Warning:
We encourage everyone to read this about a new security threat from CNN, of all places:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/gripeline/archives/2009/01/is_it_safe_to_w.html?source=NLC-GRIPE&cgd=2009-01-27

This refers to a plugin they offer, Octoshape Grid Adobe Flash Plug-in, which is more than a Flash Plug-in. I turns you computer into a part of a peer-to-peer network. Read the license agreement carefully. Not cool.

It use to be that Google did a “Google Dance” once a month indexing everything and if you were lucky you held on to your position or climbed up some. The less fortunates saw their site head for the back forty or disappear entirely. One of the famous ones was the Florida Dance that happened before a recent Christmas, dropping a lot of commercial sites the never-never land and getting these online businesses upset going into the Christmas shopping season.

The Dances are gone now. Google uses a different strategy. There are billions of pages, and the indexing challenge for returning the good sites to a searcher was too big for “the old way”.

Google now tries to return only pages with good ranking that are relevant to the search. These are indexed every month or less – some indexed every day. The main page of this site was indexed less than a week ago. The more important your page, the more often Google will index it. Sites considered less relevant are banished to the supplemental index. These are only returned to the searcher if Google can’t find much matching the site. These pages are indexed much, much less frequently if at all. If one of these pages is returned in a search, it is marked supplemental. Here is an example from our business site:

Comments on: Not getting a good Google position?
http://www.netadventures.biz/wordpress/2005/07/19/not-getting-a-good-google-position/ Building Web Sites that work.. Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:32:58 +0000 …
www.netadventures.biz/wordpress/2005/07/19/not-getting-a-good-google-position/feed/ – 1k – Supplemental Result – Cached – Similar pages
Don’t worry if some of your pages get into the supplemental index. We have thousands of pages in our site and a good number in the supplemental index. We just make sure the important pages aren’t there. Our book shows you how to get your pages out of the supplemental index.

To see if you have pages there, search your site on:

site:www.netadventures.biz *** -yuiopjkl

where the domain specified is your own. Use the three asterisks and any nonsense string with a minus sign in front of it. Avoid any special characters in the string. This is an undocumented feature, so don’t trust it too much.

PS – yes, we know there are some bad links in this site. We are working on that.

A few months ago if you searched Google on “miserable failure”, you’d find the bio of George W. Bush at the top of the list that was returned. Google tried to communicate that this wasn’t a political statment on their part, it was simply the result of their ranking algorithms putting it topside.

This ranking was the result of what is popularly known as a Google Bomb. People set their websites with a link to the bio page with the phrase “miserable failure” in the visible part of the link. They get their friends to do the same thing, and their friends to…you get the idea. Soon you have thousands of links to the Bush bio site, all with the same visible link or variation of it. The practice is called Google bombing. It was used to push many sites to the top of the ranks.

No more. Google has changed their ranking algorithm to detect such Google bombs and direct you to sites that discuss the practice instead. Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines l will still give you that bio site at the top of the list. Has Google gone Republican?

One very important blog – if you haven’t found it – is Matt Cutt’s blog. Matt works at Google and has become the primary interface between Google and the SEO community. This is as close as you are going to get to the inside scoop on how Google works. You can find his blog at:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/.

Check it out – search by topic or scan the archives.

A good recent posting is available at:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/infrastructure-status-january-2007/

This describes some of where Google is going in 2007. It’s a little big of technical stuff here, but those supplemental results he mentions are the listings Googe returns when it can’t find enough information on a search in its main database. These are labeled as such in the return from a search. Obviously, that isn’t a good place for your site to be listed. If you are there, it generally means you have a weak image to the search engine (too few links to your site?) or you are doing borderline spamming of the search engines. Matt says it basically means you have low PageRank.

DMOZ is the without doubt the major directory on the Internet. It’s unlikely, however, that someone will search it for your website. Why, then, is it so important? It’s important because (1) it is updated by human operators (2) it’s free and (3) it is Google’s directory. If you are in DMOZ, Google considers you important and that helps your ranking. More than that, the DMOZ drives your position not only in Google, but also in AOL Search, InfoSpace, Lycos, Netscape Search, and many others. In other words, a listing in DMOZ is important for good listings in the search engines.

A bit of terminology here. DMOZ is the directory name. It is the product of ODP, the Open Directory Project. The editors that keep it updated are ODP editors, not DMOZ edtors.

If you have followed our directions for getting listed in DMOZ in our book, you will notice these directions haven’t worked lately. The problem is that DMOZ crashed in late October. In addition, there wasn’t adequate backup. The directory was patched back together with clones from various sites (including Google’s clone) and is now operational again. The directions in our book for getting listed are still correct once DMOZ is fully operational.

Unfortunately, if you submitted a site back then and were waiting to see it listed, your request is probably lost. Check the DMOZ, and it you are not there try to submit it again. We’ve noticed in the categories we’ve tried they aren’t quite ready for submissions yet. Just keep watching for your category to get back up. Then submit again. Getting your site listed here is important.

For the second time, we’ve had a client having problems with their email through Comcast. Comcast is blocking their email when using another host, even though they aren’t spamming. Contacting Comcast about it doesn’t do anything. Comcast is on our blacklist of hosts that support spammers at:
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.pdf

They are also on our short list of the most serious offenders. This list is at:
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/badhosts.htm

We use Comcast broadband services at the moment, but do not use their email because of these serious problems. We had our Comcast address deleted from our email program when we saw strong evidence that they had sold our address and we started getting spam on the Comcast address. Since we never used the address, the only way anyone could have gotten it was from Comcast.

Our advice to our clients: Don’t use the Comcast POP server for your email, and don’t use a Comcast email address on any other hosting system for people to contact you. You could very well never get that email from a potential client from Comcast blocking. And Comcast won’t tell you what they are doing. Nor can you recover damages.

Google Adwords has changed things a bit for their ads going into the holidays. Bid price has become more important for positioining your pages and the quality of the landing page less so. This, I presume, is to enhance Google’s profit during December. This means you may have to increaee your bid to maintain the same CTR during the month.

If you have a web site targeted for the coming holiday sales, here are a few tips for your site:

1. It’s a little late for optimizing a new site for the organic (free) engines for the holidays. If you have an existing site, target your title, description, and page contents to one to three keyword phrases that are used frequently in searching the engines and have a minimum of competition. Second, get as many links into your site as possible. Our seo book has many tips on these strategies and others.

2. Using paid advertising gets you positioned well in minutes (Google’s Adwords) or in a week (Yahoo). Our seo book now has a lengthy chapter on using these PPC strategies to get them working for you quickly.

Order the book today and get your site going today!

For over a year we’ve been black-listing spam hosts. This has been minimally effective – but some changes are in store to increase the effectiveness of our black list. One guy threatened to sue – until we mailed his spam email to his State Attorney General.

We did have two problems, however.

1. We store the spam hosts for the spam and phish we receive in Microsoft Access, then upload the list dynamically to a MySQL database on our host. Later versions of Access (the shipping product for many years) has a bug in it that prevents this from working. Last January we worked with Microsoft engineers to get this working by switching in a dll from an Access version two levels back. Now Microsoft, with one of their “automatic updates” broke this again. We don’t know when or if this will be fixed. So we give you the list now in a static PDF form that we plan to update on weekends at:
   http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm.
   Hackers and Botnets can enjoy this free blacklist of illegal operators for their fun and games!

2. The online tool we use to identify these hosts from the spam went down, probably from an attack from the bad guys. The tool is back up in a primitive form (http://www.samspade.org), so we can start trying to process our backlog with it.

We will also expand the ranking of our spam listing page. We’ve had great success in the past by using the blogs to create a blog swarm and build high traffic levels on pages. We will try that with this spam page listing now to get its traffic up.

If you don’t like this, sorry. The Bush Administration has been given the charge by Congress to stop and fine these guys. Apparently they aren’t doing it. Too many geldings and wimpys in Congress and the Administration. (You probably get to vote next month – vote a lot of these out.) The hosts have been treating this like a joke. That leaves it up to the users to stop it.

Join us in this war. Create your own black list and circulate it in through the spam blog comments to the hackers and bad guys. This eventually creates another botnet, but targeted at the bad guys. Get serious.

Thinking of using Google Adwords? A new and updated version of our SEO book is now available at:
http://www.the-seobook.com.

The book is now 256 pages, and the PPC chapter is now expanded with more information for using Google Adwords for successful selling. Why not order it today? If you are thinking of selling something online during the holiday season and you are using a new web site, you’ll need Google Adwords to get the word out by then. Google will have trouble optimizing a new site for any quality ranking by the holidays unless you are using Adwords.