Tips on Crawling and Indexing sites with Google

Whether you have website or blog or portal, your intention is let the people know about your content.

How to let people know about content on your website or blog or portal. Submitting a sitemap to searchengines helps them to crawl site and present content in their search results. But how better your site is getting indexed or crawled by search engines, depends on how accurate and efficient your sitemap is.

Google provides some tips on how to optimize crawling and indexing.

1) Remove User Specific URLs
– Remove session id’s or user id’s or post id’s from your URLs that don’t change content.
2) Disallow actions that Google bot can’t perform
– Use your robots.txt file to stop crawling of dynamic pages or user entry forms like login page, contact form etc.
3) One to One mapping between URL and Content
–  Make sure URLs point to single piece of content. Never point multiple URLs to same content. This case often
occurs in CMS. Use rel attribute if it is difficult to do so.

Go through following presentation by Google Webmasters to know more.
Optimize Crawling and Indexing
 

Reference: Optimize Crawling and Indexing


Orkut Promote

Google introduces new feature called ‘Orkut Promote’ on their social networking site Orkut.

Inspired by news promotion techniques from popular social networking sites,  google introduced Orkut Promote, where in users can promote news, photos and videos across their friend’s network. Promoted content can be spreaded or reshared by friends of users across their friend circles.

In this way without paying single penny users of Orkut can promote their likes and dislikes across Orkut platform.

orkutpromotion

Promoted content can also be deleted by other users, to not to show on their profile, if they do not like it.

Orkut Promote also provides tracking information to monitor how far their promoted content reached among Orkut users.

Watch this video on youtube to learn how to use Orkut Promote


Get Excerpt with Thumbnail Image – Wordpress Plug-in

Get Excerpt with Thumbnail images is a simple wordpress plugin. It gives thumbnail image, excerpt and title of Wordpress post, in the form PHP array. It is upto the developer how he can display these info on his web page.

Simple to use Get Excerpts with Thumbnail plugin uses meta data of wordpress post, to retrieve thumbnail image. It also uses another plug-in named Content Extract by Rob Shumann, to retrieve excerpt from POST. You need install Content Extract plugin before start working with this plugin.

Inspite of having found numerous plugins to get excerpts along with thumbnail images in Wordpress plugin directory. I have written this plugin to reduce number of requests that are made to MySQL database while fetching data.

== Installation ==
Install Content Extract by Rob Shumann, before installing this plugin.
The plugin is simple to install:

1. Download the zip file, from wordpress plugin directory
2. Unpack the zip.
3. Extract zip file and upload directory present in zip file to the `wp-content/plugins` directory on your WordPress installation.
4. Activate plugin
5. Go to Settings -> Get Excerpt with Thumbnail page, to change configuration for the plug-in.

Configuration of Plug-in:

Goto Settings -> Get Excerpt With Thumbnail link in your wordpress admin page.
Following four elements need to be configured.
1) Thumbnail CSS Class -> this is .css class name to be used by this plug-in. By default, CSS class name is displayed as ‘imgstyle’, change this to your desired class name and make sure it is defined in .css file of your wordpress theme.
2) More Text -> link that appears next to excerpt to read full post.
3) Post Length -> Inspite of reading entire post to retrieve excerpt, plugin just reads number of characters entered by you in this field.
Note: Once an excerpt is generated by this plugin, it will be stored in excerpt field of your wordpress post.
4) Excerpt Length -> Length of excerpt to be displayed.
Note: Always make suer Post Length is greater than or equal to Excerpt Length.

Sample usage of this plugin:


while (have_posts()) {
the_post();
$data = getExcerptsWithThumbnail();
echo $data['post_thumbnail'] . ‘<h5>’ . $data['post_title'] . ‘</h5>’ . $data['post_excerpt'] ;
}


In above code snippet,
you can see getExcerptsWithThumbnail() function returns an array.
code snippet uses <h5> tag to display title of the post, you can use any of the style you want, for the presentation of thumbnail image along with excerpt.

Screen shot of the plugin, when Thumbnail Image position is used as ‘float:left’

scree1

Screen shot of plugin, when Thumbnail Image position is used as ‘float:right’

scree2

Get Excerpt with Thumbnail plugin just gives data, presentation of this data on theme pages is left to theme developer.

Reference: see category or tag pages on SearchAndhra.com to check how this plugin is used.

Please place your queries as comments to this post, so that i can reply to you.


CoTweet – CRM Twitter

Twitter, a micro blogging service, is not only for posting your micro blogs and checking who are your followers and who are following you and also checking what is happening @people followed by you.

Twitter can be used as Corporate service, as a CRM tool.
This has been proved by CoTweet. CoTweet with tag line How business does Twitter, proved it.

logo

Using CoTweet you can share single twitter account, with multiple users.

CoTweet has simplified how Twitter can be used for business. It also gave directions how Twitter can be used efficiently.

Let us say you have a twitter account for your company and you want to follow or reply to all tweets twitted by your customers. Twitter UI is messy, to follow up flood of messages and also a cumbersome way to determine where the tweet is targeted.
Using CoTweet, you can route tweets placed on your twitter account to multiple users connected to you through CoTweet and also you can monitor their replies.

Earlier corporates using Twitter used to complain, saying their single master Twitter account is shared by people accross the organization and it is difficult to monitor who is doing what and who is on duty.

CoTweet gives you solution for it.

CoTweet is on Beta now, and it says “Manage up to six Twitter accounts through a single CoTweet login. Invite colleagues to join your accounts to work as a team representing your company on the front-line of your Twitter presence. Add your personal Twitter account and manage all your tweeting through one interface and get notified when tweets are sent to your Twitter accounts.”


Google on Twitter

Twitter, the buzzword on web these days, is becoming a powerful tool day by day. Increasing popularity and the reach of Twitter on Web attracted Google, to list all its frequent updates on Twitter.

Google opened acccounts on Twitter to let everybody know what is happening inside.

Following are Google accounts on Twitter.

twitter.com/Google – our central account
twitter.com/Blogger – for Blogger fans
twitter.com/GoogleCalendar – user tips & updates
twitter.com/GoogleImages – news, tips, tricks on our visual image search
twitter.com/GoogleNews – latest headlines via Google News
twitter.com/GoogleReader – from our feed reader team
twitter.com/iGoogle – news & notes from Google’s personalized homepage
twitter.com/GoogleStudents – news of interest to students using Google
twitter.com/YouTube – for YouTube fans
twitter.com/YouTubeES – en Espanol
twitter.com/GoogleAtWork - solutions for IT and workplace productivity

Geo-related
twitter.com/SketchUp – Google SketchUp news
twitter.com/3DWH – SketchUp’s 3D Warehouse
twitter.com/Modelyourtown – 3D modeling to build your favorite places
twitter.com/EarthOutreach – Earth & Maps tools for nonprofits & orgs
twitter.com/GoogleMaps – uses, tips, mashups
twitter.com/GoogleSkyMap -Android app for the night sky

Ads-related
twitter.com/AdSense – for online publishers
twitter.com/AdWordsHelper – looking out for AdWords questions and tech issues
twitter.com/AdWordsProSarah – Google Guide for AdWords Help Forum
twitter.com/GoogleAnalytics – insights for website effectiveness
twitter.com/GoogleAdBuilder – re building display ads
twitter.com/GoogleRetail – for retail advertisers
twitter.com/TechnologyUK – for U.K. tech advertisers
twitter.com/InsideAdWordsDE – for German AdWords customers
twitter.com/GoogleAgencyDE – for German ad agencies
twitter.com/AdSensePT – info for Portuguese-language publishers
twitter.com/AdWordsRussia – AdWords news & tips in Russian
twitter.com/DentroDeAdWords – Spanish updates from the Inside AdWords blog
twitter.com/AdWordsAPI – AdWords API tips

Developer & technical
twitter.com/GoogleResearch – from our research scientists
twitter.com/GoogleWMC – Google Webmaster Central
twitter.com/GoogleCode – latest updates for Google developer products
twitter.com/GoogleData – Data APIs provide a standard protocol for reading and writing web data
twitter.com/app_engine – web apps run on Google infrastructure
twitter.com/DataLiberation – our initiative for complete import/export of all data
twitter.com/GoogleMapsAPI – about using Google Maps embedded in websites
twitter.com/GoogleIO – Google’s largest annual developer event

Culture, People
twitter.com/googletalks – notes from our @Google speaker series
twitter.com/googlejobs – the voice of Google recruiters

Country or Region
twitter.com/googlearabia – news from the Google Arabia Blog*
twitter.com/googledownunder – Google activities in Australia & New Zealand
twitter.com/GoogleDE – Google in Germany
twitter.com/GoogleKorea - News & notes in Korean*
twitter.com/GoogleLatAm – Latin America (en Espanol)
twitter.com/GooglePolicyIt – Notes on Google policy issues in Italy

So folks just follow these accounts on Twitter and get latest updates on google.