System Alert: MALWARE ALERT

Warning
Trojan Adware.W32.Exp.Dwnldr spy-ware detected. This Trojan allows Attackers to access your computer
from remote locations, stealing passwords, Internet banking and personal data. This also prompts
advertising pop-ups.

This sort of warning even in your system is good enough to give you a huge scare. Imagine what this would do to you if Google starts showing the warning to the users that this site has malware. Yes, Google does this. And this happens to more sites daily than you can imagine.

This has happened to me in past too when I had a “certain” shared hosting. All the script files in my website were corrupted with a malware. There was a small code at the bottom of the page which was basically a redirection code. As soon as user opened my site, it got redirected to a “certain” website. This was quite scary to me at first, so I contacted my shared hosting provider about this. Not surprisingly, I got a standard reply that website was hacked due to my insecure way using ftp and its not at all their fault. It took me sometime to get my website working again but then the real problem started, so to speak. Google has marked the website as spammy and showed warning to users to enter at their own risk. This was a one time incident for me but this is surely not uncommon. This has happened to a lot of sites. See screen shot:

Google has a malware database which it keeps on updating based on its own crawl of the websites. Pages which are deemed dangerous are identified and blacklisted. In addition to Google, many browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari and anti virus too use this database to warn the users to keep away from such websites/pages. This is just not about the traffic for a few days but also affects the standing of your website. The onus is upon the site owner to deal with this and clean the site in order to remove these warnings.

So as a webmaster, what should you do? You need to know how to remove your site from google’s malware database and avoid common mistakes that can leave your website (even after being cleaned) blacklisted for a long time.

First you need to figure out what went wrong. To do this you can use google’s safe browsing diagnostic page  http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site={YOURSITE}. Go to the section which says “What is the current listing status for google.com?”. If your site is in google’s blacklist then you would see something like “Your site is currently listed suspicious”.

The second section which you must carefully look upon is “What happened when Google visited this site? “. To interpret this information, you should look at the two dates: “Last time google visited this site on” & “Last time suspicious content was found on this site was on”. If your site is currently blacklisted, these two dates would probably the same.  Look for the sentences like “Malicious software is hosted on x domain(s) including xyz.com, abc.com. x Domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware content”. Scan your website for these domains. After you clean the code, you can request the website for malware review through Google Webmaster tools. In a few hours, google should rescan your site and come back with an approval.

Envigo is offering the following positions in Vasant Kunj, New Delhi

1. Junior SEO

2. Applications Developer (PHP)

3. SEM (PPC) analyst

4. Content writer

You can get more details here and can also apply online. Go for it, we are waiting to hear from you.

In our line of work, we spend a lot of time with Article websites. An article website is a website which accepts articles. It allows users to publish articles by subject. Once an article is submitted, it is reviewed by the website owners before publishing. A published article can then attract comments, and more importantly, attracts visitors. Visitors come through search engine results, in which the article might start to appear. The article website makes money by selling these visitor driven impressions on ad networks, such as Google ads.

A well designed article site therefore acts as a machine in perpetual motion. Articles are submitted by authors, who want to establish themselves or want to gain links. Every article can have a few links, which are inserted by the article owner. It is quite common for search engine optimisers to submit articles to gain these links.

An article website is a barter marketplace – Authors submit articles to gain recognition and links. Article websites offer both and want the uniquely written article content in return.

This is where our problem begins. Article website accept articles with links. We are happy with the link we get. However, what happens with some of the article websites is this -

1. Article websites remove the links a few months after the article is published
2. Article websites might insert their own links into articles
3. Article websites might remove the entire article after a few months

The marketplace of links-for-content also places a reduced value on the quality of the content. This is often capitalised by the authors, who regularly rehash their articles and lead to content and SERP spam.

What would be interesting would be to have an article website, which accepts only good quality content, and gives out perpetual links in return.

Here’s hoping for that to happen!

A common question from our SEO clients is about telling them about our most successful SEO initiatives. Without praising ourselves, there are a few sites we like to talk about – travel.ebookers.com and childfriendly.co.uk. There are a lot of things which come together in a great way for these websites. At the same time, we like to remind our clients focusing on SEO tips alone for ranking a website is not most wise.

Search engines such as Google look at over one hundred factors while ranking a webpage. Also, the algorithms attach different weights to these factors. At every major update, search engines introduce changes in their ranking algorithms. What one needs to realise is that the search engine’s goals are not only to make life difficult for an SEO. The search engine is constantly trying to deliver a better user experience for its users – this means the most relevant results, with informative page snippets, appearing in the shortest possible time.

When we design a website for better user experience, while keeping it accessible, we are actually future-proofing it from repeated search engine algorithm changes.

Google asks webmasters here to design sites for users, not search engine crawlers. The search engine crawler is somewhat like a visually challenged person. It can only read text. It can not see images and stylesheets nor can it understand audio.  It ignores Javascript or Ajax. Its view of  a web page can be very different from that of a user. The goal of a search engine crawler is to close this gap between human web browsing and machine crawling. At the same time, the search engine also tries to rank a website based on its user experience. This is why there are high marks conforming to accessibility standards.

This is why sometimes good SEOs should practise their art with blindfolds.

Our clients in the UK include a family friendly website called www.childfriendly.co.uk. We have managed their SEO and link building for a few months now and are getting excellent results. Check out Google for the keyword “family holidays” here.

Our manual link building team has been effective in generating a good page rank and rankings on relevant words. We also realised that our delivery capabilities from India while having a good understanding of the UK online landscape gives us a rather unique position as compared to other UK agencies.

We signed up our first client from India called the Wine Society of India. We will be handling their website and all their customer facing online activity. It is a great responsibility and we are happy to have been selected. I think that we were able to displace some more estabilished names in the market while getting this contract.

Envigo started its journey as a company today. We are now registered in the UK as a company and will now be setting up operations. In the first few years, we plan to have a delivery centre only in one or two locations in India. This is going to help us deliver at competitive price points. Thanks to our previous employers, we have done exactly this – have an offshore delivery centre in India to manage and deliver multimillion online marketing spends out of India. We, in our previous roles as employees working with a large budget and delivering high volumes with low margins to play with, have delivered a substantial chunk of business and managed 100% of it from India. We will do the same for our clients. The UK office will help us reach out to local clients and will function as a business development and client acquisition centre for us.