As a Webmaster, we always take down our sites for several reasons. It might be for maintenance, upgrades and many more. But from many years we are following the traditional way of showing the images of Under Construction and under maintenance.

But today we will guide you to take down your site for SOPA Blackout without losing the Google rankings and the indexed pages in the search engine.  Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Pierre Far, has put together a guide showing how to take down a site temporarily in the right way.

Suggestion : SOPA Blackout: How To Back Up Your Social Media Account Data

The most common scenario Google sees is: Webmasters implementing contents on all or some of their pages with an error message (“site offline”) or a protest message. The following points apply to this scenario (replacing the contents of your pages).

#1. 503 HTTP header for all the URL

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Webmasters should return a 503 HTTP header for all the URLs participating in the blackout (parts of a site or the whole site). This helps in two ways:

1. It tells Google it’s not the “real” content on the site and won’t be indexed.
2. Even if Google sees the same content (e.g. the “site offline” message) on all the URLs, it won’t cause duplicate content issues.

Google bot’s crawling rate will drop when it sees a spike in 503 headers. This is unavoidable but as long as the blackout is only a transient event, it shouldn’t cause any long-term problems. The crawl rate will recover fairly quickly to the pre-blackout rate.

Suggestions: You can use this simple WordPress Plugin which puts your blog for maintenance mode by sending 503 Errors to all the unauthenticated users.

For manually handling the downtime of your blog, have a read here.

#2. Two important notes about robots.txt

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1. As Googlebot is currently configured, it will halt all crawling of the site if the site’s robots.txt file returns a 503 status code for robots.txt. This crawling block will continue until Googlebot sees an acceptable status code for robots.txt fetches (currently 200 or 404). This is a built-in safety mechanism so that Googlebot doesn’t end up crawling content it’s usually blocked from reaching. So if you’re blacking out only a portion of the site, be sure the robots.txt file’s status code is not changed to a 503.
2. Some Webmasters may be tempted to change the robots.txt file to have a “Disallow: /” in an attempt to block crawling during the blackout. But this has a high chance of causing crawling issues for much longer than the few days expected for the crawl rate recovery. So we would suggest not to use “Disallow:/” for SOPA Blackout.

#3. Webmaster Tools

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Webmasters will notice these errors in Webmaster Tools: it will report that Google saw the blackout. Be sure to monitor the Crawl Errors section particularly closely for a couple of weeks after the blackout to ensure there aren’t any unexpected lingering issues.

#4. General advice

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Keep it simple and don’t change too many things, especially changes that take different times to take effect. Don’t change the DNS settings. As mentioned above, don’t change the robots.txt file content. Also, don’t alter the crawl rate setting in WMT. Keep as many settings constant as possible before, during, and after the blackout. This will minimize the chances of something odd happening.

These are the wise steps to be followed before you take down your site for any reason. Keep it simple. Keep a healthier relation between your site and Googlebot’s for better ranking.

Source

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Share this article with your friends and make them aware of these points. Hit comment section if you have got any question. Thank you.

]]> http://tech18.com/187478-google-guide-site-sopa-blackout.html/feed 2 http://tech18.com/187390-turn-off-google-personal-results.html http://tech18.com/187390-turn-off-google-personal-results.html#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:03:51 +0000 Vinay Gowda http://tech18.com/?p=7390

Google is aggressively moving by making changes to all of it’s products in terms of  User Interfaces and usages. We saw many updates from Google team these days. Recently, Google made a great move by combining Google+ posts within the search results and called it as Personal Results!

This update was very useful to many users as we get to know the most accurate search suggested by the Google+ users to whom we are connected. Yeah, we do trust our friends and their suggestion.

Google Search, Plus Your World!

Here is a video commercial of Search+.

There is a lot of talk about how it’s anticompetitive and a sign of Google abusing its legal monopoly in search to push Google+, but the reality is, “search+” as many have come to call it, just isn’t very good or useful in most instances.

Twitter slams Google!

Somewhere it irked a fellow of social media site Twitter. Lead lawyer @Twitter, Alex Macgillivray, called it a “bad day for the internet”, and suggested – as a former Google employee – that there would have been dissent internally “at search being warped this way”.

The company later followed it up with a statement, saying,

As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter, as a result, Twitter accounts and tweets are often the most relevant results. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.

Steps to disable Personal Results

For all those who didn’t like “Personal Results” on Google search page, here is how you can turn them off permanently.

Step 1: On Google search page, head towards the search settings menu by clicking on the cogwheel in the top right corner of the screen and click on “search settings”.

Step 2: Scroll down until you see “Personal results” section and select “Do not use personal results.”

Step 3: Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on “Save Button”

You are done! Search+ is off by default now. You can still turn it on anytime by reverting back the above steps.

How many of you didn’t like the Personal Result or Search+ feature by Google? What is the reason? Share it via comments. Thank you!

Facebook is world’s top most used social networking site with almost 750+ million of users signed up. Facebook is well known for it’s simplicity in it’s UI which other social networking sites lacked.

Recently Facebook unveiled a new experimental feature called Timeline which is a replacement for older version of Facebook profile. Below is a small video introduction to Timeline:

Introduction to Timeline (Video)

Well there are few users who didn’t like this new Facebook’s Timeline feature as they are pretty much happy with the old interface and moreover the new interface is a privacy killer. Your Timeline will act as your Digital Journal which can be accessed by your friends in the form of a diary

Few months back,we had written an article on how to tackle the Facebook’s New Interface by removing the ticker which is still annoying to many users and today we are going to guide you on removing the Facebook’s Timeline feature and revert back to old interface, but just to let you know this hack works only in Firefox and Chrome Browser.

Note: This hack only removes the Timeline and reverts back to old profile interface within your browser, which means your friends will still have access to your Timeline.

Following are the 3 ways to remove the Facebook  Timeline in Chrome and Firefox browser.

#1. Remove Facebook Timeline using Firefox Addon

Step 1: Install User Agent Switcher.

Step 2: Restart Firefox browser and check whether User Agent Switcher icon is available on the navigation bar. If not then right click on navigation bar and customize by dragging and dropping the Add-on.

Step 3: Now click on switcher icon and select Internet Explorer 7 option. Refresh your profile page to get old Facebook profile back.

#2. Remove Facebook Timeline using Chrome switch

Step 1: Right click on Chrome browser launcher icon and select properties option.

Step 2: On properties window, navigate to Shortcut Tab.

• Windows Vista/7 users: Append –user-agent=”Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)” in Target Box as shown below.
• Windows XP users: Append –user-agent=”Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)” in Target box.

Step 3: Click Apply and OK. Open your Chrome browser and navigate to Facebook Profile page see the changes.

#3. Remove Facebook Timeline using Chrome Extension

Step 1: Install Timeline Remove extension

Step 2: Restart your browser and navigate to Facebook Profile page to see the changes.

Note: This Chrome extension is not working for many users. Please try your luck and let us know if its working fine with you.

Don’t go away yet! We have a question for you. Why do you hate Facebook timeline? Share your thoughts and share this article with your friends if you think it’s useful for them.

Social Networking is one such place where people always love to spend their time. It is a place where people share their thoughts,reviews and trying being themselves. Today Social Networking is just filled with standard keywords : likes, comments, share, uploading pics, chatting with friends, video chatting, tweeting, retweeting etc.

How many times have you met a person who’s an online friend of yours. We meet many people online who appear and disappear like strangers. Personally I’ve come across these issues several times in different social networking sites.

A recent entry to this list is Google+. As it is still a newly born baby in this area, people tend to follow and add some big personality into their circle. One good example was Mr. Mark Zuckerberg’s G+ account. Nobody knows it’s a real or fake account. Still millions of people added him to their circle.

Why cant we just recognize these inactive people in our circle and remove them to make room for others?

Chrome Extension: Uncircle+

Here is an useful Chrome extension which can just scroll through your Google+ circles and helps you out in removing inactive people from the selected circle.

Who are inactive people?

Inactive people are those people in your circles who have not shared anything (for example: original posts, reshares, private posts, public posts, hangouts, profile photo changes) with you. Having at least 1 of these activities (no matter how far in the past) means that person is “active”. Having none of these activities at all means that person is “inactive”.

Why do you need it?

Google+ lets you add a maximum of 5000 people to your circles. Nevertheless, not all of the people in your circles are active. Therefore, you end up having lots of inactive people in your circles which count towards the quota.

How does it work?

1. Collects a listing of people you’ve added to your circles.
2. Checks the activity of people in all circles or a circle you have selected.
3. Shows you inactive people and lets you select which ones to remove.
4. Removes selected inactive people upon your command.

Well that’s an handy extension for Chrome users. What are you waiting for friends? Go and grab it now.

Download Extension

Please share this article with you friends and make their job easy. Cheers!

Are you a great Google follower and have plans of making your entry by creating some app? Ever wondered you can go and create something which puts your idea in to place? If you are a Google Chrome user, along with 100’s of features you can even play around with some nice hidden entities which we are speaking here today.

Almost a year back Chrome created something different than their rivals who were (and still) playing around with add-ons. Google came up with a new application system for its Chrome browser named as Chrome web apps. These were coded using C / C++!! Do you still remember them? :-/

Firstly let us get to know What really is Google Chrome Web App by watching the below video:

Well here we got a small video which shows how best you can make use of Chrome browser to get what you want!

How To: Easily Create Your Own Chrome Web App

Wasn’t that simple and easy friends ? , Drag and drop any Most Visited websites into  the Web Apps area and Chrome will in turn convert them into web apps.

You can now:

1. Drag a Most Visited tile onto an apps page to get an app for it
2. Drag a Most visited tile onto the trash (cool animations)
3. Blacklisting a Most visited tile with the [x] looks better
4. You don’t see the trash icon show up for things that can’t be trashed (as opposed to being able to drag onto trash but having it do nothing)

Yes, Google does values their user’s wish. Go and create apps of your most visited websites.

If you liked this easy way of creating web apps please share it with your friends by clicking on bookmarking buttons below and share your thoughts. Thank you

Facebook has rolled out many new features and they have completely changed their User Interface, which looks similar to that of Google+. You’ll use it for some time, but the nonstop ticker shows you some unwanted activities of your friends which you would never like to know.

As the Facebook’s Old Interface wasn’t enough to beat the Google+, so Facebook are working hard on their interfaces and features.

Here are some thoughts about New Facebook Interface from my friends :

• @HilzFuld, a tech blogger and a friend of mine, wrote in his recent post about how Google+ and Facebook are fighting with each other by rolling out new features slowly and  changing their User Interfaces frequently, which is making  the users to think of other Social Network.
• @SharonHayes raised an important question about the New Facebook Interface in one of her Facebook wall post and after a short discussion with her friends, she came to an conclusion that the New Facebook Interface is not for Social Media Experts and it’s a  big challenge for  Facebook to make casual users adapt to this New Interface
• @mmangen says that the right sidebar ticker is distracting; her as her eyes keep on moving to it
• @arkarthick feels that the Facebook is the New MySpace
• @rocksstar likes the the New Interface and hates the annoying ticker, but still find the ticker useful and according to her New Facebook is mashup of both Google+ and Twitter

The most annoying thing with the New Facebook Interface is the right sidebar with the ticker . So here are 3 useful ways to get rid of the New Facebook Interface by removing the right sidebar and ticker :

1. Change the Language Settings as shown below

Note: This trick might work for only a short period of time, as later New Facebook will be enabled for all the other languages as well.

2. Install the GreaseMonkey Script

You can revert the right sidebar to the old interface using an userscript. Click here to Download and install the script. Once installed, it completely removes the right sidebar and brings back the old chat style interface as shown below:

Note : This script works for both Chrome and Firefox Browser

3. Resize your Window

Just try to resize your Windows manually or using a chrome extension which will resize the window and hence the right sidebar is hided.

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What do you think friends, is the New Interface of Facebook going to be adapted by everyone or will Facebook give a permanent option to switch back to Old Interface as well? Hit the Comment Section and Thanks for reading

All the small & large scale companies are using Twitter to interact with their customers and receive the required feedback which helps them to develop their products more effectively. Below is a video which will tell you on How to use Twitter for Business:

Branding is the 1st step for any company to use Twitter effectively. To know more about Branding on Twitter have a read here ~> Power of Twitter in Engaging with Brands [Infographic]

As seen in the above video, every business needs a Brand and for a successful Brand their Twitter handle is more important, but what would you do if your handle is already taken and is inactive for long time. So today I’m going to give you a complete step by step guide on how to claim your Brand on Twitter by acquiring the required inactive Twitter handle :

Step 1 : Trademark Registration

Firstly you need to register your Brand as a Trademark and to register you need to check for your near by Trademark Registration Consultants . Trademark Registration includes checking of the availability of the Trademark name and registering the Trademark under the respective class.

Once your Trademark is registered then you’ll be given a Trademark[TM] Application No. which will be required in our next step. This process is a paid service given by the Trademark Registration Consultants. So if you can afford, then it’s well and good

Note : In my case I had registered “Tech18″ under the class No.41 which falls in the Blogging Category

Step 2 : Submit a Ticket Request to Twitter

You need to submit a Ticket Request to Twitter by clicking here. Below is the screenshot of the form to be filled to “Submit” to Twitter Support.

 After filling all the required fields, click on the “Submit” button.

Step 3 : Email Confirmation from Twitter

After submitting the Ticket, you’ll receive a mail confirmation from Twitter within few minutes as shown below:

Withing 7 working days one of the crew from the Support Team will mail you as shown below :

Hello,

Thanks for providing this information. In order to process a username transfer, please choose from one of the following options:

1. If you would like the name to replace the username on an existing Twitter account that you’re already using, reply to this email and list that account’s current username.
2. If you don’t have a Twitter account or would like to create a new account for use with the requested username, please create an account with a placeholder username that we’ll change (@tempname123, for example). You can sign up for an account here: https://twitter.com/signup

If you have an email address at your official company domain, please be sure the account is registered with an email at that domain. This makes it much easier to help if you lose access to your account in the future.

Once you reply with the account name, we’ll replace the name of the account with the requested username. A username transfer only changes the username of your account, so all the content on your placeholder account (followers, Tweets) will remain intact. Your previous username will then be released immediately for use by other accounts.

Please note that this email is not a guarantee that we will be able to make the requested transfer.

Thank you,

XYZ
Twitter Trust & Safety

In the above mail, as you can see you are given two options, i.e. If you already have a Twitter account then you can reply them with your Twitter Account to be replaced else if you don’t have a Twitter account then you’ll have to create a temporary Twitter Account and reply them with the respective Handle.

Once you reply them with the Twitter Handle within 5 working days, you’ll receive the confirmation mail as shown in the below image:

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So Finally you’ve claimed your Brand on Twitter by acquiring the Twitter Handle you wanted for Branding . Thanks for reading and if you liked it then don’t forget to hit the “Tweet” button and hit the comment section if you’ve any more questions on Twitter Branding

Yes, you heard it right Now you can easily upload pictures within Twitter without depending on any other third party applications to upload your pictures and then tweet the links.

New Twitter has started rolling out new features slowly and they started off with “Image Upload” feature and this feature is powered by “Photobucket”, one of widely used photo sharing site, which means all the images are hosted by Photobucket servers.

Although Twitter will support all the third party applications, but still users will love to use this feature as you can easily comment on the image uploaded just by replying to the tweet through which the image was uploaded and also delete the image by deleting the tweet.

The “Image Upload” API is currently unavailable to the Third party Developers, but very soon Twitter will release the API’s also.

Now let’s start off on How to Upload Image from Twitter itself :

Step 1:

Browse to Twitter.com and click the “Camera” button as shown below

Step 2:

Once you click the button, you will prompted to select the image and after selecting the image, enter the desired words for your image to be uploaded

Step 3:

Click the “Tweet” button

Once you’ve clicked the “Tweet” button, your tweet will be displayed on the Twitter Timeline as shown below

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Note : Twitter’s “Image Upload” Feature is rolling over slowly, so it might take some time for few people to use this feature.

So what are you waiting for you ? ? Jump into the Twitter Web and have fun uploading pictures. Thanks for reading and share it with your friends if you liked it Happy Tweeting

Source

Google is always known for innovativeness and they are never slow in adapting to raging war! As you all know Google has lots of products under their brand and as a company it’s more than to make money out of some great product like Google Search, Chrome, Gmail, Adsense, Google+ etc..

We have been covering most of the new features which is getting added everyday inside Google world and today we got  one amazing feature which can really turn the tables and answer to their rivals – “We are still here”!

Google added a new lab feature for Gmail / Google Mail today and expecting to compete against their arch rivals like Microsoft’s Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and few others.

Google added a preview Pane to its mail client under the labs tab. Here is how you can enable it,

Step 1:

Log in to your Gmail account.

Step 2:

Click on “Labs”.

Step 3:

Step 4:

Step 5:

After clicking on save changes your page will be reloaded. Once page is reloaded, you can find a small preview button like below to turn on and off preview Pane.

There are three types of Panes available as of now – No Preview (old Gmail), Vertical and Horizontal Panes.

By default there is a 3-second delay in marking a conversation as read after previewing it. If that doesn’t feel natural to you, you can change the timing in the General tab of settings:

We can easily understand the need of this feature getting into Gmail In quick session. Maybe we get to most of them to answer Microsoft which recently made a fun out of Gmail and Google Ads.

But who cares? Do you believe these entire nonsense acts by rivals?

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One of my Facebook friend has a question. Would anyone like to answer?

Thank you for spending you time with @Tech18 Please share your thoughts about this latest and most awaited Gmail feature. Cheers

I own a big-fat laptop and spend nearly 16 hours in front of laptop/desktop daily! Still I own a smaller device like smartphone to get in touch with my family members and friends around the world. Now let’s say “What if I forget my smartphone while travelling? Missed calls! Inbox filled with SMS’s! Bang! I missed many things, Maybe my world “.

Do you have the same problem what I just spoke about?

Isn’t that really bad when technology has moved so far which one could ever guess few years back? Yes, we can’t be always relying on Facebook or Twitter or Google+ as not everyone are still not on them! Agree with me?

Well here comes a small, tiny and very useful product named MightyText by the former Google employee, Maneesh Arora who co-founded it. Before we start, are you a strong Google product user? Do you use Google’s browser Chrome and their open-source operating system Android running device? If not then you might for one. LOL!

MightyText is a small Android App and Chrome Extension which can be synced to do following things,

1. Send SMS from PC using Chrome browser
2. Receive SMS to PC
3. Get updates on “Who’s Calling Now”, Missed Calls alerts

What else you need when you have kept your phone at home or car while you are somewhere else?

Maneesh Arora had his “aha!” moment when he worked at Google: During meetings, everyone was on laptops and used Google Chat or Gtalk. But when his wife texted him, he had to reach into his pocket. “So strange. With 6 trillion text messages sent per year, SMS is still broken. Why can’t I search a text from last month, from anywhere, at any time?”

“We have routed over 18 million SMS messages since our beta launch just 2 months ago. And our users love being able to text while working.” Arora continues saying.

Why Only for Android Devices?

Yes, we do have same question for Arora’s team. But as a Android App developer I can answer to our users by myself. There are couple of reason which may block Mighty Text app to reach other platforms,

1. As Android is open-source OS, user can customize and tweak their phone however they like. In this sense you have an access to SMS manager which is used by Mighty Text here.
2. Google has built an environment which has many open sourced products like Chrome, Chrome OS, Android etc. So we have full set of product which can be run on high end laptops/desktops and smaller screen handsets. So syncing is just like having an Ice cream. LOL!
3. About Mr. Arora, yes he is a former Google Employee and knows the Google world better than us!

Similar products and Raising Competition!

MightyText is an awesome idea by Maneesh Arora. MightyText pushes text messages and calls from Android phones to the computer screen. Yes, there are other products which do similar work but not what MightText does!

#1. Google Voice offers a similar service, but users can’t use the same phone number that they use for their cell phone. Another difference is that Google Voice sends texts to e-mail, not through a browser in the form of an instant message like MightyText does. AND IT’S AVAILABLE OUTSIDE US AND CANADA!

#2. There are Android apps like WhatsApp which does the same thing between Android devices. But problem area is this app creates separate Inbox!

Future Plans!

Yes, every company will be having future plans and thus MightyText too!

In the future, Arora wants to extend the service from your computer screen to devices like an iPad. “We want to send texts to wherever the eyeballs are,” Arora says. Currently, only Androids with operating system 2.2 and above can run MightyText; all users have to do is download the Android app and Chrome extension on their Web browser.

Our Views

As I said in the beginning, I spend 16 hours in front of computer I don’t like to worry much about my phone while I’m busy working. And yeah, I don’t want to miss any calls and SMS’s as well. So isn’t it the best product which anyone can own?

Here are the download Links:

MightyText is still under beta and works if you have invite code. Or you might to do some promotions as it says after registration

We have registered for this service. Did you? Please share your views to us as well as @MightyText team. Thanks for your visit! Watch this space for more updates!