Jason Morrison from Search Quality Team at Google posted at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog about how to control comment spam:
Blogging
Mozilla Firefox is releasing the Firefox 3 Release Candidate today and has declared it the 'Download Day 2008', in an effort to set a new Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in a day.
Some of the interesting features of Mozilla Firefox 3 are:
- One-Click Bookmarking.
- A Smart Location Bar.
- Lightning Fast Performance.
- Built-In Spell Checking.
Yesterday a whole lot of bloggers everywhere were shocked and shaken when they saw their Feedburner's Subscriber Count abruptly plummet to about 50% from the previous day. We were no exception and were left shell-shocked when we saw the figures drop down by as much as half, we had over 1000 subscribers the day before and dropped down to 678 yesterday as you know. And we went about figuring out what went wrong. It was only after we checked out the subscribers of the other blogs that that we keep a tab on, taking a hit, we knew we were not alone.
Ever resourceful Ionut Alex Chitu has a post that helps you find the number of Google subscribers to any feed.
"Now you can see the number of subscribers by searching for the feed in Google Reader: click on "Add subscription", enter the name of a blog or some parts of your feed's URL and you'll see the number of subscribers next to each (hopefully relevant) result. This number includes everyone who subscribed to a feed using Google, but the subscribers aren't necessarily active."
Yahoo! China has launched a blogging and networking service, informs Yahoo! News. This move is targeted at broadening its revenue 'as it steps up expansion in the world's second-largest Web market by subscriber numbers.'
The Yahoo! Space service comprises of blogging, photo gallery, online networking and other interactive features for Yahoo! users.
Directory submissions are a popular way of promoting blogs and RSS feeds. However, the list of directories is quite extensive and differentiated to say the least. There are blog specific directories as well as RSS specific ones.
Lee Odden has compiled a list of 97 blog directories that one can submit to. Though as Lee himself says, the list is not a new ones, there are enough resources to jumpstart any blog promotion.
Vanessa Fox on official Google blog talks about the power of community in blogging. Linking to those sites that are most relevant from the readers point of view and commenting on relevant blogs helps in increasing the relevancy of the blog. Content as always is the most significant thing of all. Good content and other bloggers will link to it.
All those who have a WordPress blog should go through the Complete Guide to SEO for WordPress by Jim Westergren. This is an excellent piece of work by Jim. A good number of bloggers out there have very less knowledge about SEO. However, with this simple and easy to understand guide they stand a good chance of acquiring a good rank with the search engines.
Google Operating System informs that Google Blog search ranks the search results by relevancy. The sort by date is also available. However, it is interesting to note the way Google ranks blog posts.
Positive signals
- links from blogrolls (especially from high-quality blogrolls or blogrolls of "trusted bloggers")
- links from other sources (mail, chats)
- using tags to categorize a post
Keeping in view that the German speaking webmasters community is the second largest community, Google has introduced Google Webmasters blog in German language.
@pagetraffic
