Monthly Archives: August 2012

“Why did our PageRank go down?”

Recently a newspaper contacted me. Their PageRank had dropped from 7 to 3, and they wanted to know why. They genuinely didn’t seem know what the issue was, so I took some time to write them an in-depth reply. Part of the motivation for my blog is to provide information in more scalable ways, so I figured I’d strip any identifying information from my email and post it. Here’s what I wrote:

Hi, the usual reason why a site’s PageRank drops by 30-50% like this is because the site violates our quality guidelines by selling links that pass PageRank. Here’s our documentation on that: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356 and here’s a video I made about this common case: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFcJ7PaLoMw (it’s about 1:30 into the video). http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/business/book-reviewers-for-hire-meet-a-demand-for-online-raves.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all is a good recent article about paid reviews. In Google’s world, we take paid links that pass PageRank as seriously as Amazon would take paid reviews without disclosure or as your newspaper would treat a reporter who was paid to link to a website in an article without disclosing the payment.

In particular, earlier this year on [website] we saw links labeled as sponsored that passed PageRank, such as a link like [example link]. That’s a clear violation of Google’s quality guidelines, and it’s the reason that [website]‘s PageRank as well as our trust in the website has declined.

In fact, we received a outside spam report about your site. The spam report passed on an email from a link seller offering to sell links on multiple pages on [website] based on their PageRank. Some pages mentioned in that email continue to have unusual links to this day. For example [example url] has a section labeled “PARTNER LINKS” which links to [linkbuyer].

So my advice would be to investigate how paid links that pass PageRank ended up on [website]: who put them there, are any still up, and to investigate whether someone at the [newspaper] received money to post paid links that pass PageRank without disclosing that payment, e.g. using ambiguous labeling such as “Partner links.” That’s definitely where I would dig.

After that investigation is complete and any paid links that pass PageRank are removed, the site’s webmaster can do a reconsideration request using Google’s free webmaster tools console at google.com/webmasters. I would include as much detail as you can about what you found out about the paid links. That will help us assess how things look going forward.

Sincerely,
Matt

That’s about it. This case was interesting because we also had an external spam report about the newspaper selling links.

Google vs Apple

August 2012 and Apple’s market value exceeds that of Microsoft’s during 1999 growth and Apple announced on Monday 20th August 2012 that the market value climbed to a value more than $623 billion making Apple the most valuable company of all time.

But Google now own Motorola and they have unleashed an attack on Apple in the courts using asking the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) to ban the import of all iPhones, iPads, and Macs and this at a time when Apple are celebrating success.

Motorola Mobility has commented that “We would like to have settled these patent matters, but Apple is unwilling to work out a license and this leaves us little choice but to defend ourselves and our engineers’ innovations,” .

Apple has already been in this argument regarding Motorola’s licensing and they have said that the fees are disproportionally too high.

The ITC have also said Apple had infringed one of Motorola’s patents and this could mean that there is a ban on iPhone imports as soon as early as next week.

Apple has been asking for it, and it looks like Google are giving it to them. Larry Page, Google’s chief executive said: “Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.”

If Google wins and the ITC agree, there might not be any iPhones, iPads or Macs in stores in the near future.

Apple might be regretting ever getting into this patent war with both Motorola and Samsung.

Nepali to English dictionary .

Please turn on two-factor authentication

You should read Mat Honan’s heartbreaking tale of a hack attack and the ensuing discussion on Techmeme. Much of the story is about Amazon or Apple’s security practices, but I would still advise everyone to turn on Google’s two-factor authentication to make your Gmail account safer and less likely to get hacked.

Two-factor authentication means “something you know” (like a password) and “something you have,” which can be an object like a phone. Here’s a simple video about how it works:



I often hear the same questions or objections when I recommend two-factor authentication. Jeff Atwood has done a good job of debunking common misperceptions–check out his post, which even has pictures. But here are some misconceptions that I hear, along with the reality:

Myth #1: But what if my cell phone doesn’t have SMS/signal, or I’m in a foreign country?
Reality: You can install a standalone app called Google Authenticator (it’s also available in the App Store), so your cell phone doesn’t need a signal.

Myth #2: Okay, but what about if my cell phone runs out of power, or my phone is stolen?
Reality: You can print out a small piece of paper with 10 one-time rescue codes and put that in your wallet. Use those one-time codes to log in even without your phone.

Myth #3: Don’t I have to fiddle with an extra PIN every time I log in?
Reality: You can tell Google to trust your computer for 30 days and sometimes even longer.

Myth #4: I heard two-factor authentication doesn’t work with POP and IMAP?
Reality: You can still use two-factor authentication even with POP and IMAP. You create a special “application-specific password” that your mail client can use instead of your regular password. You can revoke application-specific passwords at any time.

Myth #5: Okay, but what if I want to verify how secure Google Authenticator is?
Reality: Google Authenticator is free, open-source, and based on open standards.

Myth #6: So Google Authenticator is a free and open-source, but does anyone else use it?
Reality: Yes! You can use Google Authenticator to do two-factor authentication with LastPass, WordPress, Dropbox, Amazon Web Services, Drupal, and DreamHost, or even use a YubiKey device. There’s even a Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) so you can add two-factor authentication to any PAM-enabled application. That means you can use Google Authenticator to add two-factor authentication to SSH, for example.

One last tip: use a different password on Gmail/Google than on other services. If you reuse a password and a hacker cracks into one company, they can use the same password to crack into your Google account.

Please don’t wait to turn on 2-step verification. It’s not that hard, and it will really protect your account. Why not set up two-step authentication right now?

Added August 26, 2012: Dropbox added support, so I included a link above.

50 Shades Of SEO

Shocked yet thrilled by SEO it became a singular erotic task. For all the trappings involved with Google success for our clients multinational businesses, our own wealth, we find ourselves tormented by Google and consumed by not being controlled.

Chameleon embarks on a daring, passionately physical affair of discovery to find Google secrets and we explore every dark desire.

We scowl with frustration at Google results in the monitor. Damn the results just won’t behave, and damn to Google as this is making us all ill and we feel hate towards Google for subjecting us to this ordeal. We should be spending time with family, yet we find ourselves working all hours in an attempt to improve results and the final keystroke is a submission.

We must not sleep until we have completed certain tasks,  we must not sleep until all factors that make Google happy are completed. Reciting this mantra several times, we attempt, once more, to bring the Google dance under control with the latest SEO factors. We roll our eyes in exasperation and gaze at the latest rankings, up and down with daily shifts that are too big for our clients to understand, and they want to give up. Our only option is to restrain our clients and make them understand Google in hope that we make a presentable effect on the results and educate clients that SEO takes months not days until such a time that we hit page one of Google and grow to the number one spot.

A new day and we must visit a potential new client, our destination is the headquarters of Mr. Grey’s global enterprise. On arrival we are presented with a a huge twenty-story office building, a beautiful curved glass and steel finish which is an architect’s utilitarian fantasy, with the words GREY HOUSE written discreetly in steel over the large darkened glass front doors. It’s a quarter to ten when we arrive, greatly relieved that we are not late due to morning rush hour traffic in Birmingham as we walk into the impressive, enormous—and intimidating glass and steel lobby with white sandstone tile floor.

Sat behind the solid sandstone desk is a very attractive, perfectly groomed, blonde young woman who smiles pleasantly at us as we approach. She is wearing a charcoal suit jacket and white shirt with her hair twisted into immaculate perfect curls.

“Morning, we are here to see Mr. Grey. Ian and Mark from Chameleon Web Services.”

“Ok, let me check.” She arches her eyebrow and flicks her hair as we stand self-consciously before her. Ian is beginning to wish he’d ironed his shirt rather than taking the time available in the morning to eat a bacon and egg sandwich. We have made an effort and worn nice suits and a tie but the shirt is letting us down. For us, this is smart as we are geeks and geeks do not care about fashion. We stand in wait and pretend she doesn’t intimidate us.

“Chameleon is expected. Please sign in here, Ian. You need to take the last elevator on the right, press for the tenth floor.” She smiles kindly at us, amused no doubt, as we sign in.

She hands us a security pass that has “visitor” very clearly stated on the front. We can’t help but smirk. Surely it’s obvious that we are just visiting. We don’t fit in here at all. We inwardly sigh, thanking her and proceed to walk over to the bank of elevators and past the security man who is far more smartly dressed than us in well-cut black suits.

The elevator whisks us at terminal velocity to the tenth floor and the doors slide open. We enter another large lobby all glass and steel with white sandstone tiles. We are confronted by another desk of sandstone and another amazing young blonde woman, this time dressed impeccably in black and white, who rises to greet us.

“You must be Chameleon, could you wait here please?” She points to a black leather seated area.

A door opens and yet another elegant, flawlessly dressed blonde comes out of the large door. What is it with all the immaculate blonde’s?. Taking a deep breath, we stand up.

“Chameleon?” the latest blonde asks.

“Yes,” Ian croaks, and clears his throat. “Yes.” There, that sounded more confident.

“Mr. Grey will see you in a moment. May I take your jacket?”

“Oh, no thank you.” the unironed shirt will not deliver the right impression here.

Moments later the blonde returns “please follow me”, we are led to a huge directors office we dark wood furnishings and leather with a over sized flat screen monitor hanging on the wall, “please be seated, Mr Grey will be with you shortly”.

We take a seat and carmly start up our laptop and review our paperwork portfolio, the door opens and in comes Mr Grey, we shake hands firmly and all sit down.

“Thank you for coming today!, now I want to be top of Google for my keywords, and you have got my competitor in the top spot”. We think quickly and explain we only work with one company in each sector and then get told “I just explained, I want to be top of Google for my keywords”.

Ian stands up “thank you for your time Mr Grey, we are loyal to our clients and we work for a competitor of yours so sorry we cannot do business” and we then leave feeling we have the upper hand.

To be continued…

 

“Fetch as Googlebot” tool helps to debug hacked sites

One of the most tenacious blackhat webspam techniques we continue to see is hacked sites. I wanted to remind site owners that our free “Fetch as Google” tool can be a really helpful way to see whether you’ve successfully cleaned up a hacked site.

For example, recently a well-known musician’s website was hacked. The management firm for the musician wrote in to say that the site was clean now. Here’s the reply I sent back:

Unfortunately when our engineers checked this morning, the site was still hacked. I know the page looks clean to you, but when we send Googlebot to fetch www.[domain].com this morning, we see

<title>Generic synthroid bad you :: Canadian Pharmacy</title>

on the page. What the hackers are doing is sneaky but unfortunately pretty common. wgr55 . When you surf directly to the website, you see normal content. But when a search engine (or a visitor from a search engine) visits the website, they see hacked drug-related content. The reason that the hackers do it this way is so that the hacked content is harder to find/remove and so that hacked content stays up longer.

The fix in this case is to go deeper to clean the hack out of your system. See http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=163634 for some tips on how to do this, but every website is different.

One important tool Google provides to help in assessing whether a site is cleaned up is our “Fetch as Googlebot” feature in our free webmaster console at http://google.com/webmasters/ . That tool lets you actually send Googlebot to your website and see exactly what we see when we fetch the page. That tool would have let you known that the website was still hacked.

I hope that helps give an idea of where to go next.

Something I love about “Fetch as Googlebot” is that it’s self-service–you don’t even need to talk to anyone at Google to diagnose whether your hacked site looks clean.