Rearrange your Google+ Circles

Google+ users can now choose any order for their circles. The ability to reorder Google+ circles, was a feature widely requested by the Google+ users. Engineer , working on Google+ project explains that to rearrange you Google+ circles, all you have to do is to move to the Circles Tab and click and drag any of the circles to your desired location.

The best part of this new feature is that, once you rearrange your circles, you will notice the change on the list of circles on the left of your home page. This change will also be visible in the drop down menu, that appears when you are adding someone to your circles.

This is a minor feature added by Google, but its good that Google is taking customer requests into account and adding features that are widely demanded by users.

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Block Google+ Notifications With Firefox and Chrome Extension

Ali Mentioned you in a comment on a post, Ted invited you to join him on Google+, Alizee shared a post with you—All these notifications that you get on the right corner of your Google+ Menu Bar can be very distractive at times. You may wish to get rid of the notifier some how.

Here are two extension for both Chrome and Firefox that can block the notifier.

Chrome Extension: Block Extensions on Google sites except Google+

BlockPlus, a simple Google Chrome extension written by Nic Cubrilovic can hide the notifier from all your non Google Plus sites, so that you can focus on all your important work before you visit Google Plus to read the updates from your circles.

BlockPlus removes any links to Google+ in the bar that sits on all Google sites, including the profile link, circles, etc. It also removes the notifier. It blocks the requests, and also hides those elements from view - so you are not only hiding it but saving on 6-7 HTTP requests that normally take place each time you hit the global nav.

 

 

Firefox Extension: Block notifications on All Google Apps except Google+

Google+ Notification Blocker is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that block notifications on all Google websites other than Google+ so that you can work without getting distracted while you work.

The best thing of this extension is that it works also with Google Chrome by simply hiding the notification button.

Install Google+ Notification Blocker by imwill

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Choose Posts From Specific Circles and Mark posts as read in Google+

Plus Minus is an extension for Google Chrome that makes is easy to select which Circles show up in your Google+ Stream by default. If you want to hide all those long posts from the Geeks that you have in one of your circles and just make only the posts from your friends and family appear by default, Google Plus Minus will come in handy.

Apart from choosing a default circle, there are many other useful features of this extension.

Expand or Shrink posts for easy viewing.

• Click on the 'Expand' and 'Shrink' links in the top-right section of your stream to expand or collapse all the posts.

Stretch the screen horizontally to have a wider view and to be able see more content without scrolling.

• For Wide-screen view, click the 'Wide' link in the top-right section of your stream. You can switch to normal-view by clicking on the 'Normal' link.

Automatically load more post.

• The post will automatically load once you scroll down to the bottom of your stream.

You can mark posts as read.

• Mark a post as read by clicking the triangle next to the person's picture. This will shrink the read post into just two lines.

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+1s (Plus One) On Sale Online

Its hard to imagine that the number of +1s for a post or article wouldn't be one of the factors to determine its search rankings. Specially with the +1 button placed right next to the Google search results. SEO companies have, in the past, experimented and seen positive impacts of tweets on search rankings. In fact the staff at seomoz have already done an experiment to see the impact of Google+ vs Twitter on search rankings.

Various sites, just in the last 2-3 days have stated selling +1 votes at different rates for a set of votes. Just search for “Buy Google Votes” and numerous results will be returned of sites selling +1 votes. manuallinkbuilding.co.uk, googleplus1supply.com and plussem.com are just a few of them.

The sites claim that Google is not likely to know about who is clicking the plus one button. To take plussem as an example—the site states that all of the plus ones will come from 50 different accounts worldwide depending on how many URLs are submitted to them.

It also claims the following:

• All +1′s come from people with a Google account that has been verified by phone (Phone Verified Accounts).
• All +1′s come from real people. No bots are being used!
• All +1′s are being given by manually going to your website and clicking the +1 button.
• It’s untraceable because the +1′s are being given from different IP’s.
• All +1′s are given dripped over a couple of days so it looks natural.

One thing is for sure—although, using this approach many will see a positive impact on their search rankings, particularly the early experimenters, but any mistake on the part of the websites offering the service could hamper the search rankings, specially if Google could come up with a system to tackle this.

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Find Out Google Plus Posts Indexed by Google

Search operators are really helpful when your need to filter out results. Whether your want to search words or an exact phase of a blog post or a sentence on in the text field of a website or even find out how many of your blog posts have been indexed by Google you can always use operators.

Google+ apparently has no character limit for posts and people (particularly the  Geeks) are making use of it by writing content that is nothing short of a blog post.

This tip will let you find all of your Google Plus posts that have been indexed by Google. Simply type the following query in Google:

site:plus.google.com inurl:/Your Google+ Profile ID

You can search for posts in your (or anyone's) public stream by using the following query in Google :

site:plus.google.com inurl:/Your Google+ Profile ID/posts/* search terms

E.g. To find out posts in your stream about Google(If there’s any) type:

site:plus.google.com inurl:/Your Google+ Profile ID/posts/* google

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For finding out all Google+ posts by Matt Cutts where he has mentioned about twitter you can use :

site:plus.google.com inurl:/109412257237874861202/posts/* twitter

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You can also search every ones public posts by leaving the profile ID. This way:

site:plus.google.com inurl:/*/posts/* search terms

Credit: Arun Shroff

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Fix The Slow Loading +1 (Plus One) Button

People have been rightly complaining about the Google “Plus One button loading too slow” problem. Google has been working to solve the problem since it got notified about the load time.

It has, on its end made a set of changes that will make the +1 button load 3x faster on your site and has also introduced a new async snippet that, once implemented, will also improve your page load time.

The announcement about the changes was made by software engineer—David Byttow on the official Google Webmaster Central blog who wrote that:

“In addition to the improvements made to the button, we’re also introducing a new asynchronous snippet, allowing you to make the +1 experience even faster. The async snippet allows your web page to continue loading while your browser downloads the +1 JavaScript. By loading these elements in parallel, we’re ensuring the HTTP request to get the +1 button JavaScript doesn’t lead to an increase in your page load time.”

If you have already implemented the button, you need to update the code to the new async snippet to see an overall improvement in your page load time.

Use the +1 Configuration Tool and generate the new snippet.

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Graphical Guide To Google Plus

For many, Google+ is a pretty simple concept, while for others it’s a bit hard to grasp. Unlike Facebook, there are no friend requests. There are people who add you to their circles and people who you add to your circles, a twitter-like concept. You can categorize people by adding them to circles of your choice.

Forty Nine graphics put together by Saidur (Cy) Hossain, a UX Designer & Developer provide an easy explain of what Google+ is all about.

The guide is available in several languages and you can also translate it in your own language by visiting this link: http://goo.gl/zWRVU

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