Ok, first I will illustrate the issue. One fine day my vistior count dropped. At first I thought it was due to Google Sandboxing or penalizing my site. But when i searched the net I found that I was still having the same ranking. But I wan in for a huge shock when I opened my Sites Google Webmaster. My site had more than 3300+ links/pages as "URLS not followed". When I saw the detail everyone of the error showed "Redirect Error". Now I was clear why my Rankings dropped. Now there lies the real problem which creates the Redirect error. Google uses our feed as Sitemap. The problem with the current system is that my site feed is redirected to feed burner which inturn is redirected to "feedburner google" feed. Earlier all worked fine as Google never cared about re-directs. Now it looks like Google is carefully avoiding links with more than one re-direct.
I will first illustrate why this porblem arised and then give the solutions. My blog is hosted on Blogger and I have made the Site feed point to my Feedburner feed. Recently Google forced me to transfer my feedburner feeds to google. It was a pretty smooth transition and I didn't lose a single user as Google already redirected my feedburner feed to Google feed. Everything worked fine till Google changed their crawling algorithm. If you go to Google webmaster site, tools options and click "Analyse Robot.txt" you can see your current Robot.txt. For a Blogger blog, it will be similiar to:
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Sitemap: http://www.xxxxxx.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated
So the solution is simple make your site feed pointed to your google feed. i.e go to feedburner.google.com and copy the address of your feed and put it in your blog feed (Layout->settings-->Site Feed). This will solve the issue. But it will take minimum of to weeks to de-list all your URLs from Not followed. But finally my site traffic has picked up.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
How to Solve the Redirect Error in Google Webmaster
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Google Images Discards Alt Tags
Yes, as the title suggests I have strong reasons to believe that Google Images has stopped taking the alt tag into account while indexing images. I have earlier written about a possible Change in Google's Image algorithm. That was written based on the sudden drop in traffic in one of my site Actress Snaps. My site used to get more than 60% traffic from Google Images now its reduced to just 10%. This led me to see where the traffic was going from the image search.
Since the site in question is a celebrity phot site, I used to host most of the images in Photobucket. I do have a pro account there. But then later stumbled upon Shareapic.net which was paying their users a share of revenue. No need to say I slowly started hosting the majority of my images in Shareapic. They paid me 50$ the first time and from surprisingly from the next time onwards they started paying me only 40% of what I was entitled. I had a payout of 20$ but they paid me 8.92 dollars. It looks they have changed their policy for foreign users and I am from India. Anyway let's comeback to the real issue. On closer examination I found that the shareapic hosted images were not receiving any or minute traffic from Google images compares to Blogger host or Photobucket hosted.
My first thought was that Google may be penalising those paid to upload image host service. But that argument never made sense. So I took a even closer examination and found out a fundamental difference in Shareapic and Photobucket. If you have hosted your images in Shareapic, you have noticed that whatever name you give to your file while uploading thay change it to a random number. Whereas Photobucket never changes the file name and retains them. Now we all considered the two important factors with images were filename and alt tags. So for all the images hosted in Shareapic I used to use alt tags cause the filename was a random generated value. Earlier these pictures used tom have enough traffic from Google images but now they have dried up. Hence I believe like the title tag Google looks like have taken a decision not to use Alt tag, ot atleast they consider the filename as more important and alt tag as a cross verification factor.
We can only hope that a host like Shareapic, which gives unlimited bandwidth and space may change their filenaming system. Otherwise the only option looks like put the first two images in a gallery in Photobucket and the rest on Shareapic.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Has Google Changed their Image Search Algorithm?
One of my site, which basically belongs to entertainment niche, with full of images was receiving more than 60% of its traffic from Image search engine. I was getting close to 800 referrals from google's different image seasrch engine (located in different places). Day before yesterday when I checked the analytics stats I was in for a surprise, the huge number of 700+ was reduced to a mere 90+. That was a shock as against usual trends people who visit via image search engine also spends good amount of time in my site. I checked the stats today also and was dissappointed by the falling image search numbers.
My traffic from google search engine still remain the same. This led me to the question whether Google has indeed change their image search algorithm. As a usual SEO technique I used to use alt tag along with all images. Since I group images as a set I use the same alt tag for one set. Google might be now penalizing guys who are using the same alt tags for more than one image. Another could be , google may have discarded the alt tag completely as there are widespread abuse of the same. This also could have occured because I used the PageName tag for title recently; this may result in search engine taking more time for re-analysing the pages. These are my assumptions, this may be wrong. But if anyone of you have experienced the same please comment. Anyway I am going to wait for some more days to see what happens. Would report the same in a couple of days.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Blogger Title Tag for Better SEO Ranking
A big drawback till recently with Blogger platform was the way the title for each individual post displayed. Usually it involved the Blog title followed by the Page title. It is always better to display the Page title alone as it will increase the SEO ranking. But the most improved aspect could be a better performance in search results. People will click on a search result more if the title starts with the Keyword rather than Blog title. For example let’s assume that I am searching for term “FaveBot” – I have a page about FaveBot titled “FaveBot – Your Search Solution”. But in the search result it will show up as “Pen The Blog: FaveBot – Your Search Solution”. This will reduce my search effort considerably, especially considering that there could be tens of WordPress blogs which will only display Page title. Hence there was a huge demand from Blogger users from the beginning to find a solution to this.
The first solution available on the net for this issue was a JavaScript. I have no idea who compiled it – but it did serve somewhat its purpose. You can look at the code here. But its drawbacks were huge; whenever I tried to install that my blogger template started behaving oddly. So in the end I have to discard it and get satisfied with blogger default. Now Blogger team has answered all our calls. The solution is the <data:blog.pageName/> tag. This will display the Page Title alone or simply put the pageName variable holds the Name of the current page. Remember that this will not hold Blog Title and hence cannot be used to display Blog title. Why I am saying this is that people will be tempted to simply change the <title><data:blog.pageTitle/><title> with <title><data:blog.pageName/></title>. This will not work with your blogs homepage. The steps to add this to your blog is defined below. I am explaining two processes here – which one to chose is at your disposal.
Process 1:
1)Go to Edit HTML page of your blogger template.(DashBoard-> Layout->Edit HTML)
2)Search for <data:blog.pageTitle/> tag (Between head tags)
3)Replace the tag with Below given tag<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'>
<title><data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/></title>
</b:if>
Process 2:
In the step 3 replace with this code<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "Your_Blog_URL"'>
<title><data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/></title>
</b:if>
Replace the Your_Blog_URL with your blog url.
If you chose process 1, then you will have the index pages (i.e homepage, archive page, category/labe page) all displaying Blog title. In the second process only the homepage will display Blog title but the archive and labe pages will display their titles.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Viewzi – A Visual search Accumulator
Earlier I have written a post about a visual search engine called RedZee . Viewzi in contrast cannot be called as a pure search engine, they can be called a Search accumulator. Different search engines employ different algorithms, this throw up varied results for the same keyword. Many attempts, both successful and unsuccessful were made to combine them to a format. Viewzi is the latest attempt in that, with a completely different approach. Viewzi define their service as "Viewzi is a new and highly visual way to search that brings all your favorite stuff together in one place."
In contrast to the other services of similar kind available on net, Viewzi stands out for the varied options it provides to the end user. They provide you a Screenshot view which basically access Yahoo search engine.
The video search option searches the popular video sites Blinks, Veoh, YouTube. Then there is the Basic photo view option which searches Riya and Flickr. Her you have the additional option of choosing either one of Riya or Flickr, and the size of the images. Another option is the Simple Text Search which is similar to our normal serch option; this option searches Google and Yahoo to fetch results. Then there is the more powerful 4 Sources View in which in addition to Google and Yahoo, Ask and MSN is searched. Here also you have the option to deselect any number of above mentioned search engines. The other options are Shopping view, Book view, Reuters news view etc. But the most interesting has to be the Celebrity Image View which searches Google Images and just jared. This one displays the images as a pile with the option to zoom and move each one of them. 
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Preezo – Prepare Presentation Online
Preezo – Presentation For Web provides a very powerful tool online presentation. Earlier attempts of trying to create a replica of PowerPoint presentation have come a cropper. But this one looks good. Preezo should be complemented for the effort it put in. They have put all the crucial features of MS PowerPoint presentation in their tool. Their presentation interface is built upon Ajax and is pretty fast. The interface is so good and powerful that it displays all the effects and transitions without a glitch.
To start with Users need to register for a free account with Preezo. After the usual E-Mail verification users can log into the system. Preezo provides the entire standard slide layout. You can add background colours to the slide layout. You can even add your custom images to the Layout. You can add separate color for the Text Box and Customize the text with all the regular fonts and effects. Another feature which makes Preezo very powerful is the vast amount of slide transition effects. Preezo also provides with all the Bulleting and Numbering option without which no presentation is complete. Once the presentation is saved, you have the option to publish it to web and share the URL to others. Otherwise you can send it to your Email or embed it in your site.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
RedZee - Watch Your Searches
Google holds the monopoly when it comes to online search engine. Yahoo, the second best search engine comes only a distant second. Many search engines were launched with new concepts to challenge Google’s might, but most of them simply vanished. The latest trend is “Visual Search Engine”. This idea looks like one that will be here to stay. One of the Visual Search Engine which is out in its beta form is RedZee. How successful this concept and RedZee will be only time can tell. As a beginning RedZee is not bad, especially considering the fact that Visual Search Engine concept is in incubation stage. But the fact that in the end of all they have to compete with the likes of Yahoo and Google could be their biggest disadvantage. But nothing can be said at these early hours.
RedZee’s biggest attraction should be their Mascot. I don’t know whether they call it RedZee – But it’s very well animated and will surely make everyone try their service for at least once. Below is the screenshot of the search result. 
RedZee gives a text description of the sites, but only one at a time. Many were critical about RedZee ability as a search engine, as a text based description will give more information. But I believe RedZee has its own advantages, especially those who are searching for entertainment and Media related stuffs. For them, RedZee’s interface could be better than that of Yahoo and Google as we can get a glimpse of the site. But for information related search, I do believe RedZee would be in a disadvantage. But RedZee’s biggest disadvantage is the relevancy of searches – when I did a search for "f c Barcelona" (without quotes), the official Barcelona site came at fifth. Ahead of it were Wikipedia and Blogger. This could be because of the amount of blogs about Barcelona hosted by Blogger. My site All About F C Barcelona never came in the result. If you include the quotes in your search terms, nothing shows up. This could be disastrous as all the net users are trained by Google to search a particular combination this way. Second problem is with the search box in the search result page. Enter key does not work here and also you cannot select a particular to delete or edit here.
But over the entire concept put forward by RedZee. It’s still in its beta version and could turn out to be a more powerful tool when moving out of Beta. But the biggest problem for these guys could arise if Google decides to implement a Visual Search Engine.
