Every year, Google makes hundreds of changes to its search algorithm with the aim of providing quality web pages to its users. The giant search engine also applies over 200 different signals to reward websites with quality contents by ranking them high in the search results. On the other side of the coin, Google penalizes low-quality websites by either lowering their search rankings or removing them off from the search results.

Last year Google has rolled out its major algorithm change called “Panda”. While the update has improved rankings for a large number of high-quality sites, it has also identified low-quality sites and upgraded their rankings. Early this year, another algorithm update named “Penguin” was released to penalize websites that employ webspam techniques such as keyword stuffing, cloaking and link schemes.

Google has been emphasizing many times on its blog and help forum that we should make sure our sites comply with its quality guidelines and develop more unique, original and quality contents rather than focusing on any algorithm tweaks. Having said that, if we can step into Google’s mindset to find out how it has been looking for high-quality websites. That will certainly save us a lot of time and efforts. Below we’ve compiled a list of ranking signals and guidance that might be used by Google to determine how websites rank in the search results. Read more…

These days, smartphones like iPhone, Samsung Galaxy S and Blackberry can be seen everywhere. The reason to own a smartphone is obvious, it has a wide range of capabilities and functionalities to perform almost any tasks you can imagine. Thanks to the hundreds of thousands of mobile apps available on the Apple’s App Store and Android’s Google Play.

While we enjoy the ease and convenience the smartphones bring to us, they seem to have one common drawback: short battery life. Most of the smartphones’ battery can only last for 1 or 2 days, and it’s obviously insufficient. While engineers are still exploring new ways to improve both the battery life and battery lifespan, we should acquaint ourselves with some basic battery-saving knowledge. Here are 13 proven and effective tips you can use to save and prolong your smartphone’s battery. Read more…

Nowadays QR codes are being widely used every where. You can easily find them printed on newspapers, websites, billboard ads, packages and many more. The matrix barcode can be scanned through your smart phone app to gain access to website or display virtually any type of information such as URLs, address, contact details, and product description.

When it comes to design, QR codes normally presented in such a way that black square dots arranged in a square pattern with white color as a background. I know, it sounds pretty boring. Fortunately, there are many talented designers out there, with their creativity turning the black and white box into a colourful and amazing artwork. Just like the ones you may have seen on our previous post: 35 Really Cool QR Code Artworks.

If you feel like having one customized and impressive QR code for your website, blog, company or product, simply follow our easy tutorials below to get it done within minutes! Read more…

Which is the best website to display your design works? Well if you are design enthusiast, websites like deviantART, Flickr and Behance may cross your mind instantly. However your works shouldn’t be limited within these sites as there are many more design communities and networks out there where you can showcase your talents. These online communities are the places where you can keep yourself up to date with the latest design trends, get inspirations from others’ works and receive professional designers’ comments on your works.

If you are ready to showcase your skills or display art pieces which you are very proud of, below we’ve gathered 18 top online communities specifically built for web developers, designers, artists and creative people. Read more…

YouTube, being the most popular video-sharing site for years, has not only made singer like Psy with his “Gangnam Style” become famous overnight, but also enabled us to watch the first ever free and live London 2012 Olympic games through its Olympic channel.

The king of video-sharing site has over 800 million unique user visits with over 4 billion hours of video being watched every month. These astronomical figures drive a variety of third-party tools and browser extensions available on the web helping you enhance your video experience. So if you watch online videos regularly, here are 10 really cool YouTube third party tools you must try. From video downloader to top video chart, we hope you’ll find them incredibly useful! Read more…

It doesn’t matter how large or small your company is, there’s no escaping the fact that a good IT infrastructure is essential to ensure that your business will be a success. However, it doesn’t matter if you have the best software and hardware because that will quickly prove to be worthless when things go wrong if you don’t have the best support structure in place to ensure that your IT systems are running smoothly when you need them.

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Everyday, most of the Facebook users receive a variety of news feeds from their friends, family, colleagues and pages they’ve subscribed. If the posts received are too many, it’s not easy to go through all of them. And it’s even harder if most of the posts are unimportant junk. Although Facebook does provide us some features where we can filter our posts by photos and links, unfortunately that’s not enough to customize the news feed based on what we want to see.

So for those of you who want more controls over your news feed, here we would like to introduce 2 web apps that will help you get updates from people you care about as well as the information and news you’re interested in, in a more organized way. Read more…

Shadows are the phenomena of nature which have in a way become so common that they often remain unnoticed. Since ancient times, shadows have been manipulated to resemble animals and other objects. It’s hard to say when the shadow was first used by humans for entertainment and art, but it probably originated in the Far East countries like China. The art of Chinese shadow puppetry called Ombres Chinoises, which means “Chinese shadows”. In today’s modern world, we called it shadowgraphy or ombromanie, which is the art of performing a story using shadows made by hands.

However, the shadow art is not limited to hand shadow. Almost anything around you can be used to resemble different shapes from its model. All you need are creativity and good manipulation of light and space. In today’s showcase, we’ve crawled deep into the net to surface some of the most mind blowing shadow artworks that’ll make you say Wow! Read more…

Which is the best coupon site to get free shopping coupons, discounts, promo codes and freebies? These days, almost everything can be done on the Internet and that includes online shopping. Yes, instead of going to shopping mall to get yourself a clothing, electronic gadget or even food grocery, you can do it in the comfort of your home. Some of you might think that such convenience comes with higher price and lower quality. Well that’s not necessarily the case, there are many reputable and reliable online shopping sites out there where you can get great deals and bargains with certain days of money back or return guarantee.

It’s coming to the year end, have you prepared Christmas gifts for your loved ones, parents and friends? For those of you who have no time to shop at the mall, here’s your opportunity you can’t miss. Below we’ve listed some of the most popular coupon sites where you can shop online, get free coupons and buy anything you want at discounted price! Read more…

Which is the best website to check Google search algorithm updates? Every year, Google rolls out changes to its search algorithm with the aim of providing better search results to Internet users. While most of the changes are minor, every once in a while the Internet giant will make significant algorithmic changes such as Panda and Penguin updates which greatly affect the ranking of search results.

As a website owner and search marketer, we should keep ourselves updated with the latest Google algorithmic changes. It helps us to understand how Google ranks the search results so that we can make necessary changes to our website driving more organic web traffic. Below we’ve compiled a list of website, blog and forum where you can keep track of Google updates making your SEO (search engine optimization) effort easier. Read more…

Angry Birds is one of the most successful mobile games the world has even seen. The app was created by Finnish developer Rovio Entertainment. Since its first release for Apple’s iOS in December 2009, the app has achieved over a billion of downloads across all platforms, including both regular and special editions. FarmVille, CityVille and Zynga Poker, on the other hand, are popular social games developed by Zynga in 2009 for Facebook and other social networking sites. They were all once the most popular Facebook game by daily active users.

In conjunction with the recently released Angry Birds Star Wars app, we would like to present a beautiful infographic about Angry Birds and Zynga’s social games. Read more…

Wondering how to show your name and photo under the title of your blog post in Google search results? Look no further, this is the right post where we provide a quick tutorial guiding you to link your online content to your Google+ Profile.

Once you’ve gone through the tutorial, your authorship information will be displayed in Google search results as shown in the image below. Read more…

Wondering how many fake twitter followers you have? In today’s post, we’ll introduce one really cool online tool enabling you to find out the answer in seconds. Owing to the fact that Twitter is one of the most popular social networking sites on the Web, tons of fake accounts being created for spamming purposes. If you have a successful Twitter account attracting over thousand of followers, there’s a need to check whether they are real people or just bots.

To check how many spam Twitter accounts are following you, you can go to Read more…

In the previous post, we’ve introduced 45 useful Chrome extensions for Facebook users. Since then we’ve received a huge number of feedbacks from our readers asking us to recommend Facebook related addons for Firefox browser. Considering that Mozilla Firefox is the second most popular browser today, we think there’s a need to satisfy Facebook users who are using Firefox as their default web browser.

Without further ado, here’s a list of must-try Firefox addons which will greatly enhance your Facebook experience! Read more…

Last year, we had introduced 40 amazingly beautiful and intriguing cinemagraphs and received very great response from our audience. This makes us decided to release the part 2, showcasing you another 40 examples of aesthetically appealing art pieces you can’t afford to miss! In case you’ve never heard of cinemagraphs. Well they are basically still photographs in which a minor and repeated movement occurs. These animated photographs are usually published in GIF format giving the illusion that you’re watching a video.

Sounds cool and interesting? Let’s check them out now! Read more…