If you are selling paid links or linking to bad neighbourhood, or if somebody reported you, Google might impose a manual penalty and if that happens, ...]]> To all webmasters, its time to wake up. Google has been coming on harshly on webmasters and sending them warning notice for sites selling links.

If you are selling paid links or linking to bad neighbourhood, or if somebody reported you, Google might impose a manual penalty and if that happens, you will see a significant drop in traffic and your site will rank poor on all search results.

• The bad news is once Google imposes you a penalty (manual or algorithmic one), then chances to recover may take months.  Unfortunately google does not tell you the reason why you have been penalized.
• The good news is you can submit a reconsideration request to google, and Google will review your site and you will get a decision within 1-2 weeks.

I recently received this penalty on one of my sites and somehow after 4 reconsideration requests, mine was accepted and i should say i was quite lucky.

This is the warning i received from webmasters central…

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.xxxxxxx.com/,

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links on your site pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include selling links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

How to recover from penalty?

1. First of all, dont panic, think and analyze whats wrong with your site. First check whether your site fresh content is indexed by google. Use site:example.com in Google or use webmaster tools to identify the issue.  It could be your site is indexed, but may disappear in search results, because of the imposed penalty.

2. When you submit a reconsideration request, be sure to mention A to Z on what you did on your site to lift the penalty. You have to explain everything on your reconsideration request. For example  nofollow on paid links, removing links participating in link exchange, removing blogroll links, eliminating duplicate content.

3. Participate in Google webmaster central form and ask for help. Chances are there that a Google engineer may review at your site.

4. Understand that penalty imposed by Google are of 2 types: Manual one or Algorithmic one. If you are penalized by algorithms, then submitting reconsideration request for manual lift will be of no use. But if you are imposed manual penalty, certainly submitting a reconsideration request for manual review will break the penalty and get you back in Google. Manual penalty usually have expiry (see matt cutts videos) , but you will never know.

If you did everything right, and your manual penalty might be revoked, you will likely get a message like this…

Reconsideration request for http://www.xxxxxx.com/: Manual spam action revoked November 7, 2011

It is really a heartbreaking to see penalties and desperate times need desperate help and i am sure my post above will be of great help to any webmaster in bad times.

I have always loved taking screenshots in my mac. One thing that irked me is transparency in the screenshots and here is an easy way to disable that.

Observe the screenshot below with shadows..

Now, after removing shadows, notice the difference.

Here is how you do it.

The only way to do this is ...]]>

I have always loved taking screenshots in my mac. One thing that irked me is transparency in the screenshots and here is an easy way to disable that.

Observe the screenshot below with shadows..

Now, after removing shadows, notice the difference.

Here is how you do it.

The only way to do this is through commandline, you have to open terminal (look under apps > utlities) in your mac and run it.

Open Terminal, then type and enter this command

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

This will disable the tranparency shadow in screenshots.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg

This command will set your screenshots default to JPG, because png often brings big file sizes and its not recommended for uploads and downloads. JPG is much better format for file size compression.

Finally, run this command

killall SystemUIServer

Restart the system user interface.

If you want to use transparency shadows  again, then

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true
killall SystemUIServer

I have been using firefox and internet explorer all the time and never really looked back at other web browsers. Today i had a chance to look on on other alternative browsers and i was totally impressed especially with opera and chrome. Much to my surprise i really liked opera ...]]>

I have been using firefox and internet explorer all the time and never really looked back at other web browsers. Today i had a chance to look on on other alternative browsers and i was totally impressed especially with opera and chrome. Much to my surprise i really liked opera and chrome and to some extent camino browser.  If you feel that you are getting too bored using firefox and IE, i am sure that below listed browsers, would really change your perspective of internet surfing. Most browsers support Windows, Mac and Linux.

Camino Browser

http://www.caminobrowser.org

Camino is a free internet browser from Mozilla Foundation. It has nice intuitive user interface and flexibility.

Google Chrome

Google chrome is a lightweight lightning fast web browser to surf websites. It is a free a software from Google.

http://www.google.com/chrome

Opera

http://www.opera.com

Opera has a nice crisp sharp interface and fast loading browser. It is lightweight as well. It supports windows, mac and mobile platforms.

Safari

Safari is a innovative stylish browser from Apple. It is available for Mac and windows platforms.

http://www.apple.com/safari

Maxthon Browser

http://www.maxthon.com/

Maxthon is a free browser software. It is relatively new but a good limited web browser available only for windows platform.

The easiest way to extract RAR files in Mac is to use free software like Unrar. The default unzip in mac does not unpack rar files. There are plenty of freeware tools and utilities for Mac which can unpack and unzip not just RAR files, but also formats like TAR, ...]]>

The easiest way to extract RAR files in Mac is to use free software like Unrar. The default unzip in mac does not unpack rar files. There are plenty of freeware tools and utilities for Mac which can unpack and unzip not just RAR files, but also formats like TAR, GZ, 7ZIP etc..

You can use the freeware utitlities listed below to uncompress RAR files and many other file formats.

1. UnRarX

http://www.unrar.com

UnrarX is free utility unpack RAR files for your Mac.  This software will only work for rar files.

2. iZip

Free software for decompressing ZIP, ZIPX, RAR, TAR, 7ZIP and other compressed files in your Mac.

http://www.izip.com/

3. Zipeg

http://www.zipeg.com

Open zip and rar files with this free software. It supports zip, .rar, .7z, .tar, .gz, .tgz, .bzip2, .iso, .cbr, .cbz file formats

4. Rar Expander

Freeware Mac utility to unpack RAR archives.

http://rarexpander.sourceforge.net/

5. Stuffit Expander

http://www.stuffit.com/mac-expander.html

Mac software to unpack zip and rar files. It is free to use but trial version.

6. SimplyRAR

Simple utility to unpack RAR archives. It is a freeware

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/21430/simplyrar

Please note that the Mac version of popular Winrar software is only available as commandline trial version

Very often, if you are receiving payments in foreign currency,  you will be in a hurry to find latest exchange rate and its values. Well the easiest way to to do it, go to firefox or safari search bar or directly  in google,

The first should have a ...]]>

Very often, if you are receiving payments in foreign currency,  you will be in a hurry to find latest exchange rate and its values. Well the easiest way to to do it, go to firefox or safari search bar or directly  in google,

100 EUR to USD

The first should have a number, then originating currency, then to and destination currency. You just need to know the 3 letter words for the world currencies.

Thats it google will  you instant currency conversion value

I never liked visiting other third party websites to find out exchange rates, when such an easy to find out from google. Hope this tip comes handy for you.

My website was built using smarty and i had to use { literal } to wrap all javascript tags. Only then it worked. Even ...]]> I had few troubles implementing facebook like button in my website. Infact i got the code  from facebook in html5 and the like button never showed up.

My website was built using smarty and i had to use { literal } to wrap all javascript tags. Only then it worked. Even after it showed up, it disabled the tweet count and google +1  buttons making them unclickable.

Keep in mind that when you implement facebook like in your website, make sure you add data_href value

<div data-href="http://example.com" data-send="true"
data-layout="button_count" data-width="200" data-show-faces="false"></div>

and sometimes facebook like do really need the Javascript SDK for it to work. To include the source file, just add this line.

 <script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js"></script>

Thats it! The like button should work without any problems. Make sure you dont miss div or any html tags.

Use the Preview application, which is installed in Mac by default, then click on ...]]> If you are a mac user, it is very easy to fill up and complete any application forms by directly editing the PDF file. You need not take a print out and then complete forms in hand.

Use the Preview application, which is installed in Mac by default, then click on the annotations, then click on square box containing Aa (see above)  to write text, draw arrows in your pdf files. You can edit and finally save pdf documents and finally take a printout.

It is always recommended to fillup your application forms in your computer screen using this method, because the typed characters will give a clear presentation and wont confuse others who dont recognize your hand written letters, plus this saves you from scanning as well.

As soon as i updated my Firefox 4.2.1 to Firefox 5,  my macbook went numb and unresponsive and i had to force quit firefox number of times. Despite restarting my macbook, firefox loads okbut slows down everything.

I am not sure what is causing this ...]]> Does firefox 5 slow down your mac?

As soon as i updated my Firefox 4.2.1 to Firefox 5,  my macbook went numb and unresponsive and i had to force quit firefox number of times. Despite restarting my macbook, firefox loads okbut slows down everything.

I am not sure what is causing this but this slowdown is very frustration and because of this my mac wont shutdown.

Sooner i found the reason for ads not appearing in Iran is because of the trade sanctions in Iran.

Google AdWords prohibits the submission of advertisements that, if run, violate ...]]> I was using adwords few days ago and i noticed that few countries missing like Iran in the geographic country targeting bundles.

Sooner i found the reason for ads not appearing in Iran is because of the trade sanctions in Iran.

Google AdWords prohibits the submission of advertisements that, if run, violate applicable trade sanctions.

As far as i know there are atleast 3 countries which i know are affected by trade sanctions which means that adwords is not available in these countries:

• Iran
• North Korea
• Cuba
• Burma
• Sudan

You can find more information on countries with trade embargo and google adwords trade sanctions pages.