Tag Archives: SEO

Why Copying Another Website’s Code May Be Harmful

Why Copying Another Website’s Code May Be Harmful

We all have a favorite website and a favorite website design. We are impressed by some websites and also detest many. We try and incorporate what we have seen and felt about other websites, into our own web design, sometimes copying large chunks of the other websites. While this may achieve a short term goal of having a website which is pleasing, it may not be a very good idea in the long term. This article explains why copying the code of another website may be harmful for your website in the long run.

Security Flaws

When you mindlessly copy code from another website, you also copy over the flaws and vulnerabilities associated with it. This means that you may be exposing your website to several threats and exploits, which you may be blissfully unaware of. 90% of website developers use template based code or reused code snippets for page elements like menus, slideshows, banners and even animation. There is never any improvements or modification made to the code and they just adapt it to suit the needs of the client. Little do they realise that if and when a security flaw is discovered in that code snippet, their client will also be affected. Once a website is made, very little care is given to updating the code or replacing old technology with new, thereby offering little hope for security. Once of our client’s website was defaced more than 3 times in one month, because the developers kept restoring the old site which contained an inherent vulnerability in its menu system. Despite repeated warnings and inconvenience, they were completely unaware about how to solve the issue and correct the menu.

Efficiency

Large companies very often have carefully planned websites, proportionate to the web hosting resources that they possess. This means that their systems are capable of handling heavy animation, large data processing and truckloads of visitor traffic. Simply copy pasting their code onto your website can drastically reduce the efficiency of your website, causing it to repel visitors rather than attract them. A lesson can be learnt by an upcoming online retail shop, which tried to introduce features similar to Amazon, on their own website. Little did they realize that Amazon had monster servers with tons of RAM and Processing Power, which their Shared Hosting was no match for. Their site started ranking lower and served up pages slower, due to the great disparity in what they wanted the website to do and the resources given to the website.

Copyright Infringement

Copying source code of a website is a Copyright violation. Large companies sue their competitors for copying their source code, thereby claiming damages worth millions of dollars. Although in developing countries like India, China and Brazil copying of source code is rampant, enforcement is weak. Even then, in all these countries, copyright infringement is a criminal offence and the punishment can be very severe. In India, the police can search and seize computers and devices used to copy the website code, without a warrant from a magistrate. This has greatly helped reduce copyright violations as far as software source code and websites is concerned.

SEO

Although there is no concrete indication to show that if your website has copied source code then search engines will penalize you, there is a large probability that your website will not do as well as the site from which you have copied. If you copy text from a website and use it on your own site, search engines are sure to give you a lower ranking. However, as mentioned earlier, many large websites which are our role models, have given great thought before designing their website in a particular way. Their website has been specifically designed for their website, their business, their brand, their target perception and their environment. It is exactly like a tailored outfit, which has been crafted as per the specific measurements of the customer. It just wont fit as well on anyone else.

Why Website Builders Bundled With Hosting May Not Be A Good Idea

Why Website Builders Bundled With Hosting May Not Be A Good Idea

Why Website Builders Bundled With Hosting May Not Be A Good Idea

Many web hosting companies around the world are offering free website builders or website template editors bundled with their web hosting plans. Some companies offer 100 templates while others offer thousands. For a new website owner, it may sound like a good idea to cut designing costs and take a bundled template system. But in the long term, the website builders may actually be doing harm to your online presence. This article deals with why the free website builders or website template editors could be harmful for your website and online presence.

Dependence

The main aim of the website builder services is to make you dependent on their service so that you are lured into buying a paid plan. Once you have setup your website and put in your information into their system it can become pretty difficult to migrate out of it or customize it to suit your needs. This dependence is exactly why these businesses are able to get renewals of the account. If you don’t renew the bundle, you end up losing everything. If you decide to split the bundle and buy hosting from another place, they will not allow you to use their template system. An article on TheSiteWizard website rightly says:

“Building your website using a site builder only seems easy on the surface, since it provides the illusion you don’t need to dream up the visual appearance of your website. You can simply use their provided templates.”

The article goes on to clarify: “Will you be able to move to another web host simply by transferring all the files to the other host? If you find that the terms of use of those templates do not allow this, you should not even consider using the site builder. Never allow your site to be locked into any web host. If the hosting company deteriorates, or unreasonably increases their rates, or even goes out of business, your website and your business will be held hostage.”

Limited Templates and Editing Options

The template editor, image, designs and layout are all limited to whatever the service offers. This means that however incorrect or irrelevant the elements in the template may be, you have no other choice, but to use them. Even addons for backups, colour schemes, customized coding, inserting external code and modifying the source will be restricted. Somewebsite builders also offer free code templates like for ad banners, chat scripts and even contact forms. However, these code snippets may not allow the customization that you want. For example, if you want to add a Captch Image verification, the form may not allow you to do so. Similarly if you want to log the IP address of the form sender for security purposes it may not be very suitable.

Impact on SEO

Many website builders have inherently haphazard coding with deprecated code. This means that the software contains obsolete code which is no longer used as a modern standard. The obsolete parts have been replaced by more efficient and optimum code to execute the same functions or perform the same actions, but your editor framework does not contain these improvements. Some services also prevent external apps and software from accessing the website code. This means that you are dependent on the internal addons and plugins which the vendor provides. These maybe buggy, obsolete or even vulnerable, but if you want that functionality in your website you have to use them.

Advertising Banners and Popups

Some website builders come free, but with some conditions. This means that if you use the site builder to make your design, you are consenting to allow popup ads or banner ads on your website. Every 3rd or 4th website visitor will be greeted with a popup advertisement inserted by the site builder and only if he closes the popup will he be able to access your website. Some website editor services go a step further and first redirect random visitors to an affiliates websites and then allow the visitor an option to go back to your site. This can be very damaging for your website, especially due to the fact that all your hard earned traffic is being diverted for the benefit of someone else. A friend of ours was suspicious that randomly on his website a banner ad would appear and then disappear after a while. Since he was not very tech savvy, he requested us to investigate. We noticed a suspicious script running on his home page, which had been placed there by the free website builder software that his web host had given him. Even upon removal, it returned. The problem stopped when he switched to a different web host.

Why Your Website Should Be Mobile-Friendly

Why Your Website Should Be Mobile-Friendly

Why Your Website Should Be Mobile-Friendly

With the improvement of smart phone technology, websites are being constantly accessed from mobile browsers and mobile devices. This means that the conventional design techniques may need to be tweaked to suit different screen sizes and be cross compatible with the plethora of devices in the market. With multiple companies launching newer models every day, the competition for how your website will be viewed is also hotting up. The experience of a mobile user is so significant in making or breaking a sale that now website’s are forced to change the way they looked or behaved based on what the users want. This article explains why you should make your website responsive or mobile friendly if you haven’t already started.

Higher Ranking in Google Search

Starting April 2015, Google will start giving priority to websites which have a mobile-friendly version of their site. Google has already started providing tags to search results which indicate which web page is mobile friendly i.e. can be easily viewed on a web page. As per Google’s Webmaster Blog:

“Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”

They go on to say: “When it comes to search on mobile devices, users should get the most relevant and timely results, no matter if the information lives on mobile-friendly web pages or apps. As more people use mobile devices to access the internet, our algorithms have to adapt to these usage patterns. In the past, we’ve made updates to ensure a site is configured properly and viewable on modern devices. We’ve made it easier for users to find mobile-friendly web pages and we’ve introduced App Indexing to surface useful content from apps.”

Other search engines are also most likely to follow suit and give preference to mobile friendliness in a website. Yahoo and Bing, like Google also give priority to responsive websites and openly indicate that.

Multiple Screen Sizes

The main aim for any website should be to serve up what the user wants and how the user wants. With the drastic shift in internet usage to mobile devices, websites also need to adapt to this shift in pattern. This is called Responsive Design. Responsive Design is used to reduce data usage on mobile connections by stripping off unimportant parts of the website and only focusing on the important aspects. Modern web design must make adjustments for different types of screens including mobile phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, projectors and even window displays. Every screen needs to have the unique features based on their usage and based on their functionality.

W3CSchools says that “RWD stands for Responsive Web Design; RWD can deliver web pages in variable sizes; RWD is a must for tablets and mobile devices.”

Focus on important features

Larger buttons, larger font size and a design optimized for a mobile screen are ideal in giving the best website experience to a mobile user. Other factors which are given priority is element spacing, especially for things like links, popups, buttons and even drop down lists. The whole point of this is to ensure that the end user focuses on exactly what they want and not the flowery features of your website which are presented to desktop users.

Google Hates These Things You Do…

There are a couple of things that Search Engines look at when ranking your website in search results, for various keywords. These include original content, number of links pointing from other website’s to yours, your overall online presence, the quantity of relevant content on your pages. People have tried long and hard to manipulate Google’s search algorithm by trial and error of various methods. The bottom line being that you just can’t fool Google. Although there maybe more than 2000 factors which determine how your site is ranked, there is a sure-shot list

Google Hates These Things You Do...

Google Hates These Things You Do…

of points which Google hates and will punish you if you do those things. This article aims to highlight some key points which you should definitely avoid if you want to be in Google’s good books.

Plagiarized Content

Google hates copy cats. The whole purpose of Google is defeated if it is not able to serve up fresh, genuine and relevant content for a user’s search query. When a person look for something using Google, he is dependent on Google to provide the most accurate websites which will provide the information sought. If Google does not catch the attention of the searcher, he will look for the information elsewhere and Google would have lost out on potential ad revenue in the process. Google says:

“Purely scraped content, even from high-quality sources, may not provide any added value to your users without additional useful services or content provided by your site; it may also constitute copyright infringement in some cases. It’s worthwhile to take the time to create original content that sets your site apart. This will keep your visitors coming back and will provide more useful results for users searching on Google.”

Dummy Websites

To get back links from external websites, webmasters buy many domain names and put up rudimentary content with a link back to the parent website which they want to boost in search results. Google calls these doorway pages and penalizes doorway sites themselves and also websites using doorway pages. Since these websites or pages are “typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase” they offer no value added benefit to Google users.

“Google frowns on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the one they selected, and that provide content solely for the benefit of search engines. Google may take action on doorway sites and other sites making use of these deceptive practices, including removing these sites from Google’s index.”

People also use such dummy websites to automatically redirect visitors to the real website and mislead the user about where they are being taken. The dummy website will show up on Google Search Results, but the user is ultimately taken to the real website which has nothing to do with the search results.

Paid Links

Paid Links are basically links which are not earned due to quality, but are instead bought from websites which are willing to make a quick buck. This dilutes the quality of content for the search results and leads to irrelevant or misleading information. Google classifies buying or selling links that pass PageRank, excessive link exchanges, large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links and even using automated programs or services to create links to your site as Paid Links. These are all liable for being penalized and even removed from Google’s Search system.

Comment Spamming

Google’s Webmaster Support says that “If you’ve ever received a comment that looked like an advertisement or a random link to an unrelated site, then you’ve encountered comment spam.” Comment Spam is visible on many blogs, which have popular content. Spammers post a comment or remark about the article and surreptitiously insert a link with their own brand or promotion in it. Comments are usually in the form of random praise about the article or some obscure sentence related to the article content and sometimes is outright junk text. All these qualify for the penalty by Google.

Can You Pay To Become Popular On The Internet?

Can You Pay To Become Popular On The Internet?

Can You Pay To Become Popular On The Internet?

Every new website owner wants to know how he can rank high in Google so that his website sale’s take off and he can make a quick buck through his online portal. The truth is that you need to invest pots of time and money to make your website successful. You need to spend a lot of resources in understanding what your clients want and how you can cater to their needs. There is no shortcut to becoming famous or popular, although there are many companies which claim to be able to boost your online reputation. The unethical means that they use are often caught and your site maybe heavily penalized for adopting such means. This article explains why paying to become popular online is a myth and has no long term positive effect.

You Can’t Fool Google

We all want to come up in Google’s ranking for the keywords that represent our products and services. We are all willing to put in a large amount of time and money in coming up in the top 10 in Google. There are also a lot of websites which claim to do Search Engine Optimization and can guarantee tons of traffic to your website. These are all short-lived services, which will be detected by search engines and will be blocked. Google uses an unknown number of factors in determining where and why your website should be ranked in the search results. Some people estimate over 2000 factors which affect your search engine ranking for a particular keyword. Google’s algorithm to rank pages is a secret and is not publicly known. While many people claim to know it, they don’t seem to be very successful at manipulating it.

Penalty For Paid Links

All Search Engines penalize site’s with inbound paid links which try to show legitimate traffic. Google’s website says:

“Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site…Additionally, creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines.”

As far as the penalty is concerned, Google clarifies that:

“The consequences for a linkselling site start with losing trust in Google’s search results, as well as reduction of the site’s visible PageRank in the Google Toolbar. The consequences can also include lower rankings for that site in Google’s search results. If you receive a warning for selling links that pass PageRank in Google’s Webmaster Tools, you’ll see a notification message to look for “possibly artificial or unnatural links on your site pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank.” That’s an indication that your site has lost trust in Google’s index.”

Click Farms Can Spoil Your Reputation

Apart from the penalties that your site will be subject to by the Search Engines, Click Farms which bring in paid clicks or “likes” or “followers” to your website or social media pages can be harmful to your reputation. The fake profile pictures, abusive comments and suspicious activity can be quite a repelling force for your genuine clients and prospects. Click farms pay people to just keep clicking on links, pages and ads without application of mind. A YouTube Channel - Veritasium has also highlighted how these Click Farms can show false statistics of popularity and mislead webmasters.

Quick Fame Can Be Dangerous

Getting legitimate traffic to your website by employing unethical means may get you listed higher in search rankings in the short term, but it can also lead to your site coming up on the radar of the wrong elements. When SEO firms post your website URL on click farms and shady blogs, it can attract a lot of negative attention and cause malicious attacks to be targeted to your website.

Working hard and working the right way is the only way to get your website to rank higher. Tricks and manipulations may work temporarily but not in the long term.

Easy Ways Of Speeding Up Your Website Instantly

Many clients wonder why their website is slow and why it gets slower every couple of months. We often assist clients in determining issues with their website and sometimes even need to convince them that it is not related to their hosting service. It’s like having a great car but a lousy chauffeur. No matter how good the car maybe and how fast it could go, if the chauffeur is not competent, the high-end car is worthless. In the same way, no matter how fast your hosting server is, if you do not have a well coded and well designed website, your website is bound to open with a crawl. This article helps draw the attention of website owners to the various things that can be done to speed up their website to make it more SEO friendly.

Clean Code

The most important thing you need to do to improve your website’s load time is the clean and simple programming. There are some programmers who can obtain special effects on a page with 50 lines of code. There are better programmers who can achieve the same thing in 20 lines of code. This is dependent on the skills and experience of the programmer and the logical thought process. Even Search Engines want to serve up clean and quick content to their website visitors. They don’t want to inflict upon their visitors a slow and cluttered website. The short solution is to Keep It Simple.

Onsite resources

When linking to images or other media that we like from an external website, we often prefer to load the image or music or video by embedding the other persons link in our own page. This is also known as hot-linking. Earlier, some webmasters used to do this to save on their own websites bandwidth usage by causing the image to load from another person’s website and using up their bandwidth.

CDN and Content Caching

A CDN is a content distribution network, which distributes a mirror copy of your website across their global network of servers. When a visitor requests a page from your website, instead of contacting your web hosting server, it contacts the server closest to the visitor, which has a mirror copy of the website. This greatly reduces the time taken to access the page and serves up the content at lightning speed. From time to time, the cache of your website, which is mirrored on the CDN servers is updated. This means that any changes that you make on your website will not be updated across the CDN instantly and your visitors will see a delay in the fresh content. However, you may choose to cache only the static parts of your website which do not change very often, but the dynamic parts of the website can be called from your web hosting server directly.

You can also use page caching techniques to make your pages load faster by creating a temporary storage of the content on the users computer. This may cause a delay in displaying fresh content, but you can tweak the cache to only store the static pages to serve up faster.

Minimize Plugins and Frills

A major cause of your website slowing down is 3rd party plugins. We all want to connect with our audience on social media, but you should avoid using third party plugins for social networking. Some of these plugins pull statistics and display information from the plugin creator’s website, which may lead your website to become slow. While your page loads, the information is constantly requested from the plugin makers website, which causes your page to remain waiting till the data is transferred from there. A slow plugin may cause your visitors to see the page loading indication in their browser and may also cause other parts of your page or other plugins to remain in the queue. This can drastically reduce the speed of your website pages. To avoid this situation, it is best to remove slow plugins and constantly monitor the page load speed accordingly.

Compression

Easy Ways Of Speeding Up Your Website Instantly

Some compression tools which are inbuilt on your web server allow you to compress each request before sending it to your visitor’s computer. When a visitor requests a webpage from your website, the server will zip up the page content and send the compressed information to the users browser. The visitors browser will then decompress the data and unzip the file for display. This reduces the size of the data being transferred, leading to a reduction in speed and also a reduction in data transfer usage. Compression takes up a bit of processing power on the visitor’s machine and on the server, but the CPU usage is so negligible that it is worth the resources to increase the speed of the website loading.

What An SEO Specialist Does To Improve Your Website Ranking

What An SEO Specialist Does To Improve Your Website Ranking

We all want our website to be ranked higher in Search Engines, especially in Google. We all want to know the secret to success and how to be at Rank 1. The only solution to this is by an honest effort to improve your site content and serve up genuine quality of service through your website. If you don’t know how to do this or get your rank high, you may end up consulting an SEO expert or Search Engine Optimization Professional. The real SEO experts don’t do any magic or fakery. They just make your web content streamlined and disciplined. This article explains what work you should expect from an SEO professional to boost your website rankings. Do note that there is no short-cut or guarantee to SEO. It is pure simplicity and discipline that will give you results. If anyone guarantees results or ensures rank 1 is probably going to cheat you.

On-page optimization

Optimizing your website must begin at home. In this case it must begin on your web pages. The quantity and quality of content that you have put up on your website must be of a high standard. Search Engines don’t want to serve up nonsense content which is irrelevant to the visitors. An optimizer will suggest qualitative and quantitative changes for your web page text and images and may also recommend some samples based on his research. Optimizing your HTML code to serve up clean and error free code is another task that the SEO will handle. This ensures that the visitor has a trouble free and smooth experience so that his browser and your website can talk the same language with ease. They will usually use online validation tools to determine how well written your HTML is. Badly written code or unoptimized apps can lead to major issues in future, which will cause your website to be shunned by Search Engines.

Online Reputation

Your business or service’s online reputation is a key in the success of your website. Using different methods, the SEO experts can highlight the features of your business which are well recognized and carry goodwill in the market. Adverse content and false information about your business can be subtly supressed or kept hidden online to prevent it from affecting your online business. Celebrities and Big Brands are very conscious of their online image and must protect their image from adverse and false portrayal online. Using online reviews, promoted articles, news feeds and accreditation services, SEO can help build up trust in the minds of potential customers.

Link Building

The worth of a website can be determined by how many other reputed websites are pointing to it. The more number of links from reputed website will result in higher search engine rankings. This linking ensures that you are well known and literally “well connected” online. The links to your website must be relevant and must not be paid links with little qualitative value. SEO experts can work out ways to improve the links you are getting on your website in interesting ways. Remember, you cannot fool search engines by buying links or by spamming other websites or forums with your own links.

Social Media Presence

With the popularity of Social Networking websites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+, businesses are investing more and more in promoting their image online. Many businesses employ people just to make entries in their Twitter and Facebook Accounts and to respond to customers through these social media channels. Although it may seem silly, but even customers are interacting with their favorite brands more on social media and less in real life. This puts a lot of pressure on the company to ensure quality of service and prompt response on social media websites in addition to having the same content on their website.