webmasters | Technology Bloggers

How to find impartial reviews

28th July 2012 1 Reply wburns1102

One of the first things I do before I spend significant money on any product is search the internet for reviews of that product. It might be a physical product such as a computer monitor or a digital product such as a file storage service. One thing I’ve found over the years is that not all product reviews are truthful.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few product review websites that give positive reviews to sub-par products. The root of the problem is that almost every product in the world has an affiliate program that backs it. Webmasters join these affiliate programs and receive compensation for every customer that clicks through and purchases a product.

Whenever there is a financial incentive to sell products, webmasters will be tempted to write positive reviews no matter what. The more sales these webmasters generate, the more money they make. This can make it difficult for us searchers that are in need of legitimate, unbiased product reviews.

EDITOR NOTE: Please note that Technology Bloggers admin team will never give a good review of a bad product, it is unethical and against what we stand for. We will also never enter affiliate schemes which require us to promote a product we don’t believe is value for money – note by Christopher

1. Search For Discussions

The most unbiased product reviews are written by people that have no incentive to sell those products. Two of the most reliable places to find reliable product reviews are discussion forums and the comments section of major websites.

Discussions:

Let’s take online file storage for example. You can search the internet for “online file storage reviews” and find dozens of websites that review online storage services. Some of these websites are dependable, others… not so much.

What you can do instead is run a Google search for reviews, but then narrow the search down to discussions. You can narrow down the results by first running the search and then clicking on the “more” link on the left side of the Google and then the “discussions” link beneath that. See below:

Clicking on this link will change the results to only include discussions related to your term. These tend to be real discussions between real people and are therefore pretty reliable.

Note: Remember that you are likely to see more negative reviews than positive reviews when you search for discussions. People who are happy with their products post fewer comments than people who are angry. Keep this in mind as you read through various discussions.

Comments:

If you’re looking for a physical product, you can often find a good number of comments by visiting large websites such as Amazon.com and BestBuy.com. Visit those websites and search for the exact product model that you’re considering. The chances are you’ll find unbiased comments related to that product.

2. Find Trustworthy Websites

Not all review websites are bad. In fact, some are awesome. They will break down the product in its entirety and give you both the pros and cons. The key is knowing how to identify these websites.

For the most part, you can tell if a website is trustworthy or not by reading through a few reviews. The writing style will tell you a lot. Trustworthy review websites tend to stick to the facts. They will tell you both the pros and cons of any product. They will also give you hard numbers that you can use to compare various products.

Low quality review websites tend to offer more generalities than facts. For example, bad review sites will tell you that a product is “amazing” or “life changing” but they won’t back those claims up with hard numbers or legitimate reasons to like the product.

However, it is worth noting that some websites make it a point to only review products that they deem to be of high quality. They don’t even waste your time writing reviews of products that are inferior. But even in this case, the reviews include hard numbers and are willing to note both the strengths and weaknesses of each product.

Do you make use of Google Webmaster Tools?

27th June 2012 17 Replies Christopher Roberts

Everybody knows that if you want to run a successful website, Google is one of the most important factors to consider.

How Google understands, interprets and indexes your site, is crucial to where your site appears in the SERPs, and how well your site preforms in the SERPs (specifically the Google SERPs) can be a big determinant how much traffic your site receives, and ultimately how popular/successful your site it.

Google Webmaster Tools is a very useful tool which is often underused by site owners, in order to improve the quality and quantity of traffic that your site receives. In this article I will outline some of the key features I find useful, and some of the main reasons why I use Webmaster Tools.

Why Google?

Google has a monopoly on the search market, with more than 90% of all searches being done through Google – according to StatCounter Global Statistics. Therefore the chases are the majority of traffic your site receives through search is from Google. It would be naive to ignore Bing and Yahoo’s search tools available to webmasters, however if you plan on just focusing on one, Google is probably the wisest choice.

Google is renowned for its major updates, with Penguin and Panda just two recent examples. Webmaster Tools can be a great aid in helping you understand how your site has been affected by the changes and why, so you can either keep doing things the way you are, or change your strategy.

See how well you are doing

The most recent Google Webmaster Tools update has divided the dashboard into five easy to understand sections: configuration, how your site is set up (locality, URL preferences, sitelinks etc.); health, how Google crawls your site and any errors, or malware it detects, and the URLs Google is denied from crawling; traffic, how do people find your site, which search queries do you appear for, who links to your content with what keywords and how does Google+ influence your visitors; optimization, tips and tweaks on how you could adjust your content and sitemap to improve your search position; labs, the latest tools Google are trailing that may be of use.

Find crawler errors

One of the main reasons I use Google Webmaster Tools is because it lets me see how Google views and interprets the sites I administer. Therefore should there ever be an error, I am able to understand what Google is struggling to read/crawl, and therefore try to address the issue. Google lets you view and test specific URLs your robots.txt file is blocking Google from indexing and crawling – there is a difference. If you are denying it access to something by mistake you can then rectify this.

Google also lets you see any pages it cannot find. If you run a content management system based site (like one powered by WordPress) it is common that you will change things using the system, and unforeseen errors will be created leading to pages not being found where they either should be, or once were. Google lets you see when it can’t find pages, along with when it is denied from accessing pages, and when inadequate redirects are in place.

If you don’t use Google Webmaster Tools and don’t reduce the problems Google encounters when crawling your site, the likelihood is that your site will suffer in the SERPs – there isn’t much debate about that.

Labs

Google say that:

“Webmaster Tools Labs is a testing ground for experimental features that aren’t quite ready for primetime. They may change, break or disappear at any time.”

however this doesn’t mean that these tools should be ignored, in fact I think they are probably one of the most overlooked resources that Google provides webmasters with.

One of the current ‘Labs’ tools that I think is very useful is the ‘Site performance’ tool. Google may not have generated any information about your site, however if you are one of the lucky ones to be analysed, this can prove a very interesting tool. In Google’s own words:

“This page shows you performance statistics of your site. You can use this information to improve the speed of your site and create a faster experience for your users.”

As page load time becomes more and more important to users and therefore search engines alike, this page is of crucial importance for many people.

Improvements

You might not expect it, but in the ‘Optimization’ section, under the ‘HTML Improvements’ section Google will actually suggest areas where you could improve your code to ensure that your content is the best possible. Common errors Google suggests for correction include missing or duplicate title tags, (in most cases, and SEO no, no) and meta tag issues.

Traffic

The tools in the ‘Traffic’ section are probably the ones I use the most. ‘Search Queries’ gives you a fantastic incite into where your site is appearing in search results in all different locations across the world. If you pair Webmaster Tools with Analytics, this can become a lot more useful.

Links to your site and internal links lets you see your post linked to content, and the keywords that are linking to it. Generally speaking, if you want to rank well for a keyword, you need to have some links (internal and/or external) using that keyword.

The great thing about Google Webmaster Tools is that it integrates with many other Google programs, in order to improve your total control and visibility of your site. AdSense, Analytics, YouTube and AdWords are just some of the other Google products that Webmaster Tools integrates with.

That is just a quick overview of what Webmaster Tools has to offer. If you own a website, I strongly recommend that you explore it further to help improve your sites visibility in the search results, and to enable you to weather algorithm changes (like Penguin and Panda) that little bit better.

Do you use Webmaster Tools? What are your favourite features?

WordPress Security Tips – Safeguard Your Blog

8th November 2011 18 Replies Jonathan

I recently came a cropper to a hacker on a WordPress Blog I was setting up – luckily I’d backed everything up, but what if I hadn’t? Well, I’d have likely lost everything.

Now the hacking was partly my own fault for not putting the right measures in place. This got me wondering about how many other webmasters fail to implement basic security measures that could save them a lot of trouble in the future.

So without further ado lets look at my top WordPress security tips. I’ll also point you in the direction of a few WordPress Security plugins that I’ve discovered that do a great job of adding that second line of defence.

Don’t Use Admin as a Username

Let’s start simple – the default username in WordPress is “admin” – don’t use this! It’s the first username that all hackers will try, and allows them to a launch a brute force attack, which simply means a bot that tries multiple attempts at guessing your password.

This is probably one of the most common types of hacks out there and it still works. As a second line of defence I’d install a handy plugin called Login Lockdown, basically it records IP addresses of all failed login attempts, if a lot are cropping up in a short time frame it bans all IP addresses from that range. It also goes without saying use a strong password.

Change the WordPress Table Prefix

This involves changing another WordPress default that makes it harder for a hacker to attack your blog via a SQL injection. The table prefixes are defaulted to wp_ – they are easy to change in your wp-config.php file prior to installation.

However, if you have a site that’s already installed and you’re trying to secure that – I recommend using the WP Security Scan Plugin to do so. Remember to take a backup before you change anything – it’s good practice! The WP security scan has a number of cool features (such as removing the WordPress version in the source code) so it’s definitely worth installing.

Don’t forget to use secret keys

I have a friend who works for a hosting company – and he revealed it’s amazing how many people forget to use secret keys. Now if you’ve installed WordPress via Fantastico or some other quick install tool that your hosting company provides they should automatically include these.

The hashing salt keys make your password even more secure. To make sure you’re using them – visit https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1 to generate your keys, and then put them in your wp-config.php file – you’ll spot them easily.

Secure your wp-admin folder

I missed this out when installing my blog and it’s another security tip that many webmasters fail to implement. The wp-admin folder is very important and if a hacker gets into that then they’re going to cause some serious damage.

This involves using a .htaccess file to prevent access. You have two options here – you can prevent access by only allowing certain IP addresses (which isn’t ideal if you have a dynamic IP or work form multiple locations or on the move) or you can use a .htpassword file.

To use the IP address method simply create an .htaccess file and paste in the code below (switching the xxx for your IP address) then upload it to your wp-admin folder:
AuthUserFile /dev/null AuthGroupFile /dev/null AuthName "Access Control" AuthType Basic order deny,allow deny from all #IP address to Whitelist allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
You can add multiple lines of IP addresses if you want. If your site has multiple writers posting – like Technology Bloggers or accepts guest posts then it’s unlikely this method is viable.

If that’s the case use the .htpassword method – there’s a useful tutorial here: htaccess Files and WordPress Security.

Keep WordPress up to date

This seems obvious but a lot of people forget to upgrade their WordPress. Maybe through fear of breaking something or perhaps just laziness.

The majority of WordPress upgrades are made to increase security and patch up known vulnerabilities. So backup your install and upgrade to the latest version when they’re available.

Keep regular backups

Sometimes no matter how many security measures you have in place, a hacker it still able to get through, maybe through a plugin that contains an exploit.

In this case, you have to take regular backups as the last line of defence. Perhaps through the use of a plugin, or via your host. You can schedule them to run on a daily basis and then be emailed to you.

Having to restore a backup is probably a worse case scenario, but believe me, it’s far easier than having to re-setup your entire blog and redo blog posts from Googles cached pages.

What are your favourite WordPress security methods? Are there some great plugins that I’ve missed? Please let me know in the comments section below.

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How to find impartial reviews

1. Search For Discussions

2. Find Trustworthy Websites