Your website translated

Here I'll show you an easy way of having multiple language versions of your website. For this purpose we will use the Google's automatic translation. So let's get started:

1. Create an empty a href tag and put the following url there:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&langpair=en%7Cde&u=http://www.example.com/"

2. Replace www.example.com with your own webpage.

3. You must replace the value langpair=en%7Cde with en%7Cit for English to Italian or de%7Cen for German to English translation.

Bonus: Create images with flags of the preferred countries that you want to use and put them within the a href tag.


For example for the image tag you can use:
img src="german.gif" alt="Translate to German" border="1" height="12" width="18"
Thus when a user click on the flag google.com will translate the whole web page automatically.

Example: Translate this web page to German!

Congratulations.
By now you'll have your webpage translated into as many languages as you wish! by Nevyan Neykov

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How to add a website counter

In this post I will show you how to add a webcounter on your website.

Why do you need a counter?
Well there are many answers to this question, but the most obvious is that having a webcounter will allow you to track your visitors, their information as well as your most popular pages.

Below I've gathered a list of websites offering webcounters. Some of them require registration. After you've created an account you'll need to add a piece of code to your web pages. So edit your blog template or your index file and just paste the suggested code.
Wait a few days and you'll have a detailed statistics about your visitors, their operation system, browser, etc...


If you need more complicated statistics such as bounce rate, average time on page, exit rate, data funnels etc... give a try to the free Google analytics software:(http://www.google.com/analytics/).


Webcounters: counter + statistics
Sample screenshots:



Links:
http://cqcounter.com/
http://extreme-dm.com/tracking/?reg
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=newaccount
http://www.mybloglog.com/
http://www.activemeter.com/webtracker/signup.html
http://www.free-counter-plus.com/counter/signup/
http://www.countmypage.com/dspSignup.php
http://www.ritecounter.com/auth.php?act=adduser
http://www.pstats.com/index.asp?page=signup
if you have less than 2000 visitors/day: http://www.debuging.com/WS1/cgi/x.cgi?NAVG=SignUp
http://www6.addfreestats.com/cgi-bin/newuser.cgi

Webcounters: hits only
Sample screenshots:


Links:
http://www.bravenet.com/signup/signup.php
http://www.easycounter.com/
http://www.free-counter.com/register.php
http://www.webcounter.com/register.jsp
http://easy-hit-counters.com/step2.php
http://www.amazingcounters.com/sign-up.php
http://www.rapidcounter.com/signup.php
http://www.digits.com/create.html
http://www.123counters.com/step1.php
http://www.mywebstats.org/register.php
http://www.free-web-statistics.com/signup.html
http://www.pro-counter.com/signup.htm
http://www.freestatscounter.com/free-counter.asp
http://www.freecounters.ca/signin.php
http://freewebcounter.info/create.php
http://www.speedycounter.com/signup.php
http://www.webcountersforfree.com/GetCounter2.cfm
http://www.tinycounter.com/create.php
http://www.free-web-page-counters.com/signup.asp
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/counter/
http://www.devstats.com/register

Hope they help you to identify your site public. by Nevyan Neykov

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How to clean up Windows

In this article I'll show you how to clean up your windows registry, temporary files and bulk applications.

Why do we need a registry and file cleaning?
Cleaning of windows registry must be done in order to increase the overall computer speed and performance.

Why computer slows down with time?
Almost every software application saves its settings in windows registry or using temporary files. The more programs have been installed, the more size of windows registry increases.
Few programs after uninstallation erase their tracks from registry. This way when time goes by Windows gets stuffed with unusable information, leading to decreased computer performance.
This is also true for the temporary files, swap files, as well as information written due to the incorrect system shutdown: memory dumps, lost files, etc.

How to do a cleaning procedure ?
I. For a complete cleaning we will use the free software CCleaner. Download and install the program from here: http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner.html

Steps for cleaning up Windows:

1. Run CCleaner and click over Run Cleaner.

Startup screen of CCleaner.

2. Second phase cleaning:

1. Click the Issues button and check EVERY option.
2. Click the Scan For Issues button.
3. Click the Fix selected issues... button.
4. Click Yes when asked to backup changes to the registry.

You might also have to wait if your computer is highly stuffed with garbage files and temporary settings.

II. Disk cleanup is an integrated program in Windows that searches and cleans compressed old files, office setup files, temporary files as well as old file index catalog. These files could also take you lots of space. So just click on Start->Run and type: cleanmgr.exe and follow the program's dialogue.



The process of integrated disk cleanup scanning:



If you wish to free more space on the tab More Options click on the button Clean up.... This will remove the previous unused system snapshots that windows has made.



When cleaning is done you'll see how much disk space(mb) is freed. The overall effect is incredible. Now your Windows system is cleaned and will run faster than before! by Nevyan Neykov

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How to repair windows - quick fixes

Here I'll explain the procedures I do whenever my Windows stops responding or halts with errors.







I Checking the Hard disk drives

1. Run Start->Run: chkdsk /f










chkdsk will check and fix errors if there are errors in your hard drive file-system.







2. Fixing broken/missing files on your system
by running from Start->Run: sfc /scannow

The system file checker(sfc) utility will check every single .DLL and other important files on your computer for consistence and will repair them if there are corrupted.
Just insert your windows distribution into the CD-drive and wait a few minutes for the check to finish.




II Cleaning the windows registry
Download and Start CCleaner from here:

http://www.ccleaner.com/download/

Click on Run 'Clean now' and wait. CCleaner will check/repair your registry settings and delete the temporary files left on your computer.



III Running de-fragment utility
Windows has its own file and directory defragmentation utility, but we'll use an alternative one that is faster - Auslogic Disk Drefragr. This application will defragment and speed up the access to your files and directories. by Nevyan Neykov

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How to get out of Google Sandbox - part II

Let's continue with the steps that I've taken to make Google Bot respider and reindex my website again. I hope the advises below will help you to achieve a better indexing for your website. In the following article I'll assume that you are using Apache web server.

Requirements: You will need an access to your webserver .htaccess file and have mod_rewrite module enabled in your Apache configuration.

STEP 1a: Make static out of dynamic pages
Using mod_rewrite you could rewrite your dynamic pages to look like a static ones. So if you've got a dynamic .php page with parameters - you could rewrite the url to look like a normal .html page:

www.your_website.com/look_item.php?item_id=14

for the web surfer will become:

www.your_website.com/item-14.html

HOW:
You have to add the following lines to your .htaccess file(placed in the root directory of your web server):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule item-([0-9]+)\.html http://your_website.com/sub_directory/look_item.php?item_id=$1 [L,R=301]

STEP 1b: Transfer the accumulated PR
Next type in the Google's search box:

site:http://your_website.com

This query will show you which webpages Google has indexed from your website. The key here is to check if they have any accumulated PageRank. Since you've been moving to search engine pleasant(static .html) URLs you'll want to transfer the accumulated PR from the dynamic .php url to the main or corresponding static .html url.

Here is an illustrated example about transferring a .php url request with already accumulated PR to the main page url of the web site:

HOW:
Add the following line in your .htaccess file:

RewriteRule look_item\.php http://website.com/sub_directory/ [L,R=301]

Some explanations:
301 means Moved Permanently - the Search Engine Bot will then map http://website.com/sub_directory/ instead of look_item.php as legitimate source of information.


STEP 1c: Play with Robots.txt
In order to avoid Google from indexing both .html and .php pages thus assuming them as duplicate content which is bad:

Create file robots.txt, put it into root website directory and include there all the dynamic .php files that you don't want to be indexed. Reason for doing it is because you'll want to transfer the existing PageRank from dynamic .php url to the more accessible static .html url.

HOW: Place in your robots.txt the following lines:

User-agent: *
Disallow: look_item.php

Important Note: If your website is hosted under a subdomain, and you don't have access to the root domain robots.txt file, you MUST use meta attributes nofollow, noindex to achieve the same result as robots.txt Disallow directive. Otherwise the robots will only check the root domain robots.txt and will skip your robots.txt file. Thus you still will be feeding the search engines with duplicate content which is a bad thing.

STEP 2a: Redirect www to non-www urls
Just check the PageRank of your web page with and without the preceding "www". If it is different you are losing PageRank and promoting duplicate content to Google. This happens because some sites are link to you with like: http://www.yourwebsite.com and some http://yourwebsite.com

It's hard to control the sites linking to your website whether they link using "www" or "non-www". This time Apache Redirect and Rewrite rules come to help to transfer the www-urls of your website to a non-www urls. Again to avoid PR loss and duplicates you will want your website url to be accessible from only 1 location.

HOW: Place at the end of your robots.txt the following lines:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.your_website\.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://your_website.com/$1 [R=301,L]

STEP 2a: Redirect index.php to root website url
There is one more step to achieving non-duplicated content. You must point your index.html, index.htm, index.asp or index.php to the ./ or root of your website.

HOW: Insert in your robots.txt the following lines before the previous mentioned two lines:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /subdomain/index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule index\.php http://yourwebsite.com/subdomain/ [R=301,L]

Note: If your website is hosted under a sub domain fill its name in the /subdomain part. If not just delete the /subdomain . You can replace index.php with index.html, index.asp or whatever suits you.
For more information on achieving non-duplicated content and escaping from google's supplemental index then continue reading here:

STEP 3: Create custom error 404 page:
in your .htaccess file type:

ErrorDocument 404 /your_website_dir/eror404.html

Then create custom webpage named eror404.html to instruct the user what to do when came across a non-existent page.

Congratulations: I hope that by following those steps your website will be re-indexed soon.
Cheers! by Nevyan Neykov

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How to get out of Google Sandbox - part I

This time I'll tell you how do I managed to get my website out of Google's sandbox.
Here is also Part II of the escaping gooogle's sandbox!

Story behind Google sandboxing:
I've got a regional website with around 300 quality articles visited by nearly 350 unique visitors per day. Suddenly visitors dropped downto 50-25/day. After checking my website's logs I found that Google has stopped from delivering me traffic. Months have passed before I discovered that during to 302 Redirects from other sites and other factors(using javascript header refresh=0 redirects) my website has been penaltised and went down from Google's index to Google's sandbox.

I changed a few things on the website and in 1 month my website was re-indexed and the traffic flow got back to normal. After 2 weeks of code rewriting here is what I did:

Emergency steps - do these first

1. Check whether are you using in your website meta-refresh javascript redirects. For example:

meta equiv="refresh" content="5; url=http://www.website.com/filename.php"

If so remove them, because they are assumed as spam by Google's Bot.

How: You can check your whole website by using software as: Xenu Link Sleuth

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Download and start the program.

From there the whole process is straightforward - just type in the input box your website address and start the check. (click on File->Check URL. That brings up a form for you to fill in with your website's URL).
This tool will check every page on your website and produce a report. In the report if you see 302 redirects - beware and try to fix them. Using Xenu you could also check your website for broken links, etc.

2. Check if websites linking to you give HTTP response code 200 OK
2.1 at google search box type allinurl: http://www.yoursite.com

2.2 Check every website other than yours by typing them here

http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/tools/server-header.php

and look for HTTP response code 200 OK.




2.3 If there are any that give 302 header response code then try to contact the administrator of the problematic website to fix the problem. If you think that they are stealing your Page Rank - report them to google report spam page

http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

with check mark on Deceptive Redirects. by Nevyan Neykov

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