Google’s latest reaction, Saturday night by Android security head Rich Cannings, is the remote removal from users’ phones of applications identified as malware. Google also plans to release a security update “”Android Market Security Tool March 2011″ to infected phones.

The kill switch is actually software that’s downloaded onto an Android smartphone and installed automatically, removing the apps in question with no user action required. In its Google Mobile Blog, the company announced:

“We are pushing an Android Market security update to all affected devices that undo’s the exploits to prevent the attacker(s) from accessing any more information from affected devices. If your device has been affected, you will receive an email from android-market-support@google.com over the next 72 hours. You will also receive a notification on your device that “Android Market Security Tool March 2011” has been installed. You may also receive notification(s) on your device that an application has been removed. You are not required to take any action from there; the update will automatically undo the exploit. Within 24 hours of the exploit being undone, you will receive a second email.”

Google downplayed the harm caused by these malware apps, assuring users that none of their personal data has been compromised:

“For affected devices, we believe that the only information the attacker(s) were able to gather was device-specific (IMEI/IMSI, unique codes which are used to identify mobile devices and the version of Android running on your device). But given the nature of the exploits, the attacker(s) could access other data.”

Android devices are still vulnerable because of existing security holes at the system level, which must be fixed by cellular carriers and hardware manufacturers. The problem is made worse by cellular providers sticking with older versions of Android, unfortunate because the security exploit only affects Android versions 2.2.1 and older.

We knew it was not going to be long before Google released a major algorithm update to combat the very prevalent web spam and link farms we have seen growing over the past couple of years. Well the time has come; today Google’s Matt Cutts & Amit Singhal unveiled an algorithmic change that claims to impact 11.8% of search queries.

According to Singhal, this update is targeted to “reduce the rankings for low quality sites while increasing the ranking for high quality sites.”

What exactly is Google’s definition of “low” quality and “high” quality? The official definitions from Google are:

“Low-quality sites – sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”

“High-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

Google is also claiming that the update does not rely on the feedback that it receives from the “Personal Blocklist Chrome Extension”. They do however claim to have compared it to the Block List Data they have gathered to date and show a staggering 84% match with the algorithm update. Coincidence?

Finally this update is currently only being rolled out in the United States Only, other countries will follow over time.

You can read the Offical Blog Post from Google here.

Today Mehdi, Microsoft’s Senior VP of Online Services responded.

We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop. We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting.

Mehdi, then took it one step further and accused Google of performing “Click Fraud”

Google engaged in a “honeypot” attack to trick Bing. In simple terms, Google’s “experiment” was rigged to manipulate Bing search results through a type of attack also known as “click fraud.” That’s right, the same type of attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers and produce bogus search results. What does all this cloak and dagger click fraud prove? Nothing anyone in the industry doesn’t already know. As we have said before and again in this post, we use click stream optionally provided by consumers in an anonymous fashion as one of 1,000 signals to try and determine whether a site might make sense to be in our index.

Read the full post here

Is Google just trying to redirect focus from the recent discussions surrounding Google’s SERPS being full of spammy results? Maybe, they chose to wait 30 days before going public with thier findings.

What are your thoughts? Is Bing cheating from Google?

I thought it would be interesting to try a little albeit slightly selfish experiment to see if I can gather some data to support what both search engines have confirmed.  This is an informal experiment that will both help start to answer the questions these changes have brought and at the same time promote my wonderful wife’s website.

Below is a pre-crafted tweet with Keywords built in to the structure of the tweet, simply click the share button below to participate in the experiment.

I will be tracking the results with topsy.com and will publish a findings post once the experiment has concluded and I have had time to correlate the date.

I need your help!

If tweeting or linking is not your thing what are you doing reading an SEO blog?

Full Disclosure / Disclaimer – Participating in this experiment will promote a site that is owned by my wife, I do not want to hear from people that I was performing a selfish experiment. Though I fully believe the results will be useful to all SEO’s out there.

Let’s start with the latter; Google says Instant is expanding in two ways:

Google Instant On Vertical Search Properties: In addition to being available on Google.com searches, Instant Search is now functioning on “many” of the vertical search options in Google’s left navigation column, like Videos, News, and Blogs.

Google Instant In New Countries: Instant Search is now available to signed-in users in 12 new countries: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Ireland, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Ukraine.

Finally, when using Google Instant, there are new keyboard navigation options. You can use the up and down arrows on your keyboard to navigate through the search suggestions (pretty sure that’s always been the case) and through the search results, too. This video shows how it works.

All good questions in this post I will address the first question which came to my mind. What about Analytics? How do I track Google Instant partial queries? Now that Google is presenting real time or instant results, there is a high chance that the query string that gets passed to Google Analytics is incomplete or rather partial because the link was displayed before the user even completed typing the query!

For example an instant query result for “weather” may only be passing along “w” as the query parameter to Analytics since Google displays the link to weather after just typing “w”. To understand what a user needed to type to find the result they were looking for an additional parameter is being used in the result set. The parameter is “oq=” which will give you the information you are looking for.

To track Partial Queries, and their position in Google Instant, you will need to create a new profile along with a new filter in your Google Analytics Report. It is pretty straight forward; below is a sample filter you can use to start tracking.

1. Create a new Filter name: “New Instant Ranking Filter”
2. Set Filter type: “Custom filter – Advanced”
3. Field A -> Extract A: Referral, ^https?://www\.google\.(co.uk|com)/(?!custom|m/).*[?#&]cd=([^&]+).*&q=([^&]+).*&oq=([^&]+)
4. Field B -> Extract B: Medium:^organic$
5. Output To -> User Defined: $A5 (position: $A3)

You may have to play a little with the filter for you specific requirement but this should give you a good start.

Let me know if you have any other suggestion or comments.

Google is moving away from the traditional HTML based results to a more robust AJAX based application for delivering ‘real’ time search results. Marissa Mayer noted that Google has already made approximately 500 changes to search ranking and user interface (UI) in 2010.

It takes a user on average 9 seconds to enter a search query followed by a few hundred milliseconds on Google’s Servers to render a search result. The user then averages about 15 seconds looking at the results. Google Instant claims to save user 2-5 seconds per query, which in turn will save 11 aggregate hours per second.

Google will display characters in black that they have typed followed by shifting grey predicted characters as the user continues to type. Why even keep the search button at this point? Well it forces Google to search for exactly what you’ve typed, without predicting how you’ll finish that search.

Instant will begin rolling out to Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8.

For more information from Google you can visit their brief description over at:

 http://www.google.com/instant

However: Looking back at my 2010 analytic stats I can see the increase in Internet Explorer 8 adoption amongst the general home user (my target demographic). What I do find interesting is that IE7 seems to have had a very small adoption rate. This may be in part due to the commercials Microsoft has released promoting the “Enhanced Security” features of IE8.

Below are two images showing the different browser distribution of my visitors and more importantly drastic trend to move away from Internet Explorer 6.

Sure I check my Google Analytic stats every now and again, but what value is this truly providing me? GA gives website owners a false sense of security IMHO. What we tend to forget is that GA tracks links on any given page. Sure it can give you a pretty overlay on a map, but what does this mean? What does this translate to? I’m really not sure to tell you the truth.

Recently I decided to concentrate less on driving new visitors to my site and focus on “Converting” the visitors I actually have. Google Analytics did help me identify my ‘poor’ conversion rate 34% to be exact.

So the quest began, I had no idea what visitors were truly clicking on? What was driving them away? What was causing them to not convert? Oh no what do I do? How do I find out? Help!!

Crazy Egg to the rescue, they offer four views which you can see described below:

Overlay – Learn more about each element on your page.
List – Learn more about each element on your page.
Heat Map – A picture of where people clicked on your site. This tells you what’s hot and what’s not.
Confetti – Dig a little deeper and find out where people click based upon the things like: Top 15 Referrers, Search Terms, Operating System, Browser, etc…

To get started with Crazy Egg you sign up for $9 which will allow you to track up to 10 pages and 10,000 visits. You’ll need to add a piece of JavaScript to the pages you want to track. The sign up process is simple and painless, adding the JavaScript is just as simple and the same code is reused across all pages you wish to track.

After installing the JavaScript and tracking for just a few days I was easily able to identify the “Problem” areas in my design and adjust accordingly. After making the changes my conversion rate has increased to 76.5% which is more than double.  It’s simply CRAZY! Or rather CRAZY SIMPLE!

In conclusion Crazy Egg is a must have tool to compliment Google Analytics and for the price you would be Crazy to pass it up.

What does this mean for Webmasters and SEO’s? It means that it is important to be familiar with how the Bing crawler interacts with your site. After the full algorithmic transition is complete, you will only need to optimize for one crawler (Bing).

You should check out the Bing Webmaster Center for all the latest info, tips and tools, including some significant updates to Bing’s webmaster tools.

This is a great milestone for Bing and Yahoo!, but is it a great thing for SERPs?

What do you think?

So what’s the announcement? Here it is. “Showing More Results From A Domain”. Google announced a tweak designed to surface multiple pages from a single site for relevant queries.

“For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site,” says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. “Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results.”

This change does not come without controversy, many SEO are screaming similarities to “Mayday”. What are your thoughts? I would love to hear from you.

“Obviously, everyone knows that the #1 spot on Google is where you want to be,” says Chitika research director Daniel Ruby. “It’s just kind of shocking to look at the numbers and see just how important it is, and how much of a jump there is from 2 to 1.”

The simple answer is no.

The actual question that should come to everyone’s mind is will this comprise my overall SEO efforts.

Search Engine Optimization is not magic; this topic is well documented. Many if not all of the SEO methods are shared across all the major search engines, with slight weighting differences amongst them. If you follow good SEO practice you will rank well on all SERPS.

There are however some interesting observations I have made. BING & Google both at first glance seem to weigh On Page SEO very similarly. However Off Page SEO seems to influence BING a little more. BING appears to give more trust to aged domains, along with target keywords anchor link positioning.

With that being said my personal opinion is that you should concentrate on good OVERALL SEO rather than worrying about a specific search engine. 

Remember content is king.

1. Make an .htpasswd file. The htpasswd command in Unix does this. You should put the password file outside of your web directory. So a command like “htpasswd -bc /home/dmistry/.htpasswd review donotenter” will create a new file using a username of review and a password of donotenter into the file /home/dmistry/.htpasswd . If you were to run the command “cat /home/dmistry/.htpasswd” you might see a line like “review:M1OdtjdGiDn1Y”.
2. Make an .htaccess file. In this case, the file would be located at /home/dmistry/www/.htaccess and it would look something like:

   AuthUserFile /home/dmistry/.htpasswd
   AuthName EnterPassword
   AuthType Basic
   <Limit GET POST>
   require valid-user
   </Limit>

1. “Meta Tags” – Should be included on all pages, remember though these tags no longer carry the same value they used to in the early search days. Today’s search engines have evolved and now have robust algorithms which take many factors into consideration. The days of “keyword stuffing” will no longer yield in better SERP. Google has gone as far as openly stating that they in fact do not even use the Meta Keyword tag to weigh in on their decision. That being said I strongly believe that all sites should leverage the use of <meta tags> appropriately.

2. “Friendly URL’s”- Make sure all pages on your site have a friendly URL. http://www.domain.com/about-us.html try and avoid long URL’s with many parameter passed. Most search engines can handle URI’s with up to 2 parameters but after that you run the risk that your pages may not get indexed.

3. “Sitemaps” – Create a sitemaps.xml and sitemap.html publish them to the search engines via their submission links. I like to create both pages some people say you only need one.

4. “Robots.txt” - Create a robots.txt file tell the search engine where your sitemap.xml file is located. Most search engines will respect the robots.txt file. BE SURE that you validate the file before publishing, a bad entry could potentially block the crawler from crawling your site all together.

5. “Unique Content”- I personally think this is the biggest of them all, have unique content for your visitors, if you have a site that is just repeating another site what is the incentivefor people to come visit you. Creating easy to read unique content will go very far, think about it, if you have a site that is interesting more people are likley to link to your site, the more “Relevant & Reliable” back links you get the better chance you will rank higher in SERP. I will cover this in more detail on my Top 5 Off Page SEO Tips

This begs the question, Is this a result of being “released” from the Google age delay filter?, or just the mere fact that Google has index additional pages and is slowly building and calulating our Page Rank.

We have made a few changes to the site, minified the Javascript and CSS which I will talk about a later time, compressed images and added a few more backlinks. Today is exactly 2 months from the day the domain was registered so I am happy with the way things are shaping up so far.

Below are a Couple of methods to implement URL Redirection

ColdFusion Redirect

<.cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<.cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.new-url.com">

PHP Redirect

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?> 

ASP Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.new-url.com/"
%> 

ASP .NET Redirect

<script runat="server">
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.new-url.com");
}
</script> 

JSP (Java) Redirect

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.new-url.com/" );
response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" );
%> 

CGI PERL Redirect

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect("http://www.new-url.com/"); 

Ruby on Rails Redirect

def old_action
headers["Status"] = "301 Moved Permanently"
redirect_to "http://www.new-url.com/"
end 

Redirect Old domain to New domain

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name.

In addition to the redirect I would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

Redirect to www

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

So how long does this filter apply? How long will the site be “Sand Boxed”? No one really knows the answer to this, but the speculation is that for new domain’s with similar content / material Google wants to keep the ”Age Delay Filter” for approximately 6-12 months. Is this fair? I am partial to both opinions it will help reduce spam sites ensuring the site/domain is something that is going to be around, but on the other hand legitimate sites will take a penalty for quite some time reducing the potential traffic.

Let’s see how long Google makes our site play in the “Sand Box”.

Stay Tuned…