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How to Add Author Profile Picture in Google Search Results

Noumaan Yaqoob — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 22:45:00 +0000

Google has recently announced implementation of authorship markup in search results. This change allows authors to take credit for their content. It also shows author pictures in the search results. These author profile pictures are generated from the rel=”author” tag in a hyperlink that points to the author’s Google Profile.

How this is going to benefit you?

Right now implementing this will help Google display your profile picture on the content you have written. This will give credibility to your blog, increase the user trust, and will also help Google improve their search.

Increases credibility of you as an expert in your niche.
Increased trust level.
Better page rankings.

As I mentioned earlier in my blog posts (here and here) that Google is now paying more attention to gauge a page’s importance using social matrices. The author tag enables search engines to find out more about an author and their credibility in a respective field. This tag will enable search engines to understand:

Who you are.
What are the topics you write about.
Who likes your posts.
How people interact with your content.
People who interact with your content, what do they like.

How to add:

Step 1. Basically rel=author is just a hyperlink, which links to author’s Google profile. Like this:

Noumaan Yaqoob

If you own a single author blog you can put this link anywhere on your pages.

Step 2. It was that easy to give yourself credit for a good blog post. There are people who might use this feature for writing poor content and give credit to other people. To avoid this, The Google profile page should also have a link back to your main domain.

There is more on how you can add this markup to your blogs with multiple authors. Check out this post on how to add it to a WordPress blog for multiple authors. Also check out this article on Webmaster Tools help pages.

Also watch this Webmaster’s Tools video in which Google’s Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson discuss authorship markup.

Are Social Recommendations Going to Kill SEO Industry?

Noumaan Yaqoob — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 07:45:39 +0000

I recently had an interesting discussion with a friend about Google+, +1 button, Social Web and the future of SEO. He supports the idea of allowing search engines to learn more about us. He thinks that it will destroy the low quality search engine optimizers who basically just fool small businesses by providing link building and directory submission services. I do agree that many SEO services providers are basically just spammers, filling the web with the junk. But, as a blogger, I also understand the importance of SEO. I think that there are many people offering high quality services and tools to help small businesses get the most out of the search engines.

I personally don’t know enough about SEO to call my self an expert on the topic. However, blogging has taught me a few things and those few things worked really well for me until the Panda Update.

[For Non-IT folks: Social Web, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Panda Update Explained.]

Panda affected one of my blogs terribly and the number of pageviews per day dropped by more than 50%. Google’s algorithms believed that some of my pages are not that high quality.

Since Panda Update, I have become very interested in how Google is determining the quality of a page. Google uses a very complex algorithm to determine how it is going to display search results for a query. To make results more relevant, Google uses information it collects about their users.

Recently Google has indicated that they will be using recommendations from a user’s social circle to enhance search results and offer more relevant content. Tha launch of +1, just days before the launch of Google+ signifies that Google is going to become a more socially powered platform.

In my opinion Google’s social algorithms will (They have started this but in future it will become stronger) determine the quality of a page and it’s relevancy for results based on these social web factors:

Previous interactions of a user with a website in search results. For example, if you click Wikipedia pages more often in your search results than a page from Wikipedia becomes eligible candidate to be in your top10 results for any query.
If you have recommended content from that particular website on social platforms such as twitter and Google+ then it gains significance in your search results.
Your friends have recommended a page by +1, Google Buzz, or Twitter.
Your friends have shared a page on social platforms.
Friends of Friends have recommended something.

Not all friends and social contacts are considered equal. You are more likely to click on content shared or recommended by the people you interact with more often. Currently, Google shows social results at the end of the search result’s page with the explanation that someone from social circles has recommended this page. However, the results that are not marked are also some how influenced by social metrices.

How it is generating the top results?

Google is not going to dump the technologies they have developed to display you the relevant results. Social elements will enhance search results but not totally overpower them. This means that your top results will be judged based on other quality matrices as well. Such as quality linkbacks, page load time, keywords matching the content, quality of content, originality and freshness of content, etc.

Now back to SEO, I don’t think that SEO industry is going to die, it will evolve itself and become more involved in getting recommendations from social platforms. Google’s own social platform Google+ is already getting a lot of attention from bloggers, search engine experts and marketers. Search Engine Optimization services providers will evolve into community builders. Most SEO services provider currently offer full fledged social web marketing services. However, the emphasis would be on building more interactive social communities around the content of a website. I think SEO industry is already heading in the right direction.

There are few things that I don’t understand yet. Like:

If this is how search results will get generated, doesn’t this mean that I will get to see only a few limited sites in my search results?
Wouldn’t it limit a user’s reach to high quality content from sources other than those that they are more likely to interact with?
How small content publishers and bloggers would be able to compete with large publishers with stronger brand images and huge social media interactions?

8 Cool Features I would Like to See in Google+

Noumaan Yaqoob — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 20:39:41 +0000

This is a list of a few features I would like to see in Google+. I will be suggesting them to Google+ team using the feedback form. Before doing that, I wanted to see what other people are thinking, how they are seeing Google Plus and what features they think will increase the importance of G+. Here is my list of some features, which I believe will make G+ more powerful for me.

1. Suggest Friends and Contacts:
Google+ should have a feature to suggest contacts and introduce people to each other. Right now, this can be done by using huddle, or simply tagging people in a status. But it would be awesome if it was clearer and easier.

2. Joining or Subscribing to a Circle
As Darren Rowse suggested, there should be a way for people to add themselves into one or many of the circles, offered to them by another Google Plus user. This way they can subscribe to updates addressed to that specific circle and wouldn’t be bothered by other things. This will also help people with thousands of followers to speak a selected audience.

3. Improved People Search
There should be search options to find people by age, location, interests, etc. Right now, it seems like the search bar on the top allows you to search for people by name. What if I wanted to find people who are in my city, and interested in poetry reading? Advanced search options would allow more people to connect to each other, increasing the overall network size and interactivity on their accounts and Google+.

4. Chat in One tab:
When I have my Google Plus stream opened in one tab and Gmail in other, I have two tabs showing chat in the sidebar. When someone initiates a chat, a window pops up in every G+ and Gmail tab. I think Google plus and Gmail should ask me where I want to chat, on G+, Gmail, both or none.

5. Who are The People in ‘Find and Invite’?
G+ team should explain to us how they display people they think we might want to add to our circles (Update: I later found out that Google+ does explain how it suggests people). It will help us understand, how we can appear in more people’s suggestions. It will also help us understand why we see so many people that have nothing in common with us. Youtube does a similar thing with suggested viewing feature. It describes that it is recommending a particular video because I watched a similar video, and it also tells which similar video I viewed.

6. Integrate Other Networks into Stream using APIs
We all know that the work is in progress to release an API for G+ which will allow developers to integrate apps into Google+. Currently Google is offering a mailing list where Developers can sign up to get notified whenever there are opportunities available for them. Hopefully with this API release, we will be able to see our Facebook, Twitter and other social networks right into our G+ stream.

7. WordPress Integration and Comments
Hopefully, with the API release, it will become possible to integrate Google plus into WordPress. Every comment I post on a Blogger or WordPress blog should appear on my stream with a link back to original post. This means that I will carry my discussions with me to my stream. It would be awesome if we could also receive notifications for new comments on that blog post. People should not only be able to +1 a blog post or page on a website but they should also be able to +1 a comment posted by someone anywhere on the web.

Google needs to provide tools that make a WordPress blog and commenting system get totally integrated. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg recently talked about how he would like to see G+ integrated into WordPress. WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS used by millions of people. It will provide a great boost to Google+ and in return G+ will provide traffic to the websites running a G+ integrated WordPress website..

8. Allow users to suggest improvements in Find and Invite
Find and Invite shows suggestions there should be a feature to allow users to remove a profile from the suggestions. There are lots of people in there that I don’t want to add. Removing them will improve Google’s algorithms and they would be able to understand more about what I like. Isn’t this the whole purpose of G+?

These were just the few features that came to my mind, I am sure more ideas will keep coming to the minds of all Google Plus users. Many of them have already suggested similar feature requests using the feedback form. The thing that I am curious to know is how we will be using Google Plus in the future. How it will help people make money, build networks, become influential. What are the features that would make Google plus more useful for everyone?

Google+ is not Facebook and Here is Why

Noumaan Yaqoob — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 00:30:20 +0000

During last few days I used Google+, a new social networking website launched by Google. Since the launch and trial invitations, everyone started comparing it with Facebook, many claimed that it is Google’s attempt to compete with Facebook. Funny illustrations popped across the web showing Google+ punching and slapping Facebook. For a day or two, it did feel like an alternate to Facebook, but after a while I started feeling that actually it is not. There are many things that are missing from Google+, it is not even an attempt to compete with Facebook, and it actually wants you to add as many people as possible, even if you don’t know them at all, you can add them to a circle.

What is wrong with Google+ ?
Why it is not a threat to Facebook as yet?
What Google is trying to do?

Google has tried to launch social web platforms but all these attempts did not succeed to capture any significant share of the social web. Google Buzz is integrated right into Gmail, but still it did not gain the popularity Google expected, and we all remember Orkut.

Google+ is in trial phase right now and not open for all yet. There might be many improvements to it before it becomes available to all. Right now, it has features similar to Facebook but not all Facebook features are there. For example, there are no ‘Pages’, or ‘Groups’ yet. Even though Google has the technology to add these features by integrating Google Sites and Google Groups. Google+ has chat similar to Gmail Chat and ‘Hangouts’, which allows you to video and voice conference with your friends and family. Sparks are search results for your favorite topics from across the web. Except ‘Hangouts’, there is nothing unique to Google+.

In the User Interface area we see typical Google simplicity with some intuitive new ways to do things on Google+. Such as drag and drop your contacts in circles, and lots of cool nifty things that make it really interesting. However, there are a few things that make this UI a little difficult to understand for non-tech average Joes.

Google should use improved typography. Can’t understand their obsession with large fonts and fear of using small but readable fonts.
Too much empty space wasted in padding, margin and white spaces. This does make Google+ look roomier but it also hides lots of content below the scroll. People don’t like scrolling much. They want to see their updates right away when they sign in.
The sidebars can be more compact.
Thumbnails for shared photos and images are too large.
Stream’s status box should be more inviting and a little wider.

Why would people want to sign up for Google Plus?

Google is the search giant, they have tools and resources to improve Google+ into something you can’t live without. For example they have already integrated social search. When you search for a keyword that has a result which one of the people in your social connections shared, Google would highlight this result. Google’s +1 works as Facebook’s ‘Like’, except that it shows your “like” or +1 as a count to the world and as a recommendation to people in your social circle. And by social circle I don’t mean people in your Google+ circles. Your social connections are people who are connected to you on any websites you have mentioned in your Google profile.

If you mentioned your facebook ID, Twitter account, or LinkedIn profile then Google will attempt to follow your social connections from there. It not only tracks your direct contacts from Gmail Contacts, facebook, Twitter and many other websites. It will also consider other people connected to you if you have a mutual friend with them. This increases your social pool significantly, mine has nearly 2000 people. You can see your social connections by visiting your Google Dashboard.

Google+ will help Google create a social platform one what is already its most strong selling point, Google Search. With Google+, +1 buttons, and many other products, Google will try to guess:

The result you are most likely to click.
What your friends like.
What common interests you and your friends and their friends have.
How often you search for content related to your interests
And so much more.

Google will use this information to improve their products as mentioned in their TOS, and one of their products is Google Ads.

Google is not trying to beat Facebook on the social web, not yet at least. They are trying to gather a wealth of information which will generate billions of dollars in revenue. In fact, I am hoping that Google will allow Google+ users to directly post from Facebook, Twitter or any other website to their Google+ Stream. Google has already integrated +1 in search results and they are marketing it furiously across the web, asking webmasters to implement it on their websites along with other social sharing buttons.

What all this means?

For people concerned about privacy, Google knows your social connections, they know your friends, family and acquaintances, bosses, colleagues and how often you communicate with each one of them.
For other people, your information will be used to enhance search results, and you will be surprised how much relevant these results are going to be in near future.
For businesses, you will have to hire a lot of people to make sure your business is connected to a lot of people. More time and money needs to be invested on social marketing. Forget your page rank, count how many people you have connected on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube, and how often they +1, click, like, comment or react to the content posted by your business.
For Search Engine Optimizers, forget link building and build links to people, that’s new direction for the web.

Google Sites – Add Adsense to Your Google Site

Noumaan Yaqoob — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 12:23:07 +0000

Recently a visitor on our “Creating a Small Business Website using Google Sites” post, asked if they can add Google Adsense to a Google Sites website. The answer is yes you can add Google Adsense to your Google Sites pages. In fact it is simpler adding AdSense to Google Sites than adding adsense to sites created with other content management systems such as Joomla or WordPress.

Adding Adsense to Google Sites is very easy and if you have a site on Google Sites then you probably already know how to do this. But for those who are curious I have explained how to add Adsense to a Google Site below.

Save your page, and then next to the Create Page and Edit page buttons you will see More Actions button. Clicking on it opens a menu, now select Manage Site.

In the left sidebar of the Site Manage page click on Monetize.

Now click on Montize this site button.

You will be asked whether you would like to create a new adsense account or Use an existing adsense account. If you do not have an adsense account you can create one now.

If you already have an adsense account provide your adsense account email address and pin/postal code or last five digits of the phone number that you have on your adsense account. Press next and you are done. now your adsense account will be used to display ads on your Google Sites pages. But first you will have to put the ads on.

Back to the Monetize page, you can select to display Adsense ads in the sidebar of all your pages. Doing this Adsense ads will appear in your sidebar after all your existing widgets like navigational links and recent activity. You can then edit your sidebar and move the Adsense to the top or between widgets.

You can also place your Adsense ads on individual pages by editing them and choosing AdSense from the Insert menu.

Google Sites will now ask you to choose the format and style of your ad and then you are done. Google Sites Help has a section on using Adsense on Google Sites, refer to it for information or use the comment form below to ask me I am not an expert but I will try to help.

Google Sites: Add a Mailinglist or Subscribe Link

Noumaan Yaqoob — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 18:53:14 +0000

Chris from “Sunclipies” asked me how he can add a subscribe box on his website which is created using Google Sites. Honestly, I never noticed that Google Sites lacks RSS feed as a feature. Since I had in my mind that Google Sites is a good place for small websites that don’t get updated as often as a blogs or news site. But what if the web site gains popularity? What if there is audience demand for more frequent updates to what ever that particular site is publishing?

There are several ways for a webmaster to notify the users about updates on their website. There are even free tools available that can publish an RSS feed for a static webpage (I haven’t used any of these and have no idea if they work with Google Sites or not). But since on this blog we rely heavily on the free tools provided by Google, so I will talk about using Google Groups as the solution.

Go to Google Groups and press the Create a group… button. On the Create a group page fill in the information about your site doing so your group and site will have same title and description. Under the option Choose an Access level, select Announcement-only and press the Create my group button. You will be then asked to verify by writing the letters shown in an image to prevent spam. Again press Create my group button. You will be then asked to add a few members to your new group. If you have the email addresses of people who would like to subscribe your group then paste them here or Skip this step.

Now you will be taken to your new group’s homepage. Copy the link from the address bar of your browser. Now go back to your Google Site. At the bottom of your sidebar you will see a link Edit sidebar, click it. On the next page click on Add a sidebar item. A popup will appear showing a few types of items you can add to your sidebar. Select Text and press ADD button. Now you will see a Text Box in your sidebar. Click on the edit link. In the popup window, Give it a title like “Newsletter” or “Subscribe” or “Mailing list”. Below provide the link to your newly created Google group with text informing visitors about your group.

The picture on your left shows how we have used the textbox on our sample website Bashir’s pet shop and notice how we have provided the link to the newsletter. Running a newsletter is no big deal, you can keep your subscribers updated about the recent changers you made to your web site, you can tell them about new products, share something useful with them and they will love you. See this page for some general email newsletter writing tips.

Google: This site may harm your computer.

Noumaan Yaqoob — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:28:33 +0000

Google engineers has accidentally made a massive mistake. No matter what you search on Google all your results are labeled “This site may harm your computer”.

This is happening with all platforms and web browsers and to every one accessing Google websearch from anywhere in the world. So if you are seeing it, do nothing or start using some other search engine for a while.

This made me realize how much we are relying on Google. May be we should consider other ways to do our work on the web. But honestly, I have tried Yahoo Search and MSN Live search. The results were most of the time absurdly irrelevant.

Anyways, Google Engineers are working to resolve the issue. Meanwhile Google’s support pages, forums and help groups are all down due to heavy traffic. It also makes me wonder what impact this accident is going to have on the Internet, Google and Websites that are getting so much negative branding by this error.

UPDATE: Issue Resolved

Google Docs: Using Fonts for Other Languages

Noumaan Yaqoob — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 20:48:52 +0000

How to use Google Docs for with fonts for other languages. Such as Urdu, Arabic, Hebrew and Persian (right-to-left script) or any other east asian languages requiring complex scripting.

I write short stories for children in Urdu language. In order to use Google Docs with Urdu, I need Urdu fonts and I also need to adjust text direction and alignment. Currently these features are not available from the menu. But editing the CSS, one can write not only in Urdu but any language and use any fonts. Here is how I do that:

Open your document and go to Edit > Edit CSS

The CSS Editor will appear on screen. I write CSS to set fonts and text direction for the entire document:

body { direction: rtl; text-align: right; font-family: "Nafees Web Naskh","Urdu Naskh Asiatype",Tahoma,sans-serif; font-size: 16px; }

The first line of this peice of code defines the body which means that the rules described below are for the entire document. Curly bracket marks the beginning of the rules. Direction attribute makes the text direction right to left. Rest is self explanatory. You can change this to meet your needs.

If you just want to change the direction of the text. Go to Edit > Document styles and check the box that says ” Make the page text align right-to-left.”

Now there is a problem with these documents. If you have described a font not listed in the menu of Google Docs, and you download the file as PDF then you wont be able to see PDF document in your own font. Why? because in order to generate a PDF with the font described in the style sheet the font should be available to the PDF creator. In this case the font is stored on your computer not on Google. So how do we resolve this issue? Since I use Ubuntu so download my Google Docs file and open it with Open Office to create a PDF file. It works like a charm and OpenOffice’s PDF are beautiful and smaller in size. But if you don’t want to download and install open office then you can always use PDFCreator.

Chrome Your World With Themes

Noumaan Yaqoob — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:21:35 +0000

Google Chrome is becoming very popular every where particularly among people who spend their lives on browsers. You can sense the popularity by looking at blog posts, news items, and themes.

There are Google Chrome based themes available for many applications. Google Chrome’s innovative new approach to design inspired these designers and users to adapt these themes. For example there are people who are using Firefox, they either don’t want to use Chrome or can’t use Chrome (as Chrome is not yet available for Linux and Mac users). So they Chromify their firefox.

Chromifox Theme for Firefox will make your Firefox look like Google Chrome.

There are Chrome like themes for popular blogging applications.

I hope to see a Google Chrome theme for my Gnome Desktop on Ubuntu, and it would be nice to have a theme for Vista and XP too.

There are even websites offering themes to change the appearance of your Google Chrome with themes. I didn’t know that themes are supported or not so I didn’t try it. But HowTo Geek tried changing appearance of his Google Chrome browser to Windows Vista Aero Style theme with satisfactory results.

Creating a Small Business Website Using Google Sites II

Noumaan Yaqoob — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 15:04:21 +0000

In the previous post we discussed how to create a simple website for a small business using Google Sites. In this post I will talk about adding new features to your simple site to make it more interesting for your visitors.

Google sites is simple but full of features to meet all your needs. You can add almost anything to your website by using it with other Google web applications. All these great features are available to you under the Insert menu when you edit a page.

Add Pictures
There is a handy button to upload your pictures. But you can also add pictures from Picassa web albums. This feature is particularly good if you want to publish albums of your products, your business, events, and so on. Using albums will provide your visitors a reason to stay, browse, and would eventually compell to take action and contact you.

Add Videos
You can upload your videos to Google Video or YouTube and then embedd them on any page on your website. If a picture is worth a thousand words than a video is better than thousand pictures. You can use your handycam to make video and upload them to Youtube. Just make sure that your videos are not too lengthy. Make short clips and make sure that they are good. You can always edit your videos with Windows Movie Maker. Add music to them, add subtitles, slides, or logos.

Add Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations
You can embedd your documents from Google Docs to your website. Even if you use MS Word or Open Office, you can always upload your documents to Google docs just for the sharing purposes. I specially love the presentations feature. I think it is a great idea to create promotional material in slides and add them to your pages or offer them as downloads so that visitors can learn more about your business by viewing a colorful presentation.

Add Forms
People are lazy, and with the wealth of information available on the web it is difficult for them to memorize your site and your business details. They are lazy to pick up the phone and dial your number. So it is a good idea that you add forms to your site so that they can leave their contact information and you can tell them more about your business, products and services. You can create a contact page with a form on Google Sites. First create a form in Google Docs then add it to your page. It is hassle free and you don’t need to know any programing, scripting or html to do that. You can place an order /query form, run a poll on your website and ask visitors questions. Run surveys and display the data on your pages.

Add Google Gadget
Click on the More button under the Insert menu and you can choose from hundereds of gadgets to add interactivity and usefulness to your website. You can add translate tools, you can add calendars, add an online chat gadget to talk to your site’s visitors. Browse the gadgets and you will be surprised to see how many tools are there to make your site interesting. But a word of caution, don’t use too many gadgets and don’t use them at all if you don’t need them. They are available to add interactivity and external functionality to your website. Using them un-neccarily would be annoying for your site’s user experience.

There is nothing to worry about if you ever run into any problem while working on your website at Google Sites. They have support available for you. You can browse their help pages, join their forum and post your questions, or you can subscribe to their Google sites blog. They often feature websites that are taken advantage Google Sites, so drop them an email and they might even feature you on their blog.