Web Talk

Yes, you got it right! After more than 600 articles written in a span of time of 8 months I am going on vacation. I will be back in a matter of 15 days with a lot of news including an article with a brief review and some pictures of my new Asus Eee 901. Right now I  am writing with  it and I can tell you that it is simply Cool! I think to deserve such a brief vacation. As a matter of fact I have worked hard with my real job and with Web Talk too. Don’t forget that I am the only editor here so far. During  these months I have managed to get a lot of visitors and, despite the fact that August is not  positive since a lot of people are on vacation, I can tell that around 750 unique readers visit my blog everyday! During these days of vacation I won’t write any articles, of course, but I will try to reply to the emails people write me asking to solve different kinds of issues. OK, time to relax, see you in September!

If you are a webmaster, there are a lot of ways to optimize a website or a blog to be placed high in the SERP (search engine results page). One of this is, without any doubt, eliminate duplicate content from your web pages, articles and posts. As a matter of fact web engine spiders (such as Google Bot, Yahoo Bot, MSN Bot etc.) while crawling a website tend to look for suspicious content which may look too alike to something they already “saw” while surfing other sites. For a spider, the more a website has got unique content, the better. This, to make sure that what a web author produces is original and has not been forged or copied from somewhere else. That’s why, if your website has got a lot of similar content, Google and other web engines will place it low in the search result for a particular keyword or a whole set of them, with the side-effect that less people will read what you have written. But, what is a duplicate content exactly? Duplicate content is everything which looks similar to something else. Two articles speaking about the same topic will inevitably have something alike, but if the similarities are too many and whole sentences are exactly the same, because they are the result of a copy-and-past action, well, this is duplicate content. But web spiders go beyond all this. As a matter of fact, if two posts have the same, or too similar addresses, for the these spiders this is another good example of duplicate content.

We don’t know when, why or because, but sometimes it seems like that when Google spiders a website, it might end up getting wrong URL link locations by arbitrarily adding an extra or a triple slash (//). For example, Google might crawl the article www.mywebsite.com/testpage.php correctly, but at the same time it could even crawl something like www.mywebsite.com//testpage.php, which in your website doesn’t exist at all, of course, but for Google is another real page belonging to it. At this point Google bots will mark them as duplicate content, and when next time a person will look for the keyword testpage, your article could be placed in the 344 position, lessening in this way the chance to be read. Luckily for us there is a little trick to avoid all this. All you have to do is write this little piece of code in your .htaccess file which usually is located in the plublic_html folder, in the root directory of your site.

1. Open your FTP client and reach your website.
2. Open public_html folder.
3. Right click on the .htaccess file and click edit. If the .htaccess doesn’t exist, just create a htaccess.txt file with Windows notepad, put it in the public_html folder and rename it .htaccess
4. Copy and past the following code in the .htaccess:

# Remove multiple slashes anywhere in URL

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)//(.*)$
RewriteRule . %1/%2 [R=301,L]

5. If you want something more efficient copy and past the following code in the .htaccess:

# Remove multiple slashes after domain

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsitename.com/$1 [R=301,L]

6. These codes will just remove douple or trible slashes anywhere in your website addresses.

I know, I know that I have already reviewed WPAU (Wordpress Automatic upgrade) in the past, but you know, I am almost compelled to write about this excellent plugin for Wordpress again. Above all since it is one of the few plugins I really like, care and use, without speaking about the fact that WPAU lets, really lets Web Talk live and survive in this tough Internet world made out of endless updates.  When last year I started looking for a good Content Management System, one of the biggest concerns of mine was to be able to find a software which came with a kind of automatic upgrade. After the bad, really bad upgrade experiences with Mambo and Joomla! I really craved for something easy to use. My only goal, here in the web, is write. I want to focalise myself on writing good reviews and guides. That’s it. That’s why in 2007 I started surfing all of the web looking for something easy to use which let me concentrate on my work. But, with my disbelief, I found out that what I was looking for didn’t exsit. At that point I made one last attempt in Google by typing “automatic upgrade” and after a few pages Wordpress Automatic Upgrade popped out, outstanding with all its wonderful features from the list of results Google gave me. And that’s how I ended up picking Wordpress as my blogging platform. (so, thanks Keith Dsouza, really thanks a lot for creating your wonderful plugin…come on, I know that you read this blog regularly!). Yesterday WPAU has reached its 1.2.0.2 version and a lot of improvements have been made concerning stability, security and bug fixes. But let’s see a brief list of its features.

• Upgrade your Wordpress blog  in a couple of easy steps! No special knowledge is required.
• WPAU is fully compatible with Wordpress 2.6 and up.
• WPAU only lets you upgrade if your WP is out-of-date.
• WPAU now uses Snoopy to download files rather than using regular PHP methods.
• WPAU alerts you when a new WP update is available.
• Automatic Upgrade option will only be visible to Administrators.

Keith Dsouza is also working hard on the next Wordpress Automatic Upgrade (version 1.3) and in his blog he anticipated some of its new thrilling features. Here is a list.

• Better user interface which will let see user see what is going on during the update in real time!
• Ability for users to choose the language of WordPress they want to download from.
• Internationalization support.
• Cleanup of code to make WPAU more faster.

If you want to download Wordpress Automatic Update, click here. If you want to visit the blog of Keith Dsouza, the author of this excellent plugin, here is the link.

As you know I am always looking for nice widgets to add to my website which don’t require a lot of work to set them up. Yes I know, I am a bit lazy, but that’s the way I like things. Some days ago I started looking for a widget which could tell my visitors the best articles for the current day. After browsing for a while I found an excellent website offering freeware widgets easy to install. The website is called feedjit.com and with a simple copy-and-past procedure lets you add your website a full set of interesting infos. Here is a list of its widgets:

• Life Traffic Feed: this widget shows how many people are visiting your website, where they come from (thanks to a nice flag of the visitor’s country), which website they arrived from, if any, which page they visited on your website and which external link they clicked to leave your site, if any.
• Live Traffic Map: this widget reminds me of another good one which can be seen on this article of mine. It shows you the last 100 people who visited your website on a small map. If you move your mouse’s pointer on any red point on the map, you will be able to see where your visitors come from (country and city).
• Live Raccomending Reading: this widget suggests other pages on your website your readers may be interested in.
• Live Page Popularity: this widget shows you the most popular pages (usually the first 10 pages of the current day) on your website by analysing your recent traffic.

All widgets are fully customisable. In fact you can decide: text color, background color, border color, heading color and widget’s width.

I strongly recommend this website to those people who want and need simple but effective stat widgets but, at the same time, don’t want to spend too much time to tweak them or understand how they work. In fact with Feedjit.com, all you need to do is to copy a code and past it in your website or blog.

There are lots of ways to protect your computer from viruses, malware and malicious people trying to trick and scam you. Antivirus, antispyware, online scanner, specialised websites and a lot of software can protect you in a lot of ways. But how can you extricate yourself from this thick jungle and find out what you really need for you and your beloved computer? Here are the best guides I managed to find while surfing in the Internet. I have read all of them and I have to confess you that I was surprised to learn that there are, apart from expensive software, a lot of free programs that manage to shield you against the most common threads you can meet while surfing. Apart from this we can not underestimate the power of a few, little, important tips reported in some of these articles which can save us from hours of pain or worse! So, let’s read together what these writers and experts have to say and teach in order to be smarter than viruses!

• Techsupportalert.com | A very interesting website full of resources, guides, articles and lists of software to be always shielded against viruses and all kinds of threats. I use this website a lot because it contains a very exhaustive list of software covering every kind of security field as far as computer and Internet are concerned. I highly advice this website because if you can not find what you are looking for here, chances are that it does not exist!
• Webuser.co.uk | This interesting guide starts speaking about spywares and what they are, how you can get them and how to be protected from them. But just when you think to have learnt everything here it comes a list of other guides right at the end of the page concerning: Viruses, Premium Rate Diallers, Keylogging, Phishing and Identity Theft. I advice these guides to those people who are just getting seriously interested in the security subject.
• How to Protect Your Computer from Viruses | A very interesting 3-steps guide talking about the most elementary but effective ways to protect your computer from viruses. This guide focuses on the following free software which are considered by a lot of people the most trusting ones: AVG, AVAST! and COMODO.
• Don’t Be A Computer Virus Victim | A 11-steps guide talking about the most important things to do and not to do in order to make your computer virus-proof. I highly recommend this guide to beginners who want to know how to be safer while surfing.
• 10 things you should do to protect yourself on a public computer | Don’t underestimate the malevolent side of surfing on a public computer! Here is a very interesting guide about what you should do and know before and after you surf on a computer which is used by hundreds of people a day!

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

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 »