Personally I never have had any problem with the blogspot navigation bar when I used to blog on Blogger. My idea was if  I am using a Blogger blog, then why not show it. It is like a mark that distinguishes your blog from other blog platforms. And I used to like default blue navbar as it was prominent yet soothing to the eye.

But it is at least good to see that Google have listened to the bloggers demand. End of the last month they have added two new color schemes that are transparent. And so the navbar will blend with the background color & pattern of your blog template. The “Transparent Light” colour has a semi-transparent white background giving away subtle pastel colours.

And the Transparent Dark” colour has a semi-transparent black background giving it a shaded look.

If you were always complaining about the navbar, the time has come to try this new option

To choose a new colour scheme for Blogger navbar, go to Layout> Page Elements from Blogger dashboard & click Edit next to navbar widget.

As a newbie when we start a blog, most of us have one single aim. And that is earning some quick bucks. But Wordpress.com doesn’t allow you to put any kind of ads like Adsense, Adbrite or Chitika in you free blog. They will even ban you if they find paid reviews on your blog from pay per post networks like PayPerPost, Smorty or ReviewMe. Moreover you can’t even place any referral links to services like ClickBank or UserCash to earn money. Commercial use is strictly prohibited there for free blogs.

But Blogger is very liberal there. They let you put your own ads as you wish. They even support Adsense widgets for seamless integration & management of Adsense ads from one Google account.

Next big thing is having your own domain name. Whenever you get a little exposure at first, you will look to buy a top level domain for your blog to give it a professional look. Google supports custom domain option for free, meaning you can use your new TLD for your existing blogspot blog & you will get option that will automatically redirect old blog post urls to new urls seamlessly. But for the same service Wordpress.com will charge you around $10 per year. See, you have to pay more for domain mapping than for buying a real domain for one year

By the way, if you have Blogger blog on your own domain, it is not that difficult to migrate your blog to self-hosted Wordpress. So, if you don’t have money to spend online or don’t want to pay online at first, remember these two important factors & then take a decision according to your goal. It will help you in the long run.

On October 28, 2009, Yahoo! Inc., a Delaware corporation (“Yahoo!”), and Microsoft Corporation, a Washington corporation (“Microsoft”), mutually agreed to extend the period to negotiate and execute a Search and Advertising Services and Sales Agreement and a License Agreement (the “Definitive Agreements”) reflecting and supplementing the provisions of such agreements as set forth in annexes to their binding letter agreement dated July 29, 2009 (the “Letter Agreement”). The Letter Agreement specified that the parties would execute Definitive Agreements by October 27, 2009, but given the complex nature of the transaction, there remain some details to be finalized. The parties are working diligently on finalizing the agreements, have made good progress to date, and have agreed to execute the agreements as expeditiously as possible. The Letter Agreement was the subject of a Current Report on Form 8-K filed by Yahoo! on August 4, 2009.

And Nathania Johnson from Search Engine Watch contacted Microsoft. They replied that the deal might be implemented by early 2010 hopefully.

This big deal may got delayed. But more importantly it is still on course.

And I have to say that the Lists feature can be quite handy especially to those who are following a large number of people. Twitter has become a number game. Most of us follow others a lot  in hope that they will follow us back. Ultimately you end up following people whose updates don’t really attract you. And your true relations like friends or colleagues get lost in this crowd. But now with Twitter Lists you can separate any number of people under various categories. You create a new Twitter list with a name & can set the option to make it private or public. The list will have a url like http://twitter.com/username/listname. Your Twitter lists will appear on your account sidebar right below the search button. Now all you need to do is to go through your following list & add people accordingly in separate lists.

Thus you create totally different social niches like professional connections, friends, relatives or business guys just as you want. And then you can find the needed person from the corresponding list of short-listed people. By the way, at the top-right corner of your Twitter account, just beside the “following” & “followers” links, you can find “listed” link. It will show you the number of lists where your followers have added you.

It is quite a timely release from Twitter as people are just following each other without much care about who your true connections are. When this feature comes out of beta, it will help a lot of people. Just go through the pain of selecting for one time & from then keep in touch with the Twitter updates of those whom you really care.

What about a hacker getting into your Wordpress file system somehow? He can easily manipulate your theme files to add malicious codes. Think, he can easily add his own ad code like changing Adsense id or stuff a file with lots of spam links. That’s why your Wordpress blog files need to be continuously monitored. With the help of Wordpress File Monitor plugin you can just do that automatically & almost in real time.

The thing that I like about this Wordpress plugin is its simple interface with all the necessary features. You can schedule automatic scans staring from only 1 minute interval gap. Enter your email address & you will get notification email when any change is detected in your Wordpress files. Or if you want to keep it as a manual service, you can do that just by putting 0 in the “Scan Interval” box. And a quite useful feature is the option to exclude file paths. Suppose, you want your wp-content/uploads directory not to be monitored as it gets updated frequently. Moreover, if you use folder to store cache files, this feature can become quite handy & will save you from lots of unnecessary emails.

But we still try different things. And there’s no harm in trying. A few days ago, I just found out this Twitter follower increasing service called FastFollowers. It’s a bit different. You can’t just auto-follow here. It is based on some credit system. They have a list of Twitter followers. When you follow them, you gain credits. When some other user follow you, he takes credit from you. Thus when your credit becomes zero, you can’t gain followers. To keep gaining followers you need to keep following guys. And you have to do that manually

Obviously there are few other ways of gaining Twitter followers like buying credits or participating in some promotion like subscribing to the owner’s feed. But the main thing is that your followers will choose to follow you manually, by themselves. It is surely somewhat better than increasing your Twitter followers automatically. There’s bigger chance of gaining an interested follower.

By the way, if I mention this blog post to them, I will get 100 credits. But I am not writing this only because of that. And I think you guys believe me I didn’t even use my referral link to gain credits. Feel free to try.

So if you have changed your email address in Google account in the mean time, check back Google Webmaster Tools. If you want to be safe from email change, you can use the new verification process. By the way, sites verified using old verification method will continue to work.

They have made a change too in verification by HTML file. Before, if your site showed any other HTTP error except 404 for non-existent url, you couldn’t verify your site using HTML file upload. Though, if a server is properly configured it will always show 404 error for non-existent urls, still lots of sites were having problem for this reason. So, Google have removed checking for non-existent urls from verification process. Now you just have to upload the HTML file to your site without any modification. Google will check if the content is okay in the file. And if it is same, you have a successful verification. That’s all

Google won’t penalize a site for duplicate content. That’s the bottom line. So actually it breaks a general myth as you can say. So what Google actually wants is diversity in results. So if you make some little adjustments your site may also be shown in search results. Otherwise there’s possibility that your site may end up as one of these.

It is a negative effect no doubt. But Google consider that most duplicate content sites are not spam. They have their own methods to detect spam & they banned them for being spam, but not for being duplicate

Now I am coming to meta tags. Here Google confirmed the long time predictions. Google simply don’t consider keywords meta tag in SEO. The reason is simple. It has been abused quite extensively for keyword stuffing to manipulate  SERPs. Suppose, you are targeting keywords that are not in your niche & getting hits for that where users find nothing about the topic. That’s why Google removed it as SEO factor years ago.

In case of description meta tag, it can be useful if Google don’t find a suitable search snippet & will use it instead. Check the above screenshot for an example. But from SEO point of view, it has no effect.

If you want to read the original posts, here is the link for duplicate content & here is for meta tags. They have cool videos attached too. Nowadays Google seem to be publicly releasing more of their point of views on SEO. It is better to know what are going to need to do clearly. When I started it was not like this. If you are a beginner, you are going to like this more

But the interesting thing is that about 4,000 sites are still on .yu domain. That’s why Serbian National Register of Internet Domain Names has asked ICANN to consider to extend the time. ICANN is going to have a meeting about that.

By the way, if you are interested about history, .yu domain was first assigned to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1989. Then with the start of Balkan war, the domain was held by newly independent Slovenia before eventually getting passed to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1994. But as many of you know, Republic of Yugoslavia itself got renamed to Serbia and Montenegro in 2003, and Montenegro breaking out of the union in 2006, the history surely looks a bit clumsy