seo

Do You Know Qihoo 360?

It's a Chinese software company specialized in the safety use of the Internet. It is especially known for its antivirus 360 Safeguard (more than 400 millions users) being the leader in China and its web browser 360 Browsers (almost 300 millions users) being second behind Internet Explorer.

Its website hao.360.cn is very AOL-like (meaning a lot of links directing to the main Chinese websites) and has a lot of traffic as it is the default landing page for the browser.

What's New for Qihoo?

Qihoo 360 launched its own search engine in public beta on August 16^th : 360 Search. On so.360.cn, you get pretty much the same features as those on Baidu but you also have access to a software's downloading platform.

Qihoo Search is now the default search engine on its landing page and on its browsers (even on smartphones).

What about Google and Baidu then?

Before it releases its newest software, Qihoo was using another search engine, namely Google! It's a tough decision for the American company who was already having trouble in China as they moved in Hong Kong in 2010 and lost market share.

In a market dominated by Baidu, which holds 78,6% of the Search Engine market shares, Google (15,7%) and Sogou (basically almost the remaining percentage), Qihoo will have to find a spot to settle down. It sure has two major assets : its landing page and its browsers.

What Changes Can One Expect on Search Engine Market?

The Chinese Search Engine market will probably change. Will Qihoo manage to attract enough users and keep those they already own by default?

There will probably be collateral damage on Sogou that has the same business model as Qihoo. It already affected Google - they lost a lot of traffic not being the default search engine on Qihoo landing page already. And Baidu probably won't be as big as before.

The Question is : "how much"? There is already a rumour saying Qihoo 360 Search would hold 10% of the market share. Even if it's highly plausible, we'll have to wait to know the actual figures. There are also experts saying that the non-Qihoo users are very unlikely to switch to 360 Search as Chinese internet users don't like to change their habits.

Anyway, we know for sure it's going to be a major actor on the SEO market anytime soon.

Qihoo Already Playing Tricks?

Apparently, not everybody likes Qihoo 360. A few weeks ago, they were proven overestimating the traffic on their landing page by the well-known hacking activists, Anonymous. That way, they could sell the links on their website a higher price.

Only 8 days after launching its new service, they would be playing tricks to Google...

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is getting more and more importance during the past years and this is not very surprising!

Considering that many companies are now expanding their business to the online field, especially in the e-commerce industry, the competition to reach the first page of the search engine result pages is becoming tougher every month.

The solution to this well-known problem? SEO. Of course, you will have better results in the SERPs if your website is SEO friendly since its conception but if you have been missing this part for your website you can still increase your rankings. Here are the major SEO plugins for Drupal 7:

1.      Pathauto

The Pathauto plugin automatically generates URL/path aliases for different types of content (nodes, taxonomy terms, users) and the best part of this module comes from the fact that you don’t need to specify the path alias.

Then you will be allowed to have clean URL aliases such as /category/my-node-title instead of /node/4584. The aliases are based upon a "pattern" system that uses tokens which the administrator can change easily.

2.      Google analytics

The Google Analytics module allows you to directly follow your incoming traffic statistics into the back office of your website. The module allows you to add the following statistics features to your Drupal site:

• Single/multi/cross domain tracking
• Selectively track/exclude certain users, roles and pages
• Monitor what type of links are tracked (downloads, outgoing and mailto)
• Monitor what files are downloaded from your pages
• Custom variables support with tokens
• Custom code snippets
• Site Search support
• AdSense support
• Tracking of Goals
• Anonymise visitors IP address
• Cache the Google Analytics code on your local server for improved page loading times
• Access denied (403) and Page not found (404) tracking
• DoNotTrack support (non-cached content only)

3.      XML Sitemap

Sitemap is a tiny file located inside the root directory of your web server and is always an excellent way to get the robots crawlers to know where your content is located. You can change the settings in the administrative panel if you want to modify the priority rules and which pages are the most important to send to the major search engines.  

Submitting a sitemap to Google, Bing and Yahoo will indicate the crawlers where to find your webpages on your site, before they decide to do it by themselves. This ensures a faster indexing of your site, resulting in quicker rankings.

4.      Page Title

With the basic installation of Drupal, you don’t have the control over the page title configuration and the way it’s displayed.

Page Title is a very useful and powerful module which allows you to customize each and every page titles of your website. You can easily change the titles of content pages, basic pages, blogs and articles to optimize your SEO.

Setting up the page title is the main factor to be considered if you want to optimize your website with the SEO practices. The page title is the first thing that web crawlers browse

5.      Global Redirect

A helpful SEO-based module that helps Drupal to not have duplicate URLs so that your site isn’t penalized by search engines. Global Redirect does the following action on your Drupal installation:

1. Checks the current URL for an alias and does a 301 redirect to it if it is not being used.
2. Checks the current URL for a trailing slash, removes it if present and repeats check 1 with the new request.
3. Checks if the current URL is the same as the site_frontpage and redirects to the frontpage if there is a match.
4. Checks if the Clean URLs feature is enabled and then checks the current URL is being accessed using the clean method rather than the 'unclean' method.
5. Checks access to the URL. If the user does not have access to the path, then no redirects are done. This helps avoid exposing private aliased node's.
6. Make sure the case of the URL being accessed is the same as the one set by the author/administrator. For example, if you set the alias "articles/cake-making" to node/123, then the user can access the alias with any combination of case.
7. Most of the above options are configurable in the settings page. In Drupal 5 you can access this after enabling the globalredirect_admin module. In Drupal 6, the settings page is bundled into the module.

Once enabled, an alias provides a nice clean URL for a path on a site. However Drupal does not remove the old path (eg node/1234). The problem is that you now have two URLs representing the same content. This is dangerous territory for duplicate pages which can get you sandboxed by the search engines!

6.      SEO Checklist

The SEO Checklist module provides an updated list of recommended modules and SEO best practices for your Drupal based website. It is presented as a to-do list and presents each task into several points like Title tags, paths and content. The appropriate module is displayed next to each task with a short presentation and a description so you can easily set up the module.

The plugin also tracks the task done, includes several information such as a tag, date and provides a simple report.

7.      Search 404

Most of your visitors will type the right URL when they want to visit your website but sometimes few of them will write your URL with one or more mistakes, in this case the classical 404 page will be displayed.

With the Search 404 module you can avoid this issue as the plugin will run a search with the wrong parameter provided in the url and then display a list of the closest matches. This is a very useful plugin as it makes your website much more user friendly.

8.       Meta Tags Quick

This module is a must have for every website owner or SEO specialist who cares a bit about his website’s ranking. With the Meta Tags Quick, you can easily add and customize your meta tag descriptions and meta keywords to all your different nodes.  All of the meta tags (keyword, description, copyright) is treated as a separate field.

9.      SEO Compliance checker

The SEO Compliance Checker checks node content on search engine optimization upon its creation or modification. Each time one node is edited or published the module performs some checks and provides the user a feedback on the compliance of the rules. It introduces a hook to gather information about existing SEO checks in the other modules.

10.  Content Optimizer

The Content Optimizer module helps to increase your site’s search engine (e.g. Google) rankings by improving the on-page optimization variables and insuring your content is conform with Drupal SEO best practices. The SEO analyzer provides instant analysis of any site content to assure SEO best practices are consistently followed. The analysis displays vital content statistics and recommendations for improving search engine rankings.

See also:

SEO plugins for Firefox

SEO extensions for Chrome

This is the last part of our Cybersquatting Guide in which you will read some very useful advices about securing your domain name and avoid the nightmare of seeing your domain name stolen one day. We strongly advise you to also read the previous parts of our guide:

• Top 5 Domain Name Scams - Cybersquatting Guide (1/5)
• ICANN Procedure - Cybersquatting Guide (2/5)
• How to Negotiate your Domain Name - Cybersquatting Guide (3/5)

• How to Recover Your Domain Name in Court - Cybersquatting Guide (4/5)

The best way to protect your domain name from cybersquatting is to be very careful from the day you are registering your domain name. Your domain name is your first and most important digital asset and as a consequence you should be very precautious about the registration process.

Secure your Domain Name:

1. Carefully select the right accredited registrar and take care of the registration by yourself.
2. DO NOT let a third party agent handle it for you even for free. Your domain name is your first and most valuable digital asset; it is not worthy to take any risk with it.
3. Register all your websites from the same trusted registrar company accredited from ICANN or the sub branch of ICANN operating in your country. This will help you to not forget to register one domain name bought months ago.
4. If you are not sure about a registrar company but they have some nice offers, don’t hesitate to search on the popular domain name forums (namepros.com, domainstate.com, and dnforum.com) to see if they are trustable
5. Use as soon as possible the DOMAIN LOCK option if your registrar offers it. If they do not offer this, do not buy your domain name from them and look for a registrar which has it.
6. Keep your own WHOIS information always up to date; be particularly careful with your email address as it can lead to a thief taking control of your domain. An invalid address or phone number can be reported by anyone to ICANN and your registrar which may cancel your domain registration.
7. Some registrars hide a fee in their "Terms and Conditions", which allows them to charge you if you want to transfer your domain names to a new registrar. Avoid registrars with any transfer fees. Also you must be able to make changes to your personal information whenever you want
8. Be particularly careful with offers from hosting companies that offer special package with a free domain name included. You never know what the conditions behind this are.
9. If your website is managed by an independent webmaster, be sure that even if he has registered the domain name for you then he gives you the account login & password.
10. When you notice the expiration date is getting closer DO NOT wait just because you think you still have time. The next time you notice something about your domain name it may be the email sent by the speculator.
11. Setup a remember option or a warning message in the settings of the registrar administration desk so that you will receive a message few weeks before your domain expires.
12. Renew your domain name for a period of at least two years, five years is even better.
13. You should purchase several domain name extension such as .biz, .net in order to protect your domain name so if someone uses the wrong extension, they will still find your company and it will prevent people from registering similar domain name.
14. If a registrar is offering you a discount in the case of a multiple year registration, be sure then the job is done. Most of the time the registrar will only book your domain name for one year, keep your money in their bank account and only pay the next year one week before the expiration date. This is a risky situation as: they may forget to renew your domain name and if the company goes bankruptcy you will lose your money for the upcoming years and your domain name.
15. When you register a domain name a ‘Whois’ record is created which contains all your personal information: address, phone number, email address,… check that the registrar did its job by writing down your personal information.
16. Always use the “Privacy Option” if the registrar offers it, this will protect your personal information to be seen if someone is doing a “WHOIS” on your domain name. This will stop possible spammer to find your email address then send you junk email and this will also stops speculator trying to steal your domain name and identity…
17. But be careful, as registrars may use their Privacy Service to steal your domain as they will change the official record with their own details which is then submitted to the global WHOIS database. This operation makes the registrar the owner of YOUR domain name.
18. Register the domain name in the correct global or country level domain. For a global audience use a .com, .org, or .net domain. In the case you are only focusing on your regional market then use the regional sub domain, such as .co.uk, … Some search engines will only consider country-specific domains if the request is made with a local tag.
19. Buy several domain names with a close typography to your main domain, so you won’t lose any traffic if a competitor or a scammer wants to buy a domain name close to your original one.
20. And last but not least, choose a relevant domain name to your industry or brand’s name in regard with the SEO requirements.

We hope you have enjoyed reading and learning some advices about the cybersquatting environment and the different ways to defend yourself and your domain name against cybersquatters. If you still have some questions or remarks, you are much welcomed to let us know in the comments.

One month after the release of the not so much welcomed Google update named Penguin and few days after the updated 1.1 version, we wanted to make a brief analysis about websites that have been hit by the Penguin.

“Hit by the Pinguin” means that these websites have seen their average traffic suddenly decrease to 40% up in few days following the release of the wild animal by Google.

One Month Later, Which Consequences?

The main goal of this update was to penalize the “keyword stuffing” and the “webspam” techniques which were and are still used in the SEO “black” world. As described on the Google’ search blog the “black hat SEO” or “black hat webspam”.

Well the damage done by the Penguin isn’t the same for everyone. For a lot of big websites that rely on organic traffic, the one coming from the search engine and logically from Google, quickly decreased. They started to lose they ranking and of course some smaller players in the same field started to rank higher.

If your website has been hit by the Penguin update you should (read you have to) check the following points in order to be sure you are not over the line.

Quality Link

Google takes more into consideration the link’s quality and not only the link by itself. It means that now you have to look forward for links coming from quality websites and not coming from links farm or hacked website. Most of the websites that have been hit quite hard by the Penguin have been using not so white SEO techniques and as a matter of fact the wild animal has just penalized them .

Over Optimization

The second point to check is the over-optimization, a lot of websites’ owners believe they have to overoptimize their website to earn traffic. Do not forget that your website has been created for visitors (if you didn’t think about this you have to start it from now), i.e. humans people who are looking for some information, and not for crawlers, robots or spiders especially the ones that Google owns.

Quality Content

The main purpose for a website is to deliver interesting and great content to its users. If you do not offer an added value on your content, Google will consider that you should be before websites that are offering quality content.

Keyword Density

This is one of the most important points to check. Are you sure you haven’t started to speak the crawler’s language? Putting on each and every sentence few keywords making the whole sentence impossible to read just to please the spider? If you have done this, you have to rewrite your content and make it more human-being readable and do not forget to spend even more time on the link anchor text as they MUST look natural and not robot oriented.

Comments and Spam

If you have posted comments on other websites or blogs, especially if your posts look like :

”Great article, great website,

John (http://www.example.com)”

You should consider editing them as soon as possible as for they don’t bring any quality to the conversation. Also, if you have caught some people doing this on your website, do not hesitate to delete the post and why not posting a new article saying that you are now fighting this technique.

Hidden Texts and Hidden Links

Still an old technique but some people still loves it. Do not use it. Google knows if you are using it as the Google’s crawlers do not see the webpages the same way we see it. You can check their inner sightseeing vision in the Google Webmaster Tool; it’s quite different from ours.

Duplicate Content

Be sure to name properly each of your pages, even the very old ones that you have written 5 years ago and you think not one is seeing anymore. Google’s crawlers know they are still here and more importantly know they are not yet fixed.

Ask Google

Go to your Google Webmaster Tools and see if they have tried to warm you that your website is not following their guidelines. If you can’t find any useful information about your website, contact them and ask them if they could possibly give you some advices and feedbacks about what happened on your sudden traffic change.

And… Wait

Penguin is not a live feature but has already been updated once, few days ago, to make sure that clean websites which had been penalized will recover from the update.  According to Matt Cutts, head of webspam team at Google, the new release of Penguin, has only impacted less than 0.1% of the English queries which is lower that first release which was about 3% of the queries.

We can expect new releases of Penguin in the next couples of weeks or months and, as usual with Google, new techniques may become suddenly forbidden, allowed or even compulsory.