Don`t Make These Common SEO Mistakes! - The Wrong Kind of Exposure
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When I talk about the wrong kind of exposure in this case I don’t mean bad publicity. I mean exposing information to the public that they were never intended to see. Jordan gives one example involving a common web site management platform that stored site statistics in a folder labeled /statistics/. If that folder wasn’t password-protected, anyone who knew that such a folder existed could read it, which meant that “many unwary webmasters unwittingly published full traffic data for their site on the Internet,” Jordan explained. That security hole may or may not exist today, but the principle certainly holds: if you don’t want the whole world to see a particular file, secure it.
Another example of the wrong kind of exposure is what happened when AOL published a search data report in 2006. Its publication was intentional, but it was not well thought out. Supposedly AOL tried to scrub the personal information off of the search data it published, so that searchers would remain anonymous. It didn’t quite work that way; at least one major publication was able to identify one of the users from her searches. The mess led to the resignation of the company’s chief technical officer.
If your company handles any kind of personal information for your users, it should be secured so that it can’t be accessed by the malicious – and it can’t be published by the unwitting. Speaking of “unwitting,” make sure that anyone who publishes information to your web site – your website designers, for example – knows what should and should not be published. You may want to keep sales tactics on an “internal only” section of your web site that your customers never see; after all, you probably don’t want them to know the tricks you use for up-selling and cross-selling your products.
Timing may also play a role in what you want the public to see. For example, you may not want a press release published before a particular date. Think what would happen if Apple’s own employees published announcements of the company’s new products a day before Steve Jobs presented them!
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