Anyone can alter Google’s search results. This article will explain how.

In 2013 Google moved to what it called the Internet of things. The move was a change in policy, which announced Google’s use of three sources of information to obtain knowledge for search results. The new sources were Wikipedia, CIA world Fact Book and Freebase. Wikipedia appears to be the dominating source. Google’s dependence upon Wikipedia cause this accident to happen.

House Majority leader Kevin McCarthy

(R-Calif.) on Thursday went after Google for displaying “Nazism” as one of the ideologies of the California Republican Party.

A search on the site for “California Republican Party” apparently returned with a sidebar result listing Nazism as an ideology alongside “conservativism” and “market liberalism.”

McCarthy noted the sidebar in a tweet at the company.

“Dear @Google, This is a disgrace #StopTheBias,” McCarthy tweeted, accompanied by a screenshot showing Nazism listed among the California Republican party’s ideologies alongside values like “conservatism” and “market liberalism.”

Ideologies associated with the California GOP are no longer visible in the sidebar on Google’s results page when users search “California Republican Party” or in similar searches.

The sidebar, which Google calls the “knowledge panel,” is often populated by content from Wikipedia; however, no mention of Nazism is visible of the California GOP’s page there. The party’s Wikipedia page’s edit history, though, shows that “Nazism” was briefly added to the page on Thursday.

Google blamed the result as online “vandalism” from outside the company that slipped through its safeguards.

“This was not the result of any manual change by anyone at Google. We don’t bias our search results toward any political party. Sometimes people vandalize public information sources, including Wikipedia, which can impact the information that appears in search,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.

“We have systems in place that catch vandalism before it impacts search results, but occasionally errors get through, and that’s what happened here. This would have been fixed systematically once we processed the removal from Wikipedia, but when we noticed the vandalism we worked quickly to accelerate this process to remove the erroneous information,” they added.

The mistake comes in advance of California’s statewide primary elections, which are set for next week.

Other conservatives expressed outrage over Nazism appearing, including President Trump.

Anyone can post a Wikipedia article. ABCO Technology’s web development program will teach you how. If you are interested in learning advanced website techniques for promoting your business online, call our campus. You can reach us by telephone between 9 A.M and 6 P. M Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.

Email all questions to :- info@abcotechnology.edu

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Create a smart phone app, change the world

Would you like to learn and possess the technical skills to make this world a better place? ABCO Technology will teach you the computer programming skills to do just that. This article is the story about Brigitte, a cyber application that was created to prevent school bullying and other offenses against students.

A World Without Bullying: Brigitte’s Story

Some people call me a “bully buster.” As a teen I did my own research about bullying, I wrote a survival guide, and I was bullied myself. I believe there’s a lot we can do to stop bullying!

To share that hope, I often visit elementary, middle, and high schools. If I came to your school, here’s what I’d do in the all-school assembly: I’d ask everybody to close their eyes for a minute.

Then I’d ask you to think of a time when you may have been bullied. Perhaps somebody said something mean to you or gossiped about you. Somebody may have punched or kicked you; the point being, an individual or a group of people did something to you that made you feel bad about yourself.

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With everyone’s eyes closed, how many hands do you think would reach into the air? Ten, 20, maybe 40, tops? The answer is … at least ¾ of the students raise their hands — 3 out of every 4 kids admit to going through similar experiences of bullying!

You’re Not Alone

If you have been a victim of bullying, you probably understand how lonely it feels. You might have even thought to yourself, “There can’t be anyone else in my whole school going through this type of torment!” But, as my experiment shows, it’s simply not true.

I know that when I was in eighth grade, I sure felt that way. I have always been rather tall — I’m like 5 feet and 11 inches tall now — and I’m also quite the science nerd. I went to an all-girls middle school so things were pretty catty, especially to someone who was a little different from the rest of the pack. I went through a lot of shunning and name calling in eighth grade and I used to spend our lunch and break times in the bathroom, many times crying.

How It Felt

I remember some of my best friends turned against me and I just felt completely worthless. I convinced myself there was something about me that made all of these people turn against me and ostracize me! I feel really lucky that I have such a great family to help me rise above it and channel all of my pain into a project that will be able to help other kids survive similar or worse experiences.

I started doing research with tweens and teens to figure out just how many people actually are suffering from bullying. That plus my personal experience led me to write a book called “Dorie Witt’s Guide to Surviving Bullies.” It’s a made-up story about very real happenings and feelings.

I began my process by creating a questionnaire and online survey. I administered my questionnaire in various focus groups in which students came together and talked about bullying. You can find some of the questions and answers at the beginning of each chapter of my book! In my opinion, it shows that bullying is a universal issue that kids like you and me across America are dealing with every day!

So, I’ve gone from being bullied to helping other people get through it. When I talk to school groups, I close the exercise by asking everybody to close their eyes and think about a time when the situation was reversed. Was there a time when you were the one who wasn’t being too nice? (p.s. In case you were wondering, my hand goes up every time for this question, too.)

But it’s not just my hand. Again, about 3 in 4 people — most of the audience — say they have sometimes been the bully!

So I always ask, “If we know bullying can hurt so much, why do we sometimes turn around and become a bully ourselves?”

What Counts as Bullying?

When you think of bullying, you have to consider all four types: physical, verbal, nonverbal, and cyberbullying (using computer or cell phone). I think a common misconception we have is that physical bullying is the worst, when really all four types of bullying can be equally painful. Verbal bullying (like using words such as “gay” as insults or speaking badly about another) or nonverbal bullying (such as ignoring another person) can have long-lasting effects.

As you get older, it’s also good to know that bullying can be different as you go from elementary school to middle school and from middle school to high school. From my experience, in elementary school, much of the bullying happens on the playground and involves physical bullying and friendship troubles. You do, of course, find a lot of verbal bullying too.

In middle school, bullying gets amped up. I saw a lot of gossiping and social exclusion among girls, many times much physical bullying among boys and also verbal and cyberbullying among both boys and girls. By high school, the problem of bullying gets a little better because we’ve matured, but it doesn’t just go away.

From what I’ve seen, bullying in high school can be more aggressive. The word choices may change (harsher words and curse words). Also, teens communicate more freely by text or online. Because some kids are just physically big, that can make a bully scarier. In addition, many high schools are quite large and it can be difficult for teachers to be everywhere to stop the bullying if they see it.

What YOU Can Do

If you see bullying happen, then, as I explain in my book, you are a not-so-innocent bystander. Bystanders are so important and they have potential to make such a big difference!

Bullies like feeling popular and that they have the support of their friends and classmates in general. If you see someone bullied, you can help take that feeling of power away from the bully. How? The hardest thing to do is step in on the victim’s behalf, especially when you are the only one standing up. It’s a great thing to do, but here are some alternatives that also can be very helpful:

1.Talk to the victim afterward. Ask if the person is OK, tell them you think what happened was wrong, and offer to help them contact a grownup.

2.Use “group correction.” This is when a bunch of people agree that they’re going to stand up to a bully. You can just calmly tell the bully to stop and leave the person alone. This works best when students have been trained in how it works, which is why schools need to educate kids about this.

3.If you can’t do 1 or 2, at least tell a grownup (teacher, coach, parent) about what you saw.

Adults really can actually help, even though I get it, we don’t always want to admit this can be the case. But sometimes problems are way out of our hands and we need to get somebody else involved who can make the situation better. (p.s. The bully never has to know you were the one who got an adult involved and so you don’t have to worry about being targeted next.)

I understand it is very daunting to stand beside the victim instead of behind the bully. But think about it: Wouldn’t you want somebody to do the same for you?

It is important that adults help us with stopping bullying, but we also need to take some responsibility ourselves! It doesn’t even matter if the victim isn’t your best friend in the world. As I say in every single school I speak in, “You don’t have to like every single person, but you do need to respect them.”

The Last Straw

We all reach a point when we say, “Enough is enough! I can’t take this anymore!” By definition, bullying is a repetitive action, meaning it happens over and over again. It’s this repetitiveness of bullying, which I like to call the “daily grind,” that can really affect people so much!

Many times we can’t tell what the last straw is for somebody and we don’t always know how our words and actions may affect another person! One small insult or sarcastic comment gone awry could send someone over the edge, while a smile or other gesture of concern and kindness could save them from reaching that point.

There’s Hope, Really!

So I’ve talked a lot about the bad stuff. But there’s good, too!

I don’t think people are born “bad” and wanting to hurt other people. I think we can make a difference if we start teaching kids from a young age. We can’t just tell them bullying is wrong. We have to tell them why.

Everywhere around us we see so much violence whether it be on the television or in video games that I feel we have become desensitized to pain. People need to be reminded that violence is not actually commonplace. In the real world, when people are violent, it has big consequences.

Kids, parents, and schools need more resources to teach about bullying. Where I live in Massachusetts, I helped pass one of the most comprehensive anti-bullying laws in the nation. Because of this legislation, all schools must have programs in place for anti-bullying as well as mandatory reporting by teachers. Schools cannot choose to ignore a bullying problem, they must act.

Ending bullying is really a community effort and the more we spread the word, the harder and harder it will be for people to simply put it aside as “kids being kids.” I guess some people call me an idealist for my optimistic hope for the future, but I think we need to stop focusing on the negative and start thinking about the positive. If we live our lives in goodness, we will be able to share that with others around us!

I realize that I may not be able to end bullying forever. But I believe I can help spread support and resources across the country — and maybe the world someday. Then kids just like me know that they are never alone when facing bulling. There will always be somebody, somewhere willing to listen and to help!

This article defines the need. Here is an App. Meet Brigitte. This app was built by a group of millennials who wanted to end bullying of all types by making the process of reporting very simple. Brigitte is spreading throughout the east Coast and schools all over the country are adapting this application for student protection.

If you are interested in solving world problems like bullying, it’s time to think about creating a powerful application.

ABCO Technology’s computer programming program will do just that. Call our campus between 9 A.m. and 6 P.m. Monday through Friday. Call today at: (310) 216-3067.

Email all questions to info@abcotechnology.edu

Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.

ABCO Technology is located at:

11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588

Los Angeles, Ca. 90304

 

Create that new successful application today!

Google updates their snipetts

On December 1st, 2017, Barry Schwartz reported on Search Engine Land that Google had officially confirmed a change to how it displays text snippets in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Barry wrote,

“A Google spokesperson told us: ‘We recently made a change to provide more descriptive and useful snippets, to help people better understand how pages are relevant to their searches. This resulted in snippets becoming slightly longer, on average.’”

These snippets are the blurbs of text displayed in Google’s SERPs along with the clickable blue text and the page URL.

A quick Google search corroborates this – let’s use the query “how were the pyramids built” as an example:

In the answer to the general query, you can see that where Google would previously display a snippet approximately 150-165 characters long including spaces (give or take, you can see it varies now and it varied before Google made the change too), but now they’re much longer.

The text snippet Google shows in the SERP is *supposed* to be (more on this later) the contents of the meta description tag in the HTML of the page – let’s check each of these page’s actual meta descriptions and their lengths.

Here they are, in the same order as above:

◾There are no photographs of the pyramid being built, and the engineers didn’t leave detailed blueprints. [Length:109]

◾The ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids may have been able to move massive stones by transporting them over wet sand. [Length:122]

◾No meta description specified in the HTML

◾No meta description specified in the HTML

◾Here’s everything you need to know about the incredible Egyptian pyramids. [Length:74]

Two things jump out right away.

1.Google is not displaying the page’s actual meta description as the SERP snippet for these specific listings for this specific query, even when the meta description is specified in the HTML, but instead is being pulled directly from the text that appears at or near the top of the page.

2.The length of the snippets is longer than the length that Google previously displayed, congruent with Google’s confirmation that they’re showing longer SERP snippets.

Here’s how that breaks down for the above query, again in the same order as the SERP listing screenshot above:

◾The first sentence of the text is used as the SERP snippet

◾The first sentence of the text is used as the SERP snippet

◾The H1 page headline, followed by ellipses ( … ), followed by the second, third, and fourth sentences on the page in the first paragraph (skipping the first sentence in the first paragraph) are used as the SERP snippet.

◾The first and second sentences, and part of the third, are used as the SERP snippet

◾The first and second sentences, the image ALT attribute (or the image caption, they’re both the same text), plus text via HTML code associated with the image, Checking a number of other queries returned similar observations about what Google is using as the SERP snippet, but note that some SERP snippets were indeed taken from the actual meta description.

For example, in the SERP for a query for musician “Todd Rundgren”, this SERP snippet is obviously taken directly from the meta description:

For many other queries I performed, both commercial and non-commercial in query intent, it turned up a mix of SERP snippet sources – primarily either text on the page or the actual meta description specified in the HTML, and in some cases via image ALT attribute, and occasionally from some other bit of code in the HTML.

On mobile devices, the SERP snippets were very similar, in many cases the same as on desktop.

The SERP orders were slightly different, so yes, there’s going to be ranking variations based on various factors (it’s well known that Google can and will alter the SERPs you see based on your search history, geo-location, query type, your previous interaction with SERPs, etc.).

However, the overall scheme of the SERP snippets remained constant – text was taken mostly from either the first paragraph of the page, or the meta description, and in some cases the image ALT attribute, and occasionally from other text in the HTML code.

Dr. Pete Meyers over at Moz conducted research late last year on 89,909 page-one organic results.

Pete noted that the average SERP snippet was 215 characters long with the median length at 186, and he was quick to point out that, “big numbers are potentially skewing the average. On the other hand, some snippets are very short because their Meta Descriptions are very short”.

Pete also noted no significant differences between desktop and mobile snippet lengths, sometimes seeing mobile snippets longer than desktop snippets.

For sure the actual SERP snippet you see, and the length, will vary by query type.

What is going on here?

Google is trying to satisfy searchers.

Yes, traditionally the idea was that Google would pull the SERP snippet from the meta description, but for years now Google has been using whatever text its algorithms determine makes the most sense based on the user’s query.

Not all sites – for example, Wikipedia and another we saw above – don’t even make use of the meta description tag in the HTML of their pages, so what’s a poor search engine to do in that case?

Similarly, what if the meta description is badly written, or spammy-sounding with lots of keyword stuffing, or doesn’t well-reflect the page’s theme and topic(s)?

So that’s what’s going on here – Google evolved over time to use whatever it deems makes the most sense to a user performing a certain query.

Wait: What the heck is a meta description, anyway?

Meta descriptions are HTML code that Google understands, and that is meant to provide a synopsis of the page.

Here’s an example:

This code goes between the tags of the HTML and is not displayed on the visible content that a user would see.

Do meta descriptions impact SEO?

Meta descriptions will not impact rankings.

But, if Google does use a page’s meta description as the SERP snippet, that can impact click-through from the SERP.

That’s because a well-written meta description that is compelling, relevant to the page, and relevant to the query or queries for which the page is ranking, can impact organic traffic.

And that can have a downstream impact on conversions (the desired actions you want website visitors to take – fill out a form, buy something, and so on).

Poorly written meta descriptions, if used as the SERP snippet, can have the opposite effect and discourage the user to click through to your page, and instead go to your competitors.

So, what should be your strategy now that Google has increased the SERP snippet length?

In summary, you could do any of the following:

◾Do nothing at all

◾Rewrite longer meta descriptions for all your pages

◾Rewrite longer meta descriptions for some of your pages (e.g. your top ten or twenty organic landing pages, or some pages you determine have low click-thru rates)

◾Delete all your meta descriptions

◾Audit your site’s content to ensure that the first text on your page is compelling, uses keywords congruent with how someone would search for your content, ensure the first paragraph contains at least 300-350 characters of text including spaces, and front-load the first 150 characters in case google changes back to shorter snippets in the future.

What you decide to do (or not do) will at least in part hinge upon resources you have available to make changes.

Don’t take a “set it and forget it” attitude with your website’s content and your meta descriptions. It’s common for businesses to put in a fair amount of work into their website, then just let it go stale.

A good recommendation here would be to cycle through this stuff on a regular basis – think quarterly or a couple times per year. Once per year at a minimum.

Here’s what I recommend

First, it should be obvious that your page’s textual content is for humans to consume, and that should always be your primary consideration.

You’ve heard the phrase “dance like no one’s watching” – well, write like Google doesn’t exist. But Google does exist, and their mission is satisfied users (so that people continue to use their service and click on ads) – Google is chasing satisfied users and so should you.

The refrain of “write great content” has been used ad nauseum. The only reason I’m mentioning the whole “write for your users” thing is simply because often people focus primarily on “how do I SEO my pages?” instead of “what’s good for my users?”.

Okay, with that out of the way and forefront in your mind, here’s what I recommend. Adjust this according to your specific needs – your industry, your users – don’t just take this as a cookie-cutter approach.

And, do this on the time frame that makes the most sense and works for you and the resources you have available to you to make changes to your site. If you haven’t looked at your page content and meta descriptions in a year or more, then this is a higher priority for you than if you refreshed all that 60 days ago.

Meta descriptions

◾Make them about 300-320 characters long, including spaces

◾Make the meta description super-relevant to the page text

◾Front-load the first 150-165 characters with your most-compelling text – compelling to your users who might see the text as a SERP snippet (just in case Google decides to shorten them again)

◾Use a call to action if applicable, but don’t be a used car salesman about it – and as appropriate, use action-oriented language

◾Remember WIIFM – what’s in it for me – as applicable, focus on benefits, not features

◾Don’t be deceptive or make promises your page content can’t keep

Keep in mind that Google may not use your meta description as the SERP snippet and may instead use content from your page, likely from the first paragraph.

With that in mind:

Review & refresh your content

◾Make sure the H1 page headline is super-relevant to the page’s topic

◾Include an image (as applicable) that is super-relevant to the page (not one of those dumb, tangentially-related stock images) and craft an excellent and page-relevant image ALT attribute

◾Ensure that your opening paragraph is enticing and practically forces the reader to keep reading – that way if it’s the text used as the SERP snippet, that will capture people’s attention.

Summary

My summary is that if you haven’t already, please go back and read the whole article – I promise you it’ll be worth it. But I will add one more piece here and that is that ostensibly the type of content you’re creating is going to dictate how you configure your meta descriptions, H1 page headlines, and especially the opening text on the page.

In some cases, it makes sense to use the “how to feed a (Google) hummingbird” technique where you pose the topic’s question and answer it concisely at the top of the page, then defend that position, journalism style, in the rest of the text under that.

Similarly, you may be shooting for a SERP featured snippet and voice-assistant-device answer using bullet points or a numbered list at the top of your content page.

The point is, the guidelines and recommendations I’ve provided for you here are not a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach to your meta descriptions and your content. SEO experience, switching your brain into the on position, and a willingness to test, observe, and adjust are all mandatory to achieve the best results.

ABCO Technology teaches a comprehensive class for web development. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.

Email your questions to info@abcotechnology.edu

Financial aid is available to all students who can qualify for funding.

ABCO Technology is located at :

11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588
Los Angeles, Ca. 90304

 

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How to make a Google proof website

Any SEO or webmaster who has ever had a website affected by a Google algorithm change – or feared being affected by one – has probably wished that they could find a way to make their website “algorithm-proof”.

Still, surely there’s no such thing as a website that’s never impacted by Google algorithms, right? As long as your site is indexed by Google, it’s at the mercy of the algorithms that Google uses to determine website ranking, all the more so if you happen to rely heavily on organic search traffic for your business.

The art – or science – of search engine optimization is about determining as best you can what those algorithms are looking for, and giving it to them.

Yet one website believes it has found the formula for making its content “Google algorithm-proof”. Ranker is a website made up of dynamic, crowdsourced lists that users can vote on, about everything from pop culture to geography, history to sports, celebrities to science.

And according to its CEO, Clark Benson, Ranker has never suffered a negative effect from a Google algorithm change, growing its traffic steadily without interruption over the course of eight and a half years.

ABCO Technology caught up with Benson to find out Ranker’s secret to success, and whether there is a formula for creating an algorithm-proof website.

Rankings, not review sites

So what is Ranker, exactly?

“Ranker’s primary reason for being is to crowdsource anything that makes sense to rank,” says Benson. “Any topic that people are really interested in.

The unique angle that we’ve pursued is that instead of having this being one 23-year-old blogger’s opinion of the best new TV shows of the year, or whatever it happens to be, we would have a dynamic list that visitors could vote on, potentially add items to, and re-rank.

Voting on a list of ‘Historical events you most want to go back and see’ on Ranker

Lists have been a time-honored draw for magazines and other print media over the years, but it was when the internet came along that they really exploded – spawning dozens of list-oriented viral websites and the much-mocked listicle, which became a staple of online journalism. However, Benson – a self-described “lifelong list nerd” – was frustrated by the fact that these lists only ever represented one person’s opinion.

In a similar vein, he found review websites unhelpful, as user-generated reviews represented a single person’s subjective opinion in a format that wasn’t conducive to making a decision.

“Part of the reason to build Ranker was my frustration with review sites, because when I’m looking for an answer to something, like which TV show to watch, I don’t want to read a lot of text reviews.

“I also feel that in typical five-star rating systems, everything tends to be clustered around three and a half to four stars, so you don’t get any true granularity on what is best.”

In a world increasingly “cluttered with choices”, therefore, Benson was convinced that rankings were “the simplest way to dissect a choice in a category, without losing the credibility of the answer”. And so he built Ranker as a website where the wisdom of the crowd could determine the ultimate ranking for any list of items, on any topic.

The secret to Ranker’s SEO success: Content freshness

Since Ranker’s launch in 2009, the site has amassed more than 100,000 rankings across dozens of broad categories, encompassing almost any topic that people could have a passion for.

When the website first launched, however, it had very few resources, and Benson explains that he had to learn SEO from scratch in order to give the website a strong foundation.

Luckily, earning traffic was never a problem for the site, because the type of content published on Ranker was uniquely suited to catering to Google’s algorithms.

“We’ve never been hit by any algorithm changes – we’ve always grown our organic search traffic year over year over year, steadily, for the eight and a half years we’ve been live.

“You never exactly know what works in SEO, because Google doesn’t tell you what works, but I’ve always believed that the best intelligence on what to do comes from the public statements Google makes – their best practices.

“And one of the key factors that Google says is in their index is freshness of content. Content has a lifespan. In our case, because our rankings are dynamic and always changing – people are adding things to them, voting things up and down – this makes for perpetually fresh content.

“We have a lot of content that is six, seven, even eight years old that is still doing as well as it was years ago, and in some cases it’s even growing in traffic.”

One of Ranker’s most evergreen pieces of content is a list ranking the ‘Best Movies of All Time’ – which is more than 5,000 items long.

“Obviously that’s a topic that there’s a lot of passion and a lot of competition for [in search rankings]. And in the last few years, we’ve been on the top three or so results on Google for that term.

“We’ve watched that page just grow in rankings over the span of seven or eight years. I can only guess it’s because the page is always changing.”

User-curated content

At the time of writing this article, Ranker’s front page is currently spotlighting a list of best-dressed celebs at the 2018 Oscars, a best TV episode names ranking, and a list of possible game-changing deep space observations to be made by the Webb Telescope.

Anyone can add an item to a list on Ranker, although Ranker’s content is not purely user-generated. Ranker has an editorial team which is made up of people who, in Benson’s words, “have a mind for cataloging things” rather than people who specialize in writing a lot of prose.

Lists are typically started off by one of Ranker’s editors, and when a user wants to add a new item to a list, it’s cross-referenced with Ranker’s database, a huge data set made up of more than 28 million people, places and things. If the item isn’t found in the database, it’s added to a moderation queue.

Rather than UGC (user-generated content), therefore, Benson thinks of Ranker’s lists as something he terms UCC – user-curated content.

How did Ranker build such a huge data set? Beginning in 2007, a company called Metaweb ran an open source, collaborative knowledge base called Freebase, which contained data harvested from sources such as Wikipedia, the Notable Names Database, Fashion Model Directory and MusicBrainz, along with user-submitted wiki contributions.

This knowledge base made up a large part of Ranker’s data set. What’s interesting is that Freebase was later acquired by none other than Google – and is the foundation of Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Additionally, not every list on Ranker is crowdsourced or voted on. Some lists, such as Everyone Who Has Been Fired Or Resigned From The Trump Administration So Far, don’t make sense to have users voting on them, but are kept fresh with the addition of new items whenever the topic is in the news.

Can other websites do ‘Ranker SEO’?

Benson acknowledges that Ranker’s setup is fairly unique, and so it isn’t necessarily possible to emulate its success with SEO by trying to do the same thing – unless you just happen to have your own crowdsourced, user-curated list website, of course.

With that said, there are still some practical lessons that website owners, particularly publishers, can take away from Ranker’s success and apply to their own SEO strategy.

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First and foremost: content freshness is king

As you’ve no doubt gathered by now, the freshness of Ranker’s content is probably the biggest contributing factor to its success in search. “We’re convinced that the dynamism of our content is what really lets it just grow and grow and grow in search traffic,” says Benson.

“While our approach is somewhat unique to the way Ranker works – we have a bespoke CMS that makes lists out of datasets – I’m positive that there are other ways to apply this kind of thinking.”

To put content freshness front and center of your content marketing efforts, make sure that your publication or blog is well-stocked with evergreen content. For those articles or posts that are more time-sensitive, you can still publish a refreshed version, or look for an up-to-date spin to put on the old content, for example linking it in with current events.

According to research by Moz, other factors which can contribute to a positive “freshness” score for your website as a whole include:

◾Changes made to the core content of your website (as opposed to peripheral elements like JavaScript, comments, ads and navigation)

◾Frequency of new page creation

◾Rate of new link growth (an increase in links pointing back to your site or page)

◾Links from other fresh websites, which have the ability to transfer their “fresh value” (Justin Briggs dubbed this quality “FreshRank” in 2011)

Internal links trump external links

Other than content freshness, Benson attributes Ranker’s SEO success to one other big factor: its intricate network of internal links, which Benson believes are far more valuable to SEO than an impressive backlink profile.

“I think a lot of people who are new to SEO focus too much on trying to get outside links, versus optimizing their own internal infrastructure,” he says.

“We have a very broad site with millions of pages – not just lists, but a page for every item that’s included in a list on Ranker, showing you where it ranks on all of our different lists.”

The Ranker page for Leonardo da Vinci

“We made the mistake early on of leaving all of those pages open to Google’s index, and we learned over time that some of them are very thin, content-wise. New links are added to them, but they’re thin pages. So we quickly adopted a strategy of noindexing the thinner pages on our site – so they have utility, but they don’t necessarily have search utility.

“We’ve really focused a lot on internal link structure and on interlinking our content in a very intelligent and vertical-driven, page-optimized way. We’ve put a lot of engineering and product resources towards building a robust internal link structure that can also change as pages become more valuable in search.

“Outside links are very important, but they’re increasingly difficult to get. If you have good, unique content, and a strong internal link structure, I think you can get by with far fewer backlinks. Ranker has a lot of backlinks – we’re a big site – but we’ve never tactically gone out to build backlinks. And we get more than 30 million organic search visits per month.”

Think about how your content will appear to searchers

Benson emphasizes the importance of paying attention to basic on-site optimization like crafting good title tags and meta descriptions. These elements dictate how your website appears in the SERP to users when they search, and so will form the first impressions of your content.

“When it comes to creating new content, our editorial team definitely focuses on best practice with regards to title tags and meta descriptions – the basic stuff still applies,” says Benson. “Anyone doing editorial still needs to think about your content from the lens of the searcher.”

Optimizing for Google’s rich results and using Schema.org markup are additional ways that website owners can make sure that their website listing appears as attractive as possible to a searcher encountering it on the SERP.

The future is psychographic

What plans does Benson have for the future of Ranker? Up to now, the site has been concentrating mostly on search and social distribution (Facebook is another big source of organic traffic), but are now beginning to focus more on ad sales, media tie-ins and getting the brand name out there.

“We’re always focused on growing traffic, and we’re certainly investing a lot more into our brand,” says Benson.

However, the most exciting future project for Ranker is something called Ranker Insights – a psychographic interests platform which makes use of Ranker’s thousands of data points on what people are interested in and like to vote on.

Drawing connections between people’s interests on Ranker Insights

Big data on anything is extremely valuable in marketing, but big data on the things that people like is near enough invaluable – particularly in a world where psychographics (classifying people according to their attitudes, aspirations, and other aspects of their psychology) are increasingly more important than demographics (classifying people according to things like age, gender, race and nationality).

“The marketing world in general is steering a lot more towards psychographics rather than demographics,” says Benson. “Netflix doesn’t care what country you live in – when it comes to marketing or even recommendations, all they care about is your tastes. They stopped using demographics entirely years ago – and clearly they’re doing something right.

“We feel that in an interconnected world, what you like says at least as much about you as your age or your gender.

“And in a world where what you like tells people how to market to you and how to reach you, we have very, very granular, deep data on that front. There’s a lot of different applications for insights like this in a very data-driven world.”

Rebecca Sentance is the Deputy Editor of Search Engine Watch.

“The end result is a very wisdom-of-crowds-based answer which is always changing and dynamically moving along as tastes change, and as more people vote on things.”

Voting on a list of ‘Historical events you most want to go back and see’ on Ranker

Lists have been a time-honored draw for magazines and other print media over the years, but it was when the internet came along that they really exploded – spawning dozens of list-oriented viral websites and the much-mocked listicle, which became a staple of online journalism. However, Benson – a self-described “lifelong list nerd” – was frustrated by the fact that these lists only ever represented one person’s opinion.

In a similar vein, he found review websites unhelpful, as user-generated reviews represented a single person’s subjective opinion in a format that wasn’t conducive to making a decision.

“Part of the reason to build Ranker was my frustration with review sites, because when I’m looking for an answer to something, like which TV show to watch, I don’t want to read a lot of text reviews.

“I also feel that in typical five-star rating systems, everything tends to be clustered around three and a half to four stars, so you don’t get any true granularity on what is best.”

In a world increasingly “cluttered with choices”, therefore, Benson was convinced that rankings were “the simplest way to dissect a choice in a category, without losing the credibility of the answer”. And so he built Ranker as a website where the wisdom of the crowd could determine the ultimate ranking for any list of items, on any topic.

ABCO Teaches classes regarding building crowd funding websites in our web development program. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067

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Five proven tips for optimizing YouTube Videos

Just how powerful is YouTube in 2018? According to a solid infographic, which was released earlier in 2017, there are some highly incredible statistics:

◾YouTube is available and used in 88 countries around the world

◾It is the second largest social media platform with over 1.5 billion monthly users, second only to Facebook (2 billion) and more than twice the number of Instagram (700 million)

◾500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute

◾Mobile viewing makes up half of the site’s streaming.

In other words, YouTube is POWERFUL. Not only has it been steadily growing since its initial launch in 2005, it has become the single biggest and most important video service on the web. While there are others that have come in its wake, none have reached the same level of popularity.

With that fact in mind, it is no wonder that so many people are looking to boost the effectiveness of their content on the platform. However, with so much use comes other struggles, like being seen in the crowd. If 720,000 hours are uploaded in a day, you have to do everything known to marketers to stand out and be noticed.

Here are five optimization tips for your YouTube channel and videos that will help you to start doing better in search, get recommended, and gain more traction.

Find the sweet spot with your video title length

There are several things to consider when coming up with the video title:

◾How engaging and catchy it is for the eye

◾How many important keywords you use within your title (those keywords are going to help you rank that video in both YouTube and Google search)

◾Which part of the title is immediately visible when people search YouTube or see your video thumbnail in YouTube-generated related videos.

YouTube suggested

Taking all of the above in the account, the sweet spot for your video title is going to be around 100 characters. That is enough to give a unique, descriptive title while still showing in search without a cut off.

Make sure your title not only describes what is happening in the video and contains key phrases you have already researched, but it is also attention grabbing enough that people will want to click on it.

When crafting a video title, consider including the following:

◾Include the important names and entities (your interviewee, event name, branded hashtag, featured brand name, etc.)

◾Location (especially if you are targeting a specific locale)

◾Your important keyword you’d like the video to show up for.

To distinguish that important keyword, use keyword clustering technique that allows you to see core phrases behind obscure keyword variations. My own trick is to use Serpstat’s clustering feature that allows you to group keywords by how many identical URLs rank in Google for each specific query:

Clustering

You can read more on how Serpstat clustering feature works in this guide.

You may also to match each keyword group to appropriate keyword intent to make sure your future video content will cover the immediate need and prompt engagement.

Make your descriptions longer

Video and channel descriptions are another valuable resource for drawing traffic to all of your content. YouTube allows up to 5,000 characters, which is between 500 and 700 words.

The rule of thumb is obvious: The more original content you have below your video, the easier for search engines it is to understand what your video is about and what search queries to rank it for.

Not every description needs to be that long, but aiming for around 2,000 characters for videos and 3,000 for channels is a good place because it gives you the space necessary to optimize your keyword use and give some context to viewers. More is fine, but make sure you aren’t filling it with a lot of pointless stuff.

Make the first 150 characters of a description count

Of the words you write, the first 150 characters are the most important. That is because YouTube cuts it off with a (More) tag after the point, so the viewer has to specifically opt in to reading the rest. Not all of them are going to do that.

You should make sure those first characters tell the viewer what they really need to know in order to connect with what they are reading. From there you can focus more on keywords and the rest of the description, as it will still count the same towards searches.

It is also a great place to link out to other channels, your website, etc. Make sure your call to action (CTA) is in the first words, such as liking, subscribing, learning more, etc.

Have a good, high-resolution thumbnail

Thumbnails are pretty standard for monetized video channels at this point. You have probably noticed that they follow a certain pattern: silly face, bright colors, something odd in the background, over the top. Sure, it seems annoying. But they follow the formula because the formula works.

Now, you don’t have to do the same thing. You just want to make sure that you have an eye catching, visually stimulating thumbnail in the recommended 1280 x 720 size. There are a few generators out there to help you make one, but my thumbnail maker of choice right now is Adobe Spark.

Adobe Spark

Keep in mind that you want a standard format across all of your thumbnails. For instance, if you do your face on one then you should do them on all. If you use some kind of animation or logo, use that.

You want to be immediately recognizable to anyone who follows your channel right from the suggested videos sidebar, or the search results. If you have old videos, go back and upload thumbnails to each one to start getting some better click results.

Furthermore, make sure your thumbnails are readable: Viewers should be able to easily see what it is about at a glance when seeing it in the right-hand column of the suggested videos or on a small mobile device.

Utilize playlists – I mean it!

Playlists are incredibly helpful. First of all, they help you group together certain videos right on your channel. So let’s say you did a series on how to increase your YouTube views and it was split into ten videos. You would create a playlist on your channel titled “Super YouTube Tips” so that people could find them all in one place. But that has an additional benefit.

Search leans towards introducing playlists right at the top of the results page. It also allows people to specifically search for playlists. That is great because it can introduce viewers to multiple videos instead of one and many will choose to pop on a playlist and watch straight through everything there.

If you do a creative series with a continued plot you will find this is a huge help and makes it a million times easier to sort it out, even if YouTube messes with your order on your channel (an issue more than one content creator has had in the past, take it from me).

To sum that up, YouTube playlists help you:

◾Increase your chances to rank your video content for a wider variety of phrases (which is also helpful for brand-focused results)

◾Improve engagement rate with your videos by giving your audience collections of videos so that they can sit back and watch endlessly. And we know that engagement is the crucial ranking factor when it comes to YouTube rankings.

To illustrate the point, here’s a quick example of how we were able to grab two spots for our show name with the playlist:

Playlist ranking

Bonus tip: Feature your videos on your site

Finally, an obvious but often missed tactic is to increase your YouTube channel performance by prominently displaying your videos on your site. It’s simple: the more people watch your videos (especially if they watch more of each of your videos), the more exposure YouTube offers to your content through suggesting your videos as related.

One of the most effective ways to generate more views for your channel is to promote your videos outside of YouTube, i.e. use your blog and social media channels. There’s a variety of WordPress themes that aim at doing exactly that: promote your YouTube channel prominently on-site.

Furthermore, promote your videos on social media as much as it makes sense for your audience to build additional exposure, links, and re-shares.

ABCO Technology has a powerful web developer program, which includes search engine optimization where this information is covered in detail. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday. You can reach us by phone at: (310) 216-3067.

Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu

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ABCO Technology is located at:
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Google’s featured snippets what do they mean?

The use of snippets is important for many websites.

Google uses featured snippets to make it easier to connect us to the information we want, but in doing so could they be endangering the basic model the entire web relies on? We get free information and in return, we used to get served a couple of adverts on the site we look at. But without being able to serve those ads, there’s less incentive to create that content.

Featured snippets explained

Featured snippets are intended to make it easier for you to access the information available on a web page by bringing it directly into the search results.

Sometimes when you do a search, you’ll find that there’s a descriptive box at the top of Google’s results. We call this a “featured snippet.”

https://blog.google/products/search/reintroduction-googles-featured-snippets/​

Here’s an example from the Google blog post where they ‘reintroduce’ them:

So in short it’s taking the text from a page and then featuring it prominently in the search results.

#Google’s shift from connection engine to information engine

#Google has always been a connection engine. However, there appears to be a continuing change in the way in which Google sees itself. The model has always been:

•I enter a search term and Google provides a list of links to content that best answers that search

•I click on a paid or free result

•Google gains money from paid results and advertising on publishers’ sites

•Publishers get paid by the advertising on their sites

Google is increasingly moving towards just showing me the information, lifted directly from the content it indexes. The shift is subtle but it is destroying that model. So now the relationship looks like this;

•I enter a search term and Google provides me the information that best serves the search

•I read the information on Google

Not only is this chain a lot shorter, it also removes the publishers and so Google’s own methods of monetization. The key though is that Google only shows snippets for certain types of results. Results for searches with a clear purchase intent would be naturally less likely to show a snippet but more likely to have PPC ads. Whilst some results do also feature PPC results, in every search I did these were shown above the snippet, with the organic content below.

The potential effects of snippets on websites

When your business relies on traffic from providing specific or niche information then snippets can be devastating. Take the case of Celebrity networth.com as detailed in The Outline. If you want to know what someone famous is worth, you look it up on their site and they give you a number and breakdown of how they reached it. The most important thing is the number, that’s the key information people are looking for.

Back in 2014 Google emailed the owner of the site, Brian Warner, and asked for permission to use the data from the site in the knowledge graph, Brian was not keen…

“I didn’t understand the benefit to us,” he said. “It’s a big ask. Like, ‘hey, let us tap into the most valuable thing that you have, that has taken years to create and we’ve spent literally millions of dollars, and just give it to us for free so we can display it.’ At the end of it, we just said ‘look, we’re not comfortable with this.’”

https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com

However when snippets were introduced Google just went ahead and took the information anyway. The information that Brian had said he didn’t want being used by them.

The result was a loss of 65% of traffic year on year and having to lay off staff as the profitability of the site took a nose dive. That’s the very real impact of Google’s change from connecting you to the information to delivering that information right there on the page. The sites that provide that information, the ones that have actually put the time and effort into creating the content, are the ones that lose out.

#Snippets likely won’t affect all websites as badly as in this example, it is just one example. But other studies consistently show featured snippets reduce clicks on other results, in effect cannibalizing traffic. Take this study from ahrefs:

Why did snippets need reintroducing?

Snippets just weren’t that bright, and there were several high profile examples of them failing. Some snippets appeared to have been removed, especially on more controversial topics.

The problem came about through a combination of not understanding the user intent and not being picky about where information was pulled from. Google’s failure to properly understand intent is something they have got in trouble with before, like with the ‘Unprofessional Hair’ problem.

As Google shifts from connecting to content, to connecting to information directly, intent becomes even more important. Of course without the context of the rest of the content we’re even less able to judge the validity of the information shown. Especially when these snippets also serve to provide information for Google Home Assistant. So there is little context available, beyond the name of the site, to evaluate the information against. It’s simply a case of being told an answer to a question as if it’s ‘The Answer’ rather than ‘an answer’.

This also leads to problems such as the case highlighted by Danny Sullivan in his own announcement post for the new feature:

Source: Google blog

Here we have two queries where the intent is the same. The suitability of reptiles as pets. However in a glass half full / half empty kind of way different people phrase this question differently depending on their initial bias. Google has then served each with a snippet that reinforces that bias. In effect two different answers to the same question depending on the searcher’s expectation of the result. For my results at least, Google appears to have put in a speedy fix for this by stopping the snippet showing on one set of results. Replacing reptiles with goats replicated the effect though, so it doesn’t look to be a fix for the wider issue.

This might not appear to be a big problem when it comes to reptiles or goats but things could potentially get out of hand quickly as they roll this out across more queries and cover more topics (for example politics). Searching around at the moment it looks like political or controversial topics are more restricted, especially in terms of the search content.

It’s not just snippets either

It’s not just content publishers that need to watch out. Google appears to be developing their own tools for popular queries and placing these directly in the search results. This is the result I get for a search on ‘internet speed test’:

I guess for the rest of the sites offering a speed checker it’s just tough. This is different from snippets as it’s not using anyone else’s information. But in this example at least Google appears to be creating a tool and then placing it at the top of the search results above competing tools. I personally feel that sets a bit of a dangerous precedent as this could potentially spread with Google creating more tools, in partnership with more companies, so harming the competition. Competition and diversity are good, but people will be less likely to innovate and create new tools if Google is going to just step in when something gets popular and publish their own tool above everyone else’s in the results.

Google has got into trouble before for placing their own services above competitors. In July of 2017 it received a record-breaking $2.7 billion fine from the EU for antitrust violations with their shopping comparison service:

Google has systematically given prominent placement to its own comparison shopping service: when a consumer enters a query into the Google search engine in relation to which Google’s comparison shopping service wants to show results, these are displayed at or near the top of the search results.

Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google’s search results on the basis of Google’s generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google’s search results, and others appear even further down. Google’s own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google’s generic search algorithms, including such demotions.

So Google put their own service higher up in the results than competing services and didn’t make their own service subject to the same ranking algorithms as their competitors.

Source: TechCrunch

What will this mean for content?

The trouble with snippets is that the places this might hit hardest are those which invest more in the creation of their content. Or in other words, the content which has higher editorial standards. If you’re a journalist, someone needs to be paying you to write the content, an editor needs to be paid to sub the content, designers and photographers paid for graphics and images.

So the content which stands to lose the most is arguably the most important, whilst the lower quality, recycled, poorly researched and quickly written content, which needs to generate less revenue as it costs so much less to churn out, remains profitable.

This creates a vicious cycle: as there is more low-quality content it therefore captures a greater share of the audience, higher quality content gets more drowned out and so gets less revenue and diminishes even further.

Mobile users want information delivered more quickly and concisely. We have shorter user journeys on mobile with less time on site and a higher bounce rate. Capturing these visitors with properly optimized content is important as mobile is a key part of Google’s revenue as it continues to dominate the mobile search market.

It does also mean, however, that the user is less likely to visit a site which is funded by ads ironically likely served through Google’s own platform. However Google might be less concerned about this depending on how much importance they are placing on their Home Assistant product. The snippets are used by the AI to provide answers for your questions. Ads don’t factor into this and they could perhaps have calculated they stand to gain more from better information here than the loss from fewer ads served on those sites.

#ABCO #Technology teaches a comprehensive course for search engine optimization. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.

Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu

Financial aid is available to all students who can qualify for funding.

ABCO Technology is located at:

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Google Bulletin Enhances Local Search

What is Bulletin?

Bulletin is a new app published by Google, which allows everyone quickly to create and post news stories which will appear both in the app and on the web…

“Bulletin stories are public and easy to discover: on Google search, through social networks, or via links sent by email and messaging apps”
Source: Google
Bulletin App

Bulletin is currently on trial in two locations in the US: Nashville, TN and Oakland, CA.

Google has termed this new type of news ‘Hyperlocal’ and it’s aimed at people being able to create posts quickly about what they encounter in their immediate area.

Why?

Between Facebook and Google local news has truly suffered. Print media in general has experienced large financial losses and this has been very severe for smaller local news media outlets as well. Online players in this space such as The Gothamist have also collapsed leaving a vacuum in the area.

The bigger question here should really be why Google would want to fill that space. Call me a cynic but I think it’s unlikely that it’s due to some altruistic need on Google’s part to fill the space which it helped to destroy.

If this was the case, if Google was seeking to help replenish local news, then it could instead promote local news sources more heavily over national ones, as Facebook has recently announced it will be doing. Instead Google has seen an opportunity, reinforced by the rise of other locally focused sites such as NextDoor.com.

nextdoor.com

Google has been part of the undoing of a media format and there is now the opportunity to step in and fill that void. But that still creates the question…

Why should Google care about local news at all?

The more personalized the advertising, the more likely we are to respond to it. This includes the source of the advert. You’re more likely to listen to the advice of a friend about their experience with a company than the information on the company blog. This goes for local news ads as well.

According to Local Media Works local media is not only the most trusted source of information but also the best at driving customer interaction. In other words ads served on local content are more effective.

It combines personalization (adverts tailored to you) and contextualization (ads shown at the right time) for incredibly effective advertising. It also, importantly, gives Google an additional data collection point.

Each story you post provides key information beyond just geo-targeting. For example, post a story which shows an event at your local pet store and you might start getting shown ads for dog food.

Even without posting a story, but by just interacting with the content, this provides additional data, showing businesses and geographic areas you’re interested in without Google ever needing to record your physical visit to those places.

What’s the harm?

Some existing sites which specialize in the ‘hyperlocal’ have already encountered issues in how different sections of the same community interact. For example Nextdoor.com has had problems with neighbors ‘racially profiling’ people within their own communities.

It takes more than geography to make a community and there are often existing divisions within a small or ‘local’ area. This could be exasperated by the ‘echo chamber’ problem we already see across search and social platforms. Through personalization of content we don’t see outside of our own world view. In other words the content we see serves only to reinforce rather than challenge our beliefs.

Picking up your local newspaper or reading their stories online is more likely to show you information from across the full demographic of your community. In the case of hyper localization of online content, however, it may serve only to provide us with information from a subsection of our community rather than representing its full diversity.

Editorial standards and fake news

We also need to stop pretending that everyday people are as good of a source for information as trained journalists. Bulletin celebrates the quickness and ease of posting on its platform. It does not, from what I read in the promotional material, mention editorial guidelines or validity of content. Any journalist with a news organization has to adhere to editorial standards, research what they are writing and will at least attempt to convey news with some depth.

If Google chooses to show Bulletin stories in the same section as they show other news stories, – and I’m not sure where else it would show them – then it’s promoting them to the same level as actual editorial content without any of the checks and measures.

My final thoughts on this

I don’t think Google has deliberately set out to replace local news, I certainly don’t think they intended to harm the industry. However it would appear that local news is in decline and there is a gap in the market for Google to step into with Bulletin. The way it’s done this is typically clever, moving yet more content off proprietary sites which can show advertising or generate revenue in whatever way they darn well like, right on to a platform owned and controlled by Google (ahem AMP, cough cough).

Google has also embraced the idea that we can all be part of the news. We can all share events locally and connect with each other through our local postings. After the failure of Google Plus I’m not sure how far the ‘connecting’ side of things will go but we’ll have to wait and see on that one.

On the surface it sounds like a good idea, but the ramifications for local news sites could be severe, especially if Google prioritizes content from its own service over that of other providers. It’s also creating further problems with placing equal or even more weight on unverified and unchecked content compared to that of a reputable publisher.

This could end up as little more than another version of Yell, mostly used only by businesses to promote events, or it could really take off like a localized version of Twitter with people in masse connecting and sharing within their communities. The crucial thing is that it doesn’t become a replacement for all local news.

#ABCO #Technology teaches a course for web development, which includes social media strategies. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.

Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu

Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.

ABCO Technology is located at:
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9 important computer maintenance tips for beginners

abco 16 years

This article contains a brief list of nine computer maintenance tips, which will make you a valued employee at your place of work.

If you are able to perform some computer maintenance on your own, you will save both money and time.

This blog post will contain some maintenance tips, which you can perform by yourself, which will help you keep your computer running smoothly.

1 First tip make sure your computer is plugged in, connections connected and your monitor is turned on.

2 Computers often build up dust on the inside. Remove dust from your PC by using compressed air. compressed air removes dust. Perform this operation approximately every 90 days unless you are in a high dust environment. If you are in a polluted environment, then use compressed air every 30 days.

3 The disk defragmenter arranges your files in logical order. It will run automatically in Windows 7 if set up. Arranging your files in logical order will speed up your computer. The disk defrag command will defrag files up to 64MB.

If you want to defrag or arrange larger files, use this command defrag c: -w. This command will defrag all of the files in your hard drive.

4 If you want to check the condition of your hard disk, use the command, Chkdsk. This command will tell you if your disk has any errors or bad tracks.

If you want a command to fix these bad tracks and errors, use the command chkdskg/f. This command will repair your disk in many instances.

If you are using Linux, use fsck.

5 It is a good practice to delete temporary files. Deleting these files will save disk space.

6 Windows disk clean up utility will delete temporary files. Deleting these files will free up disk space, which will also increase the speed of your computer.

7 In windows you have a backup and restore command where you can restore your computer to a time when it functioned without errors.

8 It is a good practice to back up to an external hard drive. Hard drives are constantly getting cheaper. Use them, they will save you time and money.

9 When backing up files, use archive attributes, this will make it easier to find these files if you need them. You simply need to select file types to be backed up and the location where you want them to be stored.

#ABCO #Technology teaches comprehensive programs for network administration and #CyberSecurity . Possessing the knowledge to fix, maintain, install and protect networks is vital in the economy of the twenty-first century. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday. Call today at: (310) 216-3067

Email all questions to info@abcotechnology.edu

Financial aid is available to all students who can qualify for funding.

ABCO Technology is located at:
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