Posts Tagged "Google"

Update your Website’s Software regularly

Posted by beta on Jan 17, 2010 in Security, Web Hosting | 0 comments

I am following the Google walkout news from the Chinese market for the past few days. Will others online properties follow suit too?

Essentially the hacking seems to have happened because of a zero-day flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

This just shows how important it is for everyone to patch their computers.

However, there is another patch which most webmasters forget to do and that is to patch their online softwares. Be it CMS’ like Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal or any other software that you use online, it is extremely essential that they are patched to the latest build. From my early days as a developer I have observed how software flaws have been picked up by hackers. They simply run a search on google for websites running a particular software by keying in certain standard URLs that are unique to the software and then  hack into the website – defacing the homepage, deleting core files, dropping their own files or even stealing the database.

To add to one’s misery I have also observed that  users often install a CMS and don’t backup the entire installation. Reason being the size of the installation is often too large for a backup; this is a major error. Because if your site is hacked, you have to restart building your website from scratch. Trust me, this is really disheartening and time consuming.

As a webmaster these are some of the key points you must adhere to

1. Patch your software

a. You can subscribe to your software’s newsletter that updates you when a new patch is available.

b. You can add a feed from your software’s website to your feed reader warning you when a software update has been posted.

c. Use Fantastico in the first place when you start installing known software. Fantastico will automate updates relieving you of updating your software from time to time.

2. Backup Backup Backup

Seriously! Need I elaborate on how important backing up is? Use your site’s control panel. If you are hosted with WebCynergy, simply head to www.YOURWEBSITE.com/cpanel and run an entire backup of your site. You can download this backup and keep the copy with you for a hay day.

If you would rather concentrate on your business or your website was developed by a few developers and you are no longer in touch with them, simply contact us. We will maintain your website by patching and updating your software from time to time for a small annual maintenance fee. How about that? :)

Host safely.

Read More

Google’s Promise to Web Users – Part I

Posted by alpha on Jan 9, 2010 in Search Engine Optimisation, Web Marketing | 0 comments

As I promised in my last post, I’ll try and talk on what user’s are looking for and what does Google promise.

Every one of Google’s users is looking for truth and Google promises to deliver. This is nothing but result relevance, result precision and user efficiency. These are the same standards that Google uses to evaluate results and improve their algorithm. When you learn to obey the rules to what they want they’ll reward you with higher rankings.

To do this learn to work the system, there are just really three simple parts.

  1. Theme: It is the machine interpretation of web pages. This embodies the on-page factors in search jargon.
  2. Reputation: It is the use of anchor text to attach meaning to the pages that links point too. This is an off-page factor.
  3. Affirmation / Confirmation: It is a collage of filters and reputation effects from external sources that validates and confirms what a site says about itself. Primary purpose of this part of Google’s process is to shield the above two aspects from abuse.

Getting these three parts integrated is what leads to improvement in rankings. Every page should rank for one core search phrase. Be more specific as competition is far more intense and while talking about competition, don’t compete with yourself. Every page on the website should rank for a different core search phrase. Thus the page will rank for one core keyword in addition to long-tail keywords which happens because of supporting words in the body copy.

Read More

Google Algorithm Uncovered

Posted by alpha on Jan 2, 2010 in Search Engine Optimisation, Web Marketing | 0 comments

Internet is a world were searchers and webmasters come together to define what words mean. Webmasters are driven by their profit motives and want searchers to come to their site so they are constantly chasing what it is that searchers are looking for. Searchers meanwhile are diligently trying to figure out what they want. Both webmasters and searchers are motivated entirely by their self-interest thus come to a collective agreement on search terms.

Search-engine provides a medium to connect these crowds together. Unlike other search engines Google algorithm uses some things that we already may know. First step is to take a stack of pages, every page in the index and every single word found any where on the page is used to create a very big matrix relating words to pages as they appear in. This data structure called an inverted index and is a common element in all search engine algorithm.

Google derives meaning from links between pages called Anchor Text. These links tell Google how pages are related to one another and what words associate with each of these connections. To capture these relationships Google builds a matrix much like the page in word matrix but the second matrix indexes the words that appear in links rather than the words on page. We now have two major matrixes, one that identifies words on the page and one for link words pointing to each page.

It is the agreement between the text of the page and the references to it that measures ‘Referential Truth’ of a website. Words follow deeds from the real world and thus help in search engine rankings.

Google wants to rank your page and will rank it for whatever you want; you just not have to tell Google but you need to confirm to the algorithm and use algorithm rules. Once you understand these rules it really is not that difficult to rapidly create top rankings.

Next time around I’ll try and talk about what user’s are looking for and what does Google promise.

Read More