Google

While I’m cautious about purchasing expensive licenses, for some businesses, the cheapest option, Business Basic for £4.90 per user per month, is more than enough!

Every now and then, I discover new “hidden” features that I can use with just a basic license, and this time was no different.

Setting up computers in businesses, I always default to Google Search. Frankly, Bing just hasn’t kept pace, despite the recent AI hype. For most users, Google’s familiarity boosts productivity, which is key in any business environment.

What I hate is that Microsoft, with every other Microsoft Edge update, forces Bing back as the default search engine.

It’s not the first time we’ve been in this situation where when we start using a service, it’s turned into a cash cow or killed like a fly.

Google is famous for killing its services. This time, they’re not exactly killing another one, but selling it to another company is no different.

Setting a hreflang meta tag on your multilingual website shall be as simple as a piece of cake. Just put the relevant meta tag on your website, refer to the translated version and on translated version refer back to the original one.

Looks as simple as that. End of story? Wrong!

Sadly, on 25 April 2025, Google announced the following:

As of today, publishers can no longer add publications to the Publisher Centre. We are making this change as part of a transition to roll out automatically created publication pages later this year.

Publishers with manually created publication pages will continue to have access to customisation features until later this year, when pages will shift to being automatically created.

I am providing the following article for reference only.

Do you have a website or blog where you publish new things, either daily or from time to time?

Do you know that you can publish them in Google News?

Recently, when I read one of the articles on 9to5mac noticed, that after their post they got this neat feature.

An option to follow their site through Google News.

It gives them an additional way to get more visitors but also convinces them to stay connected with their content.

My first impression was… I want this as well on one of my websites, so I start exploring how to do that. When I did that, I have been surprised at how relatively easy it was without any extra work from myself. By utilising the website RSS Feed and going through initial configuration and approval (that took approximately 2-3 days) my first site was live and posts were updated when published.

This is another reason to say that RSS is not dead and it still matters.

Here is how I did that and how you can do it as well!

When Google is releasing their search engine updates, there is always a lot of action and a lot of discussions around. Everybody is looking for the impact of the update on their website and position in search engines.

By the end of August 2022, Google comes with a Helpful Content Update (HCU). This highly appreciated (by content creators) update suppose to penalise low-content websites and those generated by AI. I have been happy about it and knew, that none of my websites will be affected, and I was right!

Are you advertising for job positions on your website?

Trying to hire somebody is a bit difficult these days in some industries, especially when companies looking carefully at their budgets, everything is getting more expensive so is salary expectations higher than usual.

When the good places to advertise a job vacancy are plenty around if the company decided to put it on the website, it’s worth using the power of Google and getting this offer working for the company (it will not find itself without the right approach).

If you looked through Google for job offers you may see that some offers are displayed directly in search results (Jobs section) and they are not paid advertising (at least not most of them). Most of them are pulled from other sites.

The good thing is, that you can add your job vacancy to Google for free as well, you just need to inform the search engine the right way.

The right way to do that is with JobPosting Schema.

Sooner rather than later the time has come when another person asks me what to do when they are running out of space on Google Photos and therefore on Gmail.

It happened! Google calculated that the business it got into with Google Photos, while it has irreversibly changed the way we store photos, is very expensive for itself.

Disk space (storage) and its maintenance cost a lot, and not a little. The energy necessary to ensure the continuity of its services plays an even greater role, especially in the era of caring for the climate.

Someone at Google did not consider the fact that people like what is free, especially when you can’t see the difference. And we are talking about photos and videos stored by us on Google Photos in compressed form, but without losing visual quality, and at the same time without them taking up disk space available as part of the service.

And so after over 4 trillion (4,000,000,000,000) photos uploaded by users to Google Photos, and as large companies began to look at the money they were generating from their operations during the pandemic, it was time for Google to start thinking like a profit-oriented company.

On one hand, someone had a great plan, to offer something that would revolutionize the market. On the other hand, someone had an even better plan!

Did anyone know that after a few years (over 5) of using Google Photos, it would be increasingly difficult for anyone to move from it to another solution, if such a thing exists?

Even though I’m not a fan of excessive photo editing, sometimes even the best-taken photo just cries out for a little TLC (as the English say, “touch love care”).

There are a ton of apps on the AppStore (and Google Play) that will help you achieve your goals. Some have just a few useful options, while others have limitations that force you to reach into your wallet to get what you want.

I’ve recently been going through a ton of apps to find the one that has everything I need to achieve the desired effect.

You are probably aware that it is very important that the website you visit, especially the one where you enter any data (including login and password) is secured with a so-called green padlock, i.e. served by https:// before the name of the website.