Above is a little picture I wanted to show you.

For those among you who are used to looking at website traffic graphics you see that something strange has happened here…

You see, the picture above is from one of my websites and shows clearly what the impact was of the following story.

I made a mistake, a simple one but with large consequences as you can see.
Because of this mistake traffic for this site almost went done to zero.
But if it had gone down to zero it would have been clear what happed right from the start, but it did not, I “just” lost traffic from the mayor three search engines.

What happened?

In simple terms: the site was hacked via  a remote inclusion attack from several forum like websites, one of them was successful.
There was just one file affected but one of the most important ones, the .htaccess file.
There were four lines of code injected at the bottom to the file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Googlebot|Slurp|msnbot)
RewriteRule ^ http://example.com/ [R=301,L]three - code used

The code in line three redirects those search engine robots too the site in line four (which I changed, the real site got enough traffic from me).

How was this possible? Simple, because I forgot to reset the security on .htaccess after doing some previous test.
The file was still set to 707 = also public write access, and yes its security is set back to the right access now.

How to find out your site is hacked

As I said before if the traffic had gone to zero you most probably would have checked your site and see a defacing of the site itself of some kind. The site would not work the way you would expect it to.

In this case the only problem I could see was that the traffic dropped hard in the statistics.
Upon looking further into the details I checked the ranking of previous Google search terms the site was ranking for.

I found that all the top 10 ranking pages ware gone! All my efforts to rank for those keywords were lost.

So I logged into Google webmaster to check if there was something horribly wrong with the site and the site had received some kind of penalty.

And yes there were errors with the URLs in the sitemap.xml, errors about unreachable URLs.
So I checked the files on the site that where modified just before the drop, and there was the .htaccess file with the above mentioned code.

Getting back into Google

After cleaning up the mess and setting the security right I realized the impact of these few lines.

All three search engine robots had gotten notice that the pages where permanently moved to another domain! which is not true, but they don’t know that.

Checks on site: reference in Google, Yahoo and MSN showed that the domain was still in Yahoo and MSN Indexes, but had no entry in the Google Index anymore.

So it was time to send a reconsideration request to Google telling them what happened, what had been done to resolve the problem and what steps where taken too prevent it from happening again.

After that, you can only wait and wait…, don’t expect an email form Google, just an automatically generated message in your Webmaster control center that they will look into the matter.

After a few days traffic started to build again from Google and Yahoo as well as MSN (Live.com) so you can conclude that Google really looks and acts upon your requests.

Hard Lessons learned

Now for the fun part of this episode, the lessons learned
First lesson: make sure to secure your cms installation and critical files.

Some tips:
- change passwords on a regular basis (use keepass if you have a lot off passwords to remember)
- secure your admin directory or files with .htaccess passwords, most of the hosting companies have this option in their cpanel
- update your system as soon as a new version comes out.

Check your stats once a day, or a least every few days for strange things happening, since this could have taken me a long time to get back if it wasn’t for those early warning signs.

As a personal note: I need to get more incoming links from non-search engines to diversify my traffic sources :-)

What I realized after my traffic was back to its old level was that Google is really fast in acting on 301 redirects and changes in their index.
They update their index with a higher frequency than Yahoo and Live, and they really act fast on those re-inclusion request as well.

A hack like this before your start your SEO work for organic ranking would also mean that all your efforts will have no effect… so if a cusomers is really having trouble to get his or.her site into the search engines, check the .htaccess file!

If you have your own horror stories like this one, please share them in the comments and let us learn from those stories as well.

Tags

Optimization, Search Engines, SEO

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Looking at the new Ask.com commercial, and comparing it to the other search engine you can see some interesting developments:

First, is this the new way you as a searcher want to get results?

You definitely get more and different results from one search as before you needed to run several searches.

But then again looking at the other major search engines, they also provide you with more information than just text.
It all depends on what you are looking for…

So here are some results of one of my favorite singers, but you already knew that..

The Ask.com results page to start the comparison:

So was Ask.com comparing with Google in their commercial?

Or was it Yahoo?

Or was it Live.com they wanted to compare with?

As you can see, most of the search engines are already showing you more then just text, but it all depends on what you are searching for.

If you do a search on Ask for Joomla search engine optimization, you get just a result page as the other engines.

How is Ask going to win the battle

They are working hard on better Commercials, the old ones really didn’t do that well…

But most important is if the results are more relevant than before, and I must say they have made great progress in this field:
Joomla SEO search in Ask.com
Joomla SEO search in Google.com
Joomla SEO search in Live.com
Joomla SEO search in Yahoo.com

Looking at the September results of the Marketingcharts it looks that Ask is already chipping away on Live.com
Also Hitwise reports growing figures for Ask.com.

It would be nice to see next month if this growth path is going to continue with the new commercials.

Now if the would just bring the new interface to other country’s….
Dutch Ask.com homepage or USA Ask.com homepage

O, and do try a search on those country specific pages, so you can see there is also a layout difference in the results.
So for us Dutchies Ask is still not giving an Instant Getification! 

Next time: How are the changes in the results pages going to change SEO, so make sure to get your RSS feed or email updates

Tags

Search Engines

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You now how to find keywords for your website, right? You know about Google external ad tool, WordTracker, trillian and seobook.

But there are more easily and very targeted keyword suggestions to be found.
The Search Engines themselves will show you what they think are the most relevant keywords…
It is like looking into their database and finding what they think is relevant for you visitors.

You just have to now how and where to look.
I did some research for a new page of a new site to check out the Singer Anastacia

Google Suggests

First Google, as this is one of the biggest engines, their you can use Google Suggests to find extra keywords.
You just type in you target keyword and you instantly get a drop-down box that shows you related search suggestions.

Yahoo homepage

You have to use the search box on the Homepage of Yahoo to get the next items to show.

here it works the same way as with Google Suggests, just type in you search word and you get a related items drop-down box.

Live.com Search

Microsoft’s Search engine Live.com also has suggestions for your keywords, but the just show up after you did the search.

In the results page you will find a nice listing on the right hand sidebar.
And they throw in some songs suggestions to take into you list..

Ask.com Suggestions

Yes, you can find the best suggestions on Ask…
They give you a complete left sidebar with all kind off suggestions, even other related items…
You can find extra words to target in the “narrow your search” items.
Find other artists to include in extra pages to build somewhat of a themed site with “Related Names”
Find extra keywords in the “Expand your Search” items.

Af course you will have your own favorite, but for my the Ask results pages was on of the best to use…
You could try the more.. link as well….

Naturally you have to combine the results from all the resources you can get to come to what you think are the best keywords to target, but that’s what makes it so nice to do Search Engine Optimization.. finding new ways to get relevant visitors to your websites!

Tags

Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engines, SEO, SEO Optimization

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Yes !! They finally got it !!

In my post of November last year I asked that the search engines “Make it a standard crawl !! Instruct your robots to look for a file called sitemap.xml the way they look for robots.txt.”

Well, now they are going to do it…. in a even better way as well..

You can read about the announcement on The Ask Blog Sitemaps Autodiscovery they will tell you more on the Search Engine Strategies in New York.

It is going to be simple addition to your robots.txt file like:

SITEMAP: http://www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

You need to put in the full URL, like for this site is is going to be

SITEMAP: http://herbertvandinther.com/sitemap.xml

Put your sitemap.xml link in your Robot.txt file now!
If you have mutliple sitemap.xml files, you have to put the paths into a sitemap index file and point to that file.

If you don’t want to wait on the Autodiscovery, You can still send them:

To Google via the Webmaster Central,
To Yahoo as a feed in their Site Explorer,
To ask via the command:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

To Live? I guess just via your Robots.txt file…

Update: Read more on Sitemap and URL Submission

Tags

Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engines, SEO, SEO Optimization

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If your think you rank well in Google, think again..

Google’s Geo-targeting and your Position

Working on Search Engine Optimization, you have to think about the people who are searching for a specifiek term and how you can be found.

But what if you are trying to reach an audience form an other country?
Let say you want people from Europe to find your Camper Rental site in the US.
Just when your SEO Company or Consultant has brought you to the top of http://www.google.com/ you find your visitors only come from the USA Region.

What is happening?

The reason for this is because Google, and other Search Engines, use a system called Geo-Targeting.
In short, they look at you IP address range and focus the content of the Search Engine Results Page on your networking environment
Thus providing you with results close to your area. 

That is why you sometimes get a different result when running the same query form your home and from your work place.
If that happens, aks your network administrator if your connection to the Internet is running via a provider in an other country.

How to Check the Foreign results

First thing you can try is to change your preferences in Google and set it to a different language for the results.

Or try out the functions on http://oy-oy.eu/google/world/ , now the site may look like an Adsense scraper site, but it really isn’t!
There are really nice functions on checking your website and information on several aspect of your website.

One other site to look at, to see the results from Yahoo side of things, might be http://www.pagebull.com/ which show you the search results as click able screen shots, and you can select a country to search from. Really nice with suprising results.  

How to overcome this problem

Actually, the best thing to do is to create a new website with an extension focused on that region.
For instance use a .eu domain next to your .com website
Also choose a provider for that website in the region you want to target.

If you are from Europe and want to target the USA, pick a USA Based provider….
I know, I didn’t, but I just created Design-cars.com as an SEO study object (O Boy, did that turn out as a large knowledge enviroment..:-))

One other thing thats is easier to do, is to check with the above mentioned tool who you are competing with and learn from their sites…

Yes, doing the analysis again and do the Optimization again… its an on going effort.

If you know of other options to solve this problem, please share the knowledge by commenting!

Tags

Optimization, Search Engines, SEO, SEO Optimization

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Alexa changed there traffic ranking information.

Now you are able to see what your traffic ranking is for other countries.
And I was impressed…

You can see from which country te majority of your visitors come from and what your pagerank is for those country’s.

So now you can try and figure out what the best options are to get more visitors form other country’s :-)

Yet another great resource to tap into if you are geo-targetting your site content… 

Tags

Optimization, Search Engines, SEO

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Now everybody likes images, right…
Sometimes an image can make a better impact on your visitor then just text.
But what on earth have Images to do with SEO?

Images and SEO

Look at the images you use in articles on your website.
How did you put them in there, and what else did you do with it?

Some people don’t think that what I am going to tell you is worth all the trouble…
I think you should work on providing the best content on your site for everybody, and make the most of it to get your site into the search engines.
Both can be accomplished by optimization your images and the use of them.
But first things first.

Naming your Images.

If you incorporated some images into your site, did you just uploaded your pictures from your camera, or what you received from your client?

Or did you rename them from DSC20071302.jpg or IMG_12548.jpg to something more meaning full like Keyword-Included-fits-the-picture.jpg
And please use – instead of _ for your picture names…

If you did the later, you have one point up from the rest of many websites.

The benefit not only goes to getting an extra keyword into your page, but its also much easier for the Search Engines to index your images on keywords searches.

Yes, people are more and more using these image based searches from Live.com, Yahoo and Google.
So you might get some of your visitors from there, although they might not be the real target visitors for your website… unless you have a website with mostly images..

Optimizing you images

If you have images makes sure the have the right size for your website.
That means that, if you have an image that is 1600×1280 pixels you should not squeeze it into an 540×320 box…, yes I know people do this all the time.

The image has to be loaded completely before it is rendered to the size you want it to display.
If you make the images in the actual size you want to use them, you have a much faster loading page then if you let a browser do it.
(A great free tool to do this irfanview, which give great result in maintaining sharpness)

The use of .jpg, .png or .gif depends on what type of image you want to use.
That is mostly a matter of trying several setting.
My choice for pictures is .jpg for icons and stuff its mostly .gif
Ground rule for me is: If there are a lot of different colours in the picture I use .jpg otherwise .gif

Putting in the Image Tags

Now you have come to the fun part….

If you place images on you website, I also depends on to tools you use to make those pages.
Some of the tools you use on creating webpages, or online wysiwig editors do assist you in putting in the right tags and parameters.
For Joomla you might find the JoomlaFCK editor to be one of the best.

Otherwise you have go into the HTML coding to place them.
Here are the three key parameters for your images:
- Size
- alt tags
- title tag

Always give the size height=” ” and width=” ” tags with your images !!
This way the browser you are using can reserve space for the image while loading it, in the mean time it will bring in the text.
Your visitor can start reading while the image is loaded, so the impression is a fast loading page.

The Alt tag is used for two reasons:
One -  the alt tag is displayed if the user has the image loading function set to off.
Two -  a text based browser will show the alt tag instead if the image itself, just like a “normal” search engine spider would look at the content of your page.

Title tag is what is shown as info tip when you hover over a picture, thus providing also more information to your visitors.

A complete image tag then can read like:
< img title=”title tag” alt=”alt tag” height=”96″ width=”128″ src=”http://www.itmentor.nl/images/stories/articles.jpg” / >

Things not to do with Images and SEO

Here are a few pointers on what not to do if you are optimizing your images for SEO.
- Don’t use meaningless pictures, they should fit your topic.
- Don’t stuff you picture naming full of keywords
- Don’t stuff you “alt” and “title” tags full of keywords !! it will be noticed, provide meaning full descriptions.
- Don’t use large pictures if its not necessary.

Wrapping it up:
Use that littly extra time, just a few seconds to implement this for every image you use.
Make sure spiders can access your image directory by removing the disallow part form your robots.txt file if you have one.

Have fun taking an sharing your pictures !
And if you need inspiration, visit www.flickr.com, tons of great pictures…

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, Search Engines, SEO, SEO Articles, SEO Optimization, Webdesign

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Yesterday I found out about the free tool that Wordtracker is offering now.

You can find it at Wordtracker and it works great, better than the Overture one :-( at the moment.

But they bring you an even nicer tool as of today…
If you use Firefox its really easy to integrate this tool into you browser bar!!

Find the keywords for the site you are working on, right from you browser, you don’t even go the site.
I think Wordtracker is really working now to turn the current problems with Overture to there advantage.

And now you can profit from that a well !!
So here is the tool …http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/add-searchbox-to-browser.html.

Or get it here….

and you can link to this plugin from your own site, just spread the word (they will track it…)

Tags

Joomla, Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engines, SEO, SEO Optimization

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If you are a Blogger, or use RSS Feeds to bring your website content to your visitors, you might have seen these feed scraper sites that use your content.

Building Feed scraper sites

No, I am not going to tell you how to create those sites.
But I know of at least one that just feeds on Blogs about Joomla, just to bring visitors to their site which is filled with Google adsense adverts (not a bad thing…) and affiliate links (can work as well).
But the main problem I have with this site is that is has no original content!

And it is not set up as a RSS Feed directory where you as a blogger can place your feeds yourself.
No it automatically harvests Blog content.

However this site still gives a link back to the original Blog poster.

Today I came across a site that does the same scrapping, but does not even give a link to the original content….

The Good thing of Showing Feeds on you site

These sites are sometimes build with Joomla and the RSS Feed technology that is in the core application, or build with WordPress and a special Plugin.

These options can also be used on your website, but use them in a good way.
That means that you limit the number of Feeds you bring into your pages and keep them focused on the content of your site…. and keep the link to the original.

That way you give back some quality inbound links to the originator of the post and you, your visitors and the Blog you feed off will win in the long run.

P.s. I think these sites will get less attention once Google, Yahoo and Live are able to see these sites for what the are really are…. the evil site of RSS Feeders.

Just to give the post a nice ending…

Tags

Joomla, Search Engines, SEO, WordPress

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