Re: Is my site infected with Malware, Is there malicious code in my site?

There is one sure fire way to check if your site is infected with Malware, ask Google!

Go to the following URL and insert your domain name at the end, here is a sample:

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=uk-cheapest.co.uk

To check your PC for malware, use the following free software:

AdAware - http://www.lavasoft.com/
MBAM - http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free

This free software will remove all malware and malicious ads, spyware and cookies from your PC and should be run regularly to ensure an optimum browsing experience.

The Google Panda update is well and truly rolled out to UK sites.

Some sites lost a high percentage of their traffic, others were unaffected. To minimise your site exposure to the new rules, consider the following 5 very important tips:

1. Unique content is more important than ever
2. Links from low quality directories and blogs are worth less
3. Quality relevant backlinks are worth more
4. Quality relevant links from authority sites are worth more
5. Remove duplicate (and spun) content or risk being de-indexed.

Keep your site within the new rules and your traffic will return and if you were unaffected, significant gains could be realised.

Depending on the timing of the submission and of our crawl, the entire process can take between six and eight weeks.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Each time Google update the database of web pages (about once a month), the index shifts. If your site was dropped from Google and you have not made major changes to it in the last month, Google will likely pick it up again in the next index. It’s possible your site was simply inaccessible when the robots tried to crawl it.

You may want to check and see if the number of other sites linking to your URL has decreased. This is the single biggest factor in determining what sites are indexed by Google, as we find most pages when our robots crawl the web and jump from page to page via hyperlinks. To find out who links to your site, use Google’s link: tool.

It’s also possible your rank decreased because other sites were found and assigned a higher rank. You can be assured that no one at Google has hand adjusted the results to boost the ranking of a site. Google’s order of results is automatically determined by several factors, including the PageRank algorithm. Please check out Google’s “Technology Overview page for more information on how this works.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Although Google index more than 8 billion web pages, they cannot guarantee that they will crawl all the pages on a particular site. However, Google are always working to increase the number of pages crawled and hope to include more pages in the index soon. For more information about how Google find and include pages in the index please read Google’s Technology Overview.

If your site’s internal link structure does not provide a path to all your pages, the Google robot may not see all the pages on your site. Google follows links from one page to the next, so pages that are not linked to by others may be missed.

Basically, you can’t buy your way into the actual search results. You can however, purchase advertising adjacent to Google results.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Google is a mechanized search engine, which employs robots known as ‘spiders’ to crawl the web on a monthly basis and find sites for inclusion in the Google index.

Reasons your site may not be included.

1) Your pages are dynamically generated. Google are able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because the web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, Google limit the amount of dynamic pages it indexes.

2) You employ doorway pages. Google does not encourage the use of doorway pages. Google want to point users to content pages, not to doorways or splash screens.

3) Your page uses frames. Google supports frames to the extent that it can. Frames tend to cause problems with search engines, bookmarks, emailing links and so on, because frames don’t fit the conceptual model of the web (every page corresponds to a single URL). If a user’s query matches the site as a whole, Google returns the frame set. If a user’s query matches an individual page on the site, Google returns that page. That individual page is not displayed in a frame — because there may be no frame set corresponding to that page.

If you are concerned with the description of your site as seen by search engines, please read “Search Engines and Frames”. It describes the use of the ‘NoFrames’ tag, which is used to provide alternative content. If, instead of providing alternative content, you use wording such as “This site requires the use of frames” or “Upgrade your browser”, then you are excluding both search engines and people who use browsers with frames turned off. (For example, audio web browsers, such as those used in automobiles and by the visually impaired, typically do not deal with frames, which are a visual mechanism.)

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Google update their index about once a month. Each time Google update othe database of web pages, the index invariably shifts: new sites are found, some sites are lost, and sites ranking may change.

Your rank naturally will be affected by changes in the ranking of other sites. You can be assured that no one at Google has hand adjusted the results to boost the ranking of a site. Google’s order of results is automatically determined by several factors, including our PageRank algorithm. Please check out our Technology Overview page for more information on how this works.

You may want to check and see if the number of other sites linking to your URL has changed. This is the single biggest factor in determining what sites are indexed by Google, as Google find most pages when the robots crawl the web and jump from page to page via hyperlinks.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Google’s order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors, including Google’s PageRank algorithm.

Please check out Google’s Technology Overview page for more details. Due to the nature of our business and our interest in protecting the integrity of our search results, this is the only information Google make available to the public about the ranking system.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

There is a standard method involving a “robots.txt” file for excluding robot crawlers. This will prevent Googlebot or other crawlers from visiting your site. Googlebot has a user-agent of “Googlebot”. In addition, Googlebot understands some extensions to the robots.txt standard: Disallow patterns may include * to match any sequence of characters, and patterns may end in $ to indicate that the $ must match the end of a name. For example, to prevent Googlebot from crawling files that end in gif, you may use the following robots.txt entry:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.gif$

There is another standard for telling robots not to index a particular web page or follow links on it, which may be more helpful, since it can be used on a page-by-page basis. This method involves placing a “META” element into a page of HTML.

Remember, changing your server’s robots.txt file or changing the “META” elements on its pages will not cause an immediate change in what results Google returns. It is likely that it will take a while for any changes you make to propagate to Google’s next index of the web.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Google automatically takes a “snapshot” of each page it crawls and caches it. This enables us to show the search terms highlighted on text heavy pages so users can find relevant information quickly, and to retrieve pages for users if the site’s server temporarily fails. Users can access the cached version by choosing the “Cached” link on the search results page. If you do not want your content to be accessible through Google’s cache, you can use the NOARCHIVE meta-tag. Place this in the section of your documents:

This tag will tell robots not to archive the page. Google will continue to index and follow links from the page, but will not present cached material to users.

If you want to allow other robots to archive your content, but prevent Google’s robots from caching, you can use the following tag:

Note that the change will occur the next time Google crawls the page containing the NOARCHIVE tag (typically about once a month). If you want the change to take effect sooner than this, the site owner must contact us and request immediate removal of archived content. Also, the NOARCHIVE directive only controls whether the cached page is shown. To control whether the page is indexed, use the NOINDEX tag; to control whether links are followed, use the NOFOLLOW tag.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Except in instances involving legal issues or spam, Google’s policy for removing a page from our index requires that we obtain the permission of that page’s webmaster.

This prevents competitors from sabotaging each other’s listings. Please have the webmaster for the page in question contact us with proof that he/she is indeed the webmaster.

This proof must be in the form of a root level page on the site in question, requesting removal from Google. Once we receive the URL that corresponds with this root level page, we will remove the offending page from our index.

For more information on this process, please see http://www.google.com/remove.html

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Google does not manually assign keywords to your site, nor do Google manually “boost” the rankings of any site. The ranking process is completely automated and depends on the relative PageRank of each result found.

The best way to improve your position in results is to have relevant content and multiple links from other web sites. If there are certain keywords you feel are essential to your site’s success, you may want to consider a targeted keyword advertising program.

Google does not sell placement in the results, but Google do have advertising positions available adjacent to them.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Site descriptions in Google results are actually quoted from the web page in question. Google automatically generates different descriptions based on the search terms used to find the site (these “snippets” display the search term(s) in the context of the page on which they appear).

For example, if there is a pet site that deals with cats and dogs, and someone enters a search for the word ‘dog,’ the site description on Google will only talk about ‘dogs.’ If a person searches Google for ‘cats’ and the same site is delivered as a result, the description will be different – it will contain references to the word ‘cat’ as it appears on the website.

Google does not display a standard description. We look for the search terms specified (and in some cases, variations of those terms) and show snippets of where those terms appear. This is a completely automated process and editing is not an option. If you alter the relevant text on the page itself, Google will pick up those changes during our next crawl in a few weeks.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

It is not possible to manually change your listed address at the exact time you move to your new site. There are steps you can take to make sure that your transition goes smoothly, however.

Google listings are based in part on the ability to find your site by following links from other web pages. To preserve your ranking, you will want to inform any sites that currently link to your pages of your change of address.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

If Google continue to list an ‘old’ version of your site (i.e. to list www.my123site.org despite the fact that your site now lives at www.my456site.org ) you need to update the links that are pointing to the sites.

Since Google robots jump from page to page via hyperlinks, someone must still be linking to the defunct page. Once others correct their links, Google can too.

Once your new site is live, you may wish to place a permanent redirect (using a “301″ code in HTTP headers) on your old site to inform visitors and search engines that your site has moved.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info