Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Malware reviews via Webmaster Tools

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Malware reviews via Webmaster Tools

What is malware?

Malware is a software that tracks your moves online and feeds that information back to marketing groups so that they can send you targeted ads.

Malware can be downloaded with you even knowing by playing online games, downloading software that includes it and they don't inform you, etc. that install the software that tracks your every move.

Most of the malware installed will show you random pop-up ads but some peoples' computers slow down or even crash. The malicious software will use peoples' personal information and abuse it.

Google will now show you results in the search engine result page (SERP) that will warn you if a website uses malware. Some site owners don't even realize that something on their website has malware on it, so they are letting webmaters know through the Google webmaster tools if they have malicious software etc. on their site so they they can remove it.

I always love to see the user coming first when it comes to websites and search engine optimization and this is another great way that Google is helping the webmaster optimize the website, and pay attention to the user.

Problems with multiple domains

There are a lot of websites and companies that buy up multiple domains in order to try and corner the market and weed out the competition. While at Classmates.com I found a long list of domains that the company owned, some of which were parked, and others were resolving to the same DNS as the www.classmates.com domain. The problem with the multiple domains pointing to the same DNS for SEO is that the search engines view this as an exact match down to the same directory and filename, as well as the content on the page. The result in the end is that one or more of the domains could be banned or even penalized for being the same.

I ran into the same issue with the professional womens organization - the original domain was www.pwoo.org which was later changed to wwww.professionalwomenonline.com. The www.pwoo.org domain was used when I was quoted in articles and marketing publications, so I wanted those who came from there to still arrive to the same site even though the domain changed. With the two domains pointing ot the same site, I struggled with ranking issues due to links, and duplicate content. So I removed the www.pwoo.org domian from the Google index so that it won't obtain rankings anymore. The www. professionalwomenonline.com domain is now getting great rankings and the users who type in www.pwoo.org can still see the same site.

How did I resolve the issue?
Google has a great addition to their webmaster tools in which you can remove files, directories, and even whole domains. By removing one of the domains from the index, the other can be left to obtain rankings without resulting in being blacklisted. The only problem is that you have to have the pages 404 (page does not exist) in order for the domain to be removed.

Back up your files on a computer or separate server and remove them all (just temporarily)
Go to your Google webmaster tools and select the site you wish to choose (if you don't have a site setup in the Google webmaster tools I would advise creating an xml sitemap and setting up an account today)
From your webmaster tools site dashboard select the "URL Removals" for your website
Click the "New Removal request"
In this case you want to select " Your entire site Remove your site from appearing in Google search results."
Confirm by clicking the " Yes, I want to remove this entire site."
The site is then added fore removal.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Supplemental goes mainstream

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Supplemental goes mainstream

You know I have been an advocate of natural search landing pages. With Google's technology n supplemental results aligned with natural search optimization and marketing for usability a user that searches say Annville Institute, Annville, Kentucky (KY) on Google will see:
Annville Institute, Annville, Kentucky (KY)
Ever find yourself wondering what happened to so-and-so from Annville Institute in Annville, KY? Perhaps you’re trying to get in touch with one of your best ...

In the search results - which then takes the user to a page that is more relevant to what they are looking for than the standard www.classmates.com homepage.

This also helps projects like the buyyouadrink.org profiles so that users can share what information they want when Googlers search their name in order to find out more about them through their own personal profile pages.