Hashemian Blog Web Tools, Financial Markets, Technology Wednesday, December 12, 2007 Google Lifeblood  Like most people who have a Web site I check my site's ranking on Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) from time to time. It's striking how much of a Website's life depends on Google. That's particularly true with smaller sites whose lifeblood is the traffic Google sends their way. But even bigger sites would suffer severely if their pages suddenly lost ranking in Google. Sure there are other search engines like Yahoo and MSN, but enough about those. And so when a couple of days ago I noticed that my site's traffic had a noticeable drop in traffic, the first place I looked for diagnosis was Google. Sure enough, my site's pages where either non-existent or had dropped considerably in ranking. I know that compared to other sites, my traffic is but a drop in a proverbial bucket, but even so the realization of lost ranking made me concerned. I can only imagine how those people, whose living is tied to their traffic, may feel when Google starts to snub their sites. the results could be devastating. Had I violated any one of Google's quality guidelines? Had I engaged in any activity that might have blacklisted my site? I was stumped. I hadn't made any design changes to the site that I could recall. I even tested my site for unintended search engine spamming using a couple of different online tools. One claimed I had hidden text on my pages. They were light-colored timestamps on a colored background. Just for insurance I changed them to a darker color. It also caught what it regarded as keyword stuffing. The culprit turned out to be whitespace characters (&nbsp;) with missing trailing semi-colons. So at least I got to fix this error on my site, and then I just moved on. Today, inexplicably my site's ranking in Google SERPs seems to be back where it used to be. Could this have been the result of those minor changes? I don't think so. Most likely, the drop was due to some temporary event in Google's algorithm. What's alarming is that Google is not just influential, but it's vital to so many. Where can one go to if they are unfairly treated? Who will listen? This is not a paid service, there are no SLAs (Service Level Agreements), contracts, or even tenuous promises. Mine is just a hobby site. Being present in Google is great, but I'd still be doing this even if my site wasn't included. I don't think my attitude would be the same if I were making a living off my site. I can appreciate that Google has the enormous task of separating the good sites from the bad. But with that much power and reach, it is inevitable that many innocent sites will be inadvertently punished. Consider how things would be if there were only one powerful and unregulated credit agency with two marginal ones, instead of the three with equal standings today. google,search engines,seo,serp,spam,page ranking Labels: google, seo, spam, web <Google Lifeblood> // posted by rh 0 comments Thursday, July 05, 2007 The Greedy Shepherd  Preface: A few days ago I received an email from Answers.com inviting me (and other recipients) to write an essay or a poem using 10 words they had selected and link those words back to them — certainly a publicity and SEO stunt. At the end of the contest they will judge the entries and pick a few winners. I was going to lambaste the tactic in this blog. Instead, for some inexplicable reason, I decided to take up the challenge and write a short story. I'm not much of a storyteller, although I did write a book about financial markets a few years back, but that's a different matter. This is my amateurish stab at a short story. I know, I won't quit my day job. There was a once a shepherd in Belize who took his herd to a field near his house everyday for grazing. The field wasn't the most fertile but there was sufficient grass for his sheep to graze on. His was a perfunctory task, but for all intents and purposes he made a comfortable living from his sheep. He would occasionally visit the local market and sell a few sheep which made him enough money to buy the necessities of life like food and clothes and, on occasion, a gift for his family, like a yo-yo for his young son. On another occasion he made a quid pro quo deal with the local beekeeper to provide him with honey for a year in return for a sheep. He had vowed never to change his way of life. One day, while leading his flock to the meadow, he met a stranger who told him about a field farther away where the landscape was more lush and the grass was ubiquitous and plentiful. The stranger insisted that on this new field the sheep would get fatter much faster and the herd would double or triple in numbers at no time. He kept filling the shepherd's head with quixotic ideas of wealth and status until the shepherd agreed to take his flock to this new field, abrogating the vow he had made to himself. It was an arduous journey but when he reached the new field, instead of the lush grass he found a barren land with scarcely anything for his herd to feed on. Disappointed and ashamed of his gullibility, he set out to make the return trip home, uncertain if his herd would survive the harrowing trip back. Just then a large colony of wasps that had been disturbed by the herd's arrival stirred into action swarming the shepherd and his sheep and stinging them about their faces. His brand of sheep, known for acute melissophobia, panicked and scattered quickly. Soon they were all out of sight, seemingly lost forever. The bereft shepherd began the long trek home, alone and destitute with thoughts of regret and penitence circling in his head. Midway to his home, he sat by the side of road to rest his tired and wobbly legs. He failed to notice that his head was just inches away from a large brown recluse spider who had become alarmed by the new visitor. As the spider moved closer to defend her territory with a deadly bite, the shepherd heard a faint bleating and quickly rose in excitement to scan the area. In astonishment he saw his herd, back together, slowly trudging back toward their old grounds. His joy was indescribable as he once again took command of his herd and safely guided every one of them back to their old and trusted turf. As he watched his sheep with satisfaction grazing safe and sound, he renewed his old vow and never again strayed his flock from the trusted meadow. Moral of the story: 1) Don't abandon a sure thing chasing after dubious promises. 2) Melissophobic sheep don't make good herds, but … 3) They can save a life. sheep,shepherd,herds,belize,short story,seo,publicity Labels: seo, writing <The Greedy Shepherd> // posted by rh 8 comments Sunday, May 06, 2007 Redirect Hacks and SEO  In web terms a redirect hack is an umbrella concept that refers to various strategies to redirect visitors from one web page to another. There are several legitimate reasons a site may use this technology. These are generally necessary conditions where, for example, a site has migrated to another, or a page needs to temporarily send its visitors to another location. Try http://www.cnnfn.com/ and notice how your browser is redirected to http://money.cnn.com/. When CNNfn shut down its doors it moved its operations to this new site, and used a redirect to take its faithful readers to its new abode. Same is true with Microsoft when it acquired Great Plains Software and renamed the business to Microsoft Dynamics. The URL http://www.greatplains.com/ now redirects to http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/. These types of redirects are known as 301 or permanent redirects, referring to the code sent by a web server to a browser asking it to redirect to a new URL. The other type of redirect is known as 302 or temporary. It is used to announce a temporary relocation of a page or a site and results in the same type of redirection. The difference is mainly in how a browser or a search engine is supposed to treat the redirection. Since temporary redirects are supposed to be, well, temporary, visiting programs are supposed to treat the original URLs as valid, like any other legit web page. For example, per rules, a search engine should continue to keep the original URL in its index and give the referee the same weight and value as the original URL. Soon enough, unethical search engine optimization (SEO) guys discovered this rule (or loophole) and started gaming search engines by placing links on various sites that bounced off certain URLs from well-known web sites and redirected visitors to their own sites. When search engines encountered such links, they would give the referenced sites high rankings because the links were from trusted and well-regarded sites. Take a look at this sample URL (it still works as of this writing): http://www.aol.com/redir.adp?_url=http://www.example.com It appears that AOL has redirected one of its own pages to example.com. Most likely AOL uses this page for its own site, but as is, it can't stop others from using it too. In reality you can replace example.com with any page's URL and any search engine (or your browser) would be faithfully ushered there, courtesy of AOL servers. As a benefit, the search engine would bestow a high ranking on that final URL by proxy, because that page is believed to be somehow associated with AOL. A High ranking means more frequent appearances on or near the top of search engine results pages, which means that gamers can garner a lot of traffic on their sites for little work, and traffic translates to money. In simple cases visitors are greeted with pay-per-click or other types of ads, stock pump-and-dump schemes, or they might be scammed into buying stuff. In more insidious cases visitors might be tricked into installing spyware or malware on their computers to track their activities and annoy them with incessant popup ads, or worse, ship their private information to the bad guys waiting to wipe clean bank and trading accounts. Fortunately major search engines have now optimized their systems to forestall redirect hacks and most gamers don't see much (if any) gain from employing this tactic. But don't count out redirect hacks just yet. A more nefarious redirect usage involving phishing is alive and well, and still thriving. More on that in the next blog entry. redirect hack,seo,phishing,301 redirect,302 redirect,http redirect,search engines Labels: http redirect, phishing, seo <Redirect Hacks and SEO> // posted by rh 0 comments

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