Google has been playing around with its search results and the lives of several webmasters as well with their updates dubbed “Google Panda”. However, it looks like the reign of Google Panda is now over and it has been taken over by a new bird – “Google Penguin“.

Google Penguin will attempt to clean up some more spam in Google search results, but it has been bad at best with them messing up several high paying keywords like “make money online” among others.

Read more About Google Panda

• Google Panda Completes 1 Year: A Timeline, Analysis and Suggestions
• Trying To Recover From Google’s Panda Algorithm? Some Mistakes You Should Avoid
• The Biggest Problem Of Google Search Post Panda Algorithmic Update
• Google Confirms Panda 3.3 Update, Changes How Link Popularity Influences Search Results
• Reverse Engineering Google’s Panda Slap, Hubpages Seeing Improvements After Offloading Content To Subdomains

The Panda update has definitely caused a lot of webmasters to lose sleep because of dropping traffic and removal from lucrative search engine positioning. Google Penguin is set to compound things further. However, unlike the earlier update, users affected by the Google Penguin update will be able to voice their concerns directly to Google through a Google Docs form.

If you think that you have been affected by the Google Penguin updates, you can visit this form (which was tweeted by Head of webspam at Google; Matt Cutts) and voice your concern about being demoted or removed from Google search results. The form says;

If your site was affected by the “Penguin” webspam algorithm update on April 24th, 2012, and you don’t think it should have been affected, please give us more details below:

This seems to be the first time that Google is actually accepting direct requests from webmasters about issues regarding search engine penalties. In the past, webmasters could only use forums and webmaster tools to voice their displeasure. However, don’t expect them to go through each and every request, because they might get millions of them from users and it would definitely not be possible to go through them all.

Image credit Matt Cutts via Instagram

It looks like the popular shared hosting website Dreamhost is down and not working. Apparently, the outage is so huge that even the website Dreamhost.com and their admin panel at panel.dreamhost.com seems to be down.

Dreamhost hosts millions of websites on their server and this seems to have caused all of them to be inaccessible for now.

Additionally, several other sites which run on Dreamhost is down as well. We have an outage on our own cache servers too. There is no update from Dreamhost about this on their status website (http://status.dreamhost.com)

We have contacted Dreamhost to find out more about this outage and will update this post once we have more information.

Update: Dreamhost has posted updates saying that most of its customer accounts should be working fine. However, the web panel and dreamhost.com continues to remain inaccessible right now.

Story developing…

When I initially started out with using VPS, I had tons of problems with Apache but quickly switched to Nginx which has proven to be more than a boon, because it meant that I could do more with less. However, having used WordPress I have come to know that the system is not necessarily scalable in itself when it comes to self-hosted websites.

In the past, I have written about the architecture that powers Techie Buzz and several guides like Scaling WordPress Using MySQL Replication and HyperDB and setting up memcache with WordPress among others.

However, over time, I have learned quite a few things about managing WordPress for a website with heavy traffic and also sorted out several issues which had become a bottleneck for us.

One of the biggest issues I have faced over time with WordPress is the database. More often than not WordPress websites work slower than expected because of the MySQL database and heavy load on it. However, many a times a simple change in MySQL could speed up the website considerably.

The default engine (not forced by WordPress) while installing WordPress is MyISAM for most hosting companies. The problem with MyISAM is that it locks the entire table when it inserts or updates rows. This in turn locks other queries which are accessing the same table slowing down the entire website in the process.

For example, when you are updating a post, you will be updating the wp_posts table and during this update all other select, insert, update and delete queries will be queued till the insert/update query completes. This in itself should not be a big problem when you have a site with less traffic. However, it does make a big impact when you have a large website with multiple queries being run every minute or so.

So what is the solution for this? Well, the best I could implement was switching the tables with the frequent queries to InnoDB. InnoDB is a storage engine in MySQL which might become the default one in future MySQL versions. With an InnoDB table the queries don’t lock the entire table, but just lock a single row it is inserting/updating. This leaves the other queries to complete without having to wait in a queue.

Making this small change has definitely made life easier for us. Along with our other caching mechanisms we now have almost 0 load on our database, which is definitely a great thing.

While this has definitely been helpful for us, I would suggest that you spend some time reading up the differences between MyISAM and InnoDB and their advantages and disadvantages before you make the move. Once you are convinced that you are ready to migrate, head over to my earlier guide on how to safely and easily migrate tables from MyISAM to InnoDB Engine.

Since the time that I have run this site, I have had my fights with keeping the website running smoothly. However, over time, I have identified several areas we need to improve on and one of them has been MySQL.

The problem I have had with MySQL is whether to use the MyISAM engine or the InnoDB engine. I have more recently tilted towards using InnoDB more often than not because of the advantages it has for a high traffic website. Though, I won’t go over the advantages in detail here, I might ask you to read my article on why we switched to InnoDB.

Nevertheless, here is a quick and easy tutorial on how to switch from a MyISAM engine to a InnoDB engine safely and easily. You can run these queries on the command prompt or use a GUI like PHP MyAdmin as well. However, you must note that the data in your MyISAM table might not be similar to your new table due to frequent updates and you might want to plan downtime so that you don’t lose data or have to sync the tables again.

So without further ado, here are the steps:

Create a Replica Table

The first step is to create a replica table of the one you want to switch the engines for, for that run the query given below. Make sure to replace the table names as appropriate.

CREATE TABLE new_table LIKE old_table;

Once you have run this query you’ll have a new table which has the same schema as the older table and you are already on your way.

Drop FULLTEXT Indexes in New Table

The biggest difference, if you measure it that way is that InnoDB tables do not support FULLTEXT indexes. So before we do anything else you will have to drop the FULLTEXT indexes from the table you just created. To do that follow the steps given below.

Run the query:

SHOW INDEX from new_table where index_type=’FULLTEXT’;

Drop individual indexes from the query (rename indexname for the index you want to drop):

ALTER TABLE new_table DROP INDEX indexname;

Once you have done that, you are now ready to move your MyISAM table to the InnoDB engine. So lets get ahead with it.

Moving MyISAM Table to InnoDB Engine

The next move is to update the Engine of your MySQL table to InnoDB. For that, you will have to run the following query:

ALTER TABLE new_table ENGINE = InnoDB;

That’s it. You now have the new table in InnoDB format, now you just need to move the data.

Move Data From Old Table to New Table

You will need to move the data from the old table to the new table. To do that, run the following query:

INSERT new_table SELECT * FROM old_table;

And the data is finally there. The last but not the least step is to switch between your older MyISAM table to your new InnoDB table.

Rename Old Table to Backup and New Table to Old

Run the following queries to rename your tables:

Rename Table old_table TO old_table_backup;

Rename Table new_table TO old_table;

That’s it. You have now successfully migrated your MyISAM table to the InnoDB engine while having a backup which you can quickly switch to by renaming the backup table again.

I have been using Facebook Comments Box on this blogs for over a week now to test out and increase interaction on the site. For starters, I did like the amount of interaction from Facebook users. However, there are quite a few problems with Facebook Comments when it comes to moderation.

First off, the website where you can moderate Facebook comments (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/comments/) is down most of the time (or whenever I try to access it). It gets frustrating because it is the only way you can see new comments and trash spam or hide comments from users.

On the other hand, Facebook comments moderation in itself does not work most of the time and administrators have problems when marking a comment as spam or banning a user.

Overall, I feel that Facebook comments do provide a lot of ease for their users to quickly comment on a website. However, there is a lot of work to be done when it comes to administrating those comments. I will continue working with Facebook comments for some more time and see if there is any improvement with it before I decide to remove it for good.

What has been your experience while using Facebook comments? Have you had problems with moderating comments and administrating them? I am looking for some alternatives so please feel to suggest them (No Disqus Please).

Google recently started redirecting Blogspot.com blogs to Blogspot.in and other country specific domains. The reason being that Google wants to give more freedom of expression to users while also being able to adhere to removal requests from different governments.

The country based redirection was first rolled out in India thanks to some recent stupid court judgments against websites in India. However, this will highly inconvenience Blogspot blog owners in India since they will not have duplicate content. Even though Google has promised to minimize the  negative effects of this change, you can definitely take an initiative to minimize the problems this will cause.

Google had introduced the rel=canonical meta tag to overcome this issue. This tag allows users to point tell search engines the actual location of the content if there are one or more URLs which have the same content, thus avoiding duplicate content on your website.

If you are Blogspot blog owner, you can avoid duplicate content by adding the following content to your template. Please note that you will have to edit the HTML code of your Blogspot template and add this before the </head> tag.

If you are using a HTML template for you blog, you should add the following code:

<ItemPage><Blogger><link href=’<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>’ rel=’canonical’/></Blogger></ItemPage>

On the other hand if you are using a XML template, you will have to add the following code to include all meta tags:

<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/>

Or also individually include the rel=canonical tag by using:

<link expr:href="data:blog.url" rel="canonical"/>

Once you have added the tags, make sure to save your template and then view source of your browser to check if the tag is added to your template. That’s it. Once you have added the rel=canonical tag, search engines will only index one page instead of creating duplicate content.

Google AdSense is one of the biggest revenue generator for small and medium traffic websites. The AdSense team have been revamping their reporting interface which makes it easier for publisher to see their earnings and other related reports.

As a publisher I have always been comfortable using desktop reporting software to keep an eye on my AdSense earnings. However, of late most of the software have stopped working.

Also Read: Useful Tips and Tricks To Grow Your AdSense Income

This means that I have to constantly login into the AdSense web interface to check on my earnings every now and then. However, thanks to Google that will now be a thing of the past. Google has released a extension for Google Chrome which will allow AdSense publishers to view basic details of their earnings in Google Chrome.

The AdSense Publisher Toolbar extension (Download) allows you to view your current days earnings, yesterday’s earnings, current months earnings and last months earnings. In addition to that it also displays the top custom channels and lifetime earnings.

Once you have installed the extension, you will have to click on the extension icon and then authorize your Google account. If you use different account for AdSense and Gmail, you can easily sign in to another account thanks to Google’s multiple account sign in.

The AdSense Publisher extension is definitely a nice way to keep an eye on your AdSense earnings without having to constantly login to the actual AdSense website. I would highly recommend this extension if you are in a habit of checking your earnings multiple times through a day.

Of course, it is always a healthy habit to login to the actual AdSense reporting interface to check on detailed reports and performance of your channels and other data from time to time to increase your performance.

Don’t Forget to Read Other AdSense Tips and Tricks

• One Tricky AdSense Policy That Might Get You into Trouble
• View Google AdSense Earnings for Different Geo-locations/Countries
• Best Google AdSense Placements for Blogs/Websites
• Best Google AdSense Placements for Forums

I have always been in awe of WordPress and have come to love it since I started using it few years back. However, one of the biggest problems I have had with WordPress is their search; both in the frontend as well as in the backend.

While you can always improve your frontend search and add relevancy to it by either using Google Custom Search or a plugin like Better Search, there are not many options for the backend, or at-least my searches led me to few or none.

My dislike for the WordPress backend search grew more when I wanted to search for some articles which had a particular title but could never see them in the results for my queries. However, I did find a really good alternative after spending a decent amount of time searching for it on Google.

The extension called Search Regex is quite a life saver and is definitely better than the default WordPress backend search for posts. The plugin allows you to search only titles, within posts and comments, post meta values, post excerpts, post URLs and more.

One of the first things I noticed with the plugin was that it works really well and does it’s job. However, as always humans are usually never satisfied with what they get and so was I. I would have loved the plugin to integrate and replace the default backend search in WordPress and would like to have it on the WordPress Edit posts page itself. The reason for this is that, the way the plugin currently works, you can only edit a single post at a time.

On the other hand, WordPress backend search allows users to edit multiple posts at once. Other than this, the plugin also allows you to Search and Replace text within your posts. This can come in very handy if you want to update a link or text in a post. Best of all, the plugin supports regex (Regular Expression). However, I would avoid using that because it could really create problems if something goes wrong or you use a bad regex, in-fact the plugin itself advices you about it.

Rest assured, Search Regex is an excellent plugin to address the annoyance called "WordPress Search". Go ahead and download it from here, you won’t be disappointed at all.

Google AdSense is one of the most lucrative ad service used by millions of bloggers all around the world. However, it is also one of the most strict and smart ad network in the world too. Every day, thousands of users are banned from AdSense because they have violated one or more policies laid down by Google.

While some of the policy violations are pretty straightforward, there are some which are really confusing and hard to figure out. I was the victim of one such policy in December 2010 and had received an automated email from Google which had me both confused and scared. I was pretty sure that I was not violating any policies, but Google thought otherwise. The email in question is posted below [some parts have been obscured].

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not
accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
————————————————————————————————————–
Hello,

While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as [redacted]. Please note that this URL is an example and that the same violations may exist on other pages of your website.

Publishers are not permitted to alter the behavior of Google ads in any way. This includes resizing ad frames to cut off parts of ads or hiding the Ads by Google moniker.

As stated in our program policies, publishers are not permitted to alter the behavior of ads in any way. This includes displaying more than three ad units on each page.

Please make any necessary changes to your webpages in the next 72 hours. We also suggest that you take the time to review our program policies (https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=48182&stc=aspe-1pp-en) to ensure that all of your other pages are in compliance.

Once you update your site, we will automatically detect the changes and ad serving will not be affected. If you choose not to make the changes to your account within the next three days, your account will remain active but you will no longer be able to display ads on the site. Please note, however, that we may disable your account if further violations are found in the future.

Thank you for your cooperation.
Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team

So Google basically just told me that I only had 72 hours to fix my stuff or else I would be banned. This happened just 3 days before Christmas and I totally panicked because I couldn’t for love of God figure out what I was doing wrong. The content of the above email also confused me further more.

Also Read: Best Google AdSense Placements for Blogs/Websites | Useful Tips and Tricks To Grow Your AdSense Income