Web Talk

A few months ago Google launched its new service to create web sites from scratch without knowing any programming language. Anyway the service was just reserved to companies and organizations that wanted to use it on their own domains. Starting from the 21st of May 2008 the service is open to everybody who wants to share their knowledge, hobbies, interests and such on the Internet. A Google website will have an extension such as: http://sites.google.com/[your-website]. On it you will be able to add as many pages as you wish and there will be no advertising nor any pop-ups, banners, buttons etc. It will be a space just for you. Your personal, free space where to experiment your creativity and let other people know about what you like. To help you create your website, Google Sites gives you a full set of tools to add pictures, documents, calendars, videos and gadgets to your pages. To start creating a website you need a Google account and sign-in to Google Sites. To know more about this new service visit this link.

The endless dance between Microsoft and Yahoo seems to be finished in a little nasty surprise (for Microsoft). As a matter of fact, while Microsoft was still exploring Yahoo universe trying to determine if anyone was interested in its bunch of money, Yahoo itself released a press stating that Microsoft’s proposal to buy Yahoo had ended without a resolution. Hours later, to Microsoft’s disbelief, (I am pretty sure about this) Yahoo announced a search-advertising partnership with Google. The Yahoo-Google partnership, which should last four years with options to extend to 10, will clash Google ads and Yahoo search results together. The money coming from this deal will be divided between the two companies, while Yahoo will keep its search engine and ads separate from Google. Yahoo stated that the arrangement will add $250 million to $450 million to its cash flow in the first year. This partnership won’t be locked anyway. In fact, Yahoo stated that they are looking for other search partners who are interested in this new business. If you want to know more, read the whole news directly from Yahoo News. Here are the previous articles speaking about Microsoft and Yahoo:

• Microsoft continues to explore Yahoo
• Microsoft pulls bid for Yahoo
• Yahoo response to Microsoft: more bucks please
• Yahoo says no thank you to Microsoft offer
• Microsoft wants to purchase Yahoo

Until some years ago Google Dance was very well-known to every webmaster knowing a little bit about Google and the way it works. Google Dance was that lapse of time, usually from 6 to 8 days, where a major index and ranking update of the Google search engine was performed. During these days Google also recalculated backlinks of every page in the Internet to determine how important and authoritative a certain website was. Once this big check was finished Google had to update all its datacenters scattered all over the world. This was made little by little because a lot of data was involved and, as a result, some datacenters were updated right away while other ones not. Google Dance occurred on average every 36 days or 10 times per year. It was very easy to spot because your website, your most competitive keywords and such could disappear or be placed low in the SERP from one minute to the very next one, while other not-very-famous websites and their pages were placed high in the search for no apparent reasons. To check if a Google Dance is on and if your website is affected by it, just perform this simple check. As I said there are a lot of datacenters which have to be updated. A datacenter is just a particular server having a web address giving you, as a result, the well-known Google search page. On this page just writesite:www.yourwebsite.com. Do this for every datacenter available. After that compare all the results (I mean the number of your website’s pages which are indexed by that datacenter you performed the query on). If you see that some datacenter has not indexed all of your website’s pages while other ones do, it is highly probable that your website is undergoing a Google Dance. Here are the datacenters’ addresses:

• www.google.com
• www2.google.com
• www3.google.com
• 216.239.37.99
• 216.239.39.99
• 216.239.41.99
• 216.239.51.99
• 216.239.37.104
• 216.239.41.104
• 216.239.37.147
• 64.233.161.98
• 64.233.161.99
• 64.233.161.104
• 64.233.161.105

Since August 2003 Google Dance doesn’t exist anymore…officially. Its name has been changed into a more professional and less dramatic Google Everflux and it is performed every week, with most movement occurring on Mondays. The results, anyway, even though less traumatic than the ones seen in the Google Dance, have the same effects but for a shorter lapse of time (some hours or a day at most). Anyway there are still a lot of people thinking that the famous Google Dance still exists. I am myself prone to think like that because once in a while my blog undergoes a dramatic drop in its visits. This effect just lasts 4 or 5 days and, all of a sudden everything comes back to normal. I don’t think that it has to do with Google Sandbox at all, since with the sandbox the drop should last longer than a few days. I don’t even think it has to do with demographic waves that periodically hit all websites because they are linked to specific periods such as: summertime, good weather, holidays and such. The only thing which explains what happens to my blog is just the Google Dance

Google has just released a nice API application that lets you display maps and all the nice functionalities available on Google Heart directly on your preferred browser. Here is a brief excerpt: ” The Google Earth Plug-in and its JavaScript API let you embed Google Earth, a true 3D digital globe, into your web pages. Using the API you can draw markers and lines, drape images over the terrain, add 3D models, or load KML files, allowing you to build sophisticated 3D map applications. If you have an existing Maps API site, you can 3D-enable your page with as little as one line of code.” To download it, visit this page

I am fully aware that there are a lot of guides in the Internet speaking about this topic and how to make and increase money with Google Adsense, so I am more than sure that I will not add anything new in this article. Anyway one thing I can do is to order all the tricks I found while surfing and list them tidily, making attention to write just those ones which really worked for me and this blog. This post doesn’t promise to enrich you overnight, but assures you not to make any of those common mistakes people usually do when they decide to put Google Adsense in their websites. Just follow these tricks strictly, and you will start making some money for sure. At least this is what happened to me! Ready? Here is the list. Continue reading »

The whole story started about five days ago when, all of a sudden, Web Talk started experiencing a great drop in its visits. Basically, from almost one thousand visitors a day, at the present time Web Talk just manages to gather a little more than two hundreds people. I have lost around 80% of visitors, and considering that all of Web Talk’s readers come from Google search, well, this has obviously to do with Google itself. This tendency is still on because, while I am writing, my visits are still dropping dramatically by the hour. If it continues, I fear there will be just a dozen of people here at Web Talk. I have to tell you that this thing worries me a lot. That’s why, a few days ago I started Googling to find out if I could get a solution or a reply to this big issue. To my big surprise I learnt that this is not a lone case but a spread tendency, courtesy of Google and its Sandbox. But what is Google’s Sandbox? First of all let me tell you that Google denies any Sandbox algorithm in its policy and, as a consequence, there are lots of theories about it, all of them getting to the conclusion that, despite what Google says, there is a kind of Sandbox behaviour on Google’s side. But let’s start from the beginning. Let’s start from what means being in a sandbox and why it was created. Google’s Sandbox was put in place in March 2004 to prevent fake and spam sites from being placed and ranked highly in the Google Search. Basically, if a website manages to get a lot of visitors, or a high rank or perform well in the Google Search in a short laps of time, Google gets “funny” about the website and, because of this reason, tends to think that something weird, bogus and not-legal was made in order to trick its algorithms. That’s why it puts the website in a sandbox to play…just with itself. As a result the website will stop performing well in Google Search, and while the whole website is still indexed, its keywords will perform badly and its pages will be shown very low in the search result. Solutions? No solution are available at the present time. The only thing to do is waiting. Usually Google puts a website in the Sandbox for a period of time which varies from one month to one year at most. I don’t want to discuss about Google’s policy because a lot has already being said in the Internet. That’s Web Talk situation right now. I can not do anything but continuing writing my posts as usual. For the few of you guys who were able to find this blog, stay tuned because more news and guides are coming up. If you wish to know more about Google’s Sandbox here is a list of the most interesting articles I manged to find while surfing. Continue reading »

If you are a blogger you know only too well how important to put advertising on your bog is in order to pay your monthly and yearly fees to manage your internet activity. In fact, you have to pay the web hosting provider, ask for help to programmers just in case something gets screwed, pay a designer to get a better theme, pay Adword to let other people know about you and what you are doing etc. If you start blogging seriously and you are not into programming, at a certain point you have to pay to get help. Blogging is a continue work in progress. Usually readers don’t see a lot about this feverish activity, apart when a new article comes out, but I assure that behind the scenes there is a lot of work and posting articles is just the tip of the iceberg. Blogging is an extreme dynamic activity made of hundreds of big and small daily adjustments. OK, I apologize for this little off-topic… There are a lot of ways to get money from your blog, but the most used one is, without any doubt, Google Adsense. There are dozens of plugins letting you put its code among your pages or promising you to fine tune it, but what if you don’t manage to find the right plugin reproducing the behaviour you are looking for? A solution is to know a little bit about php programming, make a custom piece of code and put it into your blog’s theme. Let’s make an example. In the past weeks I have have been looking for a plugin which lets me put Adsense in the main page of my blog ( by the way, I use Wordpress) at specific intervals, let’s say one advertising every 3 posts. Well, believe it or not but I didn’t manage to find it at all. Lucky for me and you all, there are a lot of good guys out there willing to help you for the sake of it. This is the trick I managed to get from a good willed guy:

• Get access to your blog thorugh your FTP software.
• Go to /public_html/wp-content/themes/yourTheme.
• Open Index.php (which corresponds to your blog’s homepage loop).
• Add this piece of code after <?php if (have_posts()) : ?>: <?php $counter = 2; ?>
• Add this other piece of code containing your Adsense after <?php the_content(’Continue reading »’); ?>: <?php if(++$counter % 3 == 0) { Echo ‘Your Google Adsense code here‘; } ?>

The behaviour you should expect from this code is that it will put a Google ads at the bottom of the first post of your blog’s homepage. It will also put a Google ads every three posts, following thus this frequency: 3,6,9,12 etc. If you want your Google ads to follow a different frequency, just change the figures in the code.

The new version of Google Earth, namely version 4.3, is a real milestone in the making of this software, since lots of new features have been added to the ones already available, which make this program something to have on your computer absolutely! Now Google Earth is faster than before as far as 3D is concerned. 3D is available for more cities, giving you the chance to see more things in detail. Another nice feature is the Sunlight Shadow which lets you watch the sunrise and sunset from anywhere, while the Street View, just available for Google Maps until some time ago, is now fully integrated in Google Earth. Street View lets you fly into panoramic images of cities and take a 360 degree tour. If you want to download this new version of Google Earth, click here. If instead you want to see the new features I mentioned above, watch the video now!