Google changing mobile search listings April 21 !!!

Google is changing it's mobile search engine results listings. 

Beginning April 21 2015, it will only display sites that are mobile friendly when searches are performed on mobile devices !!! 

This means, if you have a website and have not prepared a mobile version of it, then your site will most likely not be listed on mobile phone or tablet searches.

Announcements of this change are only beginning to circulate, so many are not aware if this major change. To borrow a phrase from Dancing with the Stars:

Are you in Jeopardy?

You can quickly find out by taking Google's " Mobile-Friendly Test ". Simply click on this link and enter your URL.

If you receive an "Awsome! This page is mobile-friendly" banner, then you are all set.

But, if you get a "Not mobile-friendly" banner, you have work to do.

So what should you do now? First, test you generic webpage url and get that in order. Second, begin checking important pages within your site to make sure that they will appear. This will be a lot of work for most website owners but it needs to be done.

You can learn more by visiting these resources.

• Google's Mobile-Friendly Websites - Get Started Guide 
• How to prep, in 7 steps, for Google's mobile search change

Best of luck - it sounds like it will be a long summer.

Recovering from an Unnatural Links Penalty - A Real Life Example

Many website and blog posts written as guides to help someone recover from an unnatural links penalty only describe generic actions that one may take. Unfortunately, as most have found, these articles rarely deal with specific actions, and leave the violators at a loss for resolving the underlying issue.

This post describes a real experience of how a fellow blogger removed an unnatural links penalty violation and restored his PageRank.

Background
In mid-August, I received a message from a blogging friend stating that he had received a notice from Google in Webmaster Tools indicating that his blog violated Google's quality quidelines. As a result, his blog may or may not appear in search results, or not place as highly in the results. In addition, Google provided him with a specific post.

This type of violation is commonly referred to as an:

"Unnatural Links Penalty".

His blog is hosted on Blogger, is 7 years old, has over 1,000 posts, and enjoyed a PageRank of 3. (Note that out of respect for his privacy, I will not list his name or blog URL).

Google gets tough on link sellers with PageRank penalty (from venturebeat.com)

At the time I was contacted, his PageRank had dropped to 0, but the blog was still appearing in search results. Prior to contacting me, the blogger attempted to fix this violation by searching the web and asking for help in the google forums. To that extent, he had received a couple of good suggestions which he followed. However, these actions did not resolve the problem.

Primarily, my friend's blog is a personal blog, consisting of a variety of stories, opinions, and observations. However, in his attempt to generate revenue, he enrolled in a few "Sponsored Pay per Review" programs and began writing sponsored posts. Thinking that these posts were causing the problem, he changed the included URL's to "nofollow" and asked for reconsideration. That did not help. Further, people told him that it appeared his site was "just selling links" and did not have a consistant theme. These comments were frustrating and disappointing to the blogger.

My Review
The first course of action that I took was to understand what steps had already been taken. After learning this, I realized that the penalty was "blog" related and not "post" specific.

So, I began looking at all the widgets and links he had on his sidebar and footings. There, I recommended that he remove all the "Sponsored Post" links and images. Next, I found a link to a gambling site that needed to be removed. Still, the penalty remained.

Finally, I followed the remaining widgets that he placed on the blog. At the bottom was a link to a "Book Review" site. When I visited that site, I saw 2 reviews. Both were reviews of individual posts on his blog with links back to the posts.  I realized that this created a "circular" link from his blog, to that site, and back to his blog. Clearly, that was unnatural.

He then removed that advertising widget from his blog and he asked for reconsideration. Within days, he received a message from Google saying that the violation was removed and the penalty would be lifted. At last, the problem was discovered!  By the end of the following day, the blog's page rank was restored back to 3 again and all is now well.

Lessons learned - Things to Avoid
Very often, unnatural links can be created out of ignorance. Many times, a blogger or webmaster is simply trying to take advantage of the tools available. This is particularily true for seasoned and experienced authors. However, some blogs and websites are created the with malicious intent to boost their PageRanks and earn a quick buck. While Google can distinguish between the age of the sites, it cannot always tell what the motivation is. Thus, play it safe and try to maintain a clean enviromnent.

From this experience and my previous encounters, my friend and I learned a few important lessons.

1. Try to avoid penalties by refraining from violating guidelines entirely. Always err on the side of caution.
2. Refrain from writing Sponsored Posts. However, if you do this, make sure that: you begin by saying that you are being paid for the content of the post; and be sure to set each link in that post as "no follow".
3. Do Not place links to your blog or website on other websites or blogs. This includes comments.
4. Do Not place links to gambling (i.e. those where you can actually gamble or practice gambling) or other prohibited site.
5. Enroll your blog or website on Google's Webmaster Tools. By doing this, you can be alerted to violations, rather that operating in the dark. 
6. Do Not link sub-domains together or to your site. Sub-domains are considered to be unique URLs. When you use and reference sub-domains, you are effectively creating fake circular links.

Removing a violation
If you do receive an unnatural links penalty notice, first read and understand Google's content guidelines. Then, follow the advice of this post. You have to think back and remember at all your actions and question everything that you have done. For example: Did you leave your links in comments just to get a backlink?, Did you write Sponsored posts and not indicate it?, Are you using sub-domains?, etc.

An Exception
One exception to "circular" unnatural links are those you would list in a "Links to My Other Sites" section. These should only be links to other sites that you own, and the heading should be labeled clearly.

Summary
Whenever you question one of your links or widgets, flag them as "no follow" or remove them entirely. If you are hesitant to make these type of changes to restore your credibility, then perhaps the violation was intended rather than accidental; and thus, a penalty is warranted.

JL..........

How to add Mathematical Formulas to a Blog or Webpage

I've recently been working on a mathematical derivation of the Poisson Distribution and am nearing its completion. As I am planning to document this information, I realized that the simplest explanation is to illustrate the underlying formulas.

Through my browsing, I found a couple of webpages that include various formulas. By accident, I happened to "right click" on one of them and was presented with a pop-up menu from MathJax.

Following the links, I learned that MathJax is exactly what I need.

For example, the Poisson distribution formula is:

`P(X)=(e^-mu mu^x)/(x!)`

To get this to display correctly in Blogger or a webpage, two things must first be done.

First: The template must be edited and a CDN link to MathJax must be added. The line to be added is:

<script src="http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=AM_HTMLorMML-full" type="text/javascript">

and it should be placed just before the </head> tag. Once you have added this line, make sure you save the blog template or webpage. This only has to be done once in each blog or webpage where you want to display formulas.

Second: Now that this is complete, you may now enter formulas.  This should always be done in raw HTML mode (but this is not necessary in Blogger).

The syntax for MathJax is very similar to mathematical expressions when using ASCII Math notation. The html code for the above Poisson formula is:

`P(X)=(e^-mu mu^x)/(x!)`

The formula will remain in this format when you are editing the webpage or blog post. But, when you display it after it is published and viewed in a browser, the MathJax script will translate the HTML syntax into the corresponding  mathematical formula.

Additional Helpful Links

• ASCII Math Notation and Guide 
• Using MathJax in popular web platforms
• The MathJax Processing Model

My Dynamic View Experience using Google's Blogger

We've heard the politicians tell us that the U.S. economy is recovering and that a lot of jobs are being created. But, every time we read the newspapers, watch TV, or listen to the radio, we hear about a major layoffs in various companies.

So, last December, I decided to start a new blog recording the major layoffs occurring in the United States that I've read or heard about. I figured that by doing this, it would be easier to judge whether the politicians were right or wrong.

Thus, I launched the blog US Corporate Layoffs using Blogger's Dynamic View template as shown below.

When using Dynamic Views, the visitor is offered a choice of views by which they can see your site. However, the author must choose a default, or master, view. I chose the Classic view template because it is more like the other standard Blogger templates in that it simply presents all the blog posts in single scrollable format.

I had several reasons for using the Dynamic View template. First, I just think it looks "cool". Second, a user can change the display format by himself, and see just Thumbnails, or lists of posts at a glance. Third, because of the nature of the content, I thought that a simple, uncluttered, structure would be the most appropriate.

Lastly, I thought that because Dynamic Views were nearly 2 years old, Google would have most of the bugs corrected.

However, I was wrong about Google's performance and found a few frustrating features inherent in Dynamic Views.

• Often, when the blog is initially loaded, the CSS heading and sidebar links fail to load. When this occurs, the selected color scheme is gone as well. The visitor is required to refresh the page 1 or more times in order to see the site properly.
• When writing and pressing the Preview button 2 times or more time, the resulting Preview often displays the wrong post and loses the s resultse CSS formatting.
• After the post Preview is shown, the overlay "Preview" banner in the upper left corner doesn't display. This leads to confusion as to whether the post has been published or not.
• When adding and placing images in a post, the published image placement may not be placed exactly where it shows in the post editor or the preview window. This then results in other formatting problems that may be seen in the published post.
• Embedded post images do not become Thumbnails display in the Flipcard, Magazine, Mosiac, Snapshot, or Timeslide views unless they (the images) were uploaded directly into the post. (They cannot be and not hosted by a 3rd party).
• Changing the blog default color scheme doesn't work unless you use IE browser.
• 3rd Party widgets such as nRelate, Feedjit, will not display.  

Below are samples of alternate layouts. The first is the Flipcard. As you will see, only one post has an image Thumbnail. The others only contain the post Title text. The reason for this is because I only embedded an image into the first post. All the others are links to other 3rd party locations.

The second layout  shows the Timeslide format. Again, because only the first post image is embedded, it is the only Thumbnail shown in the display. While all the other posts contain graphic images, they do not display as Thumbnails.

In summary, although I find some of the Dynamic View features lacking, I think that the overall effect of using Dynamic Views for this blog is most appropriate. However, if you are considering using Blogger's Dynamic Views, be fully aware of its limitations before beginning to use these templates.

How to delete (or change) a Blogger label

This post describes how to delete a Blogger label using the new Blogger interface.
 
I recently wanted to change one of the Blogger labels that I assigned to my posts.  To do this, I added the new replacement label which was rather easy. This was done by selecting the posts that I wanted, and selecting the "New label..." option from the labels pull down menu on my blog's Posts page.

But when I wanted to delete the old label, I could not find a "Delete label" choice.

I was lost. So I searched Blogger help and unfortunately could not find the correct answer. I found one answer that described how to do this with the old Blogger interface, so that was useless.

The second help answer described how to change the name of a label. Reading through that, I found that I was to select a  "Remove label" choice from the label actions menu.  But, that choice was not there.

So I experimented. I selected one of the posts that had the label I wanted to remove (by checking the box next to the blog post), and then, I selected the old label from the pull-down  label action menu. I found that this action worked as a toggle. If the label was already there, it was removed. But, if the label was not there, then it was added to the post.

I also learned that my approach to changing a Blogger label was correct.  From the Google Blogger help, changing a label is done by adding a new label and then deleting the old one.

In summary, if you are using Blogger and want to delete a label you must:

• Go to your blog's Posts page in Blogger
• Click the check boxes next to each post that contains the label you want to delete
• Then, click on the label inside the "Label Pull-down menu"
• If the label is already on that post, it will be deleted. (if it is not there it will be added)

Or, if you want to change a Label, you must

• First add a new label to all the posts to be changed
• And then, you must delete the old label using the method described above.

Hope this helps !!!

Why every blog should have a "Search Box" widget

A couple of months ago, I was deciding whether I should add a "You may also like - Related Posts" widget to my blogs. I remembered that several other blogs that I visited had added LinkWithin a year or more ago and had written blog posts about their experiences. So, I visited them and used their "Search" widget to look for posts about this topic.

However, I was quite surprised that a few did not have a search capability. I did not want to waste my time reading through their posts or traversing their blog archives, so I just gave up on those and went on to the next blogs.

The reason this surprised me was that the blogs that did not have this functionality were all Blogger blogs. Blogger make it really easy for us authors to add various widgets to our sidebars. One of the widgets offered is the "Search Box", which "Lets visitors search hour blog, blogroll, and everything else you've linked to".

While this functionality may not seem important to individual blog authors, it can be an extremely important tool for your visitors.

Think about it. If a reader returns to your blog with the intention of finding a previously published article, he can find it quickly with this tool.

If the Search functionality is not there, the reader will leave, almost immediately.

What this means to the author of a blog is that a valuable reader was lost. Rather than spending time on your blog, that person just went somewhere else for information. Further, that visitor may be less inclined to return to your blog in the future.

In order to grow your readership and followers, it is important for you to think about your visitors. You must organize your blog and offer those tools that a reader may use.

Remember, blogging is not only about writing your opinions and experiences, but it is also about building a set of followers who are eager to return to your site and use your information as reference.

If your blog is hosted on Blogger, you can add this widget easily. Just go to your blog, and click on the "Layout" choice. Then, press the "Add a Gadget" link. You will be presented with a list widgets to add. Just look for the one titled "Search Box" and press the plus button. That's it!

Changing (or Fixing) Publish Date of Blogger Posts to put posts in right order in both Blogger and Feedburner

Are your blog posts out of order because you edited an old post? If so, this article explains how to reset the publish time so that your posts will be displayed in the correct chronological order.

Background
I often edit previous Blogger posts in order to add more information or fix spelling and grammatical errors.  Usually, this is not a problem. I simply select the blog post that I wish to alter, make the changes and then press the orange "Update" button at the top of the page. The post is immediately updated in both Blogger and Feedburner.

However, when I edited a 4 day old post yesterday, it was published with the current time and became the first (most recent) entry in my blog. This was quite a surprise for me because the post title contained the date 11/03/12 and it appeared in the blog before 11/07/12. For me, having posts displayed in a chronological order is important.

Usually when a post is edited, the original post date is maintained but the edit date is updated. Since this information is contained in the Feedburner XML Source, I looked to see what dates were included. For the post in question, I noticed that the published, updated and edited times were all changed to yesterday's date, thus making it the most recently published.

I did not know if this was a Blogger or Feedburner bug because my action began in Blogger and was visible in Feedburner.

After doing a few Google searches, I found that others experienced this same problem as far back as 2009.  This surprised me because I had never experienced it.

Luckily, I discovered a thread in the Google Product Forums for Blogger which described how to fix this problem.

The Solution
The remedy for changing a post's publish date is relatively easy. Simply:

• edit the post which is out of order,
• click the "Published on" link in the Post settings toolbar on the right of the Blogger screen (#1)
• make sure the "Set date and time" toggle is checked
• click on the calendar day that you wish to be set
• enter the time that you want the post published
• press the "Done" button (#2)
• press the "Update" button next to the post's title. (#3)

Once this is completed, the post will be republished with the date you want and the post will be automatically positioned in the correct chronological order in both Blogger and Feedburner!

Why I chose nRelate instead of Outbrain or LinkWithin

Providing internal links to you blog's other postings helps to engage readership by directing visitors to related content within your blog. This articles explains why I chose nRelate to increase page views and visitor duration time on my blogs.

Background
Early last month (October), I was reading Dave Lucas's blog article EntreCard Effect and noticed that he had mentioned that his traffic tripled since EntreCard closed. Dave attributed this growth to LinkWithin and Outbrain. As I was not familiar with either of these, I performed a Google search and found another post by Dave (Righthaven DMCA LinkWithin) where he welcomed LinkWithin back on his blog.

At this point, I visited both the Outbrain and LinkWithin websites and learned that these were 3rd party widgets that can be added to your blog and will display the pretty "You might also like" references the bottom of each post.  I then remembered reading about this topic a while ago on Sharkbytes's My Quality Day. So I checked her blog and Dickster's Random Thoughts and found that both of these were displaying the related articles as well.

So, in my haste, I registered with Outbrain and added the widget to my 4 blogs. Within a short time, these were displaying my own related links. However, many of my early blog posts did not contain pictures, so Outbrain often presented this content simply as a list of links.

When I compared this to the blogs above, I saw that the also had nice little pictures along with the title of the blog post.  Then, I realized that everyone else was using LinkWithin and not Outbrain.

Outbrain & LinkWithin
Unsure which was better, I decided to remove Outbrain from 2 blogs and replace it with LinkWithin. At first, I was happy with the results, but I wanted to display 4 links on one blog rather than 3. In order to do this, I had to re-install the widget again. However, after I did this, I found that both blogs now had 4 related article links. This meant that all would have either 3 or 4 articles. I settled on the four of them.

I waited 1 month and then checked my Webmaster and Analytics statistics. Neither of these showed an increase in traffic. While the actual visitor traffic remained constant, the appearance in Google Search results decreased substantially.

Further, I found that Outbrain had less images than LinkWithin, so I liked LinkWithin better. But, LinkWithin was redirecting my traffic back to their site, which I did not like.

nRelate
Thus, I decided to see if there was an alternative to these two, and found the blog article: Switch from LinkWithin to nRelate which described the pros and cons of LinkWithin and nRelate.

Figuring that I was still experimenting, I decided to remove the Outbrain and LinkWithin widgets and replace them with nRelate.

Almost immediately, I found that nRelate was a better solution for my 4 blogs.

• First, I was able to custom tailor the layout of each widget according to the space available on my blogs (3 blogs display 4 results, and 1 blog displays 5).
• Second, I was able to change the size of the graphic images being displayed. 
• Third, nRelate displays "stock" icons on those posts that do not contain their own graphics (so there is always an image).
• Fourth, I have the ability to display paid ads to generate income payable to Paypal (however, Outbrain also lets you display paid ads). 
• And fifth, the "related posts" being displayed were relevant to the current post. This means that if someone is reading an Entrecard post, they will see other related Entrecard articles of mine as well.  However, the drawback here is that the initial indexing of the blog can take up to 2 hours before the "You may also like -" results appear.

It is still too early for me to see if the nRelate widget is actually boosting my traffic, but I can already see an increase in page views and visitor duration time now that I am using nRelate.

Lastly, I like the fact that I can choose to display paid ads in these widgets. This provides an opportunity to increase income without having to do any more work.

Google Analytics adds Real-Time Page Views to help you monitor your visitor activity

One of the most interesting features of Google Analytics I discovered a few weeks ago was their new "Real-Time" page view functionality.  To access this, you will need to visit your Analytics account and select the "Home" page view. In the upper left corner of the menu, you will see the Real-Time selection. If you click on this, and then the "Overview" choice below, you will be shown a live view of the pages that visitors are accessing, similar to the image below.


The Overview page is divided 6 sections, broken into 3 rows.

• The upper left contains the visitor count and indicates the breakdown between new and returning visitors. On the right of are indicators of the number of views per second.
• The second row provides the Top Referrals and a listing of the Top Active Pages.
• The third row summarizes the Top Keywords that were used to access your pages, and a map pinpointing the location of your visitors. 

If you site is relatively active, you will have a visitor count greater than zero and the page will come to life. It's really fun to sit and watch the activity!

Google's Blogger adds Gadgets to Dynamic Views

About a week ago, Blogger Buzz posted their 3rd update of the Blogger Dynamic Views. In this release notice, they announced that several Gadgets are now supported. These include:

• Blog Archive
• Followers
• Labels
• Profile
• Subscribe
• Link List

These are great additions, but for those who utilize AdSense, you may find that this is only supported in the Sidebar and Classic front screen modes.

While I like the dynamic view formats, I found that one must be very careful when experimenting with the various templates. For example, if you click on your Blogger "Template" choice on the blogger sidebar, you will see a snippet view of what your blog looks like at the top of the page. Below, you will see the series of Dynamic View templates.

If you  roll your mouse over the templates, you will see a "Apply to Blog | Customize" tool tip.

But be careful, if you click "Apply to Blog" your blog template will automatically be converted!  You can revert back to the older version, but certain functionality will be lost. In particular, your Google Analytics will be gone.

The better way to play with the alternate dynamic views while not changing your physical blog is to click on the " Customize " button under the "Live on Blog" view at the top.  If you do this, you can click on the alternate Dynamic View templates and see what your blog will look like. If you don't want to change it, then just click the "Back to Blogger" link at the top (not Apply to Blog).

Two problems I discovered with Dynamic Views is that you cannot edit your html page directly or move around the widgets.  A third problem is discovering how to add the above Gadgets to your blog. If you have an existing blog containing the gadgets and simply convert it to Dynamic View, then your gadgets will automatically be transferred. However, if you do not have these on your blog and want to add them to your dynamic view, I have not found how to do this. Cheers!

Google Webmaster Tools adds URL parameters section

In the continuing improvement of its Webmaster Tools, Google has added a new "URL parameters" section under the "Site configuration" drop down menu.

This is an important feature in helping webmasters control the Google's crawl rate of sites where the displayed content can be modified or filtered based on URL calling parameters. For example, this can be particularly important to online merchants and stores.

As best as we have determined, Google follows nearly every hit on your site with their own mirrored hit. It records all the parameters and then has its Googlebot crawl your pages with the new parameters. By doing this, Google can index your various pages based on your content. For example, let's assume that you own an online furniture store, called onlinestoreexample.com.

When someone visits your store at that url, they are shown a series of departments. Let's say Department 1 is bedding and Department 2 is carpets.  If your visitor clicks on the bedding link, they will access the page using the url: onlinestoreexample.com?dept=1. If they want to visit the carpet section, they click on the url onlinestoreexample.com?dept=2.

This is all well and good until someone tries to access your pages by typing the url themselves. If they make a mistake entering the dept parameter and type in "dpt" or "..." instead, then these parameters will be passed along to the Googlebot crawler. This means that your site will be crawled much more often than necessary and that the error pages you display become indexed as well.

By now enhancing Webmaster Tools and giving webmasters the ability to see the crawling parameters, one can now inform Google whether the parameters that they use for crawling are valid or not. For each parameter listed, you have a choice of letting Google decide if it is important, or if it does not affect your page content.

In our own website, we were shown 19 parameters. Of those, 7 were invalidly formed and resulted in errors. By indicating that these 7 parameters did not affect our content, approximately 400,000 urls were eliminated from the crawler.

So, if you have a website and rely on Google Webmaster Tools, we recommend that you visit your own URL parameters section and learn how Google sees your site.

Use Bing's Webmaster Tools to reduce and slow down crawl rates

If you have a website and it is being crawled too often by Bing, Yahoo, or Live, this post describes how to reduce their crawl rate to acceptable levels. 

Last week, we began receiving 500 and 503 errors from one of our affiliate stores. This had the undesirable side effect of placing our local instance of Apache's web server in an error state and thus taking our site offline for several hours each day.

We realized that our site was down, but did not know why. After reading through our servers log files, we discovered the 5xx errors. After researching these http error codes, we found that we could not fix these errors directly. Instead, we had to correct the root cause.

Searching through our affiliate's website, we found that they will return these error codes when their server receives too many requests from a particular IP. So, we returned back to our log files and found that the Bing, Yahoo, and Live crawlers were simultaneously requesting many of our pages at the same time.

In order to fix our problem, we had to slow down these crawlers. Our first action was to add a crawl delay to our robots.txt file. Initially, we set this to 60 seconds.

Next, we discovered Bing Webmaster Tools.

In order to utilize this, we needed to sign in with our Windows LiveID. We did not have one so we created a new one. That was very easy and we were able to Sign In to that site within minutes.

Next,  we had to add our site to the crawler. The Bing Webmaster Home page has two sections. The first is for messages, and the second is for sites. We found the "Add Site" link and submitted our site's URL.

Unfortunately, it takes about 3 days before any statistics are displayed. So, we just waited.

Once we saw that Bing was crawling and indexing our pages, we were then able to reduce the crawl rate.

This was done by:

• Signing into the Bing Webmaster Tools
• Clicking on our site's URL listed in the Sites section.
• That brought us to the Dashboard page.
• At the top is a "Crawl" link, and we clicked on it.
• The next page then provided a sub-menu.
• We clicked on the "Crawl Settings" link and it brought us to a graphical "Crawl Rate" page.
• We lowered our Crawl rate to Minimum (by highlighting the boxes for each hour of the day)
• And lastly, we pressed the "Save" link.

Within 2 days, the Bing, Yahoo, and Live crawlers were behaving properly, and all of our HTTP 5xx errors disappeared.

During this process, we learned five important things about crawlers:

1. The Google bot crawl rate is well behaved, and does not overwhelm your server
2. The Google crawler ignores the "Crawl-delay" command in the robots.txt
3. Bing only allows a maximum crawl-delay of 4 seconds
4. Once your site becomes large enough, the crawling bots can harm your site
5. Crawlers are tamable.

Note: To set a crawl delay in your robots.txt file, enter the two lines:

User-Agent: *
Crawl-delay: 4

at the top of the file.

Even if you are not experiencing problems with your website, we suggest that you submit your site to  Bing Webmaster Tools. Although the interface is slow, it provides a wide variety of information about your website which is a great complement to the Google Webmaster Tools.

Blogger releases embedded comments feature for all

This week I noticed a new post on my Blogger dashboard from Blogger Buzz. It said they released an "embedded" or "threaded" commenting feature which is available to all Blogger users.

Eager to try it out, I read their post:

Engage with your readers through threaded commenting.

While it says that this feature is automatically enabled for all users, I found that it was necessary for me to change my settings for it to take effect. I did this by following their instructions in the blog post.

First, I went to my "Settings" menu and clicked on the "Other" choice. Then, I made sure that the "Allow Blog Feed?" choice was set to "Full".  Since I already had this done, I did not have to changed anything.

Next, I selected the "Posts and comments" choice under "Settings" and looked the "Comment Location" pull-down setting in the Comments section. This I had to change this to "Embedded". Once done, I saved the settings and checked them again.

Note: This has to be done for each of your Blogger Blogs! 

Usually, whenever I make a change to my settings, all of my Blogger blogs are automatically updated. But, this is not the case for embedded comments.  So, if you have more than one blog, make sure you check them all.

Lastly, I found a recent comment that one of my readers left and I responded. Like magic, my reply was embedded as a thread under the original comment (shown above).

Wow! This is one great improvement. Thanks Blogger!

How to set a mobile template on your Blogger blog

If you have a Blogger blog, you can display a different template on your mobile phone if you wish.

To do this, simply go to your Blogger dashboard and select the blog you wish to change. Then click on the "Template" choice on the left side.

There, you will see two template frames. The one on the left is the template that is live on your blog. The one on the right is what will display on your mobile phone browser. If you want to change it:

• click on the wheel below the mobile display (which brings up a little pop up)
• click the choice: "Yes. Show mobile template on mobile devices" at top left,
• then on left under "Choose mobile template", pull down the menu to view choices (note that Default is a valid choice)
• select a template
• press the "Preview" button to see your mobile template
• and lastly, press the Save button on bottom right.

If you have a relatively new mobile phone with browser capabilities and the internet, you will then see your new template appear on your phone.

I did this a while ago but nothing happened with my 6 year old phone. But, I replaced that with a new Blackberry about a month ago and was thrilled with the difference.

I use the "Default" template and it loads extremely quickly on the phone. It isn't fancy, but looks real good.

So, if you haven't looked at your mobile template lately, you may want to make this slight improvement to your blog.

Bloggers, Submit a sitemap to get more search engine traffic and visitors to your blog

About 3 weeks ago, I was using Google's Webmaster Tools to get an overview of my blogs. While I was on the Dashboard page, I focused on the "Sitemaps" section in the lower right of the page. There, it had a link to "Submit a Sitemap".

I always ignored this because my blogs are all hosted on Google Blogger and each has only one URL. And, since it was in Blogger, I did not think that I had a sitemap.

But, being curious, I clicked on the link, and I discovered that since the blog was distributed by Feedburner, I was given the opportunity to submit the sitemap "feeds/posts/default". So, I checked the box and hit the submit button. I then did this for each of my 4 blogger blogs.

The next day I revisited Webmaster Tools and saw my sitemap listing which had 1 URL in the web index. However, the Status was not checked. Instead it had an error.

Great, I thought. I now successfully messed up my blog listing in Google, but I could not figure out how to remove the sitemap. So I just shrugged my shoulders and let it be.

About a week later, I noticed an increase in search traffic primarily from Yahoo, Bing, Ask and even Google.

This week, I noticed that my Sitemap status is now checked with green, meaning it is accepted and is fine. I looked at each blog in Webmaster Tools and saw that each had a green check, meaning they all had an OK status.

Finally, I realized that the sitemap submission is responsible for bringing me to more search engine traffic. The sitemap provides a vehicle to help search engines crawl the site more intelligently. Since my Feedburner sitemap provides those engines with an organized list of posts, they are now able to cross-index my content with user submitted search engine requests.

To me, this was one of the missing links in the distribution of my blogs. Now, my visitor count has tripled on a quiet day, but increased 10-fold on days that I wrote new posts.

So, if your blog is hosted on Blogger and distributed by Feedburner, I suggest you submit your feed as a sitemap to Google. You may initially see the same errors as I did, but within a month you will probably begin receiving more traffic as well!

I hope this helps each of you. Please let me know if you do submit your sitemap and if your traffic increases as well.


For more information, refer to:

• Feedburner and sitemap
• Submitting Sitemaps

A comment on comments (my Andy Rooney moment about how to write blog comments)

Bloggers are urged to write comments on other blogs in order to help build and promote their own blogs. The concept is that it will help to build back links and a social network. However, many new bloggers mistakenly leave useless comments because they think they are doing the right thing. Unfortunately, their initial attempts often fail to promote their blogs because their comments are considered to be spam.

Comments arrive in many flavors. Some are written simply to promote their own blogs or products. These I classify as spam and I flag them as such. Usually, if the comment has a link in it, I consider it to be spam. Examples are:

• Nice post - please visit somelink.com
• If you're looking for XYZ product, stop by mystore.com
• Just dropped by, anotherspamblog.com

Sometimes, readers are genuinely writing a supportive complement, phrase or message because they enjoyed reading a post, such as:

• Nice post (same as above but no link)
• Very interesting opinion
• Happy birthday.

I generally will publish these short snippets if I believe the comment is sincere. If it is written by a friend, or someone I know, I will publish it right away. But, if it is written by a stranger, I will probably mark it as spam because it has little personal meaning to me.

The most interesting comments I receive are those who oppose or criticize my post's viewpoints or stance. In those, reference links may be provided. I usually publish these comments without hesitation because the author has taken the time to think about what was said and to write an opposing viewpoint. These are usually the most interesting comments to receive because they tend to lead to a real back and forth discussion.

Of course, I like to receive comments that reinforce my ideas as well. If I receive a response that agrees with me and adds new information, I'm all ears.

Over the years, I've learned that comment moderation is important. All too often, I've found that automatically publishing all comments only leads to propagating spam. Therefore, I always moderate every single comment.

Lastly, I refuse to publish any comment by an Anonymous author. I used to do this, but changed my mind. I now believe that if you cannot identify yourself, then your comment is not worthy of publication because it lacks credibility.

In summary, when you write a comment on a blog:

• Let the author know what you think and why
• Do not leave links unless it supports your viewpoint
• Forget the spam
• Identify yourself.

So those are my views about comments and I'd love to know if you agree. Please leave me a comment and let me know either way!

Know what your website is worth to you and others

Determining the value of your website or blog depends on the viewpoint of the person asking. To those who are hoping to sell their website, the buyers viewpoint (others) is most important. The consensus of all experts agree that:

Your site is worth whatever someone is willing to pay.

This is because: a buyer estimates the worth of a website based on the income it will return.

Similarly, however, a site owner also values its website based on the income it currently returns.

Example: Let us consider a 5 year old website which nets a clear profit of $2,000 per year and targets a unique audience. At current interest rate levels, we find that 5 year CD's are yielding 2.00% per year. This means that the site owner has the equivilent of $100,000 invested in the CD which returns $2,000 per year. Thus, the owner correctly considers the value of his site to be worth $100,000. His risk, however, is interest rates. If the 5 year rate increases to 4.00%, then the value of the site will drop to $50,000.

Many authors cite a website's worth based on a fixed multiple of current income. The multiples range from 5 times earnings to 20 times earnings.  This seems rather arbitrary, but from this, we can value the above site to be worth $10,000 to $40,000. Remember however, most of these multiples were established several years ago when interest rates were higher, and may have been in line at that time.

A person who purchases an emerging website is taking a risk, and therefore expects to earn a higher rate of return on his investment. Assuming an investor targets a 10% return, he is willing to spent $20,000 for a website that is returning $2,000 per year. The $20,000 value can be determined using a 10 times multiple.

However, there are many intangibles which can increase or decrease a sites value. For example, if the site is being developed on a part time basis, the full suite of its potential reach may not be acheived. A buyer may indeed see that by adding a bit more manpower resources, the site may grow exponentially.  Conversely, a blog whose content is based solely on the author's experience or memoirs, may be of little or no value to a potential buyer.

If the income of a website has continually increased since the launch of the site, future income growth may also be anticipated. If this is the case, the the value of a website should increase. However, if newly launched competition hits the web arena and threatens to reduce a website's reach, then the value of a website would naturally decrease.

So, returning to our original example and utilizing all of this information, we could reasonably expect the 5 year old website profiting $2,000 per year to be conservatively valued at $100,000 to the owner, but only $20,000 (plus an intangible margin which could range anywhere from $0 to millions of dollars). Thus, I would set a minimum price of $50,000 for this particular website example but would push for its upside potential.

Remember: It's up to you to influence what a buyer is willing to pay in order for you to receive its full potential value.

Below is a summary of intangible items that can potentially increase your website's worth substantially:

• Content Uniqueness
• Cost to replicate
• Demand
• Potential earnings
• Branding
• Domain name desirability
• Income Diversification
• Traffic sources
• Visitor demographics
• Design
• Age of site
• Search Engine position
• Tax implications

You can learn more by reading the websites below.

• How to Value a Website (Will Edwards)
• Thinking of Selling Your Web Site? How to Determine Your Web Site’s Value
• How To Find Out How Much Your Website Is Worth!
• How Much Is My Website Worth?
• How Much Might Your Website Be Worth?
• How Much Is My Website Worth?

Ideas for bloggers to write about and how to find them

Two questions bloggers continually as themselves and others are:

What should I write about today?

and

How do I get ideas for my blog?

After blogging for 5 years and facing these questions myself, I have found that ideas come from a variety of public sources: television, family topics, radio, advertisements, politics, other blogger articles, and more.

Sometimes my topics are planned, and other times they are spontaneous. For example, one morning I listened to a radio tidbit about a Supermoon. So, I decided to research it and wrote an article about Supermoons. This is currently in my top 10 most read posts.

In addition, ideas come from technical tools that many bloggers already use, such as Feedjit and Google Webmaster Tools because both of these sources list search terms that potential readers have used to find your site.  For example, last July I wrote an article about my 4th of July plans which mentions that we have a chicken barbecue. Then earlier this week, a visitor found this post by searching for:

How to cook chicken on an outdoor pit?

Since my article does not discuss this in detail, the question provides an excellent topic for a future discussion.

Unlike many other blogs that are focused on a particular topic, Ask the Blogster is broad enough in scope which allows a variety of topics to be questioned and answered.

Among the many questions and topics that I have for future posts are:

• How much money can I spend?
• Can I buy everything advertised on television and radio?
• Are work at home offers scams?
• How sharing my working experiences with my son helped his education and got him a job.
• What will happen if I lose my job?
• What will I do when my unemployment runs out?
• My favorite zucchini casserole.
• My political opinions about spending and taxes.

My list can  go on and on, but at the beginning of the day,  I must choose a topic and write about it. Since I only write a post once a week, many of these topics will never be addressed. However, having prepared a list of topics makes the process of writing a post much easier and less stressful.

So, whether you have a "money making",  "sports", "cooking", "political", "mommy related", "technical", "biographical", or "a general purpose" blog, I encourage all of you to continually ask yourself: "Is this a good topic for my blog?" whenever you hear, see, or read something (no matter what you are doing).

If you think it possibly is, then write it down for future reference. In time, your list will reward you with a variety of excellent topics.

DMCA Warning: the blogsdirectoryhub.com site may be stealing your content

I ran a Google search for this blog this morning and found the entry:

Ask The Blogster - Blogs Directory Hub

This is an illegal copy of my blog. All my posts since January 28, 2011 are there. The site reformatted all posts and all article links have been changed to point to their internal copy of my posts.

Typically with RSS feeds, the title links back to the original feed article. But, this is not the case. Thus, there is a copyright infringement.

Additionally, their Terms and Conditions section states that they only contain blogs and articles from those who have joined the site, become members, and gave permission to reprint the articles.

I have not joined this site and I have not given permission to reprint, use, or steal my content.

This site appears to be a duplicate copy of a site called thebloghub.com, except that their database of articles is not as extensive. That old site was removed from Google and later delisted entirely. At that time, I wrote an article:

Is thebloghub Stealing Your Content? Don't Fall for the Trap!

which describes the situation and what to do.

I now recommend that everyone check this site ( http://www.blogsdirectoryhub.com/ ) to see if you site's content has been stolen. If so, you should file a DMCA complaint as explained in my previous thebloghub article.

Lastly, I am writing this post with the intent that it will be copied in its entirety by blogsdirectoryhub.com as evidence that content is indeed being illegally copied and distributed.

PS: As quickly as I published this article,  it immediately appeared on blogsdirectoryhub.com.

Three jquery ajax problems encountered and solved

Recently, we decided to retrieve data from our website using jquery's ajax remote data access method, but encountered three problems that we did not know how to solve immediately.

The first problem was obtaining the information in javascript itself. Because we did not know what to do, we used the examples provided in jquery. Writing the remote function was easy. All we had to do was provide a url, specify 'GET', and provide a callback function. To test the working of this script, we wrote a simple script on our remote server to echo back the data. Once we received the data, we would process it later.

• PROBLEM: It appeared that the data was never being returned but it really was. The problem was that we expected the processing to occur in sequential order, but by default, ajax processes in asyncronous mode. Thus, the data returned much later. 
• TRICK: To solve this, we added the "async: false," option to the ajax call and it worked!

The second problem was once the data was received, it was a JSON formatted text string. In order to use it, we had to convert it to a javascript object. To do this, we used the "eval" function.

• PROBLEM: On our first tries, this kept failing.
• TRICK: Then we discovered that we needed to bracket our returned data with surrounding parenthesis characters and the eval returned an object.

Lastly, the third problem occurred when we began using real data. We wrote and debugged our application using Firefox and all seemed to work.

• PROBLEM: But, a user informed us that our pages did not work in the IE and Safari browsers.
• TRICK: The problem was that the json variable "return" in our data structure was being interpreted literally by IE and Safari, and the object conversion failed. When we changed the variable to "returnval", our problem was solved.

A sample of the code data that we were using are shown in the table below. Note that the items we added to correct our problems a highlighted in green. Erroneous values are shown in red.

JavaScript Sample var remotedata = null; function getData( ) {    var dataurl = 'http://www.myurl/getsampledata ;     var retval = $.ajax({     type: 'GET',     url: dataurl ,      async: false,     success: function( JSONObject ) {                        remotedata = eval( '(' + JSONObject + ')' );                  }     }); }

Data Sample Bad { data: [ { key:'matchstring', datapoint1:25, return:45.2, age:42 } ] }  Correct { data: [ { key:'matchstring', datapoint1:25, returnval:45.2, age:42 } ] }

While this information is detail specific, we are publishing our experiences to help you utilize jquery's ajax in your future applications.