SEO Rocks

I hate the use of the term ‘Viral’. Over the last 6 months or so, i have heard a lot of talk about viral video’s and viral marketing and on the large people have been getting it completely wrong.

I want to start this of really simple with the question, What is Viral Marketing, for the answer and to give the definition a little more credibility i asked my friend at Marketing Chatter who defined it as

Viral Marketing – A marketing message which spreads unaided from person to person either online or offline.

The reason im doing this is because i find people banding the term viral around and they are either using it out of context or they are referring to something as viral when it isn’t. There are also lots of companies popping up now and they will produce and provide ‘viral media’.

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I have recently been reading through a few SEO websites when i noticed a blog post reporting on a Hack on the krispy kreme website. The blog was written on the 8th July, that was 11 days ago, remarkably, the hack still seems to be in place.

For such a large organisation i would expect something like this to have been dealt with quite swiftly, It’s a brand site and i expect it gets a lot of traffic so google updating its cache wont be the problem so i thought i would take a look.

If you do a site command in google you can see the problem straight away.

The titles and descriptions have been changed in the listings and as you can see they are now promoting a Canadian Pharmacy which obviously isn’t doughnuts!

If however you go to the website and view the source code you will be able to see that the title and description are different to what Google is seeing.

If you want to see what google is seeing then you need to look at the website as Google. There are many plug-ins for Firefox that will allow you to do this. The best i found is User Agent Switcher, set it to browse as Google Bot and you will see the problem.

This has happened because the hack is detecting whether the user is google or not, if the user is google then it displays the hacked content. If the user is anyone else then it displays the normal page. Essentially, this is cloaking.

What do they need to do?

Well it’s not easy without access but i would hazard a guess that they have a compromised htaccess file on their server or they have had some php injected into the website which is doing this, it seems to only be affecting the inner pages, maybe this is part of the hack so it lies undetected longer.

Having a search around it seems this is a very common hack with wordpress.

Why Have I Blogged this?

Well its simple really, its easy to explain what can happen when a site is hacked, its easy to tell people how to see it for themselves but without a real life example it is nothing more than theory.

Hopefully this can be used to show people a hack and how to detect it. Also krispy kreme may read this and fix their site!

****UPDATE****

Its been a few days since i wrote this blog post, checking back today, it goes from bad to worse, The homepage of the website has now no longer cached in Google, it now looks like Google is starting to penalise the website.

Their social media people should really check their twitter stream and listen to what people are telling them!
****UPDATE**** 28th July

It now seems to be safe to buy doughnuts again! the hack has been removed, hopefully it wont happen again, if it does, lets hope they fix it faster next time.

I was reading Peter young’s blog post earlier about google getting its own geo targeting wrong and returning what looked like a polish site link in a UK result.

Earlier this morning i noticed google using a different URL when you view a cached page. Webcache.Googleusercontent.Com. After reading around the subject a little i saw that its been around since about May this year. It doesn’t seem to be anything more than a text representation of the IP address Google uses when you click the cache button on a search result.

While i was having a look round i noticed something else you wouldn’t expect to see on Google. Google has indexed over 60k queries for this domain.Most of them seem to have been blocked as the site does have the standard 1 mile long Google robots.txt file, however there are still some results that have been properly cached.

Im sure on the grand scale of things its not going to harm them. It is another example of Google not being perfect

People have been talking about it since before Christmas but today, Google have announced that the Caffeine update is now live.

In a blog post they have explained that the new index will provide 50% fresher results. This is because they have changed the way their index runs. In the past it has worked on layers, the main layer representing the bigger index updates that needed the whole web to be indexed, this meant that there was a lag between being indexed and the changes making an effect.

The new index allows Google to index and then immediately rank the content it is finding. This update has been in place for a while as i have noticed in the last few weeks the speed at which content is being indexed and made available for search. My example is only blogs being cached which happens quite fast anyway but with a few tests im sure the same will apply for other types of website.

So what does this mean? Well if Google now has 50% fresher pages in its index i would recommend keeping your pages fresh! It has always been part of my work to try to ensure pages are kept fresh in a website. The blog that you have on the back of your website could not be more important than ever.

Keep blogging, be current, controversial or just plain boring, it’s really up to you, just ensure that you are blogging and that your content is unique. Add a news feed to your website, its something i have recommended for a long time updating your blog will update your homepage, only a small snippet and keep blogging regular enough so the same snippet doesn’t spend to long on the page.

If you are an E commerce website, then categorise your blog posts the same as your shops categories. This way you will be able to take a category specific feed and place relevant news snippets on category pages keeping these fresh as well.

Everyone has heard of Bling Bling, it now seems Google are trying Bing Bing. I have turned on my PC this morning to find that you can now add background images to Google!

Its nothing serious, but it makes a nice change to the plain white screen you see. May be search is getting like British politics and merging into one!Swedish House Mafia anyone :)

Google analytic’s is great for webmasters, It helps them to look how people are using their website, what is working well and more importantly how the website is failing people. Without the likes of Google’s goal tracking, funnels and filters it would make Conversion Rate Optimisation much harder than it currently is. Being able to track how people use your website is vital for yourself and for your user’s experience.

For other people Google analytics is evil!! They think its Google playing big brother tracking and monitoring everything you do and they will do anything to stop them! (apart from leaving their computer and getting a life in the daylight!!)

Then there are people like me. I love analytics but i browse my own websites a lot and the websites of clients. If im working on a clients website i may log test pages in their analytics accidentally, i will browse other pages, i may reload their homepage several times a minute, I may look to see what the payment process is on the website. All of which will be tracked and recording traffic that i personally doesn’t think it should. This is one reason i always look to disable any tracking from my computer.

There are several ways you can block analytics. Google have recently released a Google Analytics Opt out plug-in that can be added to your browser and it will block Google from logging your visit. This can be found at http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. Google have released this saying they want to give the user more control over what data Google collects about them, they haven’t however released anything that hasn’t already been done using other methods. This plug-in is available for Firefox 3.5 +, IE 7 & 8 and Chrome 4.x and higher. This is a start and for the purpose i want to block analytic’s it will be enough, however, i don’t really want to have to install something three times.

There are other plug-ins that are available but they are mostly for Firefox, not a great solution of you test websites properly in multiple browsers.

The final method is to make your PC block Google from sending data. This can be done because the address Google uses for its analytics is an address you never need to browse to. By blocking your computer from accessing this address you can stop Google from tracking your movements for analytics.

To do this we need to edit your computers host file. A host file is checked by your browser before it retrieves information form a DNS server. If the address your computer is trying to access then is in the host file then it will always use the information in your host file.

Your host file can be found at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts (this is the windows 7 path) open the host file in notepad and add the following lines

# BLOCK GOOGLE ANALYTICS
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com

This is telling your PC that when ever google-analytics.com is contacted by your PC (or the other two variations) then always make the PC use 127.0.0.1 as the IP address. This means Google analytics will be sending its data to the wrong IP address and data will not be recorded.

This method will work for everything on your PC that tries to contact google-analytics.com. If you are not confident in changing files like this then always take a backup.

Something that is not related to SEO in any way but i felt it is a searchable topic and i have a fix (not technically me who fixed it but hey ho!). It’s a problem many people will face and it’s not a problem with Outlook 2010.

I have recently upgraded to Office 2010 on my PC, Some people hate upgrading but i love it, as long as i can still do my work, i love having new and shiny things

One problem i was faced with rather quickly was Outlook 2010. I had a problem that it would freeze within a couple of minutes of opening it and if you tried to click about, it would get the Not Responding error and you basically had to restart your PC to resolve it. If you do manage to close outlook, when you try to re open it, it will hang on the loading screen.

If you search around for this, you will read lots of people messing about with their registry and pst files.

The problem was caused by something a lot simpler than this. Adobe!! The problem for me was i had an Adobe Add-inn on my outlook which converts your email to a PDF if you want it to. Removing the Adobe Add-inn resolved my problem and i now have Outlook working like a dream!!

***UPDATE***

It turned out that after a morning of restarting my computer every 20 minutes, Adobe wasn’t the ultimate problem i had whilst upgrading to Outlook 2010.

Internet Calendars were a problem, I had a Google Calendar integrated into my outlook and the latest version of Outlook did not like this. This was a problem for two reasons, Firstly, if i tried to access the calendar Outlook crashed and would not re start. Secondly, While outlook does a send and receive, it updates you internet calendar, this is a problem because the calender updates first, because it doesn’t work correctly it never updates,  this means you can not send or receive email either.

The last issue i had was my archive folder. I’ve got almost 3 years worth of email archived in one folder, its 2.1GB in size, Outlook doesn’t like this at the moment. I have tried to repair the pst file which confirmed to me this was the issue, as the programme to fix it also crashed. I have set up a new archive folder and all is running sweet again. Its a little annoying i cant access my old email at the moment, however i dont often need to retrieve old email so im going to leave my machine to try and repair the file tonight.

***UPDATE***

After some playing around and testing it turned out that my archive folder was the problem. Once i removed my existing archive folder and started a fresh one i had no problems. I have gradually re instated my outlook to be exactly the same as it was previously with my internet calendars, adobe add on etc and it is running fine. If you are having a problem with outlook freezing then  i would recommend trying this.

If in the future you need to retrieve email from the old archive, you will need to close outlook and reopen it in safe mode, you can do this by holding down ctrl when opening outlook. once in safe mode you can re add the data file and retrieve the email needed, if you need to search the archive folder then you will need to wait for outlook to index it to make it fully searchable, depending on how big the file is, this could take some time. Once finished, remember to detach the old archive file before closing outlook and going back into normal mode.

I saw a statistic at the SEOMoz seminars in London last year and it stated that 80% of search is long tail. It comes as no surprise to me that Yahoo have successfully capitalised on this with the creation of Yahoo Answers.

Yahoo answers is a great example of a website capturing long tail traffic. I don’t believe for one moment Yahoo just want to help people, the amount of top 3 listings Yahoo now hold for long tail search will be phenomenal, that’s a phenomenal amount of traffic which in turn, turns into advertising revenue.

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SMO, or Social Media Optimisation is something that a lot of people undertake, some campaigns are amazing, some never leave the ground. EMail, twitter, YouTube can all server a great purpose to spread your message and having them working in harmony can really work.

If you have a SMO campaign set up then make sure people can see what you are promoting!

Mauro Picotto is a well known DJ in the world of dance music. I received an email about his new album and the fact he has a new twitter page, Great i thought, i love artist SMO campaighns as they can be quite informative and if the artists tweets themselves then its good to see what they are up to.

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Google in the last couple of weeks has introduced personalised search for all of its users. In the past personalised search has been a feature that only worked when a user was logged in.

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