Ratings updates on your phone with Graddit Pulse

Quick update from Graddit here.

You now can get updates about votes on your site right on your phone or tablet. The feature is called Graddit Pulse. To enable this feature you'll need to install Airgram app on the phone and subscribe to ratings for your domains. Just follow the steps here and listen to the pulse of your site.

Available on Android and IPhone.

SEO Blogger Tool

Meet new SEO tool for Blogger. It is enabled in this blog and you can see how it works right now, just click here. If you clicked you should see a new panel at the very top of this page. Also, the URL changed: see #seo hash added at the end. What the tool can do for you:

- Keywords analysis.
- Links analysis.

Keywords analysis

Click Keywords link to open keywords panel. Here you can verify multiple parameters. For this post try "SEO" keyword, you will see:

• Keywrods density. Heard many times it should be 1 - 3%, but do not follow these directions blindly. This just to make sure you didn't put too much. Remember, text is for people, not robots.
• Verifies if keywords present in page title (<title>...</title> tag).
• Checks if you have it in header tags (H1-H3).
• Checks if you have it in bold or strong tag.
• Tells you if you have key phrase in at least one image alt attribute.
• Tries to define if you have keywords in first and last sentences. Although it's not necessary, sometimes it helps search engines define better snippet for SERP.
• Calculates total amount of words.

You should know that it's not that easy to define boundaries of post text, sometimes menus, footers, archives and other widgets are taken too. The tool tries to do it's best to separate post text from other elements, but sometime you might want to help it. You can do that by adding id of HTML element where you want the tool to take text from, like this: "keyphrase | element_id". As this tool is made for Blogger it tries to find an element with id="main" (which is common for Blogger templates) and some other elements first. If all attempts failed it takes the whole text information on the page. When that happens you need to give and id explicitly, you can find it in the page source code. For example for this post the key phrase would be "SEO | post-body-6212945202675075652".

Links analysis

This panel gives you some information about the links on the page:

• Total number of links.
• Total number of external links (navigating to other sites).
• How many external links are not closed with "nofollow" attribute.

Tried that? Don't be scared by the numbers. Remember that by default it takes all links: menus, comments, widgets, even those links generated dynamically and not visible by the search engine bots. To get more precise results give it an id of HTML element where the tools should be searching links, just like for keywords.
Here's one more exremely useful thing comes with links analysis, look at "show" link near each line. Click it and you will get a list of the links. Click each link to highlight it on the page and scroll to it. It makes it easy to track suspicious links on you blog.

How to install the tool into your blog

Easy: open Blogger admin interface, navigate to Layout panel, add HTML/JS widget. Add the following code to it:

<script type="text/javascript">gradditSEOToolsLanguage = "eng";</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.graddit.com/js/seotools/blogger/all.js"/></script>

First line set the language (to English). Second line call the script and enables the tool. Now open any page of your blog and add #seo to it's URL - the tools should show. You also can add a link into widget to add #seo hash, like this:

<a href="#seo" style="text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 1px dashed;">SEO</a>

That is all. More tools will follow, new panels will be added automatically. Let me know what additional functions you would like to see in this tool.

Graddit Guard: protect content with password

Suppose, you need to protect content from being viewed, but you don't want to make the whole blog private. You just want content that can be accessed by visitors that have a password. Simple problem if your blog is on Wordpress or Drupal. Blogger blogs owners can not achieve this eassily. New Graddit widget "Guard" is made for this purpose. Look at the text below:
If you do not have password you will not see the hidden text. Now enter "123" and press "Open". Hidden text will be shown and you will not need to re-enter the password next time you visit the same page.

Text below will be shown after you tweet this page:

Tweet to unlock content.

Want to protect content in your blog?

1. Open widget page.
2. Enter password and text to protect. Press "Save" while typing your text to check how it will look on your page. If you press "Save and Lock" you will not be able to change password or text anymore.
3. Insert given code into your blog page or post. You will see the protected page because widget remembered you created it. All other visitors will see the prompt to enter password. To make sure it's working open your page in a different browser, or in incognito window, or clear the cookies.

That is all. Leave a comment to this post if you have questions.

Star ratings rich snippet on Google SERP with Graddit (for Blogger)

— this is how your blog can look like on Google search engine results page (SERP). It is an experimental feature from Graddit that allows you to create rating rich snippets based on real ratings information and add them to your posts, for Blogger only. Currently in order to update your posts with snippets you will need to:

1. Invite user "graddit@gmail.com" to be an author of your blog (Blogger Settings → Basic → Permissions → Blog Authors → + Add authors);
2. What for confirmation (leave a comment to this post to speed up the process);
3. Make graddit@gmail.com an admin of your blog. This is required to update posts by your request. Later adding graddit@gmail.com will not be necessary, but this is how it works right now. You can also revoke admin permissions once you are done with snippets and give it back only when you need it;
4. Subscribe. You can also leave your blog address in a comment to this post and I will give you 2 weeks of trial;
5. Login to admin, create an account if you don't have it yet (click "Generate secret key" for insctructions);
6. Go to Statistics tab, locate a post you would like to update (you may want to save your post first, just to be safe) and click star icon:
   
   
   It will try to retrieve Blog ID and Rating ID and will show a confirmation window:
   
   Click Ok. If system shows status "Ok", your post was successfully updated with ratings snippet. It can pass few days or even weeks before stars appear on SERP, but you can check if snippet is formed properly by checking URL of your post in this Google tool.

Disclaimer, recommendations and known issues
This will access your blog upon your request and will update post adding snippet to the end of it. It potentially can damage post content, for example, it will remove any newlines (not the <br/> tags that will remain, but \n - newlines that will be deleted), because this is how the posts content is presented by Blogger API and I could not find a workaround for it, so this method is not good if you have text in <pre> tags and want to keep newlines. In other cases removing newlines will not affect post layout. I strongly recommend to test it first on a test blog or test post. Also, do not update each and every post, Google might not like it, instead pick content that deserves to have snippet in SERP. Google does not guarantee snippets on SERP even if there is no errors in snippet code, that is stated in their documentation.
Try it and let me know here if you have any issues.

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Subscriptions

Graddit is launching paid subscriptions for ratings widget: http://www.graddit.com/eng/prices.

What are the plans and what is the difference

• Free. Fully functional widget, ratings popup can display ads. Ratings popup looks like this:
  ;
• Basic. 5 000 displays without ads daily; after that ads will be enabled; price is $3 per month;
• Pro. 50 000 displays without ads daily; after that ads will be enabled; price is $10 per month;
• Ultimate. 500 000 displays without ads daily; after that ads will be enabled; price is $25 per month;

There also will be functionality enabled for subscribers only.

Currently subscriptions can only be paid with Paypal. If you would like pay some other way or need higher limits please send your offers to sales@graddit.com.

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"I like" widget for blogs

    Now you can get heart "I like" widget for your blog? Open Graddit widgets, select Like widget on the left hand side and Platform on the right. "Generic" code would be good for single post, for example: I like

or:

    Actually, you can use any symbols and images with this widget.
    If you want it to show on each post automatically you need to select Blogger platform and follow instructions here. Instructions for Tumblr can be found here.

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Non-blocking ratings widget load

    Sometimes ratings widget can take significant time to load, up to several seconds depending on connection speed and performance of the servers handling request. That leads to bad user experience, site looks stuck. And while battle over Graddit servers performce is not over you can still help your blog yourself. You can load widgets without blocking the whole page, in order to do that go to http://www.graddit.com/ratings-widget, tick "Non-blocking" checkbox and replace your old code with a new one. As stated in the hint there don't forget that it relies on jQuery, so this library should be included (preferably in <head> section of your template).

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Graddit Aggregator: related posts from multiple blogs

Graddit presents new widget called Aggregator. It allows you to display related posts grabbed from multiple blogs. Demonstration is avaliable here - it shows 20 posts labeled "graddit,blogger,widget,seo" from 3 blogs. Aggregator will be useful if you want to cross-link your own similar blogs. Besides, it can be used commercially to show links from sponsoring blogs.

How to setup widget:

• open aggregator page;
• read rules and limitations. There's paid and free versions. In short, free allows you to use 2 blogs and display widget not more than 500 times a day. First 1000 displays will work as in paid versions, so that you could experiment;
• on the top press Get code link to open widget parameters tab;
• provide blogs URLs;
• configure other parameters. What can be configured:
  • what to display: related posts or random posts;
  • number of links;
  • links target attribute;
  • style. There are 4 predefined styles or you can choose none and make your own layout; styles samples:

    Light	Gray
    Blue	Dark

  • whether or not use inline styles. Choose no if you're making your own styles;
  • display thumbnails or just text;
  • default thumbnail.
• on the right hand side select a platform to get properly generated code;
• copy code and paste it to a desired place in your template.

Currently only Blogspot platform support is implemented. There's also experimantal support of Atom feeds. If you'd like to try atom you'll have to change few lines in generated code manually: add atom feed and set atom platform like this: (shown code aggregates posts from both blogger and atom feed):

var sites = {
 'http://fruitfulbookmarks-en.blogspot.com' : 'blogger',
 'http://ruletka.omg-linux.ru/atom.xml' : 'atom',
};

Other platforms and feed types will be added later.

Few words about paid version. You can automatically subscribe to paid version using Paypal. On the aggregator page you need to specify your blog address and set number of related blogs, then press Subscribe with Paypal. Aggregator will check your current subscription and if everything is fine you'll be able to move to payment page. Subscription can be cancelled at any time. Limitations of the paid version: up to 100,000 displays daily, up to 10 linked sites. If you think for your needs it's not enougth please email to sales@graddit.com.

Graddit Aggregator: related posts from multiple blogs, 4.04 out of 5 based on 23 ratings

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Blogspot template with Graddit widgets: mlnpics

Download template

From time to time I'm going to modify and publish free Blogspot templates witn Graddit widgets included. First example mlnpics is based on Queen template from DZignine. Main page:

Post:

Key features:

• used widgets: ratings, tops, aggregator;
• default "Prev" and "Next" links are replaced with posts titles;
• menu contains links to static pages, those pages display top posts (each page has it's own category). Order of the posts is controlled by graddit widgets and based on average rating. This kind of things are not provided by Blogspot platform by default — something that your visitors may find interesting;
• users can navigate using Ctrl + left and Ctrl + right arrows, easier navigation = better user experience.

Live demo: http://mlnpics.blogspot.com.
Template source code is not yet published, please write your comments here if you think something should/might be changed. Download links will appear here later.

Important: template does not contain Graddit copyright, but it contains a copyright of the authors of the original template, that should stay untouched, you can not remove it.

Download template

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