OK, today was total panic mode when I logged in to my Google Webmaster Tools, here is was, a message from Google saying they were going to remove a website I work on from the index because its been hacked. So I go around the office “We’ve been hacked!”, everyone working on this now…

Until someone pointed out to me the date, the message was dated August 17…. Come on Google, why on earth would you put an old message in my Webmaster account as unread? If I add a new domain to my account today I do not expect an old message thats already been dealt with ages ago as unread in my inbox..

Removal from Google’s Index

August 17, 2009

Dear site owner or webmaster of xxxxxx.xx.xx,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en. This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.

The following is some example hidden text we found at http://www.xxxxx.xx.xx/:

crack music software downloads . free software cheap fax free ware software download fallsview casino hotel niagara falls cananda Online Casino gulfstream casino hollywood gun lake casino updated information hammond indiana casino hampton beach fantacy springs casino entertainment barcode software download download free tax software 20 . coolbits software downloads free software for mp3 files downloading Online Software Store – Buy Cheap Software Downloads free quilting software download small b

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from xxxxxx.xx.xx are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.

We would prefer to keep your pages in Google’s index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-been-hacked-now-what.html. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration.

Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

I’ve passed the Google Advertising Professional Exam! The test is $50 and has about 110 questions, nothing to drastic. Some questions are a bit tricky as they are so simple they confuse you, just go with your gut instinct.

Why are custom Google Analytics settings defined in the client-side code?

I would think the most obvious place for these settings would be through the Google Analytics admin interface or an XML file that only needed to be downloaded once, not upon every page visit.

Would love to know more about the thinking behind this.

I passed my Google Analytics Qualification today and am now Google Analytics Qualified (yeah, if only it would make me more money~!).

You can take the certification at https://www.starttest.com/8.0.0.0/starttest.aspx?cmd=home

Why does Google Analytics not track a browser with JavaScript disabled? Surely a simple 1px transparent image would do the trick where JavaScript can’t?

Our telephone services are outsourced and we just got a message saying we need to return a call to Google Australia! I found it very hard to believe that Google Australia was actually on the phone, so I did some research on the phone number (1800732724 or 1800 732 724), it turns out that the phone number belongs to www.yodelaustralia.com.au

I don’t often write about things that are not directly related to something positive, but I find it a very bad business practice that they’ve employed, and I have also seen other people complain about yodel calling themselves Google Australia.

Seeing that it’s almost impossible to contact Google themselves to lodge a complaint, I am ousting my concerns via this blog and hopefully the next person researching the telephone number will end up at this blog entry.

We were in panic mode for the last two weeks, as we basically dropped completely from Googles search results. This was after doing some tweaking of the site for SEO.

But we’re back again, and the results are better than before. Again, great SEO work from Pacific Fox.

We are ranking number 19 in Google for the phrase “business directory“, up from number 45, and number 2 in Yahoo for the phrase “business directory“. 

Number 16 in Google for the phrase “australian business directory“, up from number 28, and number 2 in Yahoo for the phrase “australian business directory“.

Number 38 in Google for the phrase “search engine“, up from number 41, and number 12 in Yahoo for the phrase “search engine“.

Number 18 in Google for the phrase “australian search engine“, up from number 33, and number 1 in Yahoo for the phrase “australian search engine“.

See previous results

A couple of other great results are those for our sites dedicated to BBX and Bartercard members. We’re ranking number 1 in Google for the phrase “bbx businesses” and number 1 in Google for the phrase “bartercard businesses” and other terms like “find bartercard products”, “find bbx products” and ”find bbx services”.

For the term “product search engine” we rank number 2, funny enough for the term “service search engine” were only number 20. 

What does this tell you? Be patient with Google and don’t panic (as if)! And most importantly, don’t shout at the SEO guy when results appear bad for a few weeks, it takes time…

Why would anyone want to pay to be in a Business Directory when Google is free?

This is a question we get asked often. Our response is simple:

• there is no control on what is indexed in Google, your page might not be indexed
• there is no control over what information from the page is shown in the search results
• there is no control on what keywords you are found on
• there is no control over how many pages are indexed in Google
• if you are indexed, you are fighting for first place with the rest of your industry, and maybe even the rest of Australia or worse yet, the rest of the world
• if you’re a small or start-up business, you’ll be disadvantaged because your results in Google also depend on things like how many websites link to yours
• how many times have you clicked on Google results and found they’re not relevant to your local search?

We create the pages so that Google can be used as an additional entry into the business listings. Not only can potential buyers find your listings on clickfind, but also in Google and other search engines. Have a look at our marketing diagram to see how Google comes into play

Are you looking for Google Base Australia? Look no further! It doesn’t exist yet.

So, what do you do with your products and services in the meantime, where do you upload your products and services to while waiting on Google Base to come to Australia?

There is an all Aussie alternative called clickfind™ (www.clickfind.com.au), it allows you to upload up to 500 products and/or services with your business listing.

The good thing is, when Google Base does open up in Australia, we’ll be ready to upload your products and services for you, directly from your clickfind control panel with the push of a button.

Google only lists your products and services for up to 30 days, we’ll make it easy and allow you to re list them automatically from your control panel. By the way, clickfind itself does not put a time limit on the listings, other than those imposed by your subscription, as long as you have a subscription, your listings will be displayed.

clickfind™ has a web interface to upload individual items to the search engine, but when there is enough demand we will make available an API that will allow developers to upload directly to clickfind™. api-request@clickfind.com.au let us know!

Want to know how to easily create a Google sitemap without having to use any other external tools?

It’s easypeasy if you use MS SQL and ColdFusion!

Let’s assume you have a database full of products (11,000 or more) and you need to generate a sitemap so google knows what to index. You wouldn’t want to do that by hand! 

The SQL is very simple

DECLARE @year CHAR( 4 ), @month VARCHAR( 2 ), @day VARCHAR( 2 ), @lastModified CHAR( 10 )SET @year = CONVERT( CHAR( 4 ), YEAR( GETDATE() ) )
SET @month = CONVERT( VARCHAR, MONTH( GETDATE() ) )
SET @day = CONVERT( VARCHAR, DAY( GETDATE() ) )
SET @lastModified = @year + ‘-’ + REPLICATE( ‘0′, 2 - LEN( @month ) ) + @month + ‘-’ + REPLICATE( ‘0′, 2 - LEN( @day ) ) + @day

SELECT 1 AS tag
, NULL AS parent
, NULL AS [url!1]
, ‘http://www.clickfind.com.au/product/listing.cfm?productIdentity=’ + CAST( identity AS VARCHAR( 10 ) ) AS [url!1!loc!element]
, @lastModified AS [url!1!lastmod!element]
, ‘monthly’ AS [url!1!changefreq!element]
, 1 AS [url!1!priority!element]
FROM product
FOR XML EXPLICITHow easy is that? Just transfer it to ColdFusion, wrap the
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84“></urlset> tag around it, safe it as a file with cffile.

Obviously you need change the date last modified variable and base that on the change frequently of each individual product.

You’re more than welcome to copy the code and use it, just be courteous and reference back to this article

Sponsored by www.clickfind.com.au

Google Webmaster Tools is one of the things you can’t do without if you run a website. It’s an excellent tool for webmasters who do not have any other access to their log file and check for 404 or other errors.

It also allows you to see how Google crawls and indexes your site, learn about problems Google is having accessing your site, allows you to remove pages from Google.

And most importantly it allows you to see what search queries were performed to get to your site from Google.

Here at clickfind we also make use of the Google Sitemap and keep it up-to-date every week. Check out the Google Webmaster Tools for yourself.

We’ve created a ColdFusion CFC that interacts with Google Base. We’ve decided to make the code freely available to all on http://code.google.com/p/google-base-coldfusion-cfc/

We are using the CFC internally to allow our search enigne clients to upload their products and services to Google Base to get more exposure to their listings. (once GoogleBase is in Australia)

Anybody with a clickfind account can go to “my account > products > upload to google base”… Yet another excellent feature we’ve added…

Some of the methods are:
- doAuthenticate
- createItem
- doInsert
- doDelete

The code is still in early stages, but we’ll be adding more methods to it. Feel free to download it and make any comments or improvements, do let us know.

We’ve just written our first Google Gadget. Nothing fancy, needs some major styling, but it’s nice to see it work, and it was so easy to do.

 http://tacofleur.googlepages.com/top50keywords

The gadget displays the top 50 of keywords used in our Australian Search Engine. It might be useful data for developers and marketeers, but I can’t see any other use for it at the moment.

We’ll be thinking about other gadgets we can create that actually have some real use Know of any? Let us know.

We’ve been doing a lot of reading in regards to anything to do with Google. Not because they are competition, because they are not, we’re in a different field and we’d never be able to do what they do.

Anyways, we came across some undocumented functionality that allows you to tap into the Google spell check, and I have to say, it’s pretty amazing, the possibilities are endless.

We wrote some CFCs to call the spell check, unfortunately we’re not allowed to publish it at this stage. It’s undocumented functionality, until further research is done, we need to keep this hush hush. What’s that? Ooh I should not have blogged about it…

May be if we get enough requests we might see what we can do.