tips n tricks: April 2013

What is favicon?

While using IE, Firefox or Opera you will see an icon on the tab when you visit a page.This is called favicon. Favicon is a small icon/picture (usually 16px x 16px in size) shown next to site URL in the address bar. In Blogger, by default orange colored blogger icon is shown as favicon which looks ugly and it is common also as lakhs of blogger blogs contain this. Also having your own favicon with a nice graphical reminder of your site beside is a good way to attract visitors attention.

As you all know, Blogger has a new feature which allows you to change your blog's favicon without HTML coding (you still can use the codes if you want though).

Add/Change Blogger Blog Favicon?

Go to the Layout

Click on the favicon Edit link usually present at the top left corner.

Now hit "Choose File" button.

Browse for your own image(should be less than 100 KB) and select it.

Blogger will automatically re-size it,and finally hit the "Save" button.

Now refresh your blog you will see your new favicon,If you can't then delete browsers cookies and caches then visit your blog.

Another Way To Change Blogger Blog Favicon

Here is another simple way to change your blog's favicon.

Go to Blogger Template>Edit Html
There find the title tag which looks like

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
and immediately after that add the following code after proper editing

Step 1: On the address bar, type http://[your blog url]/favicon.ico and press Enter.
Step 2: Refresh the page.
Step 3: Go back to your blog.

Manual method to add Favicon to Blogger blog

To get started, first you need to backup your Blogger template: Click on ‘Layout’ > ‘Edit HTML’ and then click on ‘download full template’ to save it on your computer. Now perform following steps to a change favicon in your Blogger blog:

1. Click on ‘Layout’ > ‘Edit HTML’

2. Then add following code after <head>
<link href=’http://www.URL.com/favicon.ico’ rel=’shortcut icon’/>
<link href=’http://www.URL.com/favicon.ico’ rel=’icon’/>

Above http://www.URL.com is the web address or location where your favicon is stored (hosted).

‘favicon.ico’ is the name of your favicon file. You can use any name like myfavicon.ico and so on. After adding above code, update the http://www.URL.com and favicon.ico in the code. Then click on save template button. Open your blog and your new favicon should be visible in the address bar.

Go to Blogger Dashboard > Template
Click Edit HTML
Hit Proceed button
Now find for below code in your template

add below code immediately after of above code

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="URL OF YOUR ICON FILE"/>

Replace URL OF YOUR ICON FILE with your own icon.
Now save your template and you are done..

Pradeep Singh

Linking, whether you’re linking to another site or your site is being linked to, is an very

important aspect of SEO . How a site treats links is important because it can determine how search engines treat those links as well. Specifically, I’m talking about whether a site uses NoFollow tagging within its links.

When creating a link on a webpage using HTML, the standard code for that link is:

<a href="http://www.yourblog.com">Anchor Text</a>

This includes the HTML tag, the URL the link will be going to, the text that will be shown on the webpage for that link, and the closing HTML tag.

You’re able to add more HTML to the code above in order to tell the search engine spiders whether or not you want them to follow the link when crawling your website.

What do NoFollow and DoFollow mean?

DoFollow Link

A link is determined to be either a DoFollow or NoFollow by the rel tag added to the link . If the link does not have the “rel” tag then it is automatically set to be a DoFollow. When a link is placed anywhere on the internet (Website, blog, forum, YouTube, etc) it will pass some of the link popularity of the page/site where the link is located to the website it is pointing too.

Before there was the DoFollow/NoFollow tag every link anywhere would pass this link popularity. As you can imagine this caused a lot of spammers trying to post links everywhere in order to get a higher page ranking. Spammers would spam comment every blog, forum, anywhere they could comment. This was making it harder for Search Engines to determine which links where genuine and which ones should be given value.

NoFollow Link

NoFollow links where introduced to solve the problem mentioned above. To stop spammers gaining value from links that where just spam and should not have been adding value to the websites they where pointing to, the NoFollow tag was born. Now most links that are posted in forums, blogs, basically anywhere you can comment are tagged with NoFollow.

The NoFollow tag is used to tell Search Engines not to pass any link value to the website it is pointing too. So this means that spamming your link all over forums and blogs will not add any value what so ever to the ranking of the website it is pointing too. The only benefit is that having your link on those pages could possible receive some clicks from visitors which would give you some extra traffic.

You can also use NoFollow links if you want to link somewhere from your website but not pass any “credit” over to the website your linking too. However as you may know the internet basically runs on links and Search Engine rankings depend a lot on DoFollow links which are now most valuable when actually used by webmasters within content on their website.

Why Does Nofollow Matter?

For the official word on nofollow links here’s what Google says about them:

“In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.”

When Should You Use DoFollow Links

DoFollow links are very important and you should use them. If you are running a website and you link to another site because you want your visitors to see that page because it has some value in some way then you should use a DoFollow link. This will show search engines that the page you are linking to does have some value for people interested in the topic of your website. This will help search engines rank the better quality websites above those that try to get spam links.

1) In your blog’s comment section (if using most blog software, this is automatic)
Google calls this untrusted content. They think since you don’t know who’s trying to comment on your site (for Pete’s sake, they could be a spammer) you should just automatically nofollow all those links and it will hopefully discourage spammers from commenting at all. It’s worth a try and may cut down on a little of your spam comments, but if you've run a blog for even a week, you already know it won’t get rid of it.

2) Paid links: Again this is recommended by Google. Essentially, your site’s PageRank gives a small amount of rank power to the sites you link to (which helps their search engine ranking). If you have a paid link on your site, it’s essentially buying a higher rank in Google. And they don’t like that. Often it’s the person putting the paid link on their site who gets in trouble (not always the guy who bought the link), so you may want to nofollow any paid links on your webpages.

3) Areas of your site you don’t really want in the index
Using a nofollow tag to link to these pages is not a sure-fire way of keeping the pages out of the search engines, but it may help. You might as well use the nofollow tag on those links as you don’t really want the search engines following them to your exclusive pages.

DoFollow Links Don’t Hurt

Some people slam the NoFollow Tag onto every link leaving their website because they heard that if you use a DoFollow link you are passing away some of your link juice. This is totally wrong, search engines do not punish you for linking to a website with a DoFollow link, they actually prefer that because it helps them rank websites better. It has also been said that linking to a quality website with a DoFollow link can actually help your own search engine rankings. So don’t use a NoFollow link when you link to a website you think deserves it.

How to Easily Spot NoFollow Links

One way to spot nofollow links is to right click on a site and click ‘View source’. Then go up to ‘Edit’ and then ‘Find’. From there you’ll want to type ‘nofollow’ into the search box.

Using this technique, you can scroll through and see if the link you’re concerned about is nofollow or dofollow.

Another easier way is to download an extension for your browser. The following are a couple of extensions for the Firefox browser that will highlight nofollow tags for you:

tips n tricks

Monday, April 29, 2013

How to Add/Change Blogger Blog Favicon?