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Great Blog Content –vs- SEO

September 26, 2009 By 5 Comments

A while back I did a post on Social Saturation and Search Engine Optimization, in that post I emphasized how important it is to get your content onto the social networks.  I was reading a post today by Dawn Foster at Web Worker Daily and she brought up some points that I also agree with and I wanted to share it w/ you. 

In her post she mentioned a discussion panel that she was a part of where there were 2 content people and 2 seo people that do seo full time.  She hit a home run in the first few sentences on this post and I could not agree with her more:

This weekend I was on an “SEO Smackdown” panel at our local WordCamp Portland. Two of us were from the content side, while the other two panelists were SEO experts. My take on SEO is that writing compelling, interesting blog content that people will want to talk about and link to will get you around 95 percent of the way to good search engine rankings. If you don’t have great content, SEO is not going to be very useful for you. You might be able to do some SEO trickery to get people to your web site, but if they aren’t impressed by the content when they arrive, they won’t stick around long enough to have any impact.

Now, I want to emphasize that I am not advocating abandoning SEO, there are some basic principles that you should adhere to, you can find some of my thoughts on SEO in a post I did a while back, that’s not what this post is about though.  You should pay attention to key things such as page titles, descriptions, etc., but you should do that on everything you publish to the web.  Much more than that though, you need to focus on your content.  Here are some valid points that Dawn brought out in her article…

Write Great Titles

Keep in mind that you are writing titles for human beings, so your title should be catchy and convey the meaning of the post as a first priority. While you write the title, you should also be thinking about the keywords that people might want to use to find your content and make sure that you have included a keyword or two in the title. I’ll illustrate this with a couple of examples of good and bad titles.

  • Bad: Dawn’s Thoughts for March
  • Better: Analysis of Facebook and Twitter Demographics in March
  • Bad: Day 1 of LinuxCon
  • Better: Mobile Linux and Open Standards on Day 1 of LinuxCon

Write New and Interesting Content

Write content that people will want to link to and discuss. If you are rehashing the same stories as every other blogger, people are much less likely to read and respond to your content. Write posts that are new, fresh and unique with analysis and insight from your unique background and perspective. You can talk about a news story that other people are blogging about, but spend some time writing about your experiences and ideas that offer a different perspective than the rest of the crowd. Use research in new ways, interview interesting people, and talk about your experiences. By offering something new, people are much more likely to read your blog post and link to it, which is where the real SEO magic is found.

Include Personal Anecdotes

Nothing makes a post unique quite like personal anecdotes based on your experiences. I saw this first-hand when I started writing for WebWorkerDaily. I wrote what I thought was a brilliant post on using Yahoo Pipes and then I wrote a short, quick post about how I dread answering the question, “So, What Do You Do?” during the holidays when talking to non-technical family and friends. The “brilliant” post got a few comments and some traffic, but nothing like the short, personal story about how to answer that difficult question. Human beings read our blog posts, and personal stories resonate with people in a way that technical facts and figures never will.

I just thought that this was very good information and thought that I would share it w/ my readers.  Of course, if you work in this industry you well know that getting clients to write content is a lot like pulling teeth, but the ones that do put forth the effort usually see the results from it.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous, Search Engines, Social Media / Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , ,

Work From Home Scams Exploiting Twitter and Google

September 21, 2009 By 5 Comments

twitter-bird-google2 Since I have worked in this industry for a long time people often reach out to me with their web-related business ventures and ideas to more or less bounce them off of me.  One of the most common questions I get these days are related to the home based business scams using the name and even logos of Twitter and/or Google.

These things are scams as best that I can tell.  Especially in the case of Twitter, they haven’t figured out a profitable business model yet, so how are they going to pay you to sit at home and send out tweets?? 

Here is a little more information about these scams that was on MSNBC: (thanks to ShoeMoney for pointing out this article…)

Here’s something to tweet about: Con artists are now piggybacking on the popularity of Twitter and Google to pitch their phony work-at-home schemes.

Stealing the good name and familiar logo of these well-known companies is an easy way to grab attention and look legitimate to potential victims.

“They prey on people who are desperate,” says Ohio truck driver Robert Anderson, who fell for a home-based job opportunity that appeared to be from Google. “They make money by lying to people, promising them the world and giving them a guarantee they have no intention of honoring.”

The ads promise you can make thousands of dollars a week for very little work. Bogus blogs and fake testimonials back up these ridiculous income claims. And a deviously clever marketing trick makes these get rich quick offers appear to be risk-free.

“Unlike other work-at-home schemes that ask for lots of money up front, these Google and Twitter versions start with a small payment and then whittle away at your bank account,” warns Allison Southwick with the Council of Better Business Bureaus.

All they want is a couple of dollars — billed to your credit or debit card — to send you “free” information about their money-making machine. Armed with your account information they can charge you for services or products you didn’t order.

In retrospect, the offer was "obviously" a scam, says  Barbara Simonie of Henderson, Nev. She responded to a pop-up ad for the “Google Home Business Kit.”

Simonie agreed to pay $2.95 for the “free” information but never received it. She did find a recurring charge of $59.90 on her credit card statement from a company called Pacific WebWorks in Las Vegas. The company, which has a failing “F” rating with the BBB, also does business as “Easy Google Cash.”

Simonie called the company and was told the $59.50 was her monthly membership fee for the Google kit — a fee she never knowingly authorized. The customer service agent promised a refund. That was back in July. Simonie is still waiting for her $182 credit.

Pacific WebWorks CEO Ken Bell told me in an e-mail that his company’s Google offers “clearly explain the terms and conditions of the customer’s purchase before any purchase is made.”  As an example, Bell sent a pop-up ad in which the monthly charge is disclosed, but only for users who click on a tiny "Terms and Conditions" link at the bottom.

Google Money Tree

The Google Money Tree, recently shut down by a federal judge, operated in a similar manner. The online ads for this scheme were simple and direct. “Learn how to make $107,389 in six months just filling out forms and doing searches on Google and Yahoo," they said.

Karen Hobbs, a lawyer with the Federal Trade Commission, says hundreds of thousands of people fell for the pitch and had the $2 to $4 handling charge billed to their debit or credit cards.

“We have discovered no one who was able to use the information on the CD in order to make money,” Hobbs says.

But there’s a bigger problem. Those who took the bait and requested the CD were automatically enrolled in a membership program. If they did not cancel within seven days, and in many cases they did not even get their promised information in that time, they were charged a monthly fee of $72.71.  The FTC sued Infusion Media, the Utah-based company that ran Google Money Tree, and got its Web site shut down. A federal judge also froze the firm’s assets, which means if the FTC wins this case, victims could get some of their money back.

Twitter now the Hot “Opportunity”

The bad guys, always looking for something new, have added Twitter to their bogus money-making offers.  A recent e-mail picked up by the Better Business Bureau reads: “Twitter Workers Needed ASAP, You’re Hired! Make Extra Cash with Twitter."

The e-mail links to EasyTweetsProfits.com, a company located in Surrey, England. The Web site claims you can make $250 to $873 a day working at home. The company offers a seven-day free trial of its instructional CD for just $1.99.

That seven-day window starts the day you order the CD, not when you receive it. That important piece of information is disclosed in the lengthy terms and conditions page. If you don’t cancel in time, you’ll be charged $47 a month.

Walter Moline of Yakima, Wash., saw an ad on Facebook for Twitter Profit House of Glendale, Calif. Same pitch: $1.99 for a free informational CD. Moline paid with his debit card and waited for the CD to arrive. Seven days later, he noticed the company had charged him $99.

Moline says he missed the fine print about the seven-day cancellation period.  “I had no idea I was signing up for a membership,” Moline tells me. “I feel I was taken.”

Moline was lucky. He complained to the Better Business Bureau, which helped him get the money back.  The BBB of Los Angeles, which is handling the Twitter Profit House complaints, gives the company an “F” rating.”  I wanted to talk to someone from Twitter Profit House and Google Money Tree, but no one responded to my requests for a comment.

The Bottom Line

Work-at-home scams are everywhere. They’re advertised online, in print and on TV. They often make bold promises, have numerous testimonials, and may use the names and logos of trusted companies, including news organizations. It’s all marketing hype designed to get you to let down your guard.

How do you protect yourself? It’s really very simple. Never pay for a job or information about employment opportunities. And be skeptical.

Google spokesman Jason Morrison tells me the company does not send out e-mail, use pop-ups or have infomercials that offer ways to make money with Google.  “We do not pay people thousands of dollars to fill out forms or post links or click on things,” he warns.  “If you see something promises a huge reward with very little investment or work or knowledge required, be wary.”

I should also state for the record that I am not a fan of home based businesses, pyramid schemes, or multi-level marketing.  It’s just not my thing, it might be great for others, but for me personally, it’s not where it’s at.  It’s almost impossible to instill a complete vision in others for the growth of your company, sure you can train them and instill a lot into them, but when these companies cloud the “vision” with promises of getting rich by just recruiting people to be under you, I think a lot gets lost.

For more information on these scams, you can checkout the Better Business Bureau’s recent post or this one from the FTC.  If you don’t have an original idea of your own and want to pursue a home based business, I have no specific recommendations, but do your homework.  I am sure that you have someone in your contact database that participates in a few of these programs, lean on them to get their take on them as well.  I am probably not the guy to talk to.

Hope this helps…

Filed Under: Social Media / Web 2.0 Tagged With: , ,

Another Reason Social Saturation is Important

June 5, 2009 By 3 Comments

The report that shows the rise in usage posted on Yahoo didn’t surprise me too much this week when my good friend Brant Collins (another authority on social media) tweeted this link the other day.  Social Networking is here and has been for a while now.  It is for this very reason that my partners and I consult our clients to not only maintain an effective web presence but also plan for a certain level of social saturation as well.

On a recent personal project that my partners and I invested a lot of time and effort into, we were able to quickly achieve great organic search engine positioning but analyzing our statistics quickly showed us that our traffic wasn’t coming from Google so much as it was coming from RSS Feeds that we had tied into social outlets like Facebook & Twitter.

If you are behind the curve, it’s never too late to insert your company into the social landscape, in fact if you jump in now, you can probably beat a lot of your competitors to the punch.

If you thought you wasted a lot of time on Facebook last year, this year things have gotten out of hand, according to a study by Nielsen Online. Time spent last year reading our friends’ Facebook Updates and sharing "25 Random Things About Me" questionnaires totaled 1.7 billion minutes compared to this year’s total of 13.9 billion. That’s a 700 percent increase in time spent virtually loafing around, according to Nielsen Online that just loves to tell us how we waste our time. (First, television. Now, Twitter.)

Speaking of which, that chirpy social network, Twitter, has come onto the scene like a new kid on the block that drives a Mercedes. Everybody wants to be Twitter’s friend – including Microsoft. Twitter saw a 3712 percent year-over-year increase between last and this year, with users clocking in nearly 300,000 total minutes for that site in April ’09.

And for all you MySpace holdouts: That site can still claim top audience for social network video streams. Users spent 384 million minutes viewing video on MySpace in April versus only 113.5 minutes for video on Facebook.

Nielsen Online also recently released a report (PDF) that says we like blogs and social networks better than our personal email. Facebook holds our attention for longer than any other top site. And time spent on social networking and blogging sites has grown at 3 times the rate of overall Internet growth.

"The staggering increase in the amount of time people are spending on these sites … has ramifications for how people behave, share and interact within their normal daily lives," according to Nielsen’s "Global Faces and Networked Places" report (PDF).

Gulp. That’s quite the charge.

But don’t you go shaking your head and muttering, "Kids, these days," under your breath. It’s the youngsters who might actually be taking a back seat at the family desktop, and their embarrassing parents who are increasingly wooed by friend requests from their long-lost college classmates, and quizzes about what literary heroine they are.

The greatest growth for Facebook has come from the 35- to 49-year-old crowd, and has added twice as many 50- to 64-year-old members than it did of the under-18 group.

There are, after all, way more people to network with after you’ve been around for 50 years than there are when you’re just starting out as a social being.

Time Spent on Social Networks Doubles in a Year by PC World: Yahoo! Tech

Filed Under: Social Media / Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , ,

Tools for Managing PPC Campaigns…

June 1, 2009 By 2 Comments

If you are using the Internet as a vehicle to market your products or services through PPC campaigns I strongly recommend ShoeMoney Internet Marketing Tools.  And trust me, I know that when you are running PPC campaigns that you often find yourself on the front end getting ready to shell out some serious cash, and it’s intimidating.  I also know that the last thing you are looking for when getting into PPC is another online service that is going to cost you money, but if you take into consideration that by investing in a service such as this it can actually save you money in the long run, or allow you to get the most bang from your investment, it really makes a lot of sense.

Managing PPC campaigns is a service that my partners and I have offered for a number of years now, and the sheer amount of buys that we have made on our clients behalf over the years is amazing, and the management fees that we have made from our clients for providing this service is substantial, so trust me when I tell you I would not recommend using anything that I didn’t believe in because honestly I would just assume to sell you our management services, but I know that in a lot of cases clients don’t have the budget to do PPC and to pay a company like ours to manage it for them, and I hate to see our neccessary management fees cut into what the client could be investing into PPC buys.  But this program works, I have seen it in action and I can say that ShoeMoney know’s his stuff.  Here are just a few of the features that come along w/ ShoeMoney Internet Marketing Tools that you should consider:

Generate Ads – Ever wonder if your competitors’ ads are working better than yours? With the PPC Ad Generator, simply input your keyword, display URL and click URL. Click the Generate Ads button and receive sample ad copy for that keyword. This ad copy comes directly from actual competing ads currently displayed on major search engines. Select the ads you like and save them for your future campaigns.

Manage Ads – Increase your efficiency by managing all of your PPC ads from one location. Use the PPC Ad Manager to create, edit and delete your saved ad copy. You can then export your ads to Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter.

Manage Keywords – Easily manage all of your keywords from one place! After using the ShoeMoney Keyword Generator, Grabber and Suggestion tools, use the PPC Keyword Manager to create, edit and delete your saved keyword lists.

Generate Keywords – Are you looking for great keyword ideas? Type a niche keyword into the Keyword Generator and create a list of possible PPC keywords. Once you’ve edited your keyword list, you can simply save it to your ShoeMoney Tools account.

Get Your Competitors Keywords – What if you could get your competitors’ keywords? Now, you can! Other people have tried to imitate this tool, but none with our accuracy. Use the Keyword Grabber to reveal all of the keywords being bid on for a particular domain.

Get Keyword Suggestions – You can get quality keyword suggestions from various search engines. But where else can you get keyword suggestions from multiple search engines all in one place? With the Keyword Suggestions tool, simply enter a base keyword and the tool will expand upon the keyword using five different databases including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ask and Cuil.

Build PPC Campaigns Instantly – Maximize your efficiency with the Instant PPC Campaign tool. After you have generated quality keyword and ad lists in your ShoeMoney Tools account, choose the lists you would like to use, name your campaign and determine your maximum cost per click (CPC). Ad files for your Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter, and Yahoo Search Marketing advertising accounts are then instantly generated! Start earning more PPC cash now.

Build Local PPC Campaigns – Pay per click marketing on the local level is like shooting fish in a barrel! When people search locally, they typically use the keyword mixed with a zip code, city, state, or a combination. Input your keyword, zip code, and the radius you would like to target. With the Local Keyword tool, you can then develop a solid, local keyword list targeted towards specific geographic areas – perfect for local PPC marketing!

Find Local Keyword Competitors – Often times when people search for local businesses and services, they do so by searching for specific brands, stores, companies or professionals. By using ShoeMoney Tools’ Local Brand tool, you can find the names of local competitors to add to your PPC keyword list. When you’re done editing your list, simply save it to your ShoeMoney account.

Build Google AdWords Campaigns – Maximize your PPC profitability in four simple steps! With the Google AdWords Campaign Builder tool, you can instantly build a PPC campaign that gives you great, competitive results. First, select your campaign name and bidding options. Next, choose your keywords and keyword mixing options. Third, determine your display and click-through URLS. Finally, input your ad copy and click the Build PPC Campaigns button. Upload your campaign directly to your Google AdWords account and within minutes, you can start generating cash!

 

ShoeMoney Internet Marketing Tools

Filed Under: Monetization, Search Engines Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Tools for Managing SEO…

June 1, 2009 By 1 Comment

One of the popular services we offer our clients at Pleth is SEO, or search engine optimization.  I know that lately I have made profound statements saying things like SEO has taken a backseat to social saturation, etc., but honestly SEO is still something that your company should take a look at and track pretty closely.  One of the worst things that can happen for your online presence is for your search engine rankings to deteriorate, especially after all of the time and effort you have put into your rankings.

As I mentioned earlier, my partners and I manage SEO for our clients, and it’s something that keeps evolving over time.  For example, things that we used to do a year or two ago to help our clients outrank their competition have changed dramatically in only a short period of time.  But, for the most part there are things that remain constant also, these elements are somewhat easy to track.  If you are a do it yourself SEO person, I have one set of tools that I recommend, and that’s it.  These tools are provided by ShoeMoney.  Here are a few of the high points included with the tools if you are interested:

Analyze Your Backlinks – More links equal higher search engine rankings! It’s that simple. The Backlink Analyzer tool allows you to see first-hand where your competitors are gaining links from and the exact anchor text being used in the links. Now you can use their same tactics! With this tool, you can also find out how people are linking to you and increase your rankings by contacting those sites that have misspelled your link.

Buy Valuable Backlinked Domains – Want to give your domain a boost in the search engine rankings? At the ShoeMoney Tools Domain Marketplace, you can find thousands of currently unregistered sites – each one with a valuable amount of powerful links pointing to them (including .edu, .gov., .mil, and .org). Purchase and redirect 5 to 6 of these domains to a site you already have in a particular niche for a ranking boost.

Find Backlinks – Want to see if a site is worth pursuing? Want to find some quality places to purchase links? Want to view your competitor’s backlinks? With the Backlinks Finder tool, simply type in a keyword for any niche. You will then be able to view the top 10 Google results for that keyword as well as each site’s backlinks along with corresponding PR and Alexa data.

Find Out Your Keyword Density – See how your competitors are using keywords and compare it to your current strategy. The Keyword Density tool allows you to compare one keyword and one domain against the top 10 Google competitors. The tool analyzes the keyword density of on-page text and also whether or not the keyword is in the title tag, meta tags and even heading tags. Improve your keyword strategy today.

Find Most Linked to Pages – Analyze any domain to see which pages are the strongest, or the ones with the most "link juice" from incoming links. With this tool, you can view the top 10 most linked to pages for a specified domain. Now you can see what sort of content is working for your site and others when it comes to gaining links.

Optimize Your Text – Ever wondered if your website copy was keyword rich? Most well ranking pages have at least 11 to 20 repetitions of a keyword. With the Text Optimizer tool, simply paste copy into the text box. Then input the keyword for which you would like to optimize the text. Within seconds, the tool analyzes any page or article text for that particular keyword’s density. Optimize your text today!

Find Your Outgoing Links – Before approaching a website about a potential link exchange or purchasing a link on the site, it’s good to see what other sites they have already linked to. With the Outgoing Links tool, enter a specific domain and you will instantly see all the websites this domain is linking to.

Track Your Keywords – Enter the domain that you would like to track keyword rankings for. After you have entered the domain you would like to track, enter the keywords you would like to track for that domain. The system will then determine what URLs rank for those keywords.

 

ShoeMoney Internet Marketing Tools

Filed Under: Search Engines Tagged With: , , , ,

Google Set To Change Algorithm

April 22, 2009 By 1 Comment

google-logo1 It looks like blackhat seo spammers have finally forced Google’s hand and they are in the process now of making adjustments to their ranking algorithms to counteract the manipulations.

For the record, few people outside of Google, if any, are going to really know right off the bat how this algorithm change is going to affect Google’s overall search product until the changes actually go into affect.

My advice, just keep writing good content and do what is recommended by Google and the other Search Engines for getting good search engine positions and don’t try to fool or break the system, it just doesn’t pay off in the end.  Be patient…

Google is set to make changes to its search ranking algorithm to combat the spate of links leading to malicious web pages appearing at the top of Google’s search results, according to an inside source.

Over the past few months, cybercriminals have been using blackhat SEO techniques to manipulate search rankings. When it first began, they were marginally successful at following Google Trends to find buzzy search queries and elevating a newly created targeted webpage.

But after a short period of time, these same gangs appear to have become disturbingly effective. Last week, when researching a news story, I found the top five results all led to fake scareware pages.

Obviously if Google fails to do something about this manipulation, users will lose trust and the good ole days of Google will be over fast. A Googler speaking on condition of anonymity told WebProNews a ranking change is pending that tackles spam of this kind. Once the change goes live, users shouldn’t see it “nearly as often.”

A report from security company PandaLabs identified over a million links targeting malicious webpages ranking for auto part searches. Google noted that many of the phrases mentioned in the report were rare. A phrase like [1989 Nissan Pickup Truck Engine Check Light Troubleshooting], for example, only appears on attack sites set up by spammers, which explains why Google brought back so many attack sites in response to it and similar queries.

Google’s response seems also an admission of how difficult it is to provide fresh, timely search results while simultaneously combating spammers. Part of the appeal of Twitter to many people is the platform’s ability to provide real-time information; the live Web works remarkably well there so far because Twitter’s set up isn’t very conducive to spam (yet). At least Twitter has to some extent control over accounts.

Google, on the other hand, cannot control for content appearing on the Web at large, and historically its famous algorithm performed better than any other at weeding out spammy webpages and malicious results. Unfortunately, that was a version of the Web that was more static. The live Web presents entirely new challenges manifesting as the first major weakness the search engine has faced.

The company naturally didn’t have a comment on the recently pondered “link velocity” ranking factor. Search engine optimization experts have identified the speed at which organic links appear as a possible important influence.

Link velocity therefore aids in explaining how blackhatters were able to manipulate search results by dropping enormous amounts of link spam into comment and discussion areas of social sites. The freshness or buzzy nature of a query also aided in this pursuit, and cybercriminals merely have to follow Google Trends and Google News to know which keywords and phrases to target.

Google Set To Change Ranking Algorithm | WebProNews

Filed Under: Search Engines Tagged With: ,

Google Container Data Center Tour

April 9, 2009 By 1 Comment

google-logo I thought that it was pretty interesting that Google posted these tours of their new container data center storage facilities on YouTube.  If you are a nerd like me and you look at a Data Center Tour like others would a trip to Disneyland, you will love this…

I got a kick out of how advanced this data center is laid out, and all of the research and planning that went into it, pretty much under the radar screen of a lot of us in the industry.  Way to go Google:

 

Filed Under: Web Hosting Tagged With: ,

Add your URL to Google

November 20, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I had an old friend ask me today how to submit his website to Google, the short answer was to send him a link to: Add your URL to Google, but I went ahead and elaborated as to how I approach Google submissions.  The first thing that I do is to submit an XML sitemap, preferably a dynamic sitemap that changes when new pages or posts are added to your website.  There are several plugins for doing this with some of the cms solutions that are out there, I know of at least two for WordPress.  Once you have your XML sitemap location, usually something like http://website.com/sitemap.xml then you will want to submit it through Google’s Webmaster tools section.

Once I have submitted the website xml sitemap to Google I will also take it a step further and verify the domain on my clients behalf.  This can be handled two ways, one way is via meta tag.  This meta-tag can be generated inside the Google Webmaster Tools panel and is simply added to the head of your pages and then verified inside the Webmaster Tools control panel.  Another method that is sometimes easier unless you are doing a lot of Apache redirection is simply uploading an html file.  The filename for this file is also generated somewhat randomly inside the Google Webmaster Tools section.  Once this is uploaded and in place, you simply click to have Google verify that this file is in place and then you are all done.

While this is not all that I do for a client project upon it’s launch, it does cover a lot of the seo for Google that I do directly.  Indirectly I have some other strategies that I do not care to divulge for free! Another recommendation that I have for do it yourself web people is to go ahead and put Google Analytics in place on your website prior to launch.  This usually entails adding a piece of javascript to the footer of your site files that will interact with Google’s Analytical tools.  Hope that you find this helpful.  (…And Marvin, if we can help you guys out with your project just let us know! :-) )

Filed Under: Search Engines Tagged With: ,

Exploit Alerts from Google

October 17, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Today I was waiting around for a meeting to get started and pulled up Google’s blog to read about their earnings report that was posted yesterday and saw where they had expanded their Webmaster Tools to include XSS Exploit notifications.  This is a great idea in my opinion!

My business partners and I were in Las Vegas a few years ago and partnered with ScanAlert (now owned and operated by Mcafee) to offer Hackersafe Certification as an add-on service to any of our clients that might be interested in certifying their web presence to be HackerSafe. 

This service has proven to be a valuable tool for us internally by alerting us of vulnerabilities and potential XSS holes for some of our third party and open source client applications.  Of course Hackersafe certification requires a small investment from the client to setup, etc., but with Google’s webmaster tools, this very similar service is now free! 

I am extremely anxious to spend some time checking out this new tool.  Here’s an excerpt from Google’s webmaster blog:

Recently we’ve seen more websites get hacked because of various security holes. In order to help webmasters with this issue, we plan to run a test that will alert some webmasters if their content management system (CMS) or publishing platform looks like it might have a security hole or be hackable. This is a test, so we’re starting out by alerting five to six thousand webmasters.

We will be leaving messages for owners of potentially vulnerable sites in the Google Message Center that we provide as a free service as part of Webmaster Tools. If you manage a website but haven’t signed up for Webmaster Tools, don’t worry. The messages will be saved and if you sign up later on, you’ll still be able to access any messages that Google has left for your site.

One of the most popular pieces of software on the web is WordPress, so we’re starting our test with a specific version (2.1.1) that is known to be vulnerable to exploits. If the test goes well, we may expand these messages to include other types of software on the web. The message that a webmaster will see in their Message Center if they run WordPress 2.1.1 will look like this:

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Message Center warnings for hackable sites

Filed Under: Web Development, Web Hosting Tagged With: , ,

Google, Starbucks, and You…

May 28, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Elliot Noss of Tucows delivered an interesting Keynote Presentation at ISPCON in Chicago.  I have seen this posted on a few of my friends blogs so I decided to take a listen, it’s a great perspective…

 

Filed Under: Email Solutions, Web Hosting Tagged With: ,
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