on 25% of what ads that they want to see.
4. 35% of campaigns will be able to use more metrics than click and conversions to decide strategies.
5. People will know why they are seeing about 25 Billions ads.
6. 40% of online viewers in America will vote for Display Ads as their Favorite Ad Format.

These projections are not very surprising if you followed the recent news about online advertising industry taking the number 2 spot only next to TV surpassing all the other media in advertising spend and reach. These are very promising for the business of online publishers and marketing people.

While projecting that display advertising industry will grow to $200 Billion, Neal Mohan also shared many more thoughts when taking about the future of display advertising.

Display advertising industry currently has a 40% market share in online advertising and shows a growth of 25% year on year. Publishers saw a 188% more revenue by participating in the Google doubleclick Ad Exchange program. Advertisers saw conversion going up by 150%. All the 6 projections will be very promising for the business of online publishers and marketing people considering the current statistics.

You can watch the keynote from this location. http://www.google.com/adwords/watchthisspace/sandbox/iab/

live transit updates google maps

When you are at your desktop, before you leave for your transit station, you can see live services when you click on the transit icon or search for transit stations. With these service alerts, you will know if there is a difficulty in the service or any other news that can impact the trip.

And when you are on the go, you can use Google Maps for Mobile and know if your bus or train is on time or late for arrival.

Google has partnered with transit agencies to show live transit data in Boston, San Francisco, San Diego and Portland in the US. And its only beginning. So, if you are in a city with live transit updates, you can start getting live departure timings, transit updates and service news on Google Maps for desktop and Google Maps for Mobile.

If you do not have Google Maps installed you can download the necessary files from http://www.google.com/maps

On Page Optimization Factors:

First Steps

1. Is the website Crawlable? Make sure that the pages are getting indexed. Submitting the pages to search engines will do this job. For example submitting the website to http://www.google.com/addurl/ will add the website to Google’s index database.
2. How is the load time of the website? Websites that take too much time to load usually rank poor. Most search engines consider load time as a factor to rank web pages.
3. How is the URL Structured? Make sure the URLs have the keywords that are targeted to optimize the web page for ranking. Short and meaningful URLs will have priority.
4. Domain Name. Domain names containing the keywords and those that have been around for a long time have priority. If you are just starting and haven’t taken a domain name yet invest in a sensible domain name. This increased the trust and the authority of the website.

Html Code Related

1. Does the title tag have keywords? Make sure the HTML title tag contains the keywords. Having a keyword in the title tag increases the visibility of the page in the search engine ranking page also.
2. Is the Meta description tag clean and easily readable with keywords? Creating a Meta Description tag for the search engine to display text that is readable, attractive enough to prompt the user to click and containing keywords is ideal.
3. Does the H1, H2 and other heading tags contain keywords? Header tags are considered as text that contains relevant information about the web page. This is why adding the keywords to the H1, H2 and other heading tags are necessary. Order the keywords from H1 to H2 to lower based on priority of keywords from top to bottom.
4. Are images named on keyword and placed near relevant content? Naming the images with keywords and placing them in locations that is surrounded by relevant text in the web page is a good practice.  Using keywords in Alt text for the image adds value to this practice.

Page Content

1. How is the relevancy of the page to the targeted keyword? Content that is available in the page should contain the keyword and key phrases that you intend to target for the searches that people do.
2. How is the quality of the content? Search engines have to gone to the level of ranking the pages based on the readability level also. Writing content in plain English is always good. Content that is graded as suitable to read for school grads is enough and good for search engine ranking.
3. How is the visitor bounce rate? If the bounce rate is high it mostly means the content is not that appealing and hence, the visitors will not spend time reading the web page. Writing content that interests the visitors to read it fully and spend time is important.  Fresh and recent topics will always interest readers to spend time on the web page and web site.

Off Page Optimization Factors:

Back Links

1. What is the quality of the websites that are linking in? It is always good to get referred by a webpage of a higher page rank. Getting a back link from a website of good reputation increases the link authority of the linked page. Links from .edu and .gov websites are always good.
2. Does the external links have keywords in them? It would be totally irrelevant to get a back link from a link text “buy book” to a web page that sells sports shoes. Watching and moderating the linking text is necessary. Getting a back link without the proper linking text is not going to help improve the link authority.
3. How many links point to the web page? Like how the linking text and the quality of the linking page is important, it is as important to get links from as many websites are possible.

Social Site features

1. Does the site have social share features? The website should contain sharing buttons so that people can easily share the content on the page if they find it interesting.
2. Are people sharing your content? Even after implementing the social share buttons and people visiting your web page, if you see that the visitors are not sharing the content, then you need consider writing content that is interesting enough to share. Hot topics will help.
3. Who is sharing the content? It is a great value addition if people who share the content are reputed people having a good social proof.
4. 18. What is the demography of people sharing the content? It would be totally irrelevant for a webpage if people in India are sharing the content for a website that targets the US visitors. Likewise, the age, gender and other factors are also important to monitor.
5. Are people frequently visiting your site? Having returning visitors is always good. That is a factor to know that the site has attractive and interesting content.
6. Are you getting feedback? Getting feedback from people who visit your site is necessary. Different people will have different opinions. Presenting the website to appeal for the majority of the visitors is important.

Big Not to Do’s

1. Do not write for keywords alone. Search engine are very intelligent. Readability, quality and relevance are as important as having the keywords in the web page.
2. Do not do a flashy website that hides content. Do a website that is readable so that visitors can read the content. Flashy websites will only be seen and not read. Design that hides content should be avoided.
3. Do not get back links by Spamming. Getting back links from irrelevant pages of blogs and forums is never going to help and chances for getting penalized by search engines in high.
4. Do not buy links. Most link sellers are spammers. Care should be taken to consider some ethics when considering buying links as an unavoidable option. Getting all the links from the same c class IP will be considered as spam and will never increase the link authority.
5. Are people blocking your website? Make sure that the website is secure and free of virus. Search engines and visitors block your website if there is a detection of virus in your web page files. This will seriously deter the rankings.

All the above 25 factors are very important SEO Factors. None can be avoided for promoting a web page for search engine rankings. The On Page Optimization Factors and the Off page optimization factors increase your chances of making your web page rank well. The Big Not to Do’s are a must to consider to make sure the web page is not getting penalized by the search engines.

However, users felt an issue with that. Without even visiting the webpage and reading through it, how will the user be able to recommend the web page to her/his network of friends ?.  The thought of this made Google to provide a means for visitors of a webpage to +1 the webpage from the webpage itself.

With the implementation of Google +1 buttons to a webpage its easier for people to recommend the page to his/her network of friends.  This will definitely make search more relevant.

How to add a Google +1 Button to a webpage ?

Well ! Its easy. Webmasters who are managing the website will be able to add the code to implement the Google +1 buttons to their posts.

To add a standard 24px Google +1 button, here is what you need to do.

Step 1: Add the below code the head section before the </head> tag.

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js”></script>

Step 2: Add the below code to the place where you want to display the Google +1 button.

<g:plusone></g:plusone>

There are other types of Google +1 buttons that you can add to your pages. The implementation procedure for the same can be found at http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/index.html

Otherwise Google search results and web pages that have implemented Google +1 buttons, we can start to see them more on other Google properties like YouTube also. Google has also partnered with some of the leading social media giants in the internet world to show the Google +1 buttons. Some of these partners include Add This, Mashable, The Huffington post, Rotten Tomatoes, Reuters, Techcrunch, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Best Buy, Nordstorm and O’Reilly.

1 : Install a WordPress captcha plugin.

There are many captcha plugins that are available. Most of these captcha plugins severe the same purpose i.e. avoid spam comments. However the way with which they make the user enter the captcha differed among them. The most common version is the image captcha which contains an alpha numeric text on a fuzzy background.  When choosing this type of plugin, make sure the text in image that shows up is readable by real users.  There is no point discouraging your real commentators. The second most common version is asking the user to answer math questions such as 1+2=?.  This also works perfectly. The third one that I would suggest is the reCaptcha plugin. Works perfectly, and also adds a social service tint to it as the plugin helps digitize books.

2: Make the user log in to comment.

Under the “Discussion” Settings in the WordPress admin panel, there is a setting in the name “Users must be registered and logged in to comment”. Check this. However, you will not be encouraging users to comment anonymously if you enable this.

wordpress users must be logged in to comment to avoid spam

3: Akismet Plugin.

Enable the Akismet plugin and activate it by entering the Akismet API key that you buy from their website. This is a famous plugin to avoid spam, however they charge you based on the quantity of spams that they handle.

4: Block the IP of the spammer.

If you think a particular IP is spamming your blog posts, you can deny access to that IP by blocking it in your .htaccess file. Please keep in mind to backup you .htaccess file before making any changes to it as a thumb rule. Adding the below lines to the .htaccess file will do the job.

——————————————-

Order allow,deny
Deny from <…IP Address to block goes here…>
Allow from all

——————————————-

The above methods will be enough for the purpose of preventing WordPress comments spam. However some spammers are more intelligent to crack these methods and still spam. There are some advanced methods like blocking blacklisted IPs, denying comment posting to no referrer requests, blocking access of RSS feed to a spamming or a blacklisted IP. I would suggest you use these techniques if you still see spamming on your WordPress blogs.  If you ask me, I am not going to do all that I have mentioned above. I am just going to do a captcha stuff, keep blocking the spamming IPs and manually moderate the others.

Enjoy blogging and feel free to post a comment.