Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Website has malicious software and stops AdWords.

If you have a lot of website traffic and are having your website hosted with a third party with low level security on the servers you may encounter someone with a little more time on their hands than you and decide to hack the server.
Now when you go to your home page it says the site may contain malicious software and you have an option to continue to the site at your own risk.
  1. Step one is contact your hosting provider and have them clean up the server so that you may be reconsidered for your listing.
  2. After you are cleared you need to use your webmaster tools to request a reconsideration for your adwords account and your listing with Google search engine.
  3. Wait about 24 hours and if the malicious software was cleared you should be good to go.
Don't blame the hosting company in this instance, there are just people that are "malicious" and wanted to have fun at your expense.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Banned from search engine result pages?

Are you looking for the perfect URL name and it's already owned? Thinking of buying it? You might want to take a few minutes to see if the URL is worth purchasing.
  • Check the URL Status
Ex. www.NewCastleFarmersMarket.com
Go to the Google search box and type in; site:www.NewCastleFarmersMarket.com, this will tell you what pages if any are listed in Google search results. If you have multiple pages listed in the results the URL is meeting Google guidelines.
  • Check the URL Link Status
Go to the Google search box and type in; link:www.NewCastleFarmersMarket.com, this will provide you with the websites, if any, that have a text link on thier site pointing to that URL.

Repeat these steps for the other search engines you want to make sure you are listed in.
If for some reason there are no pages or links available on that search you may want to check the wayback machine to show the last page indexed for that URL, this will give you an idea of why the site may have been de-listed with the search engine(s).
Sometimes by looking at the previous site you can tell if the search engines were mislead or there was questionable content on the site that may have had it removed from the search engine results page. In any case you can ask for special reconcideration of the site using the Google Webmaster tools after you verify that you are the site owner by putting in a meta-tag code for the search engine spider to see.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Flash and Search Engine Optimization

Recently I was approached with a project to optimize that was completely flash and was just created and the URL was purchased about a year ago. Right there is an SEO nightmare and not an easy task by any means.
So how do you optimize an interactive flash site? Social media and networking 2.0 can start getting people to visit the site, maybe some ppc (pay-per-click) advertising on Google to develop a brand image for the new site and provide immediate traffic. As long as the interactive flash site has a tool of some sort to have a purpose other than viewing information. This is more or less for the other websites on the web having a reason to link to your site. There isn't any text content on your site to give them a reason to link for search engine purposes.
Flash sites do not get attention from the search engines, they don't have text for the spiders to index, thus not proving their worthiness to the search engines. I really wasn't able to find any information on the subject so I am sure in search of work arounds and any other insight on the subject, but linking will certainly work for the time being until Google changes the algorithms for links and Page Rank.