As you all know, Google is pretty hard-up about duplicate content, now more than ever, because an awful lot of blogs and websites have started making money by blatantly copying material from other sources. This not only is unfair to the original source, it also jeopardizes the integrity of search results returned by Google. Hence the stringent TOS (Terms of Service). But what about adding quotations, or sentences/paragraphs quoted from other websites? It does classify as content copied directly from another website. So how does Google treat such content and is it safe to include it on your website? Well, Google just released a video explaining how Google treats such content.
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Yesterday, we talked about whether or not bad links on your site are worth deleting. The simple answer to the question was, you might as well do it, but it'll be better to adjust your website, rather than trying to bend it. If you've been manually penalized, then this step becomes more or less necessary. But what about the links to your website, which aren't in your control? Luckily, Google has now released a link Disavow tool, which will solve such problems. Quite simply, any unnatural links to your site can be disinherited, or 'disavowed', hence preventing Google from considering them.
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No one knew that a simple Breadcrumb used in the fairyTale of "Hansel and Gretel" would become a website element one day. Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trail is a navigation system used in websites that offer more usability to the visitor. They appear horizontally above Post titles or below headers. They show user location and tells him what post and which section of the blog category he is on. Breadcrumb provides links back to the pages the user already visited in hierarchical order. Often a colon ( : )or slash ( / ) or even a greater-than sign ( > ) is used as hierarchy separator. These are now widely used by blog owners in both Wordpress and Blogger platforms. Unfortunately Breadcrumbs destroy the advantages of Permalinks which play great role in targeting rich keywords. Blogger Team has introduced permalinks on all blogspot blogs and we already discussed several ways of optimizing permalinks, now it's the right time to realize how Trailing links effect permalink display in SERPs.
We have already talked about avoiding Panda Penalty for your website, and what to do if you get hit, because apparently, Google isn't very forgiving, and has impacted tonnes of websites. But that is about as far as we can go to avoid a penalty. The next step would be to facilitate Google, and help it find, crawl, and index your website. The easier it is for Google to find your site, the quicker it will be indexed. And the better it is, the faster it will be crawled on a regular basis, hence giving you more organic traffic each day. Here are some of the best practices recommended by Google that you should apply to your website in order to get the most out of it.
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Google has been pretty active lately, and has been releasing various updates to its algorithms such as the Panda algorithm. Tonnes of websites have been hit as a result, because Google clearly has defined some very strict rules with regards to what it classifies as 'spam' or 'low quality'. If your website has been hit by any of these updates, it might not appear in the search results, or it might perform poorer than it used to. In such a scenario, you might want to start creating original, quality content. And if you think you have been unjustly hit, and that it's all a mistake, then you can submit a reconsideration request to Google.
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Ever worried about your website going down while you're away on a trip or vocation? Or maybe, you got too caught up at work to test it out or notice that your website is down, and you're losing precious audience? Indeed, it can be a really difficult situation when your site goes down, and you don't know about it. A site could go down due to many reasons, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. The best solution would be to discover errors quickly, and correct them to get your site up and running speedily once again. So to get notified as quickly as possible, you can use set up text messages that will let you know as soon as your website is down.
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According to an estimate, around 20% of searchers on Google search for local content. And since local or state or federal government sites are the primary source of information for civilians, they are important to Google search. Besides, such governments are experts in their local communities, and often have a lot of information. Due to their importance, Google has decided to address some issues faced commonly by Government Webmasters who run or organize Government run websites. These are some frequently asked questions answered by Jason Morrison from Google's Search Quality Team.
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One of the best things about online cloud storage is, it is amazingly convenient and an effective way of storing and sharing your files. But the problem nowadays is, there are so many cloud services available that it becomes difficult to manage your content, since different services have their own pros and cons. So while I use SkyDrive for large files and Google Drive for documents and photos etc, I use DropBox for quickly sharing files with others. Managing all these services is a bit of a drag. Wouldn't it just be easier if there was a unified platform where you could manage everything 'under one roof'? Hojoki is just such a platform, where you can manage all your cloud storages from one place!
MBT is back as promised with yet another special discount coupon on one of the largest web hosting provider on the internet. HostGator has once again graced us with some a discount code that gives a 25% discount on all HostGator purchases, instead of the seasonal 20%, and we will share this great discount coupon code with our loyal and beloved readers. Using this discount, you will get $44.55 OFF for Hatchling Plan, $71.55 OFF for Baby Plan and over $116.55 OFF for Business Plan. And with such great discounts, we sometimes wonder how they are still in business, and serving everyone with the best quality of service.
We use HostGator as our webhost for all our blogs under the STC network. HostGator's customer support is simply amazing. You can connect with them through live chat within seconds, and their representatives will solve your problems out in minutes. You might not get a better value for your money anywhere else. This discount offer expires October 15th 2012, so you have some time to think over it before choosing HostGator as your webhost. Let's look at why you should consider HostGator before all else
This App has been specially developed for "MBT Readers" by Lubna Essa, an Android developer . We are featuring it here and sharing the download link. If you wish to order similar Android apps, you may contact her anytime at lubna.essa@live.com
Staying updated with the latest happenings is by far the most important thing for every individual in this digital age. Whether you are a programmer or a blogger or a housewife or a businessman or a technician or anything, you read the newspaper, you check the internet just for the sake of staying updated so that you may not stay behind. But wait for a moment here and think "Don’t you want an application that actually lets you stay updated just through home screen of your Android phone?" If you are a person who uses the PC just to get some daily updates, then let there be something that can save you the hassle of turning on and off your pc all the time to get updates. Just tap on your phone screen and get all you want because it is designed absolutely for you!
You were recently presented with a post on Configuring URL Parameters in webmaster tools but details specific to BlogSpot blogs will be shared today because incorrectly optimizing URLs could make your blog posts and pages stop appearing in Google Search. We must congratulate Google for making it easy for webmasters to more easily control how their websites be crawled unlike Bing which never stops begging to optimize "Query Parameters for Normalization" without even specifying what parameters to ignore! 
With the introduction of Custom permalinks in blogger, you now have a great opportunity to utilize this new feature to improve the usability, aesthetics and forward-compatibility of your links. It also helps you to target your rich keywords. I wrote a detailed tutorial when Custom Permalinks were first introduced in Blogger draft on June 25th 2012. Permalinks can now be seen on blogger.com also. We highlighted several areas of this feature by discussing Character limit, what Characters are accepted, good and bad permalink practices but after observing the permalink keyword structure in majority of blogs, I felt the necessity to explain its importance more because newbies are really not using it the correct way in order to drive traffic from Search engines. Just like a title tag, permalinks are also now a victim of keyword stuffing. The Character limit for a permalink is different for both Google, Bing and Yahoo. Understanding this restriction is what we will learn today. You will also learn today why You should always follow Mashable but not always TechCrunch when you talk of SEO. 
If you have made up your mind to migrate your Google blog to wordpress safely then redirecting your RSS subscribers and Email subscribers to Wordpress is a must thing to do. You will need to migrate only if you have changed your domain or moved your content to a new location or server. Since in case of blogger to self-hosted wordpress migration, domain remains the same therefore we will only need to redirect the Feed. Moving your bulk of readers from one platform to another is linked with your blog Feed address. BlogSpot blogs support both RSS and atom Feeds whilst wordpress supports RSS web Feeds alone (though you can use plugins to switch to atom). What we will learn today is to simply change the FEED address and let your readers to receive email updates via your new blogging platform. This method will shift your syndication from one network to another without losing a single subscriber. The steps are clearly demonstrated to make your job easy. Lets get things moving!
Google is the largest search engine in the world today. And since it is the industry leader, it is only natural for it to set the standards. All bloggers and webmasters have only one concern in their minds regarding their sites when it comes to Google: whether Google is indexing their site or not? That is understandable, since most of their website traffic comes from Google. So to get un-indexed by Google is like having your legs chopped off - your blog won't be going anywhere, anytime soon. Well, to put some of the concerns regarding indexing at bay, Google has introduced a new Index Status feature in the Google Webmaster Tools. This feature will let webmasters know how many pages of theirs' have been indexed, crawled, and more!
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Thanks to the power of search results, the internet is an interactive space and your blog or website is a part of it. Businesses and blogs that are just starting out have to consider all sorts of different content strategies to ensure their success. Search results are an important factor in your site’s popularity and the successes you will see with it. Search results are awarded to websites for a number of different measurements. One of those is “off-site content” and it accounts for a major portion of your site’s reputation. 
PHP is one of the most widely used programming scripts. It is the same language that gave birth to Facebook and your beloved Wordpress. Content Management systems and ecommerce websites are built largely with PHP. I really enjoy writing and testing algorithms. PHP is enjoyable as long as you are using the right tool else its all of a headache and tasteless consuming language. While developing my recent university project which was based on "Online Mobile Marketplace " I badly felt the necessity of built-in PHP and JavaScript functions. It is really difficult to code every single function out of scratch unless you use a handy tool to code fast and efficiently. I used various online free PHP editors but their Syntax Highlighting, intellisense and debugger sucked so bad that I had almost made up my mind to switch to a different project. But then a fellow friend who is a freelance developer suggested that I should try Codelobster PHP Edition.
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