As of the of mid August 2011, Google has officially stopped supporting the Google Toolbar plugin, except for the Internet Explorer browser. So that means that your Google Toolbar for Firefox, Safari, and even Google’s own Chrome browser are no longer supported.
Many Firefox users may be mistaken that upgrading to the newest version of Firefox 6 has broken the Google Toolbar. This is not the case. As stated by Google:
First of all, we’d like to thank all of our loyal users of Google Toolbar for Firefox. We deeply appreciate all of the feedback over the years that helped to make the product so useful. As we all know, over the past few years, there has been a tremendous amount of innovation in the browser space. For Firefox users, many features that were once offered by Google Toolbar for Firefox are now already built right into the browswer. Therefore, while Google Toolbar for Firefox works on versions up to and including Firefox 4 only, it will not be supported on Firefox 5 and future versions. Please see our Help Center for additional details.
Most of us assume that Google is planning on integrating this functionality directly into their Chrome browser and therefore don’t need to support a separate plugin. In the case of Firefox and other browsers, many of the same features are available in the browser itself.
However, the Google PageRank value is missing from their support pages and lists of other tools to replicate the same functionality provided by the Google Toolbar. So is this a sign that Google may be taking steps to no longer publish their Google PR to the public? What are your thoughts?
Social Media is the hot trend of the day. Everyone wants to have more friends on Facebook, more followers on Twitter, more +1’s on Google. But at the end of the day, do these social media variables have an effect on your website? If its not all hype, then what are the best social media plugins to add to your site?
Well the interesting news is that social media activity has proven to be a good thing for companies. Google and Bing are leading the way with incorporating social media signals into their search engine ranking formulas. So now your number of friends, re-tweets, shares, recommendations, etc all will benefit your website’s rankings.
Besides SEO rankings from social media signals, social media sites definitely drive more traffic to your website. That means that you have to be very careful to control the flow of information on social media sites, so that it is congruent with the content located on your site when they get there.
Ok now that you know social media tools help your website, which ones should you use?
If you want to get more interactive, you can embed one of the Facebook or Twitter IFRAME plugins that will show recent tweets or a list of your friends who have Liked a particular page.
Learn more about social media plugins and their benefits on our site.
Many of us are looking at bloated Google Analtyics tracking data because it is counting visits to our website’s domain from people that are within our own organization.
There are 2 main ways to handle this issue. The good news is that with the latest version of GA, there is now a simple setting where you can exclude traffic from. After logging into GA, click on the Options gear icon in the upper right orange bar. Then Click on the Filters tab. At that point you will be able to Create a New Filter. Once you do that, you will get the screen below and you can select from 3 different ways to exclude traffic from your site:
Click on image to see full size version
The second way to accomplish this task, and if you’re not yet upgraded to the new version of GA, then the best way to exclude traffic is by setting a cookie on individual users’ machines. You can then use Analytics’ filter to ignore visits from all machines that has this cookie set.
1. Add the code below to a page on your website that is private, where only employees have access to that page. When a user goes to that page the 1st time, the cookie will be set on the users’ machines.
<body onLoad=”javascript:pageTracker._setVar('r7898787')”> |
2. Create a new filter with the following settings:
r7898787 (your cookie name)Now you’re set. You have 2 different ways to accomplish the same goal of excluding internal company visitors from your GA website traffic.
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