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).

Facebook has a had a huge week with them going public with their $5 Billion IPO. However, it looks like they are facing problems with their infrastructure with the "Facebook Activity Feed" for websites showing an "invalid action type" error all across the web.

Website owners who have been using the "Activity Feed" social plugin from Facebook might notice that the feed is no longer showing up and instead an error box with the message "Invalid action type" has taken it’s place. This problem is occurring on all websites and seems to be a big problem on Facebook’s side.

The error is also apparent on Facebook’s Social Plugin code generator for all websites as seen in the screenshot above. Facebook has faced several problems in the past where the site has gone down for hours due to database problems and DNS issues among other things. However, this look like the first time that their social plugins have had issues.

If you are a webmaster who uses the Facebook Activity Feed on your website, you might see the above error. However, having the widget in question on your site does not affect loading time. We have contacted Facebook to check why this problem is occurring and will update the post when we get a response.

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

Google Analytics has definitely been one of the best services to track your website visitors. However, it has been lacking a key feature that most of its competitors like Woopra and Reinvigorate have been offering for a while now; Realtime tracking.

Realtime user tracking is a very important feature for any webmaster who wants to track campaigns in realtime without having to wait. This helps users to make business decisions quickly if something is not working. Unfortunately, prior to today, Google never had this feature.

However, that is about to change because Google has announced a new feature for Analytics which will help you track your visitors in realtime and make business decisions quickly. The new feature in Google Analytics will allow users to track how many visitors are currently visiting the site, how many users have visited in the last few minutes as well as the number of visitors visiting your website every second.

Additionally, Google Analytics will also display the source for traffic and the keywords users are using and the geographic locations they are visiting from. As a webmaster, this is a pretty cool feature since I can now just use Google Analytics instead of using other realtime analytics tracking services.

Google has definitely been ramping up their analytic services with the introduction of Google Analytics 5 which brought about a new UI, dashboard, widgets and more. Additionally, Google has also been adding some neat features to Google Analytics like heatmaps and in-page analytics among other things.

The biggest advantage of Google Analytics is that is is completely free unlike it’s competitors. However, they are now introducing a new set of premium features which users can signup and use. The new Google Analytics Premium service is targeted at business users who want in-depth data about their users and the ability to quickly make business decisions.

Some of the key features of Google Analytics Premium include:

• Extra processing power – increased data collection, more custom variables and downloadable, unsampled reports
• Advanced analysis – attribution modeling tools that allow you to test different models for assigning credit to conversions
• Service and support – experts to guide customized installation, and dedicated account management on call – all backed by 24/7 support
• Guarantees - service level agreements for data collection, processing and reporting

Users can request access to premium accounts by visiting the Google Analytics Premium homepage. Realtime Google Analytics is being gradually rolled out to all users, however, you will have to use the new Google Analytics interface to have access to it. Additionally, only Analytics administrators will have access to Realtime Google Analytics.

If you don’t see the Realtime Google Analytics in your account. You can request for access to the service by filling up this form. Please note that Google Analytics will continue to remain free for webmasters including the new Realtime Google Analytics feature.

I am definitely loving the new Realtime Analytics features as it allows me to track campaigns and also understand where our traffic is coming from. Do you have access to the new Realtime Google Analytics? What do you think about it?

Google has been displaying sitelinks for several websites to help with easier navigation for users when they are searching for a brand or product. Sitelinks have proven useful for both search engine users as well as for website owners, since it gives users an option to navigate through the website without even visiting it.

A Google webmaster help page for Sitelinks states this:

he links shown below some sites in our search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.

In the past, sitelinks have been just plain links to webpages within a website without any description or URL associated with it as seen in the screenshot below.

However, it looks like Google is now making some changes to the Sitelinks format and is including description and the URL of the link for them.

The new sitelinks are also larger in size and take up a huge chunk of space under the main search results. However, they are now more prominent and easier to read. The descriptions are also helpful for users to find out basic information about a page.

Also Read: How To Control Sitelinks That Appear For Your Site In Google Search?

The new Sitelinks format is a experimental feature and might not be seen by all users yet. However, it is definitely something Google has been working on in addition to the other changes they have been making to their products. It all started out when they decided to add a Bing like background to their homepage and continued with a slew of other changes including removing the I am feeling Luckybutton, using a new design for search results and yet more, simplifying the image search results, adding top references to results and updating their home page design while adding a new black bar.

So what do you think of the new Sitelinks? Will they help you or do you think that they use up too much space?

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

Google is rolling out a new PageRank update to websites as we speak. This is the second update of Google PageRank in this year. Google had also rolled out updates to PageRank in January 2011.

I have seeing a lot of webmasters tweeting about PageRank updates and most of them seems positive. Google has been making several changes to their search engine lately and have heavily penalized websites through Panda updates. We had written about mistakes you should avoid if you are trying to recover from Panda algorithm.

In addition to banning some big sites, the Panda update also managed to push scraper website on top of search results, however, those problems have reportedly been fixed with the new Panda 2.2 update.

Even though PageRank is not a very important in ranking sites in search engines, sites with higher PageRank are often trusted more. If you have been seeing some drastic traffic loss, a positive PageRank update could mean that Google still sees your site authoritative. However, you might want to avoid making simple mistakes and get penalized.

Did you see a PageRank update for your website? Feel free to share your rankings through your comments.

If you check your logs regularly, you might notice 404 errors which are valid. However, several times most of the 404 errors might not be a fault of yours at all.

One of the most annoying 404 errors I have had to deal was with Google’s Doubleclick DARTIframe 404 error, which was supposed to be used for expandable ads or Interstitial ads which needed to be displayed on the site.

More likely than not every website which uses Google AdSense or a Google display ad network might see an error as shown above. Clicking on the link will give you no clue as to what is wrong.

Thankfully, I found a thread, or rather a discussion which had an answer to solve this problem. You can read more about it here. However, if you are looking for a quick solution to fix the Ad.DoubleClick.Net DARTIframe 404 Error, here is the cause of the problem and how you can solve it.

Why Does This DARTIframe.html 404 Error Happen?

According to the document I read, and from what I know as a developer; in many cases expandable ads require permissions from the website it runs on while they do it in iFrames. This disallows them from displaying.

In most of these cases, ad networks use a workaround by hosting a file on the server they are running on to circumvent the issue. DoubleClick does it too. However, neither Google or DoubleClick have a FAQ or help topic listed about it.

How To Fix This Issue?

To fix the DoubleClick DARTIframe issue, you will need to create a new folder in the root directory of your website named as doubleclick. For example, the one we have here is http://techie-buzz.com/doubleclick/ and then upload a file provided by them called DARTIframe.html to that directory.

It is pretty simple, but not documented by Google itself which is shameful. Once you create the directory and upload the file you will not get 404 errors and your ad earnings might just go up.

You can download the ZIP file which contains the DARTIframe.html file and instructions to implement it from here. I hope this helps you to solve your problem.

No matter which of the multitude of web design companies you choose to help you with your web design, there are essentially a few basic steps in the process. Most companies will implement the following six steps when they help design your website. Here we will take a specific example to help demonstrate the process of designing a website. Let us consider a person who makes handmade cards and has decided to sell them online. For this purpose she needs a website and has chosen a web design company to help her with this aspect. Here is what will happen next.

Step 1 – Information Gathering

In this step the person from the company will get all the details of what the site is expected to do. The site will have information about the handmade cards. It will need a shopping cart embedded in the website. There may be a blog by the artist talking about her latest creation. A section could be devoted to ordering customized and personalized cards.

Step 2 – Planning

Once all the elements that the website may have are listed the executive from the company will plan what can be incorporated and what may not be possible to accommodate in the web design. The planning stage helps refine all the information that has been gathered and organizes the direction that the web site design will take.

Step 3 – Design

Now the data is handed over to the graphics designer and program coder. Between them they will come up with the actual graphics and layout that the website will have. How many pages will be there, the contact form, the disclaimers and the sales element, all this and more will be hashed together in an attractive design at this stage.

Step 4 – Development

Once the design has been shown to the customer and approved the actual work of coding the website will be done in the development phase. Here the programmer will key in the final website and load it up to the designated domain name. It may now be seen on any computer. There may be some minor changes required at this stage so that the design matches the development as closely as possible.

Step 5 – Testing and Delivery

Now that the final design has been developed, it will be time for testing the design for any flaws or glitches that it may have. This may be done in house by the company or by outsourcing the process testing of the website. Once all tests have been successfully completed the website is delivered to the customer.

Step 6 Maintenance

Now it is up to the customer to handle the site on a daily basis. Each element should be working fine by this stage. The technical support from the web design company will continue for the contract period that it had been hired for. The maintenance of the site includes keeping the code updated and seeing that its processes run smoothly.

=== About the Author ===

Sarika Periwal represents KarmaCRM.com, a web based contact management software. You can use it to organize contact data and stay informed on your sales team’s efforts. It delivers management tools for tracking deals and proposals, managing your sales team, and generating useful reports. Sign up now for a free account for this web based CRM service.