google

How to check if your site is infected with Malware

Is your site infected with Malware?

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

You can also scan your website for free at Sucuri.net here:

http://sucuri.net/

Clearing your PC of Malware

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.

Securing your WordPress application

There are many ways to protect your site from hackers and malware, see here for WordPress:

How to secure your WordPress file and directory structure

How to secure WordPress in 7 easy steps


Top 5 Tips since Google Panda Update

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.

My web pages used to be listed in Google and now they are not

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

Google does not index all of my pages. Why?

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