Google has added information on the copyright removal requests it receives to remove search results that link to sites allegedly infringing copyrights. In previously announced transparency reports, Google provides information about international traffic to their services and governmental requests for information about users. A new aspect of the transparency report slices and … [Read more...]
Matt Cutts mash-up explains how to get your site #1 on Google
Matt Cutts gives a lot of great search advice on how to improve your site's ranking on Google Search results. You can watch his videos through the Google Webmaster Central channel on YouTube. Somebody took those videos and created a mash-up of those videos giving less than stellar advice with out-of-context phrases that should entertain anybody interested in legitimate … [Read more...]
How to merge and manage categories and tags in WordPress easily
Yesterday, I started doing some long delayed clean up of categories here on 404 Tech Support. I felt like the categories had become too sprawling and too specific. Things could be improved by consolidating similar categories into one. Renaming the categories was the easy part. As I looked at the categories I wanted to merge, there were hundreds of posts in some of the old … [Read more...]
Use open-source Piwik in place of Google Analytics
If you want analytics details on your website visitors, Google Analytics is the popular choice. It's simple to sign-up, setup, and start tracking your visitors' details. However, if you have concerns about what happens with that data or qualms about handing that information over to one of the largest advertising companies, it's not for you. One possible alternative to use is … [Read more...]
Fighting trackback spam on your WordPress site
Changing servers, monitoring the logs, and changing configurations recently, I seemed to find a spam campaign that began targeting my website. One interesting clue was that my site's top keyword in Google WebMaster Tools was 'pingback' while before the top keywords were 'tech' and 'support'. In recent months I had installed Disqus to stop spam comments but as this campaign was … [Read more...]