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Archive for the ‘Gadgets & Tools’ Category
February 20th, 2009 | 
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Google provides an alert service for monitoring various keywords in it’s search index as well as news, blogs and other properties it owns. This can be very useful for monitoring online reputation. Here are 10 easy steps to create a Mega Google alerts RSS feed using Yahoo PIPES.
1. Sign up or Login to Yahoo! pipes
2. Click on “create a pipe”
3. Open the sources drop down on the left and select the “fetch feed” block and drag it to your work area. Click the “plus” button in this block and add all the Google alerts URLs. You can get these from your Google alerts account by selecting the RSS option.
4. Open the operators drop down tab on the left and select a “filter” block and drag it onto the workspace.
5. Add some pattern matching rules. For example, if you want to filter out press releases you can create a rule with a negative text match on “press release” in both content and/or title.
6. Connect the blocks by clicking and holding the little dot in the feeds block and drag it to the filter block. Then click the filter block dot and drag that to the “pipe output” block that will have been auto-created.
7. Save your Yahoo PIPE and give it a name.
8. Double-click the “output” block to get your output at the bottom of the screen. From there you can tweak your filter settings to help filter content.
9. Finally, go back to “My Pipes” where you can get the combined RSS URL for your Mega Google alert which can be found in the top right hand corner of the output block.
10. Plug the newly created Mega Google Alerts feed in your favourite RSS reader and enjoy!
That’s it folks, easy peasy, a great way to monitor multiple Google alerts in one RSS feed using the fantastic Yahoo PIPES application!
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Google Webmaster Tools is a free service provided by Google which allows webmasters to have an insider’s view on how Google views a website. Google Webmaster Tools also provides webmasters with a commnication channel with Google to provide them with info such as reporting spam in the Google index, reporting paid links (eg by competitiors 
) and most crucially, submitting a site reconsideration request (if your site has been penalised by Google!)
Setting up a Google webmaster tools account is very easy, follow these simple steps:
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If you don’t have a Google account, sign up for one, if you do, login
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In the dashboard, add your site’s URL
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Next, verify your site. You can do this by uploading an empty HTML file (name of file provided by Google), you need to upload the file to the root of your site (where the home index page lies). Another way to verify your site with Google is by adding a meta tag into your site’s homepage (tag provided by Google).
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Once you’ve uploaded the verification file, go back to Google and click “Verify”
Using the Data provided by Google Webmaster Tools
Now that you’re recieving this valuable data, you will need to analyse it and use it to improve your site’s performance in Google’s search index. Here are a few tips to get you started:
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Tell Google about your XML file. This will allow Google to find all the pages within your site. If you don’t know how to create an xml file, Google provides tutorial as well as software suggestions for XML file creation.
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Setup Robots.txt. Go to Tools (left hand nav) and analyse your robots.txt file. If you don’t have one, you can create an empty one by opening up an empty notepad page and saving it as “robots.txt” and then upload it to the root of your site (where home index lies). Google allows you to test various instructions in your robots.txt.
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Analyse your meta data. Go to “Diagnostics” >> “Content Analysis” and check for duplicate title and meta descriptions tags. Also check for long and short tags.
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In the same section, check to see if Google had problems crawling your site (web/mobile crawl).
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Under “Tools” you can remove URLs from the Google index as well as enhance your custom 404 (page not found) code.
Other valuable data in Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster tools provides you with lots of valuable data and insights within the interface includes:
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Top keywords on your site
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Top linked pages (internal and external)
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Sitelinks (If your site has “site links, the expanded listing in Google results) you are able to control what pages show up by removing the ones your don’t want appearing.
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Top search queries (by impression and click through rate)
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Web Crawl stats
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RSS feed subscriber stats (you need to a have a Feedburner account for this to work)
That’s about it folks. Its worth noting that both Yahoo ad MSN also offer similar services for webmasters. Let me know if you have any questions…
It seems that Google could have banned the keyword visibility tool Web Position Gold (owned by WebTrends) from automatically querying its database for natural and paid search positions. The block seems to have occured on August 1st 2008.
Google specifically states on the webmaster guidelines section of its website that tools of this sort are not allowed and it specifically singles out WebPosition Gold.
Moreover, with the advent of “Personalised Search”, the results from these tools were beggining to display a fairly inacuurate picture.
For companies who want to prove results to their clients, I’ve discussed a few in this blog post about SEO KPIS.
Here are a few of the discussions about Google’s ban of Web Position Gold:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3716136.htm
http://www.webproworld.com/google-discussion-forum/58243-webposition-google-block.html
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?p=133156
Scott GoodYear, a representative from WebPosition Gold has joined these discussions and confirmed that there is no official ban on the software but that Google has tweaked its HTML code which casued the previous scraping template to return no results.
This could very well be the case and I personally applaud Scott’s efforts to keep clients aware of the situation. However I hope that this doesn’t take too long!
Here are some tools I use for estimating traffic potential for keywords:
The Google Adwords traffic estimation tool gives you an estimation of traffic to a particular keyword(s) or allows you to plug in a URL for a particular site to crawl and bring back suggestions.
The figures from Adwords are displayed in graphs and not actual numbers, but it gives you a good place to start you keyword research as it generates lots of suggestions. Keep in mind though that this tool is based on PPC traffic, not natural.
Keyword Discovery is by far my favourite tool out there. It allows you to plug in a keyword and outputs suggestions including estimated daily searches. Its data is compiled from 180 search engines.
If you had some money to invest I would recommend investing in the commercial version of this tool.
Word Tracker also allows gives you suggestions based on a seed keyword including daily estimates. Its figures are based on statistics from Meta Crawlers (such as dogpile.com and metacrawler.com) which account for 0.63% of all global searches). Word Tracker is a good tool, but if you had a choice between Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery I would go with Keyword Discovery (see above)
Wikipedia Traffic Estimation Tool
The Wikipedia shows up for more and more generic (1 word) keyword phrases than any other site out there. This tool, that estimates daily page views from the Wikipedia, allows you to get an idea of keyword potential (you need to account for 15-20% internal search traffic from within the Wiki)
This tool from Submit Express combines the results from both Keyword Discovery and Word Tracker in one interface, very handy and saves lots of valuable time!
“This site may harm your computer”, this is what Google placed underneath all my listings towards the end of last week, why?… Well basically because a hacker managed to penetrate my server and place invisible code designed to place “trojan horses” onto my users’ computers.
If you’re unlucky enough to be tagged with ”This Site May Harm Your Computer” this is what your listing will look like:
If you actually click on the listing, Google will proceed to take you to a page that looks like this:
I spent the best part of the weekend cleaning up the mess the hacker left behind and trying to figure out a way to tell Google to remove the ”This site may harm your computer” from my listings! I finally managed to do so on Sunday night when I discovered that the solution was right under my nose… Google’s webmaster tools!
If you don’t have a Google webmaster tools account I suggest you get one right away! It is truly a fantastic interface that includes among other things, the quick soultion for the ”This site may harm your computer” problem!. Basically the interface tells you that your listings are marked with “This site may harm your computer” and gives you a sample of pages where the malicious code appears. Its your job to go and clean that code and then submit a form telling Google that the code has been removed and request a review.
Google will then review the site and if all is okay, it will remove the “This site may harm your computer” statement from your listings and all back to normal. If the results of the review are negative, Google will let you know and will guide you further by giving you more sample urls were malicious coe (or malware/badware as they refer to it). Once you’ve cleaned your whole site, Google will remove the “This site may harm your computer” from your listings.
Anyway, to cut a long story short,, sign up for a Google webmasters tool today. I will blog separately about about this fantastic free service offered by Google so stay tuned…