Reviewer of Sites

If you have not heard about Google’s Wikipedia-like offering, now is the time to check it out!

Google Knol

The great feature is that Knol is 100% Adsense revenue sharing!  Now is the time to join, while it is young!

How to Backpack

Starting From Scratch

by Ryan Moulton

Everything you need to know to enjoy a week in the outdoors and be safe doing it.

Type 1 Diabetes

Introduction Type 1 diabetes is a disease that often starts in childhood and was previously known as “juvenile onset”…

by Anne Peters

Lung Cancer

Lung cancer is a disease of uncontrolled cell growth in tissues of the lung. A malignant tumor arising from the cells of…

by Jessica Donington

Toilet clogs

Solutions for the most common problems

by The Family Handyman Magazine

Tooth Pain

Introduction Tooth pain is generally felt as a sharp or aching pain in or around a tooth. It is most frequently caused…

by Noshir Mehta

Tags: Google by reviews
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Google has recently began allowing third-party advertisers onto their content network. Now you’ll see a larger assortment of ads displaying on Adsense.

The Google content network now accepts display ads served from qualified third-party vendors. Third-party ad serving has been a longstanding request from top brand AdWords advertisers who use third parties to create and manage their online campaigns.

Limitations (this will change as they develop):

• Right now it is only available in English, but it will eventually be extended to other languages.
• Only images and Flash ads will display third-party advertising. Text ads are not included.

For more information, click here.

Tags: Adsense, Google by reviews
12 Comments »

A new feature that Google announced is that when you do a search for a person’s name, a recent quote may appear above the search results.  Google is making quotations in news articles easy to search and browse. You can now more easily keep track of what your favorite politician, actor or sports star is saying. You can even search within their quotes for specific topics.

Maybe eventually Google will put the quotes into an RSS feed for blogs and sites about these people.  Pretty cool!

Tags: Google by reviews
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Google keeps coming up with new features and you can check them out on their Google Labs area.

The latest features include:

Alternate views for search results – You can do a variety of search types including a timeline, map, or in context of other information types.

With these views, Google’s technology extracts key dates, locations, measurements, and more from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension.

Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places. Info view shows all the data found for each result, to help you select the best choice.

Keyword suggestions – You can view different keywords to improve your search results. As you type your search, Google’s technology will provide alternative suggestions to your queries in real time. *This could be helpful in coming up with good keywords for SEO as well!

Keyboard shortcuts – Navigate search results quickly and easily, minimizing use of your mouse. Current keyboard shortcuts include:

Key Action
J – Selects the next result.
K – Selects the previous result.
O - Opens the selected result.
/ - Puts the cursor in the search box.

Tags: Google by reviews
8 Comments »

Google recently announced that they can now crawl data submitted via forms.

The other part that I found interesting is that they apparently can “scan” javascript and Flash to find links. Previously, spiders were not able to crawl javascript, but this “scanning” now allows for data retrieval. That’s big news! All those links that I thought were useless because they were displayed via javascript may count for something now!

Google is constantly trying new ideas to improve our coverage of the web. We already do some pretty smart things like scanning JavaScript and Flash to discover links to new web pages, and today, we would like to talk about another new technology we’ve started experimenting with recently.

In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a

element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made. If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page.

Tags: Google, Link Building, SEO by reviews
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Google Alerts: How to Use it to Track Backlinks

If you’re not using this, it’s worth giving it a try. The purpose for this is to have notification when new links to your site are found by Google. This can be very good for any linkbuilding campaign.

Click Here: Google Alerts

The search terms should be similar to any one or all of the following:

link: http://www.example.com <— notice the space between link: and http?
link:http://www.example.com
link:www.example.com
link:http://example.com

The question has been asked, “what does the space do?” It’s strange, but it does bring up different results of backlinks, so it’s worth using this modification. Why there is a difference, I have no idea.

It’s very handy for watching progress of Google picking up new links to your sites.

You can set the frequency to:

• as soon as it happens
• once per day
• once per week

Also, it can be set it for Blogs, news, web, etc.

What is the maximum number of alerts I can create?

You can create up to 1000 alerts. To create more alerts, you can either delete any existing alerts or request alerts to be sent to a different email address. Please remember that you can only have up to 10 unverified Alerts at any given time.

Tags: Google, Link Building, Marketing, SEO by reviews
13 Comments »

Googles Sounds the Death ‘knol’?

First, what is Knol?

Knol is a Squidoo/Wikipedia-like social media site brought to you by Google. Currently in beta, it is supposed to be a haven for authors to show off their writing skills and portfolios. Google introduced it to a select group of people in December of 2007. Here what Google had to say about it:

It is a “free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.”

What effect will it have on the likes of Squidoo, Hubpages, and Wikipedia?

Since this is a Google project, you can expect a ton of money, advertising, and support once it is finally released. There are already sites out there trying to capitalize on Knol, such as knolstuff. There are also sites that appear to be trying to convince people to join their site instead, and knol isn’t even out yet. Hubpages asks visitors to not wait for Google Knol message; “Why wait for Google Knol? Write your own Wiki pages on HubPages and Earn.” I could see Knol cutting into the Hubpages and Squidoo potential users, as they do not have the name recognition, however Wikipedia is very well entrenched. I think there will be a lot of buzz on the internet, especially within the writer and blogger communities, but I do not believe it will kill most sites (that have an established community), unless they are not already fairly well known.

Tags: Google, Social Bookmarking by reviews
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