Be careful! Google Panda is Watching You

Google.com, as we all know, is the search engine giant and to stay in this position it makes some rules and changes its search algorithms overtime so that it can give users more relevant search to its users. One of such change that was introduced on February, 2011 was the “Panda” algorithm.

Panda ready to fight for Google

This title was there on my sidebar’s popular posts gadget linking to finding more high-quality sites in search until I thought to write about this and inform my subscribers and others too.

What is Google Panda?

Google Panda is the new search algorithm that lowers the ranking of low-quality sites and blogs. Low quality sites are referred to sites and blogs which are not very useful, have low quality articles, add no or less value to its users and have copied content from other blog and sites.

How can it affect your site or blog?

Your site traffic will decrease as Google Search will send fewer readers and as well as your income will also decrease if you have AdSense or other ad networks or using any affiliate programs.

How to protect your blog from Google Panda?

First you have to accept and agree that “Content is the king”. In more guidance on building high-quality sites, you can find above 20 tips that can help you. Summing up all those I get top five tips that you should do:

• Write original articles
• Write articles for your readers
• Give useful information
• Immediately remove duplicate and copied contents
• Stop copying articles from other sites and blogs

These are the first steps you should start working on immediately because Google’s algorithm is and will update randomly as to bring up more useful, original and relevant contents around the web.

If you have found out that someone has copied your content then you can file DMCA complaint to Google to remove that content.

Source

Customize and Style Read more

Blogger has finally rolled out the Jump Breakfeature which will add a “Read more” link to every posts if every step is done correctly. That is a great news but if style matters then you have to put some more effort to edit, customize and style it.

There can be so many reasons for why you want to edit the Jump Break link. Within this post I will try to cover most of the reasons and solve most of the problems as far as possible, let us see those.

Fix Auto Jump after clicking Read more Link

Blogger team has solved a great problem by enabling “Jump Break” feature but you may have seen that when the “Read more” link is clicked, it takes to the post of course, but the page jumps to the line after the jump-break has been applied. If you think that it disturbs you and your readers as well then edit the code and fix this by this simple step.

Go to Template tab of your Blogger blog, click “Edit HTML”, check the “Expand Widget Templates” check-box and find the below code:

    <b:if cond='data:post.hasJumpLink'>
      <div class='jump-link'>
        <a expr:href='data:post.url + &quot;#more&quot;' expr:title='data:post.title'><data:post.jumpText/></a>
      </div>
    </b:if>

Within this find and delete this snippet:

+ "#more"

The full code will look like:

    <b:if cond='data:post.hasJumpLink'>
      <div class='jump-link'>
        <a expr:href='data:post.url' expr:title='data:post.title'><data:post.jumpText/></a>
      </div>
    </b:if>

Change the “Read more” Text

If you have followed how to add Read more link in Blogger and create post summaries then you must have find out how to change the default text. But if you still prefer to do it manually then just replace<data:post.jumpText/> with your custom text, example:

    <b:if cond='data:post.hasJumpLink'>
      <div class='jump-link'>
        <a expr:href='data:post.url' expr:title='data:post.title'>Continue reading!</a>
      </div>
    </b:if>

Add Image Instead of Read more Link

There can be so many ways to add image instead of the default “Read more” text of Jump Break, here I will explin the simple one. So same as above example again delete <data:post.jumpText/> and add your image here, example:

    <b:if cond='data:post.hasJumpLink'> 
      <div class='jump-link'> 
        <a expr:href='data:post.url' expr:title='data:post.title'><img src='http://image-URL.png'/></a> 
      </div> 
    </b:if >

Styling the Jump Break Link

If you want it to be simple but more prominent then you can add some styling codes to the Jump Break by using CSS properties without altering the orignal codes, for example, copy paste the below codes before]]></b:skin> and see how it will looks:

.jump-link a {
 padding: 5px;
 background: #3399bb; /* Have a background colour otherwise delete it */
 color: #ffffff; /* Link colour */
}
.jump-link a:hover {
 background: #666; /* Background colour on hover otherwise delete it. */
 color: #fff; /* Changing the link colour on hover */
 text-decoration: none;
}

Try changing the highlighted colour hex codes and see if it matches with your template style. If you want, then check out the demo.

Demo

However, adding CSS with not change the auto jump. Any thing more you want to know about Jump Break?

Source

Get ready for Blogspot SEO Updates

Now Blogger has become more Search engine optimization (SEO) friendly with its new and updated features. You are ready to enable the SEO settings for your blogs and remove all hacks and customizations that you have done to your Blogger templates so far. But do you really know which or what should be used and when?

Unlike the three letters, SEO, which creates the acronym, it is a vast term and there are so many guidelines you have to follow to increase your traffic from ‘natural’ search results. Simply speaking, following the guidelines, SEO can be done in two ways, off-site and on-site.

Off-site means preparing yourselves thinking “what if there were no search engines then how people would have reached my site?”. There are many ways, like, getting social and create Google+ Page andFacebook Page.

On-site means make your site search engine friendly by writing useful and original contents and by providing Meta tags, heading tags and some other useful tags and codes. Blogger has all these but you have to use it properly. Let us discuss those.

You will find the Blogger SEO settings under your blog’s dashboard > Settings tab > “Search preferences”.

Add Google Web Fonts to Blogspot

If you are looking for free open-source fonts to design your blog’s texts then nothing is better than Google web fonts. Blogger has been using Google web fonts for quite a long time, you can find it by clicking the Customize button found under Blogger Template tab of your blog.

But there aren’t many web fonts available to choose from as many as the font directory has, isn’t it? Or you have a custom Blogger template where you want to add web fonts. Let’s start with Merienda as our example font and see how we can add this to Blogger.

Step 1: After finding this font click on “Quick use”.