Are you getting paid for blogging? or getting penalized by google for posting paid reviews?
It is now official that google is taking action against sites/blogs with paid posts/reviews.
Bloggers and Site Owners who were members of "Paid for Blogging" sites such as PayPerPost.com, Smorty.com, SponsoredReviews etc. must have noticed that their google PageRank has been reduced to 0.
Google's official statement in its webmaster guidelines says:
"Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results."
The guidelines add that not all paid links violate their guidelines, since "Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results"
It recommends that the links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the tag "(The most preferred method in blogs) or Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file.
If a blog/site has lost its PageRank and wants to get it back then it has to comply with the google webmaster guidelines by using the above mentioned recommended practices. Once that's done, you can follow Matt Cutt's advice and read the Official Google Webmaster blog which suggests :
"The site owner can address the violations of the webmaster guidelines and submit a reconsideration request in Google’s Webmaster Central console. Before doing a reconsideration request, please make sure that all sold links either do not pass PageRank or are removed"
Wednesday, 31 August 2011
Internet Safety Advice : Deceptive Text Links
On the Internet, we all come across text links that are linked to other pages/sites. When these links are clicked they take us to a new destination. for example [ http://www.google.com/ ], link takes you to google homepage as expected. However, a harmless looking text link could be a deceptive link that could lead to a site specifically set up for stealing personal information.
Here's an example of what Iam talking about
The above link takes you to the yahoo homepage instead of google.com. As HTML coders will point out, links are constructed with two pieces of vital information : destination url and anchor text
Anchor text is displayed to the user as a clickable link and destination url is where the link is intended to go. in the first example both the destination url and anchor text are the same and therefore the link works as expected, however in the next example the destination url has been modified to link to yahoo.com instead of google.com and therefore the user is taken to yahoo.com
How can this be a threat to me? you might ask. Let us imagine this scenario. You are browsing a random site and you are presented a link to login to your gmail/hotmail/yahoo mail, where you will get the link to download some goodies. the page that opens looks exactly like the regular web mail service you use, but this random site has used a deceptive link to take you to a different site that has been cleverly constructed to match the look and feel of your regular web mail. Once you enter your email address and password on this site, it is logged and the security has been compromised.
How can you protect your personal information from deceptive links? Firstly, do not blindly trust the links on every site. To get to your regular web mail service, type the URL in the Address Bar to get to Web Mail Service.
Guard against viruses using Free Online Virus Scanners
Viruses are annoying little programs which mess up your computer. In pastwe've recommended using a resident anti-virus program to actively defend against virus attacks. We had also suggested trying out the google pack which includes Norton Security Scan and loads of other useful software
As a second line of defence, We advice you to periodically check your computer using Free online virus scanners. The following links takes you to the reputed antivirus company sites, which install a small piece of code in your browser(ActiveX/Java) to scan your computer.
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