A few months ago, we redirected this blog from WordPressGarage.com to WPGarage.com in order to respect the request by the folks at Automattic that people not use the word WordPress in their domain name. We wrote up a guide on how to do this type of 301 redirect, and at that point it seemed that things had gone mostly smoothly. However, I now know that things did not go so smoothly, and here are some things that you should pay attention to if you also choose to 301 redirect your site to a new domain:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics stopped tracking our traffic. It said it was receiving data, but the stats showed zero visitors – an internet flatline. At first I thought that the redirect had caused all traffic to this site to cease, but I knew that could not be the case since our posts were still appearing in the SERPs, which is where most of our traffic comes from. Plus, we were still getting comments, which meant that some people were visiting. My search to figure out why this was happening led me to find a bunch of other issues (listed below), but eventually I just removed the Google Analytics WordPress plugin we were using, and pasted the analytics code into the footer. That solved the problem, and the stats started showing traffic again.

On another note, it seems that you need to log into Google Analytics and update the profile to the new address. I did that, but it didn’t fix the above problem. Anyways, here says it doesn’t matter what domain name in your Google Analytics settings the tracking code is on.

Lesson: pay close attention to your analytics stats after you redirect your site to a new domain. That way, if you see a problem you can start working immediately to solve it. It took me six days to solve our problem, which meant six days of no logged statistics. I would have hated to have done that to a client!

Google Webmaster Tools

If you’ve got Google Webmaster Tools monitoring your site, you need to change some settings there in order for it to start tracking the new domain properly.

Google has complete instructions on what to do if you are moving a site to a new domain. One of the things they mention there, which we didn’t do before we did the redirect, is to update your settings in Google Webmaster Tools. If you’ve been tracking your site in Google Webmaster Tools, you need to register a change of address. To do so you, need to re-verify the old site, which includes verifying both the www and non-www versions of the site. Google says that the reason for this is that “Typically, both versions point to the same physical location, but this is not always the case.” I had only added the non-www version to Google Webmaster tools, so I had to add a new site for www.wordpressgarage.com. This was a problem since I’d redirected everything and couldn’t put the meta tag that is required in the header of the old site. So I had to remove the 301 redirect from WordPressGarage.com’s .htaccess, add the header tag, and Verify. Once that was done, I could do the change of address.

Redirect Properly with or without www

While I was trying to figure out why our analytics weren’t working, I noticed that we had set up the 301 redirect as follows: http://wordpressgarage.com > http://wpgarage.com > http://wpgarage.com. In other words, we had written in the .htaccess file that visitors to wordpressgarage.com should be redirected to www.wpgarage.com, but here on wpgarage.com we have it set up that all visitors are redirected to the non-www version of the domain name. Basically, visitors were redirected twice. Not elegant, that’s for sure.

Google PageRank

I recently realized that this site lost its Google PageRank in the redirection process. We used to have a PR of 4, and now it’s 0. Zero!! I would like to know why that is the case, since all of a site’s value is supposed to be passed on to the new domain if a 301 redirect is used. But in consolation, I haven’t seen a reduction in traffic. In fact, traffic has gone up since we did the redirect.

So there you go: some more things you should pay attention to when doing a 301 redirect of a site to a new domain name. All of the above makes me realize how dependent we are on Google for managing our site properly. What can we do – they create the best (free) tools, so we use them, and we also depend on them for traffic.

This post was originally published at More on doing a 301 redirect of a WordPress site to a new domain on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Fancy words aside, a canonical URL is Google’s way of identifying a “preferred” URL for your posts to avoid duplicate content. Duplicate content is generally defined as “separate web pages with substantially the same content, which may attract a penalty from search engines.”

WordPress is often criticized for having duplicate content since new posts appear on many pages including category pages, archive pages, feeds, and trackbacks.  While this helps visitors find the content they are looking for, it confuses search engines, forcing them to “choose” which URL to serve in search results.

And so… Google (Yahoo and Microsoft too)  recently came out with a new link tag to help with the duplicate content issue which can be added to the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />

But honestly, who can be bothered to go into the <head> for every post. Luckily, there are 2 WordPress plugins that are here to help:

Yoast adds rel=”canonical” links to your blogs <head> section

SEO No duplicate – This simple plugin helps you easily tell the search engine bots the preferred version of a page by specifying the canonical properly within your head tag.

For more information, read the official announcement from Google.

This post was originally published at Canonical URLs to help WordPress duplicate content issue on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

If you’re an avid Google Calendar user, it would probably make your life easier if you could access it easily all the time. BNET describes a really easy way to get your Google Calendar to appear in your Firefox sidebar at all times.

This type allows you to put any website in your sidebar, which is really really handy.

Add Google Calendar to Your Firefox Sidebar on BNET

This post was originally published at Add Google Calendar to Your Firefox Sidebar on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

A lot of bloggers talk about the danger of placing all of your “eggs” in the Google basket, whether it’s for search results or for advertising revenue.

IncrediMail, an Israeli company that has mysteriously made lots of money by adding smiley faces to email, has just announced via a press release that they received a “notice” from Google that they have “decided to stop the AdSense partnership with the Company and therefore [they are] disabling ads to search result pages displayed through the Company’s account, and in addition that the Company’s AdSense account has been disabled.” This is a blow to IncrediMail since “in 2006 and 2007, search revenues powered by Google’s AdSense program made a significant contribution to the Company’s results.”

Google’s hand is swift and ruthless.

IncrediMail Receives Notice from Google Regarding AdSense Program

This post was originally published at Google removes IncrediMail from AdSense program on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

When developing blogs or sites on WordPress, we often have to search for information or need help solving a problem, and in those times many of us turn to Google. Did you know that Google has zillions of ways that you can focus your searches and make them even better? The major drawback is that you have to remember zillions of queries in order to do that, and in the end it’s just so much easier to do a regular search and see what you get.

That’s when Advanced Dork Firefox Add-on comes to the rescue! All you have to do is right-click it in Firefox, and you get a whole myriad of Google search options.

Here’s what the download page says about the Add-on:

Advanced Dork: Main Functions:

• Highlight any text, right click, and choose from over 15 Advanced Google Operators. This function can be disabled in the options menu.
• Right click anywhere on the page with no text selected to be provided with the active pages HTML title for use with Google’s intitle Operator, and the active pages HTML ALT tags for use with Google’s allintext Operator. This function can be disabled in the options menu.
• Right click on a link and choose from site: links domain, link: this link, and cache: this link. Site: links domain will only search the domain name, not the full url.
• Right click the URL Bar (aka Address Bar) and choose from site, inurl, link, and cache. Inurl works with the highlighted portion of text only. Site will only search the domain name, not the full url.

Sound good? Visit the Advanced Dork download page to learn more and get the Add-on.

This post was originally published at Advanced Dork Firefox add-on gives you right-click access to Google search options on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

I just noticed that WordPressGarage finally has a Google PageRank! For many many months, this blog has had no PageRank, for reasons I don’t completely understand. It seems that Google sweeps the web very infrequently, doling out page ranks as they go along. These PageRanks stick until the next time around, and if you start a blog or site in between sweeps, you are stuck with a PageRank of non-existent (you don’t even get a rank of 0) until Google sweeps again.

I check PageRank with a very handy Firefox Add-on called SearchStatus. It adds a little toolbar at the bottom of the browser that indicates PageRank, Alexa, and Compete rankings.

I just checked all of my sites, and they all were awarded a PageRank of 4/10. Is that good? Is that bad? I don’t know, but at least now they have a rank of some kind and I have something to tell people when they ask. It’s like they didn’t exist until Google benevolently bestowed upon them their rank.

What is PageRank? Well, Wikipedia has the following to say about it:

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.

We care about it because if Google gives a site a higher PageRank, it means they see it as more important and it will probably do better in search results.

Interesting, but here’s the really important stuff:

PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank^[1]) and later Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine.

It’s named after Larry Page! It worked out so well for him that his last name isn’t Wolfsonbergerstein. WolfsonbergersteinRank just wouldn’t have the same ring to it.

This post was originally published at WordPressGarage now has a Google PageRank! on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

After blogging for a while and building up a decent readership, I’ve decided to test out the whole monetization thing. I figured “why not?” – I’ve got nothing to lose, and if I make a few bucks, then I can kind of justify the time I spend (waste?) blogging.

So I’ve decided to give Adsense a serious go here at wpgarage. I read up on it a bit, and took some time to choose certain ad types for certain locations on the page.

So far so good. And I can see that people are clicking.

But here’s where it gets really frustrating: my stats program shows that people are clicking on ads, but these clicks aren’t showing up in the Google Adsense reports. And the few clicks that are showing up in the reports aren’t making any money!

This is annoying, but even worse it strengthens my suspicion that Google can basically do whatever they want and we’d never know. Google could be charging the advertisers for the clicks on their ads without fairly paying me for providing the advertising real estate!

So some questions:

1. Does anyone know why Google doesn’t pay out for clicks? I read somewhere that it’s because they deem such clicks as problematic or fraudulent. If so, what is this based on?
2. Is there any type of checks and balances system where we can verify that if Adwords advertisers are being charged for clicks, Adsense users are being fairly compensated?
3. There are so many monetization systems out there – any suggestions for other systems besides Adsense?

I can see this monetization thing is not going to be so easy…

This post was originally published at Google Adsense: clicks don’t make money on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

As mentioned in a previous post, Google penalizes sites for duplicate content. One way of solving this is modifying the robots.txt file. Daily Blog Tips describes another way to prevent Google from finding duplicate content on your site: by using excerpts:

In order to make sure that you are not incurring any penalty for duplicated content you should make all those pages display only post excerpts instead of full posts. You could even display post excerpts on the Homepage…

This method involves modifying the theme files so that only specific pages will display excerpts.

Use Post Excerpts Everywhere>>

This post was originally published at Another way to prevent Google from spidering duplicate content: excerpts on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

A standard WordPress site has the same content displayed in numerous places, such as Archives, Categories, Feeds and so forth. Blog Rambler says that this can damage your Google ranking since Google penalizes duplicate content:

When a crawler visits the site it must decide which of these pages is most relevant, and the majority of time it does not pick the one you would. I have tested this on several sites and found that the Category pages usually get listed ahead or in place of the actual post.

Read the solution at WordPress Duplicate Content on Blog Rambler>> 

This post was originally published at Set up robots.txt to prevent Google from finding duplicate content on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t like AdSense. I think that most of the time it’s tacky. Here are two more opposing opinions on this issue:

1. Daily Blog Tips has a blogger face-off between Brian Gardner and Cory Miller and asks them for their opinions on a number of topics. One of the questions asked is “Do you think Adsense units make a blog look unprofessional?” Both of them basically said that if they are professionally designed and placed, they are not unprofessional.
2. On the other hand, The Real Estate Tomato gives 7 compelling reasons why AdSense will ruin your blog. These include that AdSense cheapens your blog, can display inappropriate ads, wastes valuable (blog) real estate, and may even be blocked by Firefox Adblock.

The question is, do those of us in the anti-AdSense camp dislike it because we don’t know how to use it properly, or is it truly an eyesore?

This post was originally published at Pros and Cons of Google AdSense on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.