Sherpa for Majestic Chrome Extension – Review

Sherpa extension
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Most professional SEOs I know use Majestic.com for reliable backlink data. Majestic provides a lot of data about the links to a site, including data about the quality of those links. I have used it for many years, from the time it was known as Majestic SEO. I usually enter the URL of the domain of interest and I am given the relevant information.

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Sherpa for Majestic

I was one of the early testers of a free Chrome extension known as Sherpa for Majestic, which is made by fastfwd. I could not imagine how a Chrome extension would help me in a way I could not already get from Majestic directly. So I installed it, only to find that it didn’t work with Google Australia. That was quickly resolved by Rishi Lakhani’s team and today we have a mature, released product.

Sherpa extension

The extension installed correctly and after linking it to my Majestic account, I did a Google Search. The SERP was modified slightly as per the image below.

SERP with Sherpa

Sherpa for Majestic adds a control panel on the left and data blocks below each search result. You can also turn off ads and regain some screen space.

I enabled some options to highlight certain words in the URL and in the result, so you are seeing some yellow and green highlights. You can choose to see more than 10 results from a selector in the left margin, that is, without going to the search settings. Each search result is numbered, which becomes more useful when you have more than 10 results.

Benefits

You may have noted from the screen shots that you can do your own ranking analysis for a search term of interest. As per the example above, the #1 ranking page has lower Trust Flow (TF) than the lower-ranking results. It does not have the highest Citation Flow (CF) either. OK, experienced SEOs know that backlinks alone don’t influence ranking positions, but this type of data on a SERP page enables me to look at the top ranking URLs and look for backlink patterns, if any. In this home insurance niche, it seems that the top ranking sites have a similar Topical TF.

The fastfwd page has more details about the data the extension provides. You will want to use it.

 

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Availing Leaves

Reading Time: < 1 minute

A viral post on Facebook about the “slow cashier” provides this example of a common error made by many. Two errors, in fact, in one paragraph:

He also said that she has enough leaves that could be availed (and get paid for sitting at home) but Premlata chose to come to work because she wanted to retire with dignity.

Source: http://www.financialexpress.com/india-news/the-slow-cashier-whose-video-went-viral-has-survived-a-paralysis-stroke-once-and-heart-attacks-twice/434600/

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Leaves

It is never plural, in the context of leave from work. You have “enough leave”

Avail

You always “avail of” something. The second word is required.
 

Stepney

Reading Time: < 1 minute

When your car gets a puncture (increasingly called a “flat tyre” in the non-American parts of the English speaking world) in India, you open the “dicky” (“boot” in British-influenced countries), (“trunk” in America) and get the “stepney”.
What’s a stepney? No, not some suburb of London or Adelaide, but the spare wheel (and its fully-inflated tyre). Try to search for it in Google and at least in Australia, you’ll not find the Indian meaning of stepney, namely, the spare tyre. Even the car-related results are simply car dealerships and service stations in Adelaide. (The definition in the Urban Dictionary is most unkind and we won’t go there.)

Stepney, aka spare tyre
Stepney, aka spare tyre

Origin of “Stepney” as a spare tyre

The explanation is that a mechanic in Llanelli, Wales had a shop on Stepney Street and he was the first to sell spare tyres when cars did not come with them. The coat of arms of Llanelli Borough Council (not the current city’s coat of arms) even had a spare tyre on it!
For an excellent article on its origins, please visit the entry for Stepney at World Wide Words.
:mrgreen:
 

President Obama’s whitehouse.gov pages archived

New home for Obama's White House pages
Reading Time: < 1 minute

After Mr Donald Trump became the president at noon today (USA EST), many reported that the whitehouse.gov website removed references to Climate Change and LGBT. That isn’t entirely accurate. The website up to that point has been archived and can be found at https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/.

New home for Obama's White House pages
New home for President Obama’s White House pages

The LGBT URL was https://www.whitehouse.gov/lgbt but it redirects to this temporary page https://www.whitehouse.gov/transitionsplash/

White House 404
404 error page

The page is now at https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/lgbt – why didn’t someone tell the new team how to set up a redirect script so that all old URLs that won’t exist at whitehouse.gov can still be found. Maybe they don’t want them to be found?

LGBT pages
New URL for LGBT pages – click this image to go there.

The climate change pages are now at https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-record/climate

Climate pages
The Climate Change pages at its new URL – click image to go there.

Other old White House pages

As best as I can tell, if you have an old URL, just replace whitehouse.gov/ with obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ and add the rest of the URL to it. For example, to get to whitehouse.gov/vp (to reach Joe Biden’s page), just go to obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/vp and so on. Looks like it’s all there at the archives.gov location, but some links will have broken.

Inspiring employees to “Adopt Adapt Flourish” – a book review

Reading Time: 3 minutes

My earliest memory of a workplace change was in the late 1970s. I worked for a whitegoods manufacturer with an office staff around 20 and about 50 factory workers. I was a part-time student and worked in the “cost office”. We costed all the appliances on a large sheet of ruled paper, otherwise known as the original spreadsheet. Each screw, washer, motor, sheet metal, etc was listed and costed, to arrive at the cost of materials. Continue reading

Book review: Urnabhih: A mauryan tale of espionage, adventure and seduction

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Urnabhih means a spider’s web in Hindi, a language you may need to know to get the best value from this historical fiction.I bought the Kindle edition, although a paperback is also available from Amazon India.

The plot

The spider’s web refers to a web of deceipt and intrigue that is cast across the Mauryan empire during the reign of Chandragupta Maurya (321 – 297 BCE), one of the legendary emperors who ruled much of the lands that span modern Pakistan and India. The protagonist is Misrakesi, a former danseuse-turned-femme-fatale now in the employ of the kingdom’s secret service. She saves the emperor’s life early in the book and then happens to go to Ujjaini, where the Kama Sutra is being drafted with her help. Very convenient, if you ask me.

Continue reading

Jewellers

Reading Time: < 1 minute

The words “jewel”, “jewellery” and “jewellers” are commonly mispronounced. The “w” should be almost silent, i.e. “jooal”, “jooallery” and “jooalers”.
This was brought home by a story in Mid-Day.com and this picture (credit to Mid-Day):
Jewellers
The Marathi sign board uses the transliteration “jyuwelers”, which should really have been जूलर्स.

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