Do you need another reason for using Google Analytics? Here is one. If you have already set up Google Analytics for your site, you can verify ownership of your site with just a click in Google Webmaster Tools. There is no need to add meta-tag, upload HTML file in your server or change DNS record. It is the latest release from Google to make your verfication process faster and without any hassle.
But you have to use new profile-based asynchronous Analytics JavaScript to verify your site in Google Webmaster Tools. So if you are using any older tracking code, switch to it. Don’t get afraid ofthe name. It is just simple Javascript that you can easily embed in your HTML 
I have always wanted this feature. I have two Gmail accounts that I use heavily. But like other email services, you could log in to only one Gmail account from your browser. I have used CookieSwap add-on for Firefox for some days. And I have to say that it is quite good as an alternative. With a few clicks you can swich back and forth and use multiple Gmail accounts at the same time. By the way, it is not only for Gmail, you can swap cookies and switch any web service that you have multiple web accounts.
But now Google has just released this awesome feature. Now from your Gmail account menu at the upper right hand corner, you can access multiple Gmail accounts simultaneously.
You can easily toggle back and forth between the accounts using the menu dropdown. Or you can even open a new browser tab for your second Gmail account. Use it without any hassle.
But remember only the below Google products have these capability. If you open any other Google service, it will open as your first Google account using the current browsing session. But I am pretty sure most of us use only Gmail that much 
And you can always hope, they will extend this feature to other Google services soon. So go to your Google account and turn on “Multiple sign-in”.
I was just going through the new products in Google Labs. And that’s where I stumbled on to this project called Follow Finder. Now when Google has introduced it’s own microblogging platform called Google Buzz, it’s a bit refreshing to see that some guys in Google have tried their hands in Twitter experiment. This service is meant to find out new people whom you most likely to follow.
But anything from Google doesn’t necessarily mean great. But I am not going say it is bad either. It is a simple application for a user. Just enter your Twitter username and it will analyze your public social graph that includes your follower and following list. So like they will find out the guys who are following the same people as you. In most cases you are likely to have some common interests and that means you might follow them.
There are lots of Twitter directories and lists categorized by topics and interests. And this application doesn’t do anything out of blue. But as a Google product you most likely have a look at it
Yes, Google Blogger allows adult content. But obviously there are some restrictions. I will copy directly from Blogger’s Content Policy to show you what kind of adult content is not allowed in your Blogger blogs:
Adult Content: We do allow adult content on Blogger, including images or videos that contain nudity or sexual activity. But, please mark your blog as ‘adult’ in your Blogger settings. Otherwise, we may put it behind a ‘mature content’ interstitial.
There are some exceptions to our adult content policy:
- Do not use Blogger as a way to make money on adult content. For example, don’t create blogs where a significant percentage of the content is ads or links to commercial porn sites.
- No incest or bestiality content: We do not allow image, video or text content that depicts or encourages incest or bestiality.
Child safety: We have a zero tolerance policy towards content that exploits children. Some examples of this include:
- Child pornography: We will terminate the accounts of any user we find publishing or distributing child pornography. We will also report that user to law enforcement.
- Pedophilia: We do not allow content that encourages or promotes sexual attraction towards children. For example, do not create blogs with galleries of images of children where the collection of images or text accompanying the images is sexually suggestive.
So as you can see, you can use your blogspot blog for adult blog purpose without getting banned if you are a bit careful. But don’t get excited so easily
As I have mentioned earlier in this blog Google Adsense doesn’t allow you to put ads on an adult site. So though you will get half support for quick money, you will have to find the main thing, the money part from some other ad company than Google
First of all, I dont use Google Analytics as my visitor tracker. This blog is not a business site and I have been quite happy with Ritecounter.com for more than a few years now. It gives me all the traffic statistics that I need.
But here is something that I have found about Google Analytics:
Google Analytics generally updates your reports every 24 hours. This means that it could take 24 hours for data to appear in your account after you have first installed the tracking code.
See the first line carefully. So Google Analytics doesn’t update your visitor statistics in real time. It may get delayed by a day. So if you just compare your site stats with another real time site tracker you may get different results. Don’t get confused about it.
By the way, I am not telling you to avoid using Google Analytics because at least I know what kind of detailed stats you get from them
Have your ever checked your page load time with Google Page Speed? Perhaps you have checked the site loading time using some other speed test services. But you can do it by using Google’s own Page Speed Service. For that you need FireBug addon with Firefox web browser. But frankly speaking, I was never not too excited about it. The page speed activity looked somewhat clumsy to me. First of all, it will display all the request and response times for whole open browsing session. That means if you have more than a site opened in your Firefox then the log will get mixed up with all the service times across the domains in a single console. And the individual request time just comes and goes through the console. So when a processing is finished like a image loading or Javascript execution, those timings will vanish from console. If you want to monitor times, you have to stop Page Speed Activity in the middle of page loading. That is rather inconvenient. By the way, check this manual from Google to learn in detail how to test page load speed of a single site and monitor times in log.
But one thing that stands out is analyzing performance using Page Speed.
So it will have a thorough check-up of your page and give you a overall score out of hundred. And it will list all the problems from DNS request, url redirection, image loading to CSS, Javascript or caching problems. You may find out a few things that you really need to tweak.
Yeah, just few hours ago I got a mail from Google Apps team. In 2010 they are planning to phase out support for several old browsers that are not supported even by their own manufacturers. And that includes Internet Explorer 6. This is what they have said in the email:
Dear Google Apps admin,
In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.
We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.
Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.
Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.
In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.
Thank you for your continued support!
Sincerely,
The Google Apps team
So if you have any webpage created with Google Apps then I hope you have no issues with the old browser users having problem with your site. Besides it will show them message to update their browsers. I know as a webmaster you would like to reach as many readers as possible. But still if someone wants to use IE6 now, I am not going to take the responsibility to show a good webpage. IE6 really sucks!
Have a look at this fun quiz from Google for webmasters. The questions are all objective multiple choices and are based on common queries in Google Webmaster Help Forum. I checked the questions & they have some pretty good questions about the problems that you face regularly as a webmaster like on multiple domains & ccTLDs, url changes or robots.txt etc. You can take the quiz till this January 27.
The answers are not available right away. Google will write a follow up blog post in their webmaster blog with the correct answers. Don’t forget to save your answers now before submitting. Then you can realize if you are making any common mistakes.
First thing first, this is only for Indian sites. Google India has opened a Health Clinic for your site. Actually in this service Google Search Quality team will review some handpicked sites. They will analyze & suggest you improvements so that you can find out what is going wrong & rectify accordingly to get better visibility in Google search results. You need to send your request for free site analysis through this form. The applications will be accepted till this 20th January. Remember you must have your site registered in Google Webmaster Tools & your site should meet Google webmaster guidelines. So hurry up & see whether you can get a free site check up from Google
Yeah! That’s true for all present Google Webmaster Tools users who have verified their sites using meta tag method. The meta tag generated for the verification process used to depend on the email address of the user’s Google account. So if you change your email address, all the sites that you have verified will become unverified. But just a few days ago Google came out with a tweak on the verification process. From now on, the new meta tags generated for site verification will not depend on the email & will remain same whether you change your email address or not.
So if you have changed your email address in Google account in the mean time, check back Google Webmaster Tools. If you want to be safe from email change, you can use the new verification process. By the way, sites verified using old verification method will continue to work.
They have made a change too in verification by HTML file. Before, if your site showed any other HTTP error except 404 for non-existent url, you couldn’t verify your site using HTML file upload. Though, if a server is properly configured it will always show 404 error for non-existent urls, still lots of sites were having problem for this reason. So, Google have removed checking for non-existent urls from verification process. Now you just have to upload the HTML file to your site without any modification. Google will check if the content is okay in the file. And if it is same, you have a successful verification. That’s all