Yoast 12.1 adds custom favicons to the mobile snippet preview

Yoast has released version 12.1 of its WordPress plugin; the update adds your custom favicon to the mobile snippet preview, matches Google’s font sizes on desktop search results and introduces new schema filters.

An accurate preview of your mobile and desktop listings enables you to get a better idea of what your customers see before they click through, which may help you optimize your snippets and encourage them to click on your results.

The new filters introduced in this update can also be used to control your schema output and provide searchers with pertinent information about your brand.

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SEO TOOLS - Paid VS Free

You know that when you enter in the world of SEO it's no escape. That's so many things you can learn that it's overwhelming just to think. So learning is a big part of SEO, that's the part you need to do first before you "put you'r hands in the dirt".
So, when you start to study you realise that you need some tool to understand better what you are doing (for me works like this...) and you start to realise that the best tools aren't free and they are in some cases very expensive...and you must pay monthly...yaikss :/. So for a starter this start to be a problem. All that knowledge, all that hard work in finding the best answers to understand SEO and know you have to pay.
So, fear not my friends, here are some tools for you to start optimizing your websites and see the amazing world of SEO.

WEBSITES AND PROGRAMS

When you start to search some tools for SEO, instantly you find the website from SEOmoz, and you see on the page "Pricing & Plans" and you think ohhh %$&#" is not free. Before you go away just stay a little bit on the site and make the register to find some great stuff. Once you register you can ask questions in the forum and learn some great stuff from guys that have seriously knowledge in this subject.
A great tool from SEOmoz is Open Site Explorer. With this tool you can compare 5 websites simultaneously and check for the page authority, Domain Authority; Linking Root Domains, Total Links, Anchor Text and Link Metrics (at this point a great part of your study is done and you know what i'm talking about), and then you can export them to CSV, how great is that! And everything for free!! 
So, and if you want to analyse some geek stuff like the communication from the server to the browser? Well Fiddler do the job just well. Here you can check the response of the website, Host, Url and see if you have some error pages (404).
Another program that is essential for SEO is Screaming Frog. This is a smal program you can install on Pc or Mac that spiders the website's links, images, CSS, scripts, pages titles, meta keywords (yeah yeah, they are not so relevant this days but if you have too much it can be consider spam), client and server side erros, redirects, etc, etc, you MUST install this. As free edition you can only scan as much as 500 pages, but for starts is rather good.
Xenu is another great program where you can see your page status code, size, outbound links, page errors, load time and more.
If you, for some reason, want to "spy" your competition and analyse their backlinks you can use SpyGlass from Link Assistant. As a free tool is very very good. You can check the number of backlinks of your competitor, Google pageRank of every backlink, the exact anchor text and anchor url, link value, etc etc. With this tool you have the oportunity to build your links more easily, but i must advise you that Google is penalizing backlinks came from poor websites and link farms, so if your competitor website is penalized you will be too for the same reasons. Act carefully on this.

EXTENSIONS BROWSERS

Another thing about SEO is that you must get familiarized with browsers and work with them as they are you family (well not family but close friends...). The best browsers to work with SEO are Firefox and Chrome, they have sooooo many extensions that is hark to count them.
So start with Firefox, one of the best Extensions is the SEOquake extension. With this extension activated you can access as many information on the page as your brain can handle. Starting with page info, Page Rank, How many pages Google and Bing has indexed in this domain, age of the domain, how many interactions from Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus this page have, information about the server, keyword density, description about Text/HTML Ratio and much more.
Another extra for firefox is the Backlink Explorer. With this tool (as it says) do best for your backlinks, as it search your backlinks in Bing, Blekko, searchmetrics and more.
As you know, speed plays a major role in websites as Google and other search engines are giving it much more importance as it gives better user experience. So what do you want to measure speed? Well lori is a great tool to measure the speed and page size of a website.
So...know that we'r more or less done with Firefox, let's see the Chrome.
As i mention above SEOmoz have great tools for free. If you use Chrome (or Firefox) you can use their extension and almost instantly you can check some page elements as no-followed / followed links, internal, external, keywords, ranktracker, Text to Code Ratio, Bold / Strong words (gives relevance to those keywords) and some other great SEO tools.
The Meta SEO Inspector is another tool that you can't loose. This extension is mainly aimed at web developers that need to verify the description tag of their site to follow the Webmasters' Google Guidelines, SEO, or even to who is curious about page contents that are usually not visible, but can reveal interesting site properties. Alerts are showed when the meta data is not within certain ranges, for example when the description tag is too short, or too long.
SEO Workers have an excellent tool that allows you to perform a basic analysis of the page in your browser with a single click. The results from the SEO Workers Analysis Tool are displayed on their site.
With some sort of limit and with more work you can get as almost information about your site as a paid versions with these free tools.
So, it's up to you if you want to experiment this tools or go on adventure on your own and find others that's suit you.

Google Encrypted Search - HTTPS

Soon Google will launch encryption (SSL) in local domains (google.pt, google.es, google.com.br, etc..).
Despite this safety, is only active when we are within our Google account, this will lead to more confidence, more privacy and security in the searches.
All this security is welcome, at a time when Google starts giving more relevance and privacy to the user and group of people in your network (Google +) and since he is often not aware of a variety of network web attacks, identity theft or fraudulent use.
But for a marketer, does he have some kind og advantage will with all this security? Although there are alternatives to Google Analytics, this is still a very useful tool for managing a site.
Some time ago, Google reported that it will not provide information about the keywords that brought a user to visit a particular site, now supports with encryption SSL (https), but all this security can be "manipulated". Beiing an advertiser you will still have all the keywords available. The question remains: What is the difference in the protection of search among a normal user and an advertiser? Well ... they pay... simple.
Google indicated that the impact will be less with this change so that the keywords must appear to those not logged in by Gmail, but with the integration of all Google services, the advantages that the user have being logged in, this number will grow exponentially. It is not yet known whether this change will affect Google Analytics Premium.
With this policy, Google is becoming not only more secure and safer but is giving a competitive advantage in PPC segment.
For now we can always count on the top of the main words in Webmaster Tools and Bing, who has not followed in the footsteps of Google.
We may draw the conclusion that Google will distinguish even more between user and advertisers.

New privacy policy on Google SEO

In March 1º Google will implement the new policy. This consists in the integration of all google products that will be more accurate, more personalized and much more user oriented.
This step was made for the interest of user, and try to find what is more relevant for then (rumors saying that they will actualy tell you if you'r late for work based on you location and your calendar...).
Since all the Google products will be seen as one, your searches in Google will reflect the searches on youtube. So if you search for [jaguar] on Google the results are basicaly the same as if you search [jaguar] on you tube. All this happend if you'r logged on your Google account.
Does this affect SEO? Well, for my point of view...yes.
First, we must not be logged on for our results be more precise and don't "mining" the SERP's.
Second, user's don't tend to refine refine searches very much, they usualy stick to what firts pages gets, so more useful pages (and with a good optimization) may be left behind.
Third, when you search for some restaurante you can get information from a friend ( Goolge +) first and not the actual restaurante.
Most of the personalized content are here since 2005, now they introduce (Google +) on it and make you one giant client for them to study.
One other aspect is the "remarketing" of ADS. Goole can advertise you even when you'r in a non-Google website and not log on. This isn't based on what you search for but with a anonymous cookie tagged on an advertising site.
So, what does it mean?. If i search [buy car] in Google, you can start to see more Ads related to your search even if you'r not on a Google site but sites that carry Google Ads.
Finding the "opt-out" for this is no easy task but you can find it here.

There's a disable button too for Google + for them not to take relevance on your searches here.

Although remarketing has nothing to do with privacy policy. Even if you never create a google account retargeting happends through anonymous cookies.
So, if you don't bother with none of that, you will see more and more friends on search results...or simply.."unfriend" them.

The "Don´t Be Evil" Tool

Soon Goole will release the "Search Plus your World" "thing" in any language (for now only in .com), that consist in integrating social in your search results. For ex. if you search for "movies" it will give more relevant results for users (showing or hiding personal results if you want...).

But what it really does is giving more relevance to Google + profiles and NOT the most relevant for that particulary search.
This Tool (yes it's safe and very easy to install ) will give you more relevant and updated content search focusing on user. What it means is if you have a Twitter account that have more updates than a Google + profile, is that account that will prevail). The companies behind the tool (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace)want to show that it really can be possible a better and more accurate content.
Goole must do what we expect it to do, relevant, accurate, and updated content not injecting Google + pages as the most relevant.
Google + can be a great product, but Google must give him a "fair trial"

Backstabbing of Google

Here's a thing, Google policy "do no evil" is...not so good.
Mocality, a reputable Business Directory in Kenya, has a different prespective about Google.
When Goolge launch in September the Getting Kenyan Business Online (GKBO), Mocality saw it like a competitive challenge, and hope a "clean" competitor.
Since that time Mocality start to receive odd calls from costumers asking to help on the site (thing not supported by Mocality).
After further analysis, they discovered that Google was contacting costumers from the Business Directory and sayind thad Mocality was working in collaboratin with Google and helping them (not so true...) and Mocality was "under" Google. They even charge 200$ for listings! Here's a snick pick of the calls (it's confused so here's a translation from another call captured).
Is this the procedure from a Big Company like Google to get in the market? Is this the first time that occured?
Google already sorryed for the act, and will investigate the subject, but is this enough? If Mocality doesn't investigate they will stop? Can read all story in this blog.
What would you thinking???

Google + mais integrado no motor de busca

Cada vez mais a google tem integrado as suas aplicações no motor de busca e com o google + não é exceção.
O que vai mudar então? Segundo o Google a pesquisa ficará mais integrada com os seus círculos, mostrando, por exemplo, as fotos que seus amigos compartilham no Picasa e também os posts que são colocados no Google+.
Outra coisa que muda é a pesquisa de pessoas, agora quando você pesquisar por alguém o Google mostrará perfis do Plus permitindo também que essa pessoa seja adicionada ao circulo.

And the Smartest Site on the Internet Is...

Google now lets you filter sites by "reading level."

The Internet used to be full of highbrow reading material, until broadband penetration exploded and everyone with a credit card managed to find his or her way onto the Web. Finding your way back to the rarefied air that used to suffuse the 'net can be a slog, so Google has a new way to help you out: You can now sort sites by reading level.

(For those of you following along at home, under Google's "advanced" search, simply switch on this option by hitting the dropdown next to "Reading level.")

The results are fascinating. Searching for any term, no matter how mundane, and then hitting the "advanced" link at the top strips away all the spam, random blogs and all the rest of the claptrap from the advertisers, hucksters and mouthbreathers.

This is only one of the varieties of elitism enabled by the new feature, which was created by statistically analyzing papers from Google Scholar and school teacher-rated Web pages that are then compared to all the other sites in Google's index.

As pioneered by Adrien Chen of Gawker, by far the most interesting application of the tool is its ability to rate the overall level of material on any given site, simply by dropping site: [domain.com] into the search box.

By this measure, the hallowed halls of the publication you're reading now fare pretty well:

Not quite as well as some sites that share our audience:

But certainly better than certain other, decidedly middlebrow, publications:

It's when you turn to the scientific journals that the competition really heats up:

And the battle between traditional and open access publishing models takes on a new dimension:

(Just for reference, Here's how MIT itself performs)

And, much as I'm loathe to admit it, the smartest site on the Internet is...

Meanwhile, excluding sites aimed at children, here's the dumbest:

Site: Technologyreview

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist Tells the Tale of the World’s First Computer | Magazine

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist Tells the Tale of the World’s First Computer | Magazine

who invented the computer? For anyone who has made a pilgrimage to the University of Pennsylvania and seen the shrine to the ENIAC, the answer may seem obvious: John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr., who led Penn’s engineering team in the 1940s. As it says on the plaque, the giant machine made of 17,468 vacuum tubes was the “first electronic large-scale, general-purpose digital computer.” But notice all the qualifying adjectives. Does this mean there was a smaller digital computer that actually came first?


Yes, it does. And that computer was invented by John Vincent Atanasoff, who, with his partner Clifford Berry, started assembling the machine in the basement of the physics building at Iowa State University in the late 1930s. (It was finished in 1942.) Atanasoff, a physicist by training, was on the engineering faculty. Berry was a graduate student. Their computer, which was the size of a large desk, could do laborious mathematical calculations electronically using vacuum tubes to perform its logical operations. Now called the ABC (for Atanasoff-Berry computer), it was little known at the time. But it was admired by a small circle of brilliant inventors who were working on the problem of massive calculation, including John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study and the engineers working on the ENIAC in Philadelphia.1


This fall, the unsung physicist is getting some of the credit he deserves from an unlikely author: Jane Smiley, the American novelist whose pastoral melodrama A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She was captivated by the story and characters, “not for technical reasons as much as for narrative and psychological reasons.” In The Man Who Invented the Computer, she paints a portrait of a prickly, relentless engineering savant who got hooked on the problem of automatic computation while working on his dissertation in quantum mechanics, which required tedious calculations. After building his computer, he went on to tackle a series of unrelated challenges during the early years of the cold war, including measuring the effects of nuclear test explosions. He founded his own firm, received several patents, and died wealthy and respected. But Atanasoff’s greatest work, the first digital computer, was forgotten until the late 1960s, when a legal battle broke out over the patents that the ENIAC project leaders had filed on basic computing concepts.


In the course of the bruising litigation between the Sperry Rand Corporation, which had purchased the ENIAC patents, and Honeywell, which wanted to break them, it was proven that the ENIAC team stole key ideas from Atanasoff. The patents were declared invalid by a federal judge. But Atanasoff’s achievement never became widely known or celebrated.


Although he remained largely forgotten on both coasts, the legal case made Atanasoff something of a hero in Iowa. At Iowa State, where Smiley studied and taught for more than two decades, she met someone who plays a minor, ignominious role in her tale: a professor who told her that, as a graduate student, he had been the one to dismantle and throw away the prototype of some strange calculating device that had been left behind in the basement of the physics building. The first digital computer was lost. “He ultimately went on to become the head of the computer science department,” Smiley says, “and he told me that destroying that computer was one of the great regrets of his life.” It is out of such personal twists and ironies—a novelist’s materials—that Smiley builds her tale, capturing both Atanasoff’s genius and, at the same time, the forces of chance that influence invention.


Wired: As a writer, most of your career has been dedicated to the novel. Why did you take on this biography?


Jane Smiley: I was asked by an editor to consider writing something about an American inventor. I asked him if he knew who invented the computer. He said he didn’t. In that case, I told him, I should write a book about John Vincent Atanasoff.


Wired: We think of the ENIAC as the first computer. But what did the team that built it copy from Atanasoff?


Smiley: In 1937, Atanasoff came up with four principles that were new: electronic logic circuits that would function by turning on and off; binary enumeration; the use of capacitors, which were needed as a kind of memory; and digital operations, which used counting to perform calculations. The calculating machines of that time were like elaborate slide rules that used measurements to compute results, but Atanasoff, who was trained as a quantum physicist, understood that this would be very unwieldy for large numbers. He didn’t want to measure, he wanted to count.


Wired: Atanasoff introduced the concept of digital calculation? Nobody else had considered this approach?


Smiley: Konrad Zuse, in Berlin, also did. Zuse built his first computer, the Z1, in his parents’ apartment. But he never got to patent it, and he never got to have his ideas influence computing, because he was so far outside the mainstream, working in isolation in Nazi Germany.


Wired: Didn’t Alan Turing, the great British mathematician, give the definitive description of a computer that proceeded by discrete steps?


Smiley: Turing was mainly a theoretician. He worked for the British government during the Second World War on the great code-breaking machine Colossus. But this also remained relatively unknown, because Churchill was obsessed with keeping it secret and ordered all the machines destroyed.

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Why Windows Phone 7 Will Make Android Look Chaotic

Microsoft may be late to the game with a consumer-savvy phone OS, but Windows Phone 7 is aiming to do right a lot of what Google is doing wrong. Based on what I saw during a visit to Microsoft’s headquarters two weeks ago, the Windows Phone 7 team may be on the right track to pose a serious threat to Google. The crucial part of Microsoft’s new phone strategy is the quality control it imposes onto its hardware partners. Rather than code an operating system and allow manufacturers to do whatever they want with it — like Google is doing with Android — Microsoft is requiring hardware partners to meet a rigid criteria in order to run Windows Phone 7. Each device must feature three standard hardware buttons, for example, and before they can ship with Windows Phone 7, they have to pass a series of tests directed by Microsoft. (As I mentioned in a feature story about Windows Phone 7, Microsoft has created new lab facilities containing robots and automated programs to test each handset to ensure that features work properly and consistently across multiple devices.) The effort to control quality and consistency may be just what Microsoft needs to regain some ground in the phone battle. In the wake of the iPhone revolution, Windows Mobile saw a serious decline in market share; the computer-ey, feature-loaded interface just didn’t cut it anymore. Windows Phone 7 is Microsoft’s complete do-over on a mobile operating system, with a slick new tile-based UI. The first Windows Phone 7 handsets are due in stores November. With brand new test facilities, Microsoft is taking on the duty of ensuring that touchscreens and sensors are calibrated properly, for example, and each hardware model undergoes software stress tests to catch bugs and system errors (see picture above). The end result should be getting very close to the same OS on smartphones made by different manufacturers. That in turn could mitigate the issue of fragmentation for third-party developers: They can effectively code the same app for a large party of devices without much tweaking. By contrast, Google doesn’t subject manufacturers to similar testing criteria. And we’re seeing the consequences: Some touchscreens work better than others, some apps don’t work on one version of Android while they do on another, and some manufacturers are even cramming bloatware onto Android devices. Most importantly, a consistent user experience will help customers understand what they’re getting when they’re shopping for a Windows phone. The OS is going to be the same with identical features on every handset, so as a consumer, your decision-making will boil down to the hardware’s look, weight and size. Compare that to the experience of buying an Android phone, which could be running a different version depending on the handset you buy: Donut, Eclair, Froyo, blueberry pie, Neapolitan or whatever Google chooses to call it eventually. You won’t have to ask yourself, “Am I going to get X on this phone or do I have to get another one?” because they’re all running the same OS with a few variations in hardware. The inevitable question that arises is what Windows Phone 7 means as a competitor to iOS. It’s tough to say. I haven’t spent quite enough time with a final version of a Windows Phone 7 device yet. Still, I think the Phone 7 user interface is refreshingly different compared to the siloed-app experience of iOS. But Apple is so far ahead in terms of cultivating a rich mobile ecosystem that I don’t think Steve Jobs needs to be sweating just yet. Google, though, needs to get Android’s story together, because the fickle platform gets more confusing and convoluted every day, and it could have the same destiny as Windows Mobile.

 Source WIRED