Now you can carry your favorite computer programs along with all of your bookmarks, settings, email and more with you. Use them on any Windows computer. All without leaving any personal data behind.

With the Portable Apps Suite you can place a host of applications in your USB drive and be able to run them on virtually all computers (Windows). The programs in this suite are no slouch either with firefox, openoffice, pidgin (for universal IM), Thunderbird, Clamwim Antivirus. Also included are VLC media player, audacity, and a host of web hosting applications. Best of all it’s all free!

The first one, from SEO Chat allows you to search for keyword ranking in multiple datacenters of Google. As I have recently learned depending on where you are you are liable to get different search results for the same keywords. That’s because Google maintains several datacenters (I assume per region). So if you are using OpenDNS as I am then  you probably will get a different search result compared to one using your ISP’s DNS.

The second tool which I use, from SEO Centro let’s you check your keyword ranking for Yahoo, Google and MSN. Not only that it also gives a list of  possible keyword variations (for your long tail) that other people might use as their keywords.

So if you’re curious as to where your site ranks why don’t you try out the two sites now…

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in…”

Nice huh ? After more than a week out of the Google SERP getting back is definitely a great feeling. Wonder whether my recent post on Google’s Paid Reviews made any difference

Seriously, I really do not see Google getting into the paid reviews arena unless the end result is the indexing of this review information within the Google Shopping and Google social network as a way to get the jump on Amazon, Yahoo and other online vendors who post user reviews.

Here’s how :

• Since Google’s end product is search, I could see Google offering some kind of tested review process where their reviewers must enter a proof of purchase code into the interface to prove they have used or purchased an item
• Then they post a review within Google or on their own blog, in order to receive a payment for the review, if they do post on their own blog, the blog would have to run Google AdSense.
• When someone searches for a specific product brand name, model number or relevant term, Google Products / Google Shopping then serves idenpendent third party reviews, both hosted on Google or Google Partnered blogs (blogs serving AdSense).
• The user then reads the reviews and makes the purchase of that product or other products suggested via Adsense.

For now I’m editing my robots.txt file and  adding a sitemap to DigitalFrap.com, hopefully this will help in bringing things to normal. In case you are wondering (like I was) what the difference is between robots.txt and a sitemap is:

I already have a robots.txt file, do I still need to submit a sitemap.xml file to Google?

You sure do! Using a robots.txt file is great way to tell Google what ‘not’ to index. Using a sitemap.xml file is a way of telling Google, ‘Hey, check out these new or updated pages’. It’s like the reverse of the robots.txt file, but even better.

And in terms of precedence, robots.txt goes first…