Google Search Preferences Saved In Account Now

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Does it bother you when you have to reset your search preferences (such as turning off Google Instant) on Google when when you switch from using a laptop to an iPad or a computer? And if you change your browser, you have to reset those preferences again. Google has announced that search preferences can now be saved at the account level. As long as you are signed in to your Google account, saved search settings will be available from any computer.

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New: Save Your Google Search Settings & Take Them With You

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Facebook Status Updates For Businesses: 7 Tips

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Facebook has implemented an algorithm called “EdgeRank” which adjusts the weight of importance of any post based on how popular it is. So how can you improve the EdgeRank of your posts on your business accounts on Facebook? Here’s a few ways:

  1. Scheduling – Pay attention to when your followers are most active on Facebook, when they’re most likely to see new posts. Try experimenting with different times of the day. Facebook allows you to schedule posts, so this is easier to do than you might have expected.
  2. Add tags – Pages that you’ve “liked” will be more readily available so that if you want to add a tag it will be easier to find these. To find any sort of connecting page to get a tag, just type in an “@” sign and start typing. You can discover many tags this way – it’ll help promotion.
  3. Add a location – When you do a status update, there’s a “placemark” icon that looks like an inverted teardrop you can click on. This can come in handy to tag events or to put your business location when people have a reason to come visit.
  4. Target specific locations – You can make your post in a specific place (instead of “Public”). Doing this is good if you are needing only to connect with people that are in that location, for example if you are promoting an event in that area.
  5. Target by language – Use the same customization you use for location (instead of “Public”) to target a language. This way you can do a very personal outreach to members of the public who are more comfortable with a different language.
  6. Add pictures/photos – If you put photos in your posts, it will grab attention much more readily and make it a lot more tempting to share or comment on.
  7. Emphasize a post – You can pick out special posts and draw attention by either “highlighting” it (click the start at the top of the post) to make it go across both columns in your timeline or you can pin your update. Pinning it will make it stay on top of all updates so that something of particular importance will stay at the top until you unpin it. To do this, click the pencil icon and choose “Pin to Top”.

Make your Facebook posts stand out by trying any one of these or a combination. See what works best for your page and keep those practices.

Read the original article here:
7 Tips For Crafting Local Business Updates In Facebook

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Google’s First SERP Down To 7 Listings

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Google appears to be testing some changes to the first page of results. The first listing is getting additional “sitelinks” underneath in many cases, from two links to as many as six additional links. For search results that have the first listing containing these sitelinks, there is now only seven listings total on the front page. It doesn’t matter how many sitelinks, it’s still seven listings. For an example, Google “ebay” and check the results.

Another change is that Google is not limiting the number of results appearing for a single domain to two per page – it looks as though one domain can potentially dominate the entire front page now, without limitation.

Whether or not these are permanent changes or just tests we’ll see as time progresses.

Read the full article here:
7 Is The New 10? Google Showing Fewer Results & More From Same Domain

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Google Says If You’ve Blocked GoogleBot

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There are many webmasters who have their reason to block GoogleBot from their site. Your site can still be listed, but if you’ve prevented the GoogleBot from crawling your pages Google will display it clearly in the SERPs. Instead of showing the standard description tag (or another snippet) it will say, “A description for this result is not available because of this site’s robots.txt – learn more.” This may be worth knowing if you care about what displays on Google when people find you there and you’ve been blocking the GoogleBot.

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Google Search Descriptions Now Say If GoogleBot Is Blocked

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Google and Oracle Both Pay Bloggers, Now Ordered To Reveal Who

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A United States judge has demanded that Oracle and Google reveal paid bloggers. The two firms must provide the information by August 17. It is already known that firms pay commentators, but the information on who the paid commentators are must be revealed. Unfortunately however, it is unclear to both firms what will qualify as payments, as there are many ways they send out payments. Where is the line between bloggers and professional journalists, and is it distinct enough to clarify?

Read the full article here:
BBC News – Oracle and Google are ordered to reveal paid bloggers

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Facebook Hack Help and Fixes

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There are some steps one may take to retrieve their Facebook when it is hacked. First and foremost, one should change their password, along with having a secondary email and phone number submitted to Facebook in case of a hacker changing the password. One should also verify their identity on Facebook, and utilize the two-step login process. Also, to see if anyone has hacked into an account, one can check their Facebook sessions. If you do all of these, you can recover your account and prevent future issues.

Read the full article here:
Steps to Take When Your Facebook is Hacked

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Custom URL on Google+ Coming Soon

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It’s been done on Facebook, and it looks like it’s coming to Google+. Getting your own customized URL. For now, Google’s offering it only to limited numbers of users (apparently large name brands and personalities), but word is that it will be coming soon to anyone who wants it.

Read the full article here:
Google+ Launches Vanity URL Feature for Select Users

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SEO Is Not Always What The Client Thinks

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In many cases where a client is looking to gain SEO, their expectations are set in their minds. “I want to be #1 for 10 terms” or “I want 2000 visits a month”. And they expect to have these results in one or two months. But this is usually far from reality. Real SEO means putting time and money into the project to build trust with both Google and with visitors to the site. This isn’t a switch that you turn on or off, and it does take a good amount of time to build properly. A good SEO company will warn their potential clients about this reality before starting work or taking money, but sadly, “good” SEO companies are a bit more rare than not. Mark Jackson has his thoughts on this struggle in the article linked below.

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Why I Talk Most Folks Out of SEO Projects

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Google Acquires Travel Guide Company Frommer’s

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Google has bought another company and may be moving forward to make some more changes for user interaction with the search engine. Zagat was bought to allow reviews to be made in a different way. Why Frommer’s was bought is still a bit of a mystery, but this company is one that provides a variety of travel assistance, known for their travel guides. Perhaps Google has plans in the future to support travelers that need some help on their excursions and do not have established resources they know to use.

Read the full article here:
Zagat Take Two: Google To Acquire Frommer’s Travel Guides

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Translation From Images On Your Phone by Google

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Google has introduced a new service that ties Google Translate to Google Goggles. It means there’s a new OCR tool useable on your phone that can detect language from images and translate them. An example of a good way to use this is of a restaurant menu with foreign unknown language – the service uses OCR (optical character recognition) and allows your to brush your fingers over the screen to select the part of the menu in the image you want translated. The update is currently available for Android’s version of Google Translate and supports Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish languages.

Read the full article here:
Google Translate: Picture To OCR To Speech

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