Our January Newsletter is Posted

Topics in our January e-newsletter are:

Simple Blog Security May Prevent Hacking

Have you checked out your blog admin or writer passwords lately? Are they something simple like aabbccdd or squirrel94? If you don’t have a secure password like Afj*2p!5, a password that includes upper and lower case letters, characters and numbers, you may be a prime target for hacking.

We had a most unusual case this past month where one of our top performing client sites went from top placement on Google.com to no where to be found. More problematic was in the Google Webmaster control panel new strange gambling related keywords were being reported as top page keywords. Additionally his meta title tag and description on Bing showed casino and gaming descriptions. Yet, when the specific website pages were inspected using an online browser, the keywords did not exist in the source code. Read mor…

What Happens If You Let Your Domain Name Expire

For most website owners, the ownership of their website domain name is secure. You know where you registered it, you keep the same email, and you renew your domain on time. But for large volunteer organizations, sometimes this is not the case. This past month we’ve had a very thorny situation for a webmaster client and have been hired to try to fix it.

In this case, the association had a key member leave. The domain name was registered to the organization but with the key person as the registrant. Additionally the email address tied to the domain was the one referencing the site’s domain name. When the key member left the association, no one thought to change the domain’s registration records. When the domain’s annual renewal came around the renewal notification was sent to the past key member’s email account, but no one ever checked it because the key member was no longer associated with the group. Read more…

Does Your Site Place Well on Caffeine? Wait ’till January to Know

Google is rolling out a new algorithm after the holidays and it has some webmasters shaking in their boots. It appears that this new update will have far reaching consequences. When a huge adjustment comes, it even gets a name, and this one has been named Caffeine. The last one that shook the webmaster world was called Florida and it was, and still is, infamous in my circles.

Google is indicating that with the new Caffeine algorithm that website speed may be a key factor in deciding organic placement. We suspect that Google will be further devaluing inbound links in this new algorithm as well. One interesting conversation has surfaced about Caffeine that is mentioning that the number of social bookmarks a site has may replace links as a website popularity vote. There is strong talk that Google will strongly consider these numbers for organic ranking. Read more…

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