SEOProgress

Following my injection attack to my main niche site I have actually been paying attention to it again and doing a bit of a tidy up and making some SEO tweaks etc.

All has been going well and I more than recovered from the post attack slump. Then June 2^nd hit! Overnight I was on about 40% of my old traffic – OUCH!

Now I don’t panic so much anymore as I have seen a bunch of changes over the years and been through the whole chasing my tail thing. I have watched people on forums panic and frantically make changes to it in with the “new Google”. That’s all very well if that change is definitely permanent.  Luckily in the past I have been too busy to attend to that site and by the time I get round to it things are back to normal.

I have heard some mention that this is an over optimisation penalty. I don’t think this is a likely issue but in view of the fact I have been making changes you can’t help but wonder. However, I hardly think having a relevant title and h1 tag etc is cause for a penalty. I’ve also heard talk of it not happening to older domains. Well this website is 11 years old now so I really think that is clutching at straws. But considering it is the only site of mine that's been hit (certainly this hard) then it is a worry.

I am going to hold on for now. I am putting on some quality articles and I’ll keep working on that and see if things pop back into place.  Adsense earnings back up a little over the last few days – not so much because of traffic but eCPM is sitting much better.

Let’s hope Google has been a bit over zealous in one area of their algo change as there are far too many people who feel they have good sites yet still being hit. Mind you, we all feel we have great, non spammy sites don’t we?

Tags: google, serps

I have quite a few email accounts and even more contact forms that are included on many of my websites. I also receive some of my client's forms as I help them run the site - so I can get quite a bit of Spam but the stuff I really hate is the stuff offering SEO services. The following message is one I get more than most.

What I really hate is my clients also get them and, in turn, I have to answer stuff about them. Especially irritating when I am already working with the client on SEO or the site was built by me properly from the start and they don't really want to spend much money to get some regular promotion going. However, they are looking for that magic bullet. I guess they are hoping for that $100 fix. Explaining that these people are saying that you aren't found in the search engines but managed to find YOU. They don't reveal their company name and use a gmail email address - why would you do anything more than delete the email?

One particular irritation to me is they all trace to India yet they use English sounding names - yet more signs of deceipt. A small sample of the names I have come across are:

Melodie Johnson
Ron Cheny
Lawrence Baxter
Robert Karlson
Kent Cornwall
Travis Crane

and that's just this week!

It is unfortunate that is gives India a bad name. There are some great workers there - I know as I am now using several for my outsourced articles and if it wasn't for that I would be tempted just to block India from my server. What a shame to feel like that from the actions of what is probably just a few people. However, it would save the time I have to spend dealing with questions about these types of mailings.

Dealing with clients that feel they want to find out more about these emails reminds me of why I am concentrating more and more on my own sites. It also disheartens me that I can see that these spammers do get responses making this rubbish worthwhile.

Tags: seo spam

It's been a busy week pushing forward with my new niche sites - not an easy task when you have a development project for a demanding customer on the go. However, I have to make time in order to be less reliant on them (bit of a catch 22 really)

Anyway, yesterday my day was ruined dealing with an unfortunate incident. I will readily admit it was really my fault because I didn't attend to something that I should of. Despite having mapped out my week which included launching my 3rd niche site, I had to drop everything and deal with a Malware incident.

One of my older sites that earns a moderate income of around $20 per day saw a dip over the easter weekend. I wasn't overly worried as I assumed perhaps it was just a holiday slump and besides, I was busy on other things. On Thursday my earnings were down to around $2 and I was really worrying now. I was beginning to feel relaxed with this low maintenance, regular income and didn't want to see it go down the pan.

What did I do? I started looking to see if others were complaining about an Adsense drop. What I found was speculation about the very same weekend and the introduction of the Google Caffeine update. Bearing in mind I still hadn't looked at my site - why would I? I know what it looks like.

At this point I was about to just sit back and let others worry about fiddling with their sites, chasing their tails trying to second guess Google. I found it is just not worth panicking because if you have built your site right then it should come good in the end.

All that was left to do was a quick "site:mysite.com" on Google see if the count was normal and then I could just put it behind me for a while - then I saw this next to every one of the 900+ pages:

This site may harm your computer

Now panic sets in. Mistake? Bad problem? What do I do?  I FINALLY pop over to the site to find that rather lovely Firefox red warning page

Reported Attack Page!

Now I really did have a problem. I popped onto the server and opened up the logs, choosing the day that the traffic started to drop. And there it was - SQL inject attempts (including the successful one at the end). They had inserted some javascript into a description field while wiping out my subject in the process of trying. Annoyingly the latter is used as the title tag so I have some blank title listings in Google now.

It was all down to an insignificant, small 3rd party script that I have always known was a bit ropey - more fool me.

I got it fixed moderately quickly and restored a backup from well before the attack as the site hadn't been updated for about 8 weeks.

Now to get those warnings removed. All it took was logging into my Google webmaster account and requesting a malware review of my site.

I was quite worried about how long it was going to take but it was pretty quick - I submitted at around 2pm and the browser warning was lifted at around 9pm. Unfortunately I was still stuck with This site may harm your computer on every single one of my Google results which really worried me that this was going to last for quite a while. However all was well another 2 hours later.

So, there it is, a ruined day, lost income which could take a while to recover and possibly a damaged reputation. At least the warning removal was fairly painless and pretty quick but it didn't feel like it at the time while I was waiting.

I am not going to let it get me down and I got that 3rd niche site launched today together with an article submission to ezinearticles pointing to it. So now I am back on track with an important lesson learned.

Tags: malware warning, google, firefox

Having decided to diversify and make a big push with my online income I started to look at building micro niche websites. This all began about 3 weeks ago and have now released 3 new sites. Then, I discovered the THIRTY DAY CHALLENGE - http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com. How I missed it before I don't know but it gave me the idea to go back to basics. While I already earn a good living from my websites (and related work) I know there are some gaps in my knowledge. So, what better thing to do that follow a program and fill in those gaps.

I hope people will follow me on my journey and maybe we can all learn something.

I have also set up a Twitter page so please follow me!

http://twitter.com/seoprogress/

There is also a little more about me here:

http://www.seoprogress.co.uk/page/About-Me.aspx

Tags: 30 Day Challenge