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:

<a href="https://plus.google.com/108579361730459688657" rel="author">Noumaan Yaqoob</a>

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.

We need a solution that could help us get all the information from our friends and family in an easy and quick manner.

Some smart developers realized our need, accepted the challenge and took it seriously to develop a new web application called “friendfeed“.

FriendFeed describes itself as:

Sign up for FriendFeed, invite some friends, and get a customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared — from news articles to family photos to interesting links and videos. FriendFeed automatically imports shared stuff from sites across the web, so if your friend favorites a video on YouTube, you get a link and a thumbnail of the video in your feed. And if your friend likes a news story on Digg, you get a link in your feed. FriendFeed makes all the sites you already use a little more social.”

In easy words FriendFeed is a feed of all the online activities of your friends that are accessible via RSS feed. Like their facebook, twitter, youtube, blogging, digg, stumbleupon and other activities. Check the list of supported sites.

FriendFeed is supercool, however there is a little difficulty. In order to get all the updates from your friends it is important that your friends have already made an account on FriendFeed and has shared their account information for the websites that they use.

You can add an imaginary friend which means you can add a friend’s RSS feed but adding all those feeds manually for each friend is difficult and not an ideal situation. So it would be better if you just invite your friends to give FriendFeed a try. I have invited my friends already and I am hoping that since they are so addicted to social media they are definitely going to love friendfeed.

People all over the web are talking about FriendFeed and many of them are comparing FriendFeed with Twitter. I think this is a totally wrong comparison. While Twitter is a microblogging site that helps you publish tiny bits of content. FriendFeed is more like a feed aggregator. That merges RSS feeds for a person and publishes a unified feed for that person and then helps sharing this feed with other people. I think FriendFeed is cool and I feel that I will be using it a lot in future. Please feel free to join me on friendfeed.

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.

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

This is really a tough question. Some bloggers, even the experienced ones, spend so much time looking around for the perfect theme to beautify their blog. There are themes with lots of images in header and every where they look amazingly beautiful. There are themes that are simple and elegant. Themes, with functionality to improve certain aspects of your blogging experience. Themes designed for SEO and themes designed to be used with advertising programs such as Google Adsense. There are three columns, two column and single column themes. How do you know what is right for your blog?

Here is how I do it. First of all I try to think what I want to achieve with my new blog. Like this particular blog that you are currently reading is a place to share tips. So I needed a theme that was easy on reader’s eyes so that they can read the content, apply it somewhere, and then leave a comment if they want. This approach to design is called Usability and it helps a lot in the long run. This blog is new, so I also needed a theme that is easy to modify for my future needs.

I wasn’t sure about sidebar and layout. But then I thought that I don’t have enough content at the moment to fill the two sidebars with interesting items. So I decided to go with a single sidebar theme such themes are also called two column themes sometimes. Right sidebar or left sidebar? I remembered reading somewhere (probably here) that people read left to right so if you put your content on right and relevant links and navigation on the left then it is easy for them to quickly find what they need.

So this the first step of choosing the right theme. You need to think what you want to do with your blog and think of a layout that fit both your’s and your readership’s needs.

The Next step is design, color, and layout. There are so many colors in this beautiful world and please remember that we all love colors. So even if you are into simple looking web pages make sure that it has some colors too. While browsing the theme directories you will see many themes and I would suggest that you bookmark the themes that you like on your way. Once you think you have browsed enough themes then look into your bookmarked themes. And select a few that you like most.

In my opinion themes with large image headers containing pictures of irrelevant things are not very good. because these images provide no benefit to your reader. Still if you prefer images in your header then make sure that they are not too big.

Optimizing your blog for search engines and advertising programs is no more a hassle. But it could be if you pick a theme that is not easy to modify or relies on some plugins that you don’t really need. You don’t really need to pick up a search engine friendly theme, because it could easily be done later on with either plugins or manually. You also don’t need to pick up a theme that has room for lots of advertisements. Because such themes are used widely by bad websites and if your visitor has seen such websites already he would think that your blog looks like those trash sites so it would be useless as well.Choose a theme that is easy to modify and you can always add your advertisement code in it.

Widgets or No Widgets?

Depends on how easy you want it to be, I personally feel easier working with themes in my text editor. But lots of people like the comfort of Widgets. So if you want to make adding items to your sidebar simpler then you go for widgets ready themes.

While picking up a theme don’t just think about the attractiveness. Look for a theme that is easy for your readers so that they can easily navigate your website or blog. Also make sure that the same theme is easy for you too, so that you can work with it in future and add features to it if the need arises.

How do you know that the theme you want is easy to modify or not? I particularly check the theme in theme-editor. Since I feel that most editing goes on in sidebars so I look at the sidebar template. Themes that use complex div structure in sidebars are difficult to use. I prefer themes that have simpler sidebar code so that I could add my own items easily.

Another quick tip, don’t just go for the popular themes. If you browse the theme directories deep down you would find some really amazing themes that are not already used by hundreds and thousands of blogs. Also make sure that you add your own branding to the theme. Like your own image in header, or your customize it so that it looks uniquely yours.

Caution: Please remember to look at the theme carefully. There are some dirty minded people who add links to adware and spyware sites in wordpress themes. Some people even add their own Google Adsense code in themes. So if you see any such thing you can either remove the code or simply choose someother theme. The best place to look for themes is the theme directory at official WordPress site.

NoFollow and NoIndex Tags

If you have a form on your website’s contact page to collect user feedback. Then it would be wise to hide this page from search engines. If you are worried that what if there were visitors specifically looking for ways to contact your company or you then you should probably create another contact page with no form or provide the contact information on your main page.

You can hide your page from search engines by using a no follow tag on the link that leads to your form page and then by adding noindex meta tag. You can add this tag on the links and pages manually or add a few lines in your robot.txt file. This way the spammers wont find your page from search engines. Here is how to do that:

Lets say that your form is located at a page called “contact.php”, and you have links to your contact page in your site’s navigation menu and some pages. Then you will have to modify these links by adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to your link.

<a href="http://www.example.com/contact.php" rel="nofollow">Contact</a>

Then create a robot.txt file and save it to your site’s main/root directory. Add these lines to your robot.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /contact.php


Then add a meta tag noindex in your contact page between <head> and </head> tags:


<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">


Using the meta tag on your page will tell search bots not to index your page. Read more about Robots Exclusion Standard or check out Google’s webmaster guidelines’ support page.

Human Identification validating techniques:

Using this technique you try to present a challenge to someone who comes to submit the form. This challenge is something simple like copying the code shown in an image file, or answering a simple question. The image verification is called CAPTCHA or reCaptcha. There are several hundered plugins and tools available that allow you to include CAPTCHA image verification to your forms. For example the official reCAPTCHA project offers you to sign up for an account and you can then add their image verification technology recaptcha on your pages. They also have plugins for various Content Management Systems such as WordPress, MediaWiki or phpbb. The site also has tutorials to teach you how you can add the code to your php pages and use it with other server side programming languages.

But if you are a total newbie and can’t configure an image validating script, then you should probably go for simple questions. In this method you add a field to your forms asking users questions like: “2+9=?” the user then enters 11 in the answer field and when they submit form you can check out their answer. If it is correct then the form gets submitted other wise user is taken back to the form. There are ready-made plugins available to do that too on various content management systems.

Do Not Use A Form

Just in case if you get tired of fighting spam or if you lack the skills to get spam protection configured properly. Then it is highly recommended that you use a contact page with no Form at all. Use the No follow tag for your contact page and your email address in image format like this:

If your users have something important to say they would email you. I know that people are lazy, they usually find it easy to just fill out a form and send rather than opening their email client and manually typing your email address. But trust me they will email you if they have something valuable to say. I personally feel that spending time and money on fighting spam is such a waste of resources. Millions of dollars are spent each year on sending spam messages and combating spam. I feel that if we start using techniques that do not give way to other people for exploitation then we would be indirectly adding to conservation of human resources.