Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with Google and blog

Best tablet and workflow for blogging

melissa — Mon, 13 May 2013 08:57:44 -0800

I would like to purchase a tablet so I can do more blogging without lugging a laptop around. What are the best tools/apps/workflow tips to be able to do this without tearing my hair out? Special snowflake stuff inside. Here are my snowflakey specs:

I blog using self-hosted Wordpress, and I can do basic maintenance on it myself.
I already have a Bluetooth keyboard I like, and that works with both iOS and Android.
I currently have an iPhone 4S and my husband has a Nexus 7 tablet I can experiment on.
I'm leaning towards an Android tablet because there are more options at various price points (read: cheaper).
A 7 inch tablet is ideal - will fit in my purse with the keyboard and all my other purse stuff.
I would love to be able to insert Flickr/Instagram pictures easily, but the more I search, the more I see that this isn't really done outside of the iPad-only Blogsy app. That app looks like what I'd like to use, but I can't justify spending so much more on an iPad (with all new connectors/accessories) on the basis of one app that may or may not stick around.
I am reasonably comfortable with HTML. I just think it's ridiculously difficult to insert Flickr images into the WordPress mobile app.
I have and use both Dropbox and Evernote. I know that Evernote works in rich text and can cause unusual formatting when exporting to Wordpress. Should I consider a plain text editor and work in Markdown? (I've never worked that way before, but it looks easy to learn.)
I have no problem paying for apps if they're worth the money.
Outside of blogging, I would be using this tablet mostly for various social media (Twitter/FB/Pinterest) as well as reading web stuff from Pocket and ebooks via Kobo/my local library. I'm not a big gamer, but I'd probably watch occasional videos on it too
I'm in Canada if that affects any tools/toys I can purchase.
I'm willing to wait if the Next Big Thing is worth it. (I need to save my pennies too!)

How do you make blogging on a tablet work for you? What's your workflow? Thanks!

Are you there Google? It's me, antonymous

antonymous — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 10:07:59 -0800

Why is google indexing my personal domain "better" than my work's domain - both have WP blogs, but only posts under my personal domain show up in the Google Alert I have for my name. I am responsible for the visibility of my employer's blog and I do not think it's being crawled effectively (or something). I'm fairly certain that this is related to the poor SEO practices that were put into place at my employer's WP blog, which I am trying to fix. But essentially, when I post an item to my personal site, I'll get a Google Alert in my inbox (in a few hours) that I have set up for my name. When I post something to the company's site (which does include "author name" which I'd think would be indexed), I have never gotten any type of alert, and I do post there more frequently.

Of course, my personal domain has the blog front-and-center, but my work has the main page and it's blog is at employer-dot-com-slash-blog. I can't see that making too much of a difference, but I could be wrong. I will also mention that our main blog page does not list authors (and I cannot fix this due to some poor hardcoding by hired SEO "experts"), but if you drill down into an individual post my name is listed. (and yes, that's listed as my full name and not just first initial and last name)

FWIW, when I google my own name, my author page at my employer's blog comes up 3rd (which is great), but again, I'd like to understand why Google Alerts does not ping me when I write for work.

How can I create a blog that autoposts specific content when I post it at another site?

reenum — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 04:22:19 -0800

How does the Metafilter Deleted Threads blog pull info and then publish it automatically? I'm not a programmer, so forgive me if this is a easily answerable question.

I want to know how the blog pulls the name of the thread, creates a link to the thread in the post title, and then pulls and publishes the reason for deletion.

I'd like to set up something similar for my delicious.com links and have no idea how to do so.

There's spam in Google's cache of my site

Addlepated — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 11:03:11 -0800

I have spam showing up in my website header and cached copy on Google's search results. When searching for my name, the first Google result goes to my firstnamelastname.com website, which is my professional portfolio. However, it's showing up in search results with "BUY Naltrexone ONLINE NO PRESCRIPTION" at the beginning of the description. If I go to Google's cached copy of my site, it has "BUY CHLORAMPHENICOL ONLINE NO PRESCRIPTION | BUY CHLORAMPHENICOL ONLINE NO PRESCRIPTION" across the top where my contact information should be. The first instance is a link to my webpage. There is no such spam on my actual, non-cached website.

Searching for these phrases shows that a lot of other pages have this stuff in their search results, too. What is this, and how can I get rid of it?

I'm running the most current version of Wordpress, if that helps.

How to recover page-ranking in google after being pharmahacked?

jlunar — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:21:14 -0800

SEO Fliter: My blog recently got pharmahacked and my page-rank has died. Anything I can do to hasten recovery? Or am I permanently hosed? So peeved. Used to come up on the second page for "toronto food blog" and first page for most restaurants I've posted about. Now... I'm nowhere to be seen.

Looking through my google webmaster tools, the drop-off in incoming search traffic definitely coincides with my blog being hacked last week. I think I've got it mostly under control, but it makes me cry inside to see my page ranking become nothing so quickly.

Ultimately, this is pretty trivial. Still, is there anything I can do to bring things back up faster? Or do I just have to wait until Googlebot likes me again?

Wordpress.org or Blogger? Help me decide which would be best in this case, please.

iamkimiam — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 02:50:36 -0800

During this holiday break I'm going to be purchasing a domain name and migrating a University department's WordPress.com blog over to either WordPress.org or Blogger. I need help deciding which (Wordpress.org or Blogger) will be the best way to go based on the blog's needs and the capabilities of its authors. I need to have some flexibility with adding and displaying features such as Google Calendars, Flickr photo streams, Twitter & RSS feeds, and YouTube or UStream. The Google Calendar is the most important.

I'm prepared to purchase the domain and hosting, installing wordpress, etc., but I don't want to go that route if it's going to be time-consuming and difficult to integrate and use all the features. Blogger already has the templates and integration features I need, but it's a new platform for the authors to get used to, and it may not be a good solution in the long-term.

As you can probably tell, I'm more comfortable/familiar with Blogger. I'm happy to learn CSS, but I don't want to spend the entire break tearing apart and building up code. And I certainly don't want to hit a wall wrt feature integration, where I end up sorry that I started going down a certain route.

What do you suggest?
(I'm happy to provide more info and answer questions related to this; thanks!)

Has anyone used the firm, Brafton "Custom News Marketing" for their website's blog & news article needs?

lorebella — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 09:47:35 -0800

Has anyone used the firm, Brafton "Custom News Marketing" for their website's blog & news article needs? Would retaining the services of Brafton be a good choice for a small e-commerce business? Aside from writing fresh and relevant articles Brafton is supposed to also perform in-bound link generation and other valuable marketing techniques like getting the said article posted to sites like "Ezine Articles" and the such. At $2000 per month for 50 articles each month and a minimum 6 month commitment, it's a considerable amount of money for a small business. Has anyone had any experience with them? Can they really play a significant role in improving a small business' Google page rank?

Thanks for the pageviews, no thanks for the spam.

tip120 — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 06:26:21 -0800

I have been getting weird Wordpress referrer spam the last 4 days, but there are no injections or anything of the like on my site. I have a site running wordpress. No comments or users, I'm using it as a simple CMS.

I'm using the StatPress plugin to check out who is coming to the site. This morning, I noticed an abnormally large number of visitors the last few days.

People seem to be visiting pages like mysite.com/?myfjkfosljfsfjd (NB : not a string I've seen, just an example). When clicked, it will go to my homepage. Checking the source, there is nothing out of the ordinary (no spam links, etc). If you google that end string by itself, you get one result, to my site, with a summary that lists a whole bunch of viagra type words.

Any idea what is going on, and how I can stop this?

I was running 2.8.2, upgraded to 2.8.3 this morning.

You can get my details from my userpage if you want specifics.

Blogger/Google Hit Counter?

anastasiav — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 07:45:14 -0800

StupidQuestionFilter: I have a small-time blogger blog, but I can't seem to find a tool that will give me the most simple thing: a hit count for it. Blogger is a Google tool, so you'd think that under Webmaster Tools there would be some kind of hit stats, but there don't seem to be. Feedburner used to provide me with this basic info, but that vanished when Google bought them and now Feedburner only tracks who has my feed. What embarrassingly simple thing am I missing? Or do I need to install some third party tool?

How can I get Google Analytics to provide a by-visitor report like Sitemeter does?

TochterAusElysium — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 13:17:30 -0800

How can I get Google Analytics to act like Sitemeter? Specifically, Sitemeter does a nice roundup of information under "Recent Visitors - By Details." It shows a chronological list of recent visitors to my blog, with domain name, visit time and page views. Clicking on the number in front of each listing takes you to a page about that visit which shows their ISP, referring URL, keywords they searched for, outclick page and more.

I really like this view of the data and I can't figure out how to get Google Analytics (which I must use for my portfolio site) to show me the same data. I can see the "All Traffic Sources" info which does show the number of visits from specific sources, and I see the "Keywords" area which shows what people searched for, but I don't see how to get the same list Sitemeter shows: who was there, when, from where, looking for what, and for how long.

Google Analytics is so crazy complex that I'm sure there must be a way, though, and I'm sure there are several people here on AskMeFi who can tell me how. And for that, I thank you in advance.

Tumblr google issues

ecab — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:33:36 -0800

Why does my tumblr blog not show up in google search? I started a tumblr blog maybe about a month ago with some friends and have recently come to realize that it is not showing up in the google search at all, by which I mean I get absolutely no results searching for specific phrases or the title of the blog or anything similar. Nothing.

Does anyone know why this might be? What I can do about it? It appears that other tumblr blogs show up on google, but I do remember reading somewhere that tumblr as a site has bad seo or some such thing.

Why can't I hide from Google?

hamster — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 07:24:03 -0800

Help me hide my blog from the Googlebots. I blogged professionally from 2002-2007, when the project ended. I decided to start a personal Wordpress blog, and linked to the new blog from the old site before it was taken down.

Unfortunately, because of the link to the old site, the personal blog is now the first Google result when you search under my name. The new blog doesn't use my name or identifying details, but the Googlebots must know it's connected to my name anyway.

I'm starting a new job soon and expect that clients will search for me by name, so the old blog has to go. I'd like to continue blogging for the sake of old fans who still read me, but it would need to be "secret" and not associated with my name in any way.

I don't have email addresses for most of my readers, so I'd like to post the new blog on the old site... but will that just lead the bots to the new home? Can I do something like writing out the new site's address in a way that doesn't link and wouldn't search?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Please Help me with my Blogger Blog and Custom Domain

andoatnp — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 13:26:09 -0800

Why might my Blogger blog not be working with my custom domain and how do I fix it? Four days ago, I set up a blog at CUSTOMDOMAIN.blogspot.com and I own the url CUSTOMDOMAIN.com from GoDaddy. I followed the instructions here from Blogger so that people who visit the Custom Domain would see me Blogger blog. When I visit CUSTOMDOMAIN.com it just shows the godaddy.com parking page without the content from my blogspot blog.

In order to set up the domain I own with the blog I created a CNAME record for the domain (screenshot here, does this look right?) and changed the setting in my blogger setting panel to indicate that it is a custom url that I am using. I'm reasonably certain that I did everything in the blogger side ok, because when I visit CUSTOMDOMAIN.blogspot.com it redirects to CUSTOMDOMAIN.com, but with just the empty godaddy parking page.

Is there something I did wrong or something that I can fix so that my godaddy.com domain works with my blog?

Also, is it possible to set up a Google Apps account and then transfer this domain that I have purchased to that account so that blogger is handling both the domain and the blog? I see where I can purchase a new domain with Google Apps, but can I transfer one that I already own?

Also, I emailed godaddy tech support, and they sent a reply saying that it didn't look like a problem on there end.

How do I change the name and URL of my website without losing visitors and Google search placement?

rintako — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 07:39:15 -0800

How do I change the name and URL of my website without losing visitors and Google search placement? I want to change the name and URL of my website. It currently receives 3000 uniques a day. About 90% of my traffic is from outside sources such as Google, or others that have linked to my content. How do I change the name and URL so that my visitors can continue to come find my site, and so I don't lose my top 1-3 positions on the Google search pages for my terms?

Keep my Wordpress blog out of search engines!

Drohan — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 20:38:05 -0800

Why is my Wordpress blog showing up in Google when I have specifically chosen the option to keep it private from search engines? I have a new Wordpress blog, hosted by Wordpress, that I'd like to keep from being indexed by search engines if possible. Under Settings: Privacy, I have selected "I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors". I have also password-protected all posts.

Yet the blog is showing up in Google. I put my own name in a post to see if it would show up, and a Google search for my name brings up the post, plus the usual Google blurb of one or two lines before or after where my name appears in the post. When you click through, you cannot read the post because of the password protection, but I'm troubled that the blog posts are being indexed b y Google when I've specified that they not be, and also that excerpts from my password-protected posts are showing up in the Google results. Please help! (Hosting the blog on my own server is not an option.)

How many people actually visit my blog on a regular basis?

eurasian — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:26:30 -0800

Google Analytics Question: Over a five month period, it's telling me I've had about 300 visitors who have read my site between 9 and 100 times. I realize this is small potatoes in the World O' Blogs, but it seems entirely too high to me. Please explain how Google thinks 20 semi-loyal visitors (my estimate) is 300. Surely they are mostly bots?

Increasing googlability

serazin — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 19:18:35 -0800

Increasing google visitors to blog? I've been using google analytics to track visitors to my blog, and now I'm a little confused.

Each of my posts is about a different subject. It seems that immediately after I post, I get a number of visits from people who googled that subject. But then a few days pass, or I post something else, and my blog must stop popping up on google in relation to that subject because I stop getting new hits with those same search terms. For example, I posted about Chinese American history. For a few days, I got a bunch of visits from people googling "Anti-Chinese Violence" or "Chinese in the Gold Rush". But now that time has passed and I've posted other stuff, I don't get those visits any more. I don't understand why the google results appear higher when I first post than they do a week or two later. Any suggestions?

In a related question, I can't decide how many posts to display on the front page of my blog. Now, I have all my posts on the front page. My thought is that that will encourage folks to read further. But if someone comes to my page through google, they don't immediately see what they're looking for (like, Chinese Americans during the Gold Rush for example) becuase google will tend to link to my blog's main page - not that specific entry - and what they want is buried towards the bottom of the page. Any ideas about what's best for helping people find what they're looking for?

Thanks folks.

What is the best way to live-blog a cross-country road trip??

tarthur — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 19:40:01 -0800

What is the best method & location for live-blogging a cross country trip using a MacBook, DSLR camera, DV camera, t-mobile EDGE and intermittent wifi? I'm about to drive/move back to Southern California from Central Florida with my boyfriend and we want to document the trip with photos/video 'live' as we progress across the United States. Our travels will bring us up through New Jersey, Chicago, Denver with a stop at the Grand Canyon.

I have a t-mobile phone capable of EDGE (slow but useable) data transfer for the Mac and plan on stopping at wifi equipped locations to upload video/photos. A GPS type hookup would be sweet but I'm not familiar with doing that with a Mac.

It would be nice to have some type of map showing progress (GPS preferred but manually updated OK), the ability to post photos, gas prices, mood and other utterly useless information.

Has anyone had any experience with this type of blogging? I'm trying to determine if it would be best to use my limited skills to build some type of moveable type/wordpress with google + flickr or use something like Vox.

Thanks!

Google, was verfolgst du mich?

mendel — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 12:45:52 -0800

My website/blog has all but disappeared from Google. What happened, and what can I do to fix it? For years my personal website (linked in my profile) has been the first hit for "Rich Lafferty", without the quotes, in Google. But suddenly it's not showing up at all. I still have PageRank (5), and it's still in there if I search for the right terms, but it doesn't appear for the obvious search.

There's a whole bunch of things that could be contributing factors: I recently redid the entire site, from a static site to a blog. I started using a sitemap. I was recently linked to by some major blogs. I've been copying my content to my LiveJournal (username "mendel") -- and since I wondered if I was hitting Google's duplicate content trap, I've just today put a robots.txt file on the LiveJournal.

Aside from disappearing from the listings, the other weird things I've noticed are that my main page is no longer cached on Google, and searches for phrases from individual posts of mine turn up multiple duplicate results: my site, my LiveJournal, my Feedburner feed, Technorati, and some of my LiveJournal friends' friend lists.

Am I just in the process of getting re-added after I changed everything around? Did I get burned by the duplicate content trap, which considered my LiveJournal to be the main copy? Are there any other red flags you see?

It's not such a big deal that I'm not #1 anymore, but since I work in high tech I'd like to figure out how to at least show up again.

Google search

tellurian — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:53:46 -0800

How do you know what Googlers were searching for? I often see blogs saying things like 'people searching for ["Malcolm Fraser"+trousers] arrived here'. How do they know that?

htaccess syntax woes

sindark — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 14:10:52 -0800

I need to add a few lines to my htaccess file to deal with the fact that Google Image Search never updates its database One of the most common ways people find my blog is through Google Image Search. It has taken the keywords used to tag my images, as well as the pagerank of the site, and made me a prominent hit for many search terms. The trouble is, when I moved to WordPress, I broke all the links. They have not yet grown back.

Most of the hits are for archive pages for the old blog. For example, someone looking for photos of Oxford might be sent to:

http://www.sindark.com/archive/2006_01_01_sibilant_archive.html

Now, that page still exists. It is at:

http://www.sindark.com/blogger/archive/2006_01_01_sibilant_archive.html

Ideally, the person should be sent to the new post page in the WordPress architecture, but sending them to the new location of the Blogger archive page is better than dumping them into a 404 File Not Found screen.

How can I edit my htaccess file so that anyone looking for:

Xyear_Xmonth_Xday_sibilant_archive.html

will be sent to

/blogger/archive/Xyear_Xmonth_Xday_sibilant_archive.html

Of course, this is a temporary fix until Google finally understands the new architecture of my site.

A cleaner explanation of this is on my blog (SELF LINK!).

Viva la web revolucion!

Smarson — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 07:23:44 -0800

What is this web revolution I see before me? Over the course of the past year I have had a lot of time to surf the web and have come to the conclusion that a new era of web based communication is unfolding before my very eyes. It started when I stumbled across Lifehacker.com, which showed me a whole new side of the internet that I had never conceived of. From that point I began to discover websites that re-oriented the way I've come view information creation, distribution, and storage (Ask Metafilter being one of those discoveries). Some examples of websites I lump into this category are:

*Del.icio.us
*Metafilter
*Ask Metafilter
*Lifehacker
*Wikipedia
*Firefox
*Google (and it's all it's applications including Gmail and Gcal)
*Flickr
*Blogger/Wordpress/etc.
*Bloglines

The list goes on and on and is constantly growing (thanks largely to Lifehacker discoveries). Obviously Google and Wikipedia were known to me prior to my new found web exploration, but only as straight forward tools. It's only in the last 8 months that I've come to understand the potential of their design (e.g. Google Map Mash-ups and wiki-technology as a whole).

Among the above listed websites and others I identify in my "web revolution," I see common themes. The use of tagging is widely present as well as the concept of the blog (In reality Lifehacker and Metafilter/Ask Metafilter are just widely popular blogs with no single author and Flickr is essentially a collection of thousands of photo blogs). I guess even deeper than that is the theme of individual empowerment through the web. Most of these sites were not generated by large corporations (although they may later have been aquired by them), but rather created by a single individual or small group of individuals in order to address an existing need they percieved.

So my questions. Does anyone else see the watershed that I speak of, or is this normal web progression and my "revolution" is simply a personal one? If this is an actual distinct movement within the internet, does it have a name or other identifying characteristics similar or different to the ones I listed above?

HTML woes: Google/Amazon ads and IE display woes

jdroth — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 07:38:23 -0800

HTML woes: How can I make Amazon ads play nice with Google ads? Also, why is my web site's layout screwed up in Internet Explorer on Windows? I can't figure it out. #1 — Starting with this Sesame Street post in the blue, I was able to create an entry on my personal site that has enjoyed very high traffic (for me) over the past week. My Google Ads have worked nicely, but now I want to tack on an Amazon iframe ad in the middle of the entry. When I do, something goes wrong. Where the Amazon ad should appear, half of the Google ad appears, and the regular Google ad doesn't appear where it should at the bottom of the page. I haven't the faintest clue what's wrong. (I've taken the Amazon ad down for the time being, so there's no broken-ness to view; I can re-implement the broken-ness if that will help diagnose the problem.)

#2 — On a similar note, my site doesn't display properly on Internet Explorer for Windows. It's always been a source of embarrassment, but now I'm even more ashamed to have all these new visitors coming to look at Sesame Street videos only to find my broken formatting. Here's a screenshot of how things look on my Mac (and most (all?) Mozilla-based browsers). Here's a screenshot of how things look on Internet Explorer for Windows. I have no idea what is causing the problem. (Well, I suspect it's something in my sidebar, but beyond that I'm clueless.) Can anyone help me diagnose this problem? I've been ignoring it for almost two years.

A blogger is hurting our business.

astorias — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 04:56:06 -0800

How can I outrank bad comments? I work in a small legitimate company (I'm not ready to go into detail of who), and we do have a decent business. Unfortunately, we had a customer who had a poor experience with us, which we have tried very hard to make right, but she just isn't happy. This happened a few months back, and she started posting negative comments on a blog that now show up #2 in yahoo searches (right behind our company), while google seems to be ok (well down the list). Since we aren't search engine experts, does anyone have any suggestions on how we can push her ranking down? Can we get our name higher through blogging? We can't for the life of us figure out why her blogging is ranked so high.

And yes, we are attempting legal recourse as well, but that doesn't happen quickly. Thanks!

How can I force Google Blogsearch to index my archived blog entries?

dmd — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 14:30:57 -0800

I'd like to be able to search my (MovableType) blog via Google Blogsearch, but they only update via RSS. Most of my entries are many years old. I want to be able to search those entries. Is there any way to force Google to pick those up? (Adding a sitemap doesn't seem to have helped.)