Google Hacks, Cheats & Tips

Remove Gmail via Field and Add mailed-by & signed-by with PHP mail()

PHP mail() is a great function to easily send emails from your website server. If you have ever used it before in action, or are currently using mail() to send out emails from your website or application, chances are you would find Gmail to be very persistent in attaching a ‘via’ field to the from …

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Aweber, Mailchimp Alternative – Free Email Autoresponder Subscription

I’ve been with Aweber for nearly 2 years and they are good. But I eventually decided that newsletter is not my type of thing — there are people who are making big bucks by building and maintaining a high profile email list, but I’m just not one of them. So I left Aweber and switched …

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How to slow down the frequency Googlebot (search engine crawler) visits your site?

Googlebot is the indexing program of Google that visits your site to fetch the content to determine your search engine rankings. With a popular website, tens of thousands of pages can be a problem in that Googlebot may visit more than you want because it’s expending your precious bandwidth and even crashing your server. Every …

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Use robots.txt Disallow directive to forbid spiders and search engine robots

Just like .htaccess, robots.txt resides at the document root of your domain. It’s a text configuration file containing directives or rules any well behaved web spiders or search engine robots should respect. While you can use .htaccess to forcibly prohibit any visits (including those of human visitors) to a certain part of your site, robots.txt …

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Ask Google for Astronomical Unit, proton mass, planet or sun’s mass and radius

To get the exact Astronomical Unit in kilometers: astronomical unit 1 Astronomical Unit = 149 598 000 kilometers To get Google to return the mass of proton: mass of a proton proton mass = 1.67262158 × 10-27 kilograms To get the mass of any planet in solar system from Google, search by: m_Earth Will yield …

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Google: Restrict matching results by searching only the anchor text, page title, page URL, page text or filetype

For a normal search, Google decides the best results and the web page order by a variety of matching criteria such as in anchor text, page title, page URL. Sometimes, however, you need Google just to search certain part of the entire spectrum of comparison candidate. For example, to search with the matching phrase just …

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Google: Find out the population of a country, state or city – Google Public Data Search

Google identifies data in a lot of fields across the web and population is one of them. To get the local population of a city, a state or a nation, simply type in Google search: population new york population paris population shanghai population CA Or population california population japan What can be more handy. Google …

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Google: Search only a specific site

Sometimes you may only want to pull information and searching results from a specific sites such as nytimes.com, just use the site clause in the searching phrase. For example, to search ‘mortgage loans’ only from the website nytimes.com: mortgage loans site:nytimes.com Google will then only return those web results from the site nytimes.com that’s about …

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Google as an online advanced mathematic calculator for arithmetic calculations and big number scientific computations

Google’s a supercomputer! With Google toolbar, these can be as handy as they get. To get the value of pi: pi // Google spits pi = 3.14159265 Add them up (and don’t worry about overflow): 62385761827351234125236 + 29893847592638741692387568 Calculate the product (same as above): 854736820183475 * 29347568389187 You get the idea. And of course you …

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Google: Get definitions of terms and phrases

Google recognizes HTML definition structures and some of the web’s most prominent definition sites such as wikipedia.org, wordnet.princeton.edu and so on, and it has collected adequate stock of definitions in its database. You can navigate to your favorite online definition resource or you can just search on Google for any words or phrases’ definition: define:RAM …

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Google: Search by sentence fragments with forgotten word replace by asterisk or wildcards

We forget things. There’s a time when we want to search for a full sentence that we read before but can’t remember the full line with the correct wording here and there. To look up its original complete form or the author of it so that we can quote the literature, we have come to …

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Google: Search for similar / synonymous terms and phrases

Google’s getting smart, not only basing its algorithm on existing natural language theories and references but also the feed of billions of searches performed by people around world daily. It learns from you. For example, Google knows PC and laptop are common types of computer, while when you search ‘computer’ alone it would present results …

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Google: What time is it now? Get current local time from Google

Other than just glancing at the clock (at the bottom right if you are using Windows) of your desktop or laptop computer screen, you can try a slightly more geeky way of querying the Internet for the current time. By asking Google. With Google toolbar installed, this would even come more handy than you think. …

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How to know if your site has been penalized by Google for malicious software or suspicious content?

Back when WordPress was pretty young there’s some loopholes that enable hackers to inject unauthorized and dangerous HTML code into your website pages, thus promoting the distribution of malware that damages the end users computer. I was once there and got penalized by Google for one of my sites. However, they are gentle enough to …

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Link building and content development, who is the King?

Just roaming about some forums to feed myself with daily new information when I came across something worth taking a look. http://www.v7n.com/forums/seo-forum/51295-not-what-but-where.html Above is an interesting discussion of whether linking rules over content or the other way around. I’d say it was indeed not something I, as an SEO novice, had expected. John Scott, and …

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What is wrong with ‘Supplemental result’?

Many a new website such as this one, who has just made its way into Google’s database and got indexed a dozen of pages, might have quite a number of pages ‘indexed’ as ‘Supplemental result’. Use “site:yourwebsite.com” as the phrase in Google search, then jump to SERPs buried behind. Do you got any of these? …

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