Bangle Bangle Blog

Google have just added ‘promote’ and ‘remove’ buttons to their regular results. When you click one you will get the following text in a popup:

Customize your search results with your rankings, deletions, and notes — plus, see how other people using Google have tailored their searches.

Please remember that your SearchWiki notes will be visible to other users, identified with your Google Account nickname.

If you do a search for ‘buy bangles’ and you ‘promote’ next to a particular bangle website that website will move to the first position of your search results – for that exact search. If you click ‘promote’ for another bangle result and it will move into the second place on your results. You can move the second placed bangle website into first position by clicking promote on it again.

If you click remove on any promoted website it will return to its previous place in your Google search results. If you click remove on any un-promoted website it will be permanently removed from any results for that exact search.

The results are associated with your Google account so they will be constant across any computes you log in to with your account.

At this stage it doesn’t look like Google will be including the results from promoting in their results algorithm. I imagine the spammers would go to town on them if they did.

This tool is focused on improving the end users experience by letting them promote search results that they like to the front page for easy future access. From that point of view it is difficult to see how it improved existing technology like browser bookmarks or rss readers.

So from a seller/SEO/bangle promotion point of view it doesn’t seem like there is much advantage in getting shoppers to ‘promote’ your site.

While you are hear did you know that bangles make excellent Christmas presents?

There are many different browsers that people can use to visit your site. And as an online retailer it is important that your site looks the same and functions correctly on all of them. Otherwise you may find that some users may not want to or be able to complete their purchase.

One way to test that your site is coded correctly is to install the most popular browsers on your own machine and use them to visit your site.

But this method will not let you see what your site looks like on all of the browsers that your customers might be using. Some browsers will only let you have one version on any computer at any one time. This means you can’t test on the other versions that you don’t have installed. Also some users may be using different operating systems that you do not have access to like Mac OS or Linux.

One way to check that your site displays correctly on all of the main browsers and operating systems is to use the free service offered on http://browsershots.org/. Simply go to their site and input your own sites url and they will generate screen shots of your site on 49 different browsers across 4 different operating systems.

It is very important for an online bangle businesses to have a professional store front at all times. A big part of this is attention to detail like correct spelling and not having any broken links.

Once a site has been going a while the number of links can really add up. A quick way to check that all of your links are coded correctly is to use a link checker site like the W3C link checker http://validator.w3.org/checklink.