SEO Blog

Google is the most powerful and popular search engine in the world and It is rocking the entire cyber world making it shift at its own pace. Questions may what it does it take to enter the giant organization. I just found some questions that Google used to recruit people in the past. Well, the questions are funny, interesting and gives you a lot to think about to find the answers. The questions are probably some old ones, but these sorts of questions can always test your knowledge, intelligence and wit. So, here is a brief discussion about those questions and the answers to them.

The first question is about solving a cryptic equation. In this question the value of M and E are assumed to be interchanged if needed and the leading zeroes are not to be allowed. The answer to be found is the value of WWWDOT – Google = DOTCOM.

Well the answer is 589486.

Second one is about the number of colors can be used to make an icosahedrons while having one of the three colors on each and every face.

The answer is 58130055.

Now comes a very tough one (!), which is about the over-arching philosophy of Google. The answer to the question is “Don’t be evil”.
Now for the toughest, the question is asked to wonder about benefits and there are multiple answers which are ranged from coffee to skiing and if you still have the interest to seek an employment with Google yet, well, simply Apply at Google.

If you are a rookie in the business of blog you better get ready to face many controllable, partially controllable and even uncontrollable problems. One of the problems you might face is the violation of rules and regulations regarding the contents of your blog. And trust me in this you will have to be tough enough about these kinds of trouble and even take initiatives like blog deletion. But things can get even worse if you are not sure why and how you will block a blog. Otherwise blocking can backfire at you.

Six Apart tried to block some blogs of them, which they believed to contain inappropriate contents. But the attempt failed and even left them to pay a price. Six Apart went to take action on their very own site Live Journal. After the revealing of a potential sex-themed content they tried to block it. But they actually blocked all the members. Later they were able to unblock the people who didn’t disobey the terms and conditions. (Check out the CNET coverage here & here)

As a publisher, it is your job to check the transparency of the contents of your blogs. In this age of advanced internal search engine application it is never hard to search for inappropriate or unwanted topic in your blogs. As the writers of blogs are bound to the terms and conditions set by you, there is no question of defying any rules. You can also change the policies of your blogs according to the need.

You have to monitor, decide and set the level of independence, which never should be more than 99.99%.

Gmail obviously has written new dimensions to the e-mail system on the web. Banging off with its impressive storage capacity, Gmail now declares even a bigger attachment opportunity. With some of the other mail services still striving to break the hurdles of a limited memory space, Gmail allows 20 MBs of allocation just on the attachment files only, previously this being 10 MB. Although the Gmail help says that the precise permissible amount will depend on the type of the attachment, may be it has something to deal with whether it is audio, video or text documents. Got something to learn about it from a Gmail expert commenting –

“In email, a binary file is expanded (due to encoding) and hence the size of the binary file and the one sent in mail are different. Hence the precise size depends on the encoding and attachment sent.”

Gmail has invented an ever increasing storage device which is something like 2859 MB at this moment. Has got to say that most of the users are never troubled by the file size, rather the dialoging of “you can’t send .exe, etc. file without renaming them” creates a bigger amount of annoyance for the users.

Although I personally am never disappointed by the bigger attachment tender as in this process of Gmail upgrades, people might be offered to share favorite movies between them in the near future.

Google Maps is a new revolution by the kingpin in the search industry Google. It has been developed almost regularly, bringing new services and facilities on a customary basis. One of the new advantages provided by Google Maps is the real time traffic information of Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Boston, New York and many more. Google Maps has now started showing live traffic information for about sixty United States cities. This functionality has been on hand for cell phones since July, but now it is accessible in many languages on the standard edition of the Google Maps software.

The authorized Google blog explains what is meant by the colors, although the Google Operating System appears to be more precise. I am describing the hints of the colors for your interest here. The green color means more than 50 miles per hour, yellow indicates between 25 and 50 miles per hour, red means less than 25 miles per hour and Gray means – no data available. When a user is viewing a certain location on Google Maps where traffic data is available, a certain traffic light is shown, and there is a new button tagged Traffic on it as well. Google is not the first to insert live traffic to its maps; Microsoft and Yahoo! have been doing that for quite a while now already. As the competition is increasing day by day, the users are being benefited mostly by new and exclusive features.

I just had Rafi, an associate that is a Wedding Photographer in Toronto, contact me wanting some help with his site. Some hacker got into his hosting account and either installed malicious software on his site or added links on his site to malicious software.

I am making a case study out of this incident and will be adding information and resources as I work to get the Google flag and redirect lifted from Rafi’s site.

All the VideoBabylon.ca pages in the Google SERP now have “This Site May Harm Your Computer” right below the title and when you go to click through to the site you are taken to a Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer! page. This means no traffic from Google until this flag gets lifted.

The following screen shot shows the warning which I have highlighted in yellow. Here is the results live on a search of Wedding Photographer Toronto.

When you click on the warning for any of the VideoBabylon.ca pages it takes you to a Concerns About Content in our Index page.

When a site gets flagged by Google for badware, Google also sends the data they have gathered to StopBadWare.org which in turn posts this information on their Badware Website Clearinghouse. Here is the Badware Website Clearinghouse record for videobabylon.ca.

In the Google Webmaster Guidelines there is a seperate page for the specific guideline of Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware which gives you Googles position on badware.

For those that are concerned that someone may wrongly or falsely report your site and cause Google to place a warning in the search engine results StopBadWare has posted the following information on their FAQ page.

Google independently identifies sites that host or distribute badware. If it finds a site that contains or links to badware, it puts up a warning page in the search results for that site (discussed in the FAQ above). Google also informs StopBadware, after the fact, of its findings. If a search for your site leads to a Google warning page, it means that Google’s testing process has found your site to be hosting or distributing badware, and thus potentially harmful. Google does not post warning pages merely in response to reports from the public but only after, and as a result of, its own testing of the site.

Steps to Getting this Flag Removed

1. Get the Badware off Your Site
Read through the StopBadWare Tips for Cleaning and Securing Your Website and read the their FAQ about Google Warnings.

Completing the following can significantly shorten the time for StopBadWare to process your review.

Remove all badware and links to badware from your website, and fix any security vulnerabilities that are present on your site… In addition, fixing security vulnerabilities will help prevent badware from being injected onto your site in the future, and thus reduce the probability that your site will be submitted to the Badware Website Clearinghouse again.

VideoBabylon.ca is on a shared hosting account so all files were restored to an older version and all passwords were changed.

2. Request a Site Review
The 2nd step is to do a request for review. On this page you add your site into the field that is in front of the “Search Clearinghouse” button and click the button. This will do a search for your domain.

If you have a warning page from Google your site should come up. Click on link to the site after you search and fill out the Review Request. If you site doesn’t come up you can request a review of your site on the Review Request for Website not in Clearinghouse page.

StopBadWare will forward your request information to Google.

Here is the request for videobabylon.ca.

3. Verify That you Have Requested a Review.
After you have done a request for review you want to double check to make sure StopBadWare.org shows that you have in fact done this. Go to the Search Badware Website Clearinghouse page and search for your domain. You domain should show in the results of the search and will have either a Red A in a circle or a Black A in a circle to the left of the domain.

A shows that you have made a review request and the shows you having not made a request for review.

Here is the status of the request from videobabylon.ca.

4. Monitor the Status of Your Request for Review
After you have verified that you have requested a review you want to monitor that request and wait for the decision that StopBadWare gives.

I am currently monitoring videobabylon.ca.

According to Danny Sullivan the process is still an up to 2 week processing time.

Time Line:
Jun 20 1400hr: Rafi viewed site SERP and there was no flag.
Jun 20 1200hr: Rafi is informated they have been flagged.
Jun 21 1200hr: Rafi replaces all files with backup and changes all passwords.
Jun 21 1200hr: Rafi made a request for review to stopbadware.
Jun 21 1300hr: Rafi contacted SEO Company.
Jun 21 1400hr: SEO Company goes over site. Submits request to stopbadware to review URL www.videobabylon.ca/ which is the URL Google flagged. (The client made request for review for URL www.videobabylon.ca but Google flagged www.videobabylon.ca/ which stopbadware showed as different).
Jun 25 1900hr: stopbadware shows a review request has been made for www.videobabylon.ca/.
Jul 05 1835hr: stopbadware sends client an email noting the site has obfuscated code that injects an iframe with a link to an infected site. Requests code removable and to do another request for review.

Related Links:
Matt Cutts Blog — How Google handles malware: a historical overview
Matt Cutts Blog — Info about malware warnings and how to appeal them
Matt Cutts Blog — Got malware? Google will help you find it
Google Group — stopbadware
Google Webmaster Central Blog — Better badware notifications for webmasters
Niels Provos & other Googlers — The Ghost In The Browser Analysis of Web-based Malware

Notes:
The Virus Graphics is from Geeks.com tech-tips and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

The big ones in the search players market, Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask announced together that there will be a new way added in their sites to let you tell them where you stored your Sitemap XML file. All you have to do is to add a line in the robots.txt file as follows:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Sitemaps.org explains that Sitemaps tell the search engines about your URLs to help the crawlers of theirs to index them. One may not find a use of the sitemaps. It can be considered as extra work invested for nothing by a person, because search engines can discover links and content files that are linked.

Sitemaps can be a document in any form. You use this as a planning tool to list webpage or web design in an organized way. This really helps the search engine bots and visitors to find the right pages. Sitemaps also help to ensure a properly performed search engine optimization for the site. This is an important factor for the site especially when the site does not have HTML links and uses Macromedia flash and Javasript menus. And for the large websites it is necessary to have a sitemap so people can find all the contents of the site. As the biggest search engines in the internet are using the same protocol, using a sitemap will definitely help these search engines to know updated information of the page.

Microsoft reported its Q3 earnings, where it announced its overall revenue. The total revenue was of $14.4 billion which is 32% more compared to last year. Net income is of $4.93 billion and it is also increased at the rate of 65% over the previous year’s quarter.

While doing a conference call, Colleen Healy -investor relations manager, has said that advertising revenue rose by 23% and the company is heading before the last year’s monetization goal made for the adCenter (Transcript is available in SeekingAlpha.com).

Healy also said that monetizing is done more effectively as they are doing it on their own adCenter platform. It is better than having a third party Overture at this time in the previous year. Their display growth was in line with healthy market, which is driven by the increase in the number of times page is viewed.

Search revenue is benefited from the increase in number of queries. So the revenues are increased per search on both consequential and year on year. As said by CFO Chris Liddell, Microsoft seems to be happy with the growth found in the display ads and also about the fact that the search products are relevant. But Microsoft is not happy with the market share it has. So it plans to invest in all these areas. Let’s see how much profit and revenue Microsoft earns this year with its continual effort to make growth in the market.

Recently, Google added page view information when a user checks personal gadgets from “Google Gadgets for Your Webpage” directory. Gadgets are the previous modules that can be consisted in three dissimilar places right now; a user’s Google homepage, user’s personal computer running beyond the Google Desktop, and other websites, such as, blogs. It is puzzling to think that Google did not combine this into a solitary directory up till now. Google says that, these figures are rough calculations which represent how many times each gadget is left across each and every place where Google Gadgets can be observed.

According to Google, some of the weekly page peeps for the mainly prominent gadgets are given below:

• YouTube player - 32,787
• Mini Web - 47,484
• Google Calendar - 74,182
• Maukie - 244,118
• MyWeather - 519,294
• Google Calendar Viewer - 932,224
• Digg - 3,228,599
• Google Maps - 4,861,113
• PacMan v2.0 - 8,114,344
• Date & Time - 130,290,121

Some portion of these statistics look fairly remarkable (Maukie, a cat which follows the mouse pointer of the user, attracts more than 240,000 page sights!), though keep in mind that widget numbers have a tendency of being inflated - a gadget heaps with each single page view, repeatedly included in the direction - finding of the page in query, or someplace on the Google customized homepage, and the scrutiny will tally independent of whether the user still appears at the gadgets or not.

At Search Engine Journal, Loren Baker has disclosed another pay-per-digg scheme named Subvert and Profit, which asserts that it will not get users prohibited from famous social network promotion tool, the Digg. According to its homepage, it is a new type of black market that permits promoters to buy actions on social networks and it pays social network users to carry out those actions.

I clearly admit that, the service it provides is a violation of the social network’s Terms of Use. But, Subvert and Profit states that, they have an algorithm which chooses users to Digg a story founded on how irrelevant they are according to the terms of Digging history and that the traffic they provide is much cheaper than ppc.

To comment on this service, Technical Bliss informs us that the two blogs that were posted in the Subvert and Profit blog were written almost without any doubt. It was written under names assumed from Atlas Shrugged of Ayn Rand and a famous KGB master strategist. All these blogs asked only one question that, how shady it is?

Would a user actually trust the status of his site to a firm which gives answer to a question - who are you - in their Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) section? And the answer to this question was that, they are whoever the user wants them to be and they are everywhere. The question is, how soon will it happen before going back from where they came from?

Did you ever get what you thought was a good idea on ranking higher and then there was a little nagging voice in your head that said “you better not do that”. You didn’t listen to it and a few days later all your website rankings when poof.

Well what was talking to you was your conscience. That is the faculity or sense that has the ability to tell you that you should or shouldn’t do some thing on your website.

Your need to mold and shape and educate your conscience so it can keep you in the straight and narrow as far as search engine guidelines are concerned. The following are a number of things you can do that will help you with this job.

1. Read the following seach engine guidelines monthly.
–Google Webmaster Guidelines
–Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines
–Items and techniques discouraged by MSN Search

2. Read Matt Cutts blog daily. Matt is the head of the Webspam Team in Google. He reports from time to time on sites that get banned and why that happened.

3. Visit a number of SEO forums and the Google Webmaster Help forum and read about websites that have gotten banned and what they have experienced.
Here are a few search examples.
–Google Webmaster Help search on website banned
–Search Engine Watch search on banned (click on the Search Now button).

4. Sit down for 30 minutes and mediate on what would happen to your business and website if you were banned. Make on it has just happened and think of the impack it is now going to happen. The stress, the lost of revenue, and all the extra working. In your mediations I suggest you think that your site will not get back in the Google index for 2 months and the rankings will not recover for another 3 months.

Related Links:
–Google Reinclusion Request
–Matt Cutts Video Reinclusion Requests
–Search Engine Penalty Consulting — We Will Get You Back In!