Oral SeymourEntrepreneur. Internet, Technology, Social Networking and Search Engine Enthusiast………

I must commend Google for stepping up to the plate in the public and webmasters fight against badware. Some time ago Google started to show its users warnings and prevented them from visiting dangerous sites when users completed a search. Most webmasters whose sites were flagged found out from users themselves.

When users attempt to click over to a Web site considered to be potentially dangerous, Google shows an alert page that informs them of the possible risk and gives them the option to click back to the results page or continue on to the questionable Web site. However, these alerts sometimes anger webmasters who are convinced their sites don’t contain malware.Google flags Web sites according to guidelines set by The Stop Badware Coalition. Webmasters who feel their sites have been incorrectly flagged as having malware need to contact the coalition and request a review.

A few months they integrated malware notifications into webmaster tools and now they are sending out detailed information to webmasters via email.

“Webmaster tools notifications Now instead of simply informing webmasters that their sites have been flagged and suggesting next steps, we’re also showing example URLs that we’ve determined to be dangerous. This can be helpful when the malicious content is hard to find. For example, a common occurrence with compromised sites is the insertion of a 1-pixel iframe causing the automatic download of badware from another site. By providing example URLs, webmasters are one step closer to diagnosing the problem and ultimately re-securing their sites.“

They are sending emails to webmasters notifying them of problems with their sites.

“for now we’re sending the notifications to likely webmaster aliases for the domain in question (e.g., webmaster@, admin@, etc). We considered using whois records, but these often contain contact information for the hosting provider or registrar, and you can guess what might happen if a web host learned that one of its client sites was distributing badware. We’re planning to allow webmasters to provide a preferred email address for notifications through webmaster tools, so look for this change in the future.“

The above quotes were taken from the official Google Blog

I have a partner that took about a year off from SEO to take another job. The other job required all his time so he wasn’t even able to browse forums and keep up with the new trends. I can’t blame him, the other job was paying a lot more. He is now back and while in a meeting yesterday I realized what a difference just a year makes in this industry.

• Link exchange was still high on his link building list. When I calmly explained to him why link exchanges shouldn’t be at the forefront of your link buulding, a few hours later he came up with the brilliant “new” idea of three way linking.
• He was still stuck in the dreaded “cult of PR”, where he concentrated on building his site’s PR and getting links from high PR and not necessarily related sites.
• The rel=nofollow tag dumbfounded him because all his “easy linking” techniques will be rendered useless.
• He was using IBP to measure the keyword density on a page, sorry pal, the industry moved past that to Latent Sematic Indexing.

I told him to get in the forums and do some reading. I also recommended he register for the 2007 Search Engine Strategies conference in New York.

http://www.google.com/sorry/misc/

I got the following url today when I was performing some SEO research. It was the first time I have ever gotten that page but when I did some forum searching I realized that a number of other people have seen it over the past year.

I was doing a lot of computer related searches, each search was just slightly different from the last. I was doing anywhere from 10 to 20 per minute, I was just noting the top three urls before moving on the net search.

Don’t waste your hard earned money on search engine submission services. You don’t need to pay to get your site listed in Google’s index. All you need is one good link and your site will be added to Google. You also don’t need to pay to have your site resubmitted every month, once your site is listed, it stays listed.

You should also stay away from SEO’s that promise to submit your site to thousands search engines. There are millions of search engines but only 4 will bring you any significant traffic, Google, Yahoo, MSN and ask. Most of these thousands of search engines are free for all link pages that are worthless and do nothing to help your SEO campaign.

These are some of the SEO questions that I was asked over the past week. As usual things are simple. I have been hanging out in some SEO forums with members who are relatively new to SEO.

What is a backlink?

Backlinks are usually used to refer to links on other sites that are pointing to yours. These sites link back to yours hence the term backlinks (I just made that up but it sounds legit doesn’t it?)

I have links on my website that are irrelevant to my website theme. Is this going to hurt my rank in search engines? Could I be doing better if I was linked to similar sites like mine?

As long as you are not linking to a bad or banned site then it won’t hurt your rankings, however, I’m a firm believer that linking to a related site helps in SEO. It might be a very small piece of the total puzzle but it helps anyway.

How often should I submit our website to the Search Engines?
Does resubmitting our url improve our ranking?
resubmitting our site cause our site to be banned?

You don’t need to resubmit your site to the search engines. Once they index your site they will revisit periodically to see if your site still exists. How often they revisit depends on your total number of links and the sites that links to you. It will not improve your rankings and I have never seen or heard any solid proof that resubmitting can hurt your rankings although I don’t recommend you resubmit once your are indexed.

I have seen lots webmasters buying signature links in forums. Are signature links helpful for SEO?

I think signature links are more useful for traffic, especially in a high traffic forum. I think they can be easily detected and they have very little to no SEO value.

Can you review my site and my top 10 SEO questions to avoid. The site is here

You need a new design, I nominated you for worst of the web. It funny that you recommend not using a free host yet you are using one, i guess you don’t follow your own advice.

Can the length of the URL be to long for some SE’s? For example: www.mydomain.com/local_real_estate/WA/washington-king-county.php. Can the depth of directories have an effect as well? I’ve been having a very difficult time getting indexed by Yahoo, and I’m thinking that maybe this could be one of the factors?

The depth of your page can have an effect on the page getting index and crawled regularly. Sometimes you need to layout your site in a categories and this cannot be avoided. In this case, try and keep your most important pages as close to your homepage as possible and get other sites to deep link to these pages.

I just feel like it really is not right to get 98% of my site into Google’s supplemental basket. Anyone here knows how to make a Re-Inclusion Request to Google? Do we contact them via yahoo or google?

Having pages in supplemental index is not a penalty so you do not need to file a reinclusion request. Since the supplental index is a part of Google then I think you would want to contact them and not Yahoo. To get your pages out of supplemental, first make sure that they have enough unique content on them, unique titles and descriptions and then get deep links pointing to these pages. Wait a few weeks and you should see a difference.
I must note that having pages in supplemental is not all that bad. I do and I still recieve organic search engine traffic to them.