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Tag Archives: google
Google+. The social network that wants to be cool but isn’t.
Who doesn’t love the idea of Goolge+? It’s a social network, from Google, that ties into your Google life. It’s got a pretty easy to use interface, does a great job at grouping friends, has video and audio chat built-in and can automatically upload every picture you take from your Android phone into the system. It has a lot of good things going for it; except no one really uses it.
Sadly, Google+ doesn’t fix the main problem with social networks; noise. I actually follow fewer people on Google+ than I do on Twitter or Facebook and it just seems more noisy. There are so many links, images and videos that it’s information overload.
Google Music’s uploader app finally adds playlist support.
I’ve been using Google Music for a while now, but my biggies issues is that the app uploads everything in iTunes. This means that it uploaded Christmas & children’s music whether I wanted it or not. Plus there is no way to create smart playlists so I could listen to everything but those genres.
Turns out that when I opened Google Music’s uploader system preference the other day it now appears that it supports playlists; regular not smart playlists. This should make it easier to upload only the music I want and exclude the rest.
Google Wave logo recycled for Google Wallet
If at first you don’t succeed, recycle the logo and re-use it.
Bad Behavior WordPress Plugin Killed My Google Traffic
I’ve been looking into the Bad Behavior WordPress plugin to help stop some of the spam comments that I’ve been getting. Turns out, it made things horribly worse.
I’m not sure why, but the plugin decided to block Google bot. By the time I noticed, the damage had been done and my visitor stats are falling at a rapid rate. I’m getting 1/3rd of the traffic I was last week and it continues to go down.
I’ve removed the plugin and am now eagerly awaiting Google bot to come back and index my content. I don’t know how long it’ll take to recover, but I’m hoping not to long.
What happens when you change WordPress’ URL structure? Will it kill SEO?
Earlier this year I switched all my WordPress URLs (aka permalinks) from date based to ID and post names. Since then I haven’t seen any negative effects from search engines when it comes to the amount of referral traffic.
The Background
Now, when a blog is set up, the URL structure is defined. If you don’t really know what you’re doing, then you probably don’t think twice about the URL structure. I sure didn’t when I setup my blog in 2004. However, years later, I realized that I hated having the month and day in the URL and I wanted to change it to be shorter and cleaner.
Me & WordPress vs Google Page Speed & YSlow
If it’s not one thing, it’s another. It seems that I can’t stop tweaking my WordPress install & settings.
I’ve done some major re-working of things on the back-end and I’m hoping I didn’t break anything. If I did, please tell me!
The bulk of my changes are to help with my site speed addiction. Ever since Google announced tools to help webmasters find ways of speeding up their sites, I’ve been hooked. I check the graph in Google Webmaster Central all the time in hopes of seeing sharp declines.
Google's Site Performance Analysis
Google Analytics Extension Upgraded
Just a quick note to say that the Is Google Analytics Installed? Firefox extension recently has been updated to work with Google’s new asynchronous tracking code.
It should now work for all versions of Google’s code.
And, if Google doesn’t drastically change the analytics tracking in the future, it should continue to work well for future updates.
(fingers crossed)
New URLs & Lots of Patients
For some time I’ve wanted to remove the month, day, year from my URL structure on my blog but I haven’t. Everything I’ve ever learned about SEO is to not change the URLs. However I really wanted to.
Then, late last week, my host somehow blocked Google bot from accessing the server I’m on and my traffic tanked; badly. Once I got that figured out, I realized that now was as good of time as ever to re-do all the URLs. Since my site was already screwed up in Google, why not?
Blog Traffic
Minor Design Changes Can Make A Big Effect
When it comes to web design, sometimes less is more. And sometimes you don’t need to change a lot to make a big improvement.
Case in point, the latest Google update. All they did was add a few icons, make the colors pop, soften up the buttons a little and the new look is very nice.
Google Search Icons
Google Search Update
Small changes, but a big effect. Way to go Google!
See Today’s Schedule In A Small Google Calendar Desktop Application
I’ve been intrigued by an application called Today that gives a quick overview of what you have on your calendar for today and places it in a nice little window on your desktop. However, for $20 I wasn’t sure that I needed it. So, I found a way to create a similar, but not as cool, app using the iPhone version of Google Calendar.
For free, I’m able to get an overview of my schedule for today, for this month, and the ability to add new events. Plus it works on Mac and Windows.
