Webmaster Level: Advanced A few weeks ago, we introduced a new way of verifying site ownership , making it easy to share verified ownership of a site with another person. This week, we bring you another new way to verify. Verification by DNS record allows you to become a verified owner of an entire domain (and all of the sites within that domain) at once. It also provides an alternative way to verify for folks who struggle with the existing HTML file or meta tag methods. I like to explain things by walking through an example, so let’s try using the new verification method right now. For the sake of this example, we’ll say I own the domain example.com . I have several websites under example.com , including http://www.example.com/ , http://blog.example.com/ and http://beta.example.com/ . I could individually verify ownership of each of those sites using the meta tag or HTML file method. But that means I’d need to go through the verification process three times, and if I wanted to add http://customers.example.com/ , I’d need to do it a fourth time. DNS record verification gives me a better way! First I’ll add example.com to my account, either in Webmaster Tools or directly on the Verification Home page . On the verification page, I select the “Add a DNS record” verification method, and follow the instructions to add the specified TXT record to my domain’s DNS configuration. When I click “Verify,” Google will check for the TXT record, and if it’s present, I’ll be a verified owner of example.com and any associated websites and subdomains. Now I can use any of those sites in Webmaster Tools and other verification-enabled Google products without having to verify ownership of them individually. If you try DNS record verification and it doesn’t work right away, don’t despair! Sometimes DNS records take a while to make their way across the Internet, so Google may not see them immediately. Make sure you’ve added the record exactly as it’s shown on the verification page. We’ll periodically check, and when we find the record we’ll make you a verified owner without any further action from you. DNS record verification isn’t for everyone—if you don’t understand DNS configuration, we recommend you continue to use the HTML file and meta tag methods. But for advanced users, this is a powerful new option for verifying ownership of your sites. As always, please visit the Webmaster Help Forum if you have any questions. Posted by Sean Harding, Software Engineer

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DNS Verification FTW

by Sage Lewis ConversionConference.com is a very cool new conference being put on by Tim Ash. It’s May 4 & 5 2010 in San Jose. If you are looking to get the most out of your traffic you need to seriously consider this conference. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Tim Ash’s Upcoming Conversion Conference

The principle behind the advertising products we build at Google is simple: ads are information . But the type of information that ads provide is getting more varied and inventive all the time, and as a result ads are getting more interesting, social and useful. As advertising evolves, we want to build the tools that make it possible for marketers to connect with customers in meaningful, creative ways. We’ve found that the best way to do that is to focus on the user, test new approaches regularly and listen closely to the feedback of the advertisers using our products. To work closely with advertisers on what comes next, today we’ve launched Google Ad Innovations , where we’ll show you some of our latest ideas around advertising technologies and get your feedback. One of the new features we’re showcasing is a set of AdWords reports, launched last week, called Search Funnels . These reports can help an advertiser understand whether there are keywords in her account that are helping to drive sales at a later date. At Google Ad Innovations, you can read more about this feature , watch a video walking you through how it works and send us your ideas on how to improve it. If you’re interested in the future of advertising with Google, pay Ad Innovations a visit — we’ll regularly add tools and features to the site, and we hope you’ll check them out! Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Vice President, Product Management

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Introducing Google Ad Innovations

The principle behind the advertising products we build at Google is simple: ads are information . But the type of information that ads provide is getting more varied and inventive all the time, and as a result ads are getting more interesting, social and useful. As advertising evolves, we want to build the tools that make it possible for marketers to connect with customers in meaningful, creative ways. We’ve found that the best way to do that is to focus on the user, test new approaches regularly and listen closely to the feedback of the advertisers using our products. To work closely with advertisers on what comes next, today we’ve launched Google Ad Innovations , where we’ll show you some of our latest ideas around advertising technologies and get your feedback. One of the new features we’re showcasing is a set of AdWords reports, launched last week, called Search Funnels . These reports can help an advertiser understand whether there are keywords in her account that are helping to drive sales at a later date. At Google Ad Innovations, you can read more about this feature , watch a video walking you through how it works and send us your ideas on how to improve it. If you’re interested in the future of advertising with Google, pay Ad Innovations a visit — we’ll regularly add tools and features to the site, and we hope you’ll check them out! Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Vice President, Product Management

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Introducing Google Ad Innovations

by Jennifer Laycock If you’re looking to further your education in online marketing or know of a non-profit that could use an educational boost of their own, you’re going to be interested in hearing about MarketMotive’s spring scholarship contest. The team at MarketMotive is generously allowing each faculty member to award a scholarship to one of their readers. The contest is simple…just write up a brief social media marketing plan for your favorite non-profit and you’ll have a chance to earn a free scholarship (valued at $3500) for the Master Certification class of your choice in MarketMotive’s spring quarter. You can choose to publish the proposal on your site and e-mail me the link, or you can e-mail it directly to me for review. I’ll pick my three favorites and will post them here on Search Engine Guide next week. My readers will vote on their favorite and the winner will be awarded the scholarship. If you’re already a social media whiz, that’s fantastic…use the scholarship to sign up for one of our other courses. (Or, give it away to someone else!) You can choose from quite a few different options: Paid Search Advertising with David Szetela Internet Marketing Fundamentals with Matt Bailey Web Analytics with Avinash Kaushik and John Marshall Online PR with Greg Jarbo e Social Media Marketing with Jennifer Laycock Conversion Optimization with Bryan Eisenberg Search Engine Optimization with Todd Malicoat Not familiar with MarketMotive? That’s ok… check out the program and watch a brief video explaining how it all works. Rules: Submitting a plan means contestants agree that their plan may be be posted (with attribution) and/or sent to the charity. Plans may be edited before being posted at blog owner’s discretion. Winning plan (s)will be selected at the discretion of MarketMotive faculty chairs . All entries must be submitted before 12:01 am EST on April 4th, 2010, and the finalists will be announced the week of April 5th. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Win a $3500 Online Marketing Scholarship from MarketMotive (and Help a Non-Profit to Boot)

by Jennifer Laycock If you’re looking to further your education in online marketing or know of a non-profit that could use an educational boost of their own, you’re going to be interested in hearing about MarketMotive’s spring scholarship contest. The team at MarketMotive is generously allowing each faculty member to award a scholarship to one of their readers. The contest is simple…just write up a brief social media marketing plan for your favorite non-profit and you’ll have a chance to earn a free scholarship (valued at $3500) for the Master Certification class of your choice in MarketMotive’s spring quarter. You can choose to publish the proposal on your site and e-mail me the link, or you can e-mail it directly to me for review. I’ll pick my three favorites and will post them here on Search Engine Guide next week. My readers will vote on their favorite and the winner will be awarded the scholarship. If you’re already a social media whiz, that’s fantastic…use the scholarship to sign up for one of our other courses. (Or, give it away to someone else!) You can choose from quite a few different options: Paid Search Advertising with David Szetela Internet Marketing Fundamentals with Matt Bailey Web Analytics with Avinash Kaushik and John Marshall Online PR with Greg Jarbo e Social Media Marketing with Jennifer Laycock Conversion Optimization with Bryan Eisenberg Search Engine Optimization with Todd Malicoat Not familiar with MarketMotive? That’s ok… check out the program and watch a brief video explaining how it all works. Rules: Submitting a plan means contestants agree that their plan may be be posted (with attribution) and/or sent to the charity. Plans may be edited before being posted at blog owner’s discretion. Winning plan (s)will be selected at the discretion of MarketMotive faculty chairs . All entries must be submitted before 12:01 am EST on April 4th, 2010, and the finalists will be announced the week of April 5th. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Win a $3500 Online Marketing Scholarship from MarketMotive (and Help a Non-Profit to Boot)

There’s a lot of content on the Internet these days . At some point, something may turn up online that you would rather not have out there—anything from an inflammatory blog post you regret publishing, to confidential data that accidentally got exposed. In most cases, deleting or restricting access to this content will cause it to naturally drop out of search results after a while. However, if you urgently need to remove unwanted content that has gotten indexed by Google and you can’t wait for it to naturally disappear, you can use our URL removal tool to expedite the removal of content from our search results as long as it meets certain criteria (which we’ll discuss below). We’ve got a series of blog posts lined up for you explaining how to successfully remove various types of content, and common mistakes to avoid. In this first post, I’m going to cover a few basic scenarios: removing a single URL, removing an entire directory or site, and reincluding removed content. I also strongly recommend our previous post on managing what information is available about you online . Removing a single URL In general, in order for your removal requests to be successful, the owner of the URL(s) in question—whether that’s you, or someone else—must have indicated that it’s okay to remove that content. For an individual URL, this can be indicated in any of three ways: block the page from crawling via a robots.txt file block the page from indexing via a noindex meta tag indicate that the page no longer exists by returning a 404 or 410 status code Before submitting a removal request, you can check whether the URL is correctly blocked: robots.txt: You can check whether the URL is correctly disallowed using either the Fetch as Googlebot or Test robots.txt features in Webmaster Tools. noindex meta tag: You can use Fetch as Googlebot to make sure the meta tag appears somewhere between the and tags. If you want to check a page you can’t verify in Webmaster Tools, you can open the URL in a browser, go to View > Page source , and make sure you see the meta tag between the and tags. 404 / 410 status code: You can use Fetch as Googlebot, or tools like Live HTTP Headers or web-sniffer.net to verify whether the URL is actually returning the correct code. Sometimes “deleted” pages may say “404″ or “Not found” on the page, but actually return a 200 status code in the page header; so it’s good to use a proper header-checking tool to double-check. If unwanted content has been removed from a page but the page hasn’t been blocked in any of the above ways, you will not be able to completely remove that URL from our search results. This is most common when you don’t own the site that’s hosting that content. We’ll cover what to do in this situation in a subsequent post. If a URL meets one of the above criteria, you can remove it by going to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals , entering the URL that you want to remove, and selecting the “Webmaster has already blocked the page” option. Note that you should enter the URL where the content was hosted, not the URL of the Google search where it’s appearing. For example, enter ��� http://www.example.com/ embarrassing-stuff.html not ��� http://www.google.com/search ?q=embarrassing+stuff This article has more details about making sure you’re entering the proper URL. Remember that if you don’t tell us the exact URL that’s troubling you, we won’t be able to remove the content you had in mind. Removing an entire directory or site In order for a directory or site-wide removal to be successful, the directory or site must be disallowed in the site’s robots.txt file . For example, in order to remove the http://www.example.com/secret/ directory, your robots.txt file would need to include: ���User-agent: * ���Disallow: /secret/ It isn’t enough for the root of the directory to return a 404 status code, because it’s possible for a directory to return a 404 but still serve out files underneath it. Using robots.txt to block a directory (or an entire site) ensures that all the URLs under that directory (or site) are blocked as well. You can test whether a directory has been blocked correctly using either the Fetch as Googlebot or Test robots.txt features in Webmaster Tools. Only verified owners of a site can request removal of an entire site or directory in Webmaster Tools. To request removal of a directory or site, click on the site in question, then go to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL ; click “New removal request;” and select the “directory” or “entire site” option. Reincluding content You can cancel removal requests for any site you own at any time, including those submitted by other people. In order to do so, you must be a verified owner of this site in Webmaster Tools. Once you’ve verified ownership, you can go to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL > Removed URLs (or > Made by others ) and click “Cancel” next to any requests you wish to cancel. Still have questions? Stay tuned for the rest of our series on removing content from Google’s search results. If you can’t wait, much has already been written about URL removals, and troubleshooting individual cases, in our Help Forum . If you still have questions after reading others’ experiences, feel free to ask. Note that, in most cases, it’s hard to give relevant advice about a particular removal without knowing the site or URL in question. We recommend sharing your URL by using a URL shortening service so that the URL you’re concerned about doesn’t get indexed as part of your post; some shortening services will even let you disable the shortcut later on, once your question has been resolved. Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

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URL removal explained, Part I: URLs & directories

Webmaster Level: Intermediate In our recent post on the Google Online Security Blog , we described our system for identifying phishing pages. Of the millions of webpages that our scanners analyze for phishing, we successfully identify 9 out of 10 phishing pages. Our classification system only incorrectly flags a non-phishing site as a phishing site about 1 in 10,000 times, which is significantly better than similar systems. In our experience, these “false positive” sites are usually built to distribute spam or may be involved with other suspicious activity. If you find that your site has been added to our phishing page list (”Reported Web Forgery!”) by mistake, please report the error to us. On the other hand, if your site has been added to our malware list (”This site may harm your computer”), you should follow the instructions here . Our team tries to address all complaints within one day, and we usually respond within a few hours. Unfortunately, sometimes when we try to follow up on your reports, we find that we are just as confused as our automated system. If you run a website, here are some simple guidelines that will allow us to quickly fix any mistakes and help keep your site off our phishing page list in the first place. - Don’t ask for usernames and passwords that do not belong to your site. We consider this behavior phishing by definition, so don’t do it! If you want to provide an add-on service to another site, consider using a public API or OAuth instead. - Avoid displaying logos that are not yours near login fields. Someone surfing the web might mistakenly believe that the logo represents your website, and they might be misled into entering personal information into your site that they intended for the other site. Furthermore, we can’t always be sure that you aren’t doing this intentionally, so we might block your site just to be safe. To prevent misunderstandings, we recommend exercising caution when displaying these logos. - Minimize the number of domains used by your site, especially for logins. Asking for a username and password for Site X looks very suspicious on Site Y. Besides making it harder for us to evaluate your website, you may be inadvertently teaching your visitors to ignore suspicious URLs, making them more vulnerable to actual phishing attempts. If you must have your login page on a different domain from your main site, consider using a transparent proxy to enable users to access this page from your primary domain. If all else fails… - Make it easy to find links to your pages. It is difficult for us (and for your users) to determine who controls an off-domain page in your site if the links to that page from your main site are hard to find. All it takes to clear this problem up is to have each off-domain page link back to an on-domain page which links to it. If you have not done this, and one of your pages ends up on our list by mistake, please mention in your error report how we can find the link from your main site to the wrongly blocked page. However, if you do nothing else… - Don’t send strange links via email or IM. It’s all but impossible for us to verify unusual links that only appeared in your emails or instant messages. Worse, using these kinds of links conditions your users/customers/friends to click on strange links they receive through email or IM, which can put them at risk for other Internet crimes besides phishing. While we hope you consider these recommendations to be common sense, we’ve seen major e-commerce and financial companies break these guidelines from time to time. Following them will not only improve your experience with our anti-phishing systems, but will also help provide your visitors with a better online experience. Written by Colin Whittaker, Anti-Phishing Team

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Will the Real <Your Site Here> Please Stand Up?

The year was 1986. A gallon of gas cost 89 cents, Paul Simon’s Graceland won the Grammy for album of the year, and the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which governs how law enforcement can access electronic data, was signed into law. A lot has changed since 1986. Gas is now measured in dollars and Taylor Swift (born 1989) won album of the year. All the while, technology has moved at record pace. But ECPA has stayed the same. Originally designed to protect us from unwarranted government intrusion while ensuring that law enforcement had the tools necessary to protect public safety, it was written long before most people had heard of email, cell phones or the “cloud” — the term used for programs helping people store personal data like photos and documents online. As a result, ECPA has become outdated. This is why we’re proud to help establish Digital Due Process , a coalition of technology companies, civil rights organizations and academics seeking to update ECPA to provide privacy protections to new and emerging technologies. Specifically, we want to modernize ECPA in four ways: Be tter protect your data stored online : The government must first get a search warrant before obtaining any private communications or documents stored online; Better protect your location privacy : The government must first get a search warrant before it can track the location of your cell phone or other mobile communications device; Better protect against monitoring of when and with whom you communicate : The government must demonstrate to a court that the data it seeks is relevant and material to a criminal investigation before monitoring when and with whom you communicate using email, instant messaging, text messaging, the telephone, etc.; and Better protect against bulk data requests : The government must demonstrate to a court that the information it seeks is needed for a criminal investigation before it can obtain data about an entire class of users. We also created this video to help explain ECPA and why it needs updating: You can read more about our proposal at our coalition website . In the coming months, we’ll meet with lawmakers, law enforcement officials and others to help build support for modernizing the law. 1986 was a good year, but it’s time our laws catch up with how we live our lives today. Posted by Richard Salgado, Senior Counsel, Law Enforcement and Information Security

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Our stand for digital due process

Who is going to pay to tell people that they are good enough and their lives are fine as they are? A fundamental truth of advertising is that advertising the truth usually isn’t very profitable - which is why there is lead generation, affiliate programs, public relations, negative billing options, small print, bogus medical research, and so on… Ever wonder how an SEO professional can charge first world rates to do do third rate, third world work and still get a top rating from a heavily advertised SEO rating website? Edward Lewis has the lowdown on Top SEOs , including TopSEOs complaints . A big part of the problem with the affiliate business model is when people offer fake rankings / ratings and only promote whoever pays them the most. The person/company which can afford to pay the most for leads often can only afford to because there is hidden risk or hidden cost in the service, or because they don’t deliver on their promises. An analogy here is those AAA rated mortgage backed securities where an S&P employee explained, “We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.” The biggest brands don’t pay as much per lead because they don’t have to. They invest in brand and quality of customer service. The best service-based companies don’t need to pay cut-rate ad prices to advertise. The best SEO companies have far more demand for their time than time to pay to hunt for customers. I remember back in 2006 when one of the currently “top rated SEOs” did work for my wife’s website (before she met me). That SEO firm did nothing but outsource overseas irrelevant reciprocal link exchanges and her website *would not rank* for any semi-competitive keywords until *after* the reciprocal links page was removed from her site. After we took down those reciprocal links and built some quality links the site started to rank. We changed the FTP details as well because that guy’s services were not only not worth paying for…the reciprocal links were proved to be damaging, and we didn’t want him to put them back up. And in spite of not doing any services for months (and certainly no services worth paying for), this person wanted ensure they got paid for 12 months of service. And they didn’t want to let the contract end when it was supposed to either. They were all sales all the time. What eventually stopped the credit card charges was when I wrote him via email “If her credit card is charged again we will be doing a reverse charge and a full writeup on the service.” He responded to that with the following: I would watch your comments and threats my friend as you have no idea of what I am capable of or who I am - this is a small industry and if you are trying to be a an up an coming player in it this is not the way to do it by bashing your competition. A simple email professionally stating that you were unhappy with the service would have sufficed and I would have looked into to make sure Giovanna got what she paid for. I have run 2 optimization companies and have been in this business for 12 years now. With my contacts at Google and the other main engines I can get your ebook website banned within 1-2 days if this is how you do business - with threats and slander - keep it up. The funny thing is all I said was that if he tried charging again (past the contract) that we would reverse charges. And yet the sleazeball told me to “watch your comments and threats” and that he could use “contacts at Google and other main engines” to get my website banned. What a jerk. I have always had contempt for blowhards, and for pure hard-sales salesmen who put sales first and are willfully ignorant of their trade and/or who are willing to sell garbage product without any concern for the customer’s welfare. I am grateful that the above mentioned person sucked at what they did & ripped people off back then. If they were not out scamming people and actually provided a useful service then my wife wouldn’t have had a reason to contact me and meet me and marry me. I let it go for over 3 years, but if they are still scamming people then that needs to stop. I figure its only right that I write this post as a fair warning. All good things must come to an end. And so should bad things. Hopefully these clowns quite scamming people. Enough is enough.

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TopSEOs.com - A Review of the Top SEOs Paid Rating Service