Does your website hacked?

Most of the webmasters are suffering with hacking and de-indexing problems. We need to take a lot of care while protecting a website even it is small or big. 

To findout the problems why your site is de-indexed or how hacked is little bit difficult and needs lot of attention to find out the reason. Participate in Google webmaster groups, so that Google engineers might guide you in the right direction. 

Actually when we will have a doubt that whether our site is hacked or de-indexed from google, just observe the following factors so that you will came to know the status.

• Website is ranked for spamy words
  
• Taking more loading time and getting error even host is good
  
• Suspicious messages from browsers
  
• Web pages disappeared from the Search engine results
  
• Homepage is De-indexed from Google
  

How to confirm that your site have suspicious content :

Google has released Safe Browsing Diagnostic Tool in Mar 2008. Using this tool you can check

• Present status of your site
  
• While visiting does google have any problem?
  
• Does your site distributing malware or not?
  
• Is your site hosted malware?
  

In the following URL just replace cnet.com with your site URL to get the results 

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://cnet.com/

Just have a check on your site and let me if you have any problems and concerns. It looks as follows . If your site is safe then that's good or else what's next step you need to take (Described below the image)

If your site hacked then :

First step you need to take is contact your hosting service and inform him to remove the malware from the site. Then have a look on the following factors

• Hidden text and links
  
• Cloaking urls
  
• Automated requests to search engines
  
• Doorway pages
  
• Duplicate content
  
• Paid links
  
• Do follow links for ads
  

You must avoid all the above techniques to get good rankings in search engines. Once you fixed all these issues then go to the Google webmaster tools and request for re-inclusion. After few days your site will get back to the old position and some times even better positions too.

I hope everyone is using Google webmaster tools, if not please start using it. why because you will get all the information about your site that how Google is crawling your site, how many pages are included, indexed, crawling issues, problems .....etc. So as per the instructions in the account you will fix the issues and make your site clean and perfect. Sometimes you will get a mail or message from webmaster central team by stating about issues in your site. Would you like to know how the mail looks like, here it is ...

Here is a small video where Mattcutt explains What we need to do before submitting re-inclusion request to Google about our site.

Effective way of Doing Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking has it's own place in the internet even the social media is getting raised. It's a process where people can find links and bookmark or favorite those links and also can vote for the links. More votes for a link means the popular bookmark it is. 

Most of the guys even don't the right process that how to do social bookmarking. It's also an art, if you know that how to perform the art perfectly then your profile would be get more visits and your links would get more votes.

I would like to explain you the right way that how you need to perform social bookmarking. Step by step described follow :

• Update entire profile will complete info which looks professional
  
• Search authorized profiles then vote and comment on their links
  
• Add Authorized profiles in to your friends
  
• Build a professional relationship with them
  
• First to vote and comment on their links
  
• In result you will get good comments and votes for your links
  
• Provide different kinds of good links which catches public interest.

List of Social Boookmarking sites :

• Digg.com
  
• StumbleUpon.com
  
• Technorati.com
  
• Del.icio.us
  
• Propeller.com
  
• simpy.com
  
• Slashdot.org .......... etc...
  

Main problem here is most of the people will create profiles and submit their own website links again and again in the same profile, it causes to ban account by the site administrator and also you will get a bad impact in the internet world. Hope you guys are clear with instructions if not let me know. So that i can correct myself. Feel free to ask questions. Looking forward for your comments.

Are shorten urls SEO friendly? …. Yes

Shorten URLs will be used especially at Social Media sites to share web pages and interesting links. People are spending hours and hours in front of Facebook, Twitter etc, so URL Shortener services are increasing day by day. Most of people have this question that whether these short URLs are SEO friendly or not. 

Usually shorten URLs will redirect to destination URLs. We need to find out whether these redirections are permanent (301) or temporary (302). We have few free tools on the web to check it. Yes, URL Shorten Services are using permanent 301 redirection which is search engine friendly. Please have a look at the following screenshot and video for better understanding.

 

Mattcutts explaining the same in the following video:

Google Webmaster Tools - SEO Updates 2012

I would like to highlight & include the summaries of SEO Updates in 2012 which are published on Google webmaster central official blog.

1. Google https search is faster now on modern browser             - Mar 19th 2012
2. SEO Friendly Pagination algorithm update from Google           - Mar 13th 2012
3. Better Crawl Errors reporting in Google Webmaster tools         - Mar 12th 2012
4. Filtering Free hosting spam websites from search results          - Mar 06th 2012
5. User & Administrator access are now available in GWT           - Mar 05th 2012  
6. Video markup language for better indexation of Videos             -  Feb 21^st 2012
7. Optimize your site to handle unexpected traffic growth              -  Feb 09^th 2012
8. Webmaster tools sitemaps interface with fresh look                  -  Jan 26^th 2012
9. Few changes on Top search queries data in Webmaster tools    -  Jan 25^th 2012      
10. Google Algorithm update to Page layout structure                     -  Jan 19^th 2012
11. Page Titles Update in Search Results                                       -  Jan 12^th 2012

1. Faster HTTPs Search:
Google made some changes to its https search. If you are logged in to your gmail account and searching for some thing on Google, When you click on a specific result for a keyword then you will reach that web page little faster compared to earlier https search. Google Team has reduced the latency of https search in modern browser like chrome.

2. SEO Friendly Pagination:
Most of the eCommerce and content portals will usually have pagination issue. Due to pagination most of the duplicate pages will be created with product titles in eCommerce portals and with article titles in content portals. Now Google came up with updated algorithm i.e. following are the two ways to fix pagination issue.

• Insert View all page and use rel="canonical" in sub pagination pages
• Use rel="prev" and rel="next"

3. Upgraded Crawl Errors Reporting:
Crawl Errors is a feature in Webmaster tools which will report all errors in your website. Google webmaster team started detecting new errors and reporting all errors in a better way. Categorized crawl errors in to two types i.e. "Site Errors" and "URL Errors".
 
4. Filtering Free hosting spam websites:
We know that "few of the hosting providers will offer free hosting services". Due to free hosting most of the spammers will create low quality content websites dynamically. Google started filtering this kind of websites from search results and also requesting free hosting providers to show patterns of spam to Google team, so that Google team can effectively update their algorithm and filter these spam sites from search results effectively.


5. Now Webmaster tools have both admin & user access:
Earlier we do not have an option to give user access to our webmaster tools account to any other user. Only admin access should be shared to other users, which isn't safe. With the latest update we can give webmaster tools user access to other users now onwards.

6. Schema.org Video Markup:

We all know that Google, Yahoo & Bing are supporting schema.org common markup language to make a better web. Now schema.org released mark up for Videos i.e. http://schema.org/VideoObject. Follow this markup while adding videos to your site. It will help search engines to crawl these videos effectively.

7. Handle sudden traffic spike:

Usually popular sites face downtime issues due to sudden increase in traffic, websites will crash often in such cases. So, it’s better to plan “lightweight version of the website or mobile version” to handle traffic in difficult times. Also we can use third party services to land that particular page which is receiving higher traffic. 

8. New interface for sitemap section:

Earlier sitemap section used have normal interface with some basic content stats. Now added videos, images sitemap statistics with colorful interface. Compared to old interface, new interface looks pretty clean and easier to understand with better usability. Now users can delete sitemaps, which were submitted by another webmaster owner. 

9. Search queries data update:

Normally in webmaster tools search queries data rankings will show average position of the keyword. Now onwards it will display top position of that keyword.

10. Page Layout Structure algorithm Change:

We often see websites with too many ads and it’s difficult to find out the difference between real content and ads. Few sites will have completely ads about the fold, users will have bad experience with these sites. As per new page layout algorithm, these sites will lose rankings and bring down from top search engine results.

11. Page Titles update in search:

Page titles will have higher impact in CTR. Usually Google pick the title tag from

Better page titles in search results

Page titles are an important part of our search results: they’re the first line of each result and they’re the actual links our searchers click to reach websites. Our advice to webmasters has always been to write unique, descriptive page titles (and meta descriptions for the snippets) to describe to searchers what the page is about.


We use many signals to decide which title to show to users, primarily the

Page layout algorithm improvement

Webmaster Level: All

In our ongoing effort to help you find more high-quality websites in search results, today we’re launching an algorithmic change that looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result.

As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

We understand that placing ads above-the-fold is quite common for many websites; these ads often perform well and help publishers monetize online content. This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page. This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads.

This algorithmic change noticeably affects less than 1% of searches globally. That means that in less than one in 100 searches, a typical user might notice a reordering of results on the search page. If you believe that your website has been affected by the page layout algorithm change, consider how your web pages use the area above-the-fold and whether the content on the page is obscured or otherwise hard for users to discern quickly. You can use our Browser Size tool, among many others, to see how your website would look under different screen resolutions.

If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes. How long that takes will depend on several factors, including the number of pages on your site and how efficiently Googlebot can crawl the content. On a typical website, it can take several weeks for Googlebot to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes on the site.

Overall, our advice for publishers continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus on specific algorithm tweaks. This change is just one of the over 500 improvements we expect to roll out to search this year. As always, please post your feedback and questions in our Webmaster Help forum.

Posted by Matt Cutts, Distinguished Engineer

Update to Top Search Queries data

Webmaster level: All

Starting today, we’re updating our Top Search Queries feature to make it better match expectations about search engine rankings. Previously we reported the average position of all URLs from your site for a given query. As of today, we’ll instead average only the top position that a URL from your site appeared in.

An example
Let’s say Nick searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 3, 6, and 12. Jane also searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 5 and 9. Previously, we would have averaged all these positions together and shown an Average Position of 7. Going forward, we’ll only average the highest position your site appeared in for each search (3 for Nick’s search and 5 for Jane’s search), for an Average Position of 4.

We anticipate that this new method of calculation will more accurately match your expectations about how a link's position in Google Search results should be reported.

How will this affect my Top Search Queries data?
This change will affect your Top Search Queries data going forward. Historical data will not change. Note that the change in calculation means that the Average Position metric will usually stay the same or decrease, as we will no longer be averaging in lower-ranking URLs.

Check out the updated Top Search Queries data in the Your site on the web section of Webmaster Tools. And remember, you can also download Top Search Queries data programmatically!

We look forward to providing you a more representative picture of your Google Search data. Let us know what you think in our Webmaster Forum.

Posted by Chris Anderson, Google Analytics team, and Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

What’s new with Sitemaps

Webmaster level: All

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site. Webmaster Tools’ Sitemaps feature gives you feedback on your submitted Sitemaps, such as how many Sitemap URLs have been indexed, or whether your Sitemaps have any errors. Recently, we’ve added even more information! Let’s check it out:


The Sitemaps page displays details based on content-type. Now statistics from Web, Videos, Images and News are featured prominently. This lets you see how many items of each type were submitted (if any), and for some content types, we also show how many items have been indexed. With these enhancements, the new Sitemaps page replaces the Video Sitemaps Labs feature, which will be retired.

Another improvement is the ability to test a Sitemap. Unlike an actual submission, testing does not submit your Sitemap to Google as it only checks it for errors. Testing requires a live fetch by Googlebot and usually takes a few seconds to complete. Note that the initial testing is not exhaustive and may not detect all issues; for example, errors that can only be identified once the URLs are downloaded are not be caught by the test.

In addition to on-the-spot testing, we’ve got a new way of displaying errors which better exposes what types of issues a Sitemap contains. Instead of repeating the same kind of error many times for one Sitemap, errors and warnings are now grouped, and a few examples are given. Likewise, for Sitemap index files, we’ve aggregated errors and warnings from the child Sitemaps that the Sitemap index encloses. No longer will you need to click through each child Sitemap one by one.

Finally, we’ve changed the way the “Delete” button works. Now, it removes the Sitemap from Webmaster Tools, both from your account and the accounts of the other owners of the site. Be aware that a Sitemap may still be read or processed by Google even if you delete it from Webmaster Tools. For example if you reference a Sitemap in your robots.txt file search engines may still attempt to process the Sitemap. To truly prevent a Sitemap from being processed, remove the file from your server or block it via robots.txt.

For more information on Sitemaps in Webmaster Tools and how Sitemaps work, visit our Help Center. If you have any questions, go to Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Kamila Primke, Software Engineer, Webmaster Tools

Preparing your site for a traffic spike

Webmaster level: Intermediate

It’s a moment any site owner both looks forward to, and dreads: a huge surge in traffic to your site (yay!) can often cause your site to crash (boo!). Maybe you’ll create a piece of viral content, or get Slashdotted, or maybe Larry Page will get a tattoo and your site on tech tattoos will be suddenly in vogue.

Many people go online immediately after a noteworthy event—a political debate, the death of a celebrity, or a natural disaster—to get news and information about that event. This can cause a rapid increase in traffic to websites that provide relevant information, and may even cause sites to crash at the moment they’re becoming most popular. While it’s not always possible to anticipate such events, you can prepare your site in a variety of ways so that you’ll be ready to handle a sudden surge in traffic if one should occur:

• Prepare a lightweight version of your site.
  Consider maintaining a lightweight version of your website; you can then switch all of your traffic over to this lightweight version if you start to experience a spike in traffic. One good way to do this is to have a mobile version of your site, and to make the mobile site available to desktop/PC users during periods of high traffic. Another low-effort option is to just maintain a lightweight version of your homepage, since the homepage is often the most-requested page of a site as visitors start there and then navigate out to the specific area of the site that they’re interested in. If a particular article or picture on your site has gone viral, you could similarly create a lightweight version of just that page.
  A couple tips for creating lightweight pages:
• Exclude decorative elements like images or Flash wherever possible; use text instead of images in the site navigation and chrome, and put most of the content in HTML.
• Use static HTML pages rather than dynamic ones; the latter place more load on your servers. You can also cache the static output of dynamic pages to reduce server load.
• Take advantage of stable third-party services.
  Another alternative is to host a copy of your site on a third-party service that you know will be able to withstand a heavy stream of traffic. For example, you could create a copy of your site—or a pared-down version with a focus on information relevant to the spike—on a platform like Google Sites or Blogger; use services like Google Docs to host documents or forms; or use a content delivery network (CDN).
• Use lightweight file formats.
  If you offer downloadable information, try to make the downloaded files as small as possible by using lightweight file formats. For example, offering the same data as a plain text file rather than a PDF can allow users to download the exact same content at a fraction of the filesize (thereby lightening the load on your servers). Also keep in mind that, if it’s not possible to use plain text files, PDFs generated from textual content are more lightweight than PDFs with images in them. Text-based PDFs are also easier for Google to understand and index fully.
• Make tabular data available in CSV and XML formats.
  If you offer numerical or tabular data (data displayed in tables), we recommend also providing it in CSV and/or XML format. These filetypes are relatively lightweight and make it easy for external developers to use your data in external applications or services in cases where you want the data to reach as many people as possible, such as in the wake of a natural disaster.

We’d love to hear your tips and tricks for weathering traffic spikes—come join us in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst