Interview with Adam Lasnik - Part 3

we've observed that a lot of Indian websites tend to get hacked so what are your suggestions to prevent such a thing from happening um also what's the fastest way for a webmaster to know that aside has gone at night yeah we're unfortunately seeing a lot of hacking incidents not only in India where of course as you've mentioned it is really a problem now but I have to say this is actually an issue that's affecting large websites small websites all over the world where we've seen even some very prestigious government and large companies that have fallen prey to hacking and we really take this seriously seriously with Google and I'd like to give you three things to keep in mind the first the most important one is prevention because of course you really you don't want to get hacked in the first place one of the best ways to protect your website is make sure any software you're running for instance WordPress or Joomla make sure you're using the latest version and that includes plugins as well because very oftentimes these soft these software packages are issuing important security updates about the main software and the plugin so please don't ignore that um you also can sometimes get hacked through things that your web host provider offers such as a control panel or cpanel so making sure that your host has that up to date as well can also be helpful so once you've taken these adequate precautions particularly making sure your software is updated then how can you detect if your site's been hacked well sometimes it's pretty blatant when you go to look at your site or one of your friends looks at your site they may see information there or links there that really clearly don't belong and then you know if you're running a great gardening site and you see Graphics or links for gambling then you know you have a probably a hacked problem sometimes unfortunately this is actually a very invisible issue where the folks that are doing the hacking will actually insert those nefarious links but not if you look at the site directly so there are a couple of tricks you can use to try and detect that doing for instance a site colon and then your site's domain can show you a lot of a lot of the pages in your site some of which you may discover oh wow that's that's not that page isn't supposed to be there uh and even can zoom in if you have lots of pages on your site you can do a site colon your domain and then for instance a porn term or a pharmaceutical term and unless you are a porn site or a pharmaceutical site and you see Pages like that there you know you have a problem a couple other quick thoughts that can help you detect the hacking you could set up a Google alert for your site your site colon again same thing as a search so that you don't even have to go every day or every week that on a regular basis if we detect something we will send that via alerts to you I also strongly recommend regularly checking in both your analytics and your webmaster tools that can oftentimes bring to light whoa I'm ranking for these terms oh that's not what that shouldn't be and that gives you a quick indication that something happened so the third and last part about hacking is okay so you've been hacked what do you do well actually my best piece of advice for you is to go on our webmaster blog and look at two really relevant articles one of them is titled I've been hacked now what do I do and there's a more recent one from 2009 that talks about best practices to prevent and deal with hacking I don't remember the exact title but if you search for the Google webmaster blog and hacking you'll definitely find those and of course the most important thing is clean up the situation so if there's a vulnerability in your software update your software if there's a problem with your web host talk to your web host to fix and Patch their system whether it's an outdated version of Apache or whatnot the last part is then once you've got everything cleaned up go into webmaster tools and file a reconsideration request and if actually they've put malware unfortunately a viruses and such onto your site then you'll also need to ask for a malware review but don't worry these things are actually pretty quick to do they just require a few sentences a few clicks on your part and then in pretty quick time some folks from our team should review your site and get it back in the index and I hope none of you that are watching this ever end up having your sites hacked but if you do realize it happens to the best of us right so let's move to one of the biggest problems that webmasters and site owners face today that are duplicate content ah yeah so how does a webmaster fix this yeah duplicate content so there are actually two different types of duplicate content that you want to keep in mind but before I even touch on that let me first say that there have been a lot of fears in the webmaster community that I've heard a lot of people are thinking oh no if I if I have duplicate content Google's going to penalize me and I want to assuage those fears and let you know that in the vast majority of cases that we see duplicate content is accidental and it's not malicious and that's definitely not the sort of thing that we want to penalize for and it's not a violation of the webmaster guidelines rather duplicate content can often be a problem that ends up resulting in people seeing a version of your page a version of that URL more specifically that really isn't the the version you want them seeing it's either containing a full session ID so it's not nice to pass on to friends and to include in emails or it's showing prices ranked from low to high but you wanted it sorted alphabetically so typically duplicate content is perhaps a notable inconvenience and it also can diffuse pagerank which certainly could be a bummer if you have many versions of a page a particularly different URLs for the same content and you have people across the web linking to many of those pages well we'll really do our best as Google to figure out ah this is the preferred or the canonical page but we can't always be perfect so I want to then come back briefly and touch upon the two different types of duplicate content one is the duplicate content on your own site which is what I've been touching upon and the other type is duplicate content across the web that might be for instance if you're using content from an article bank which let's be honest here there might have been hundreds if not thousands of other webmasters who have used exactly the same content so that's considered duplicate and more than anything else we look at that and say well this really isn't of much value and as you know we're looking for pages that offer original and compelling value so if you're thinking about engaging in duplicate content like that I would say it's pretty it's probably going to be a waste of your time and I would just recommend against against that in focusing on instead of instead on building your own content but touching lastly back on the duplicate content on your own domain we just unveiled a really neat new Option and it's called a special tag a link tag that you can put in the header of certain pages in your site and it's Rel equals canonical we actually just made a blog post on this as well with all the details so I won't go into all the technical stuff now but basically this lets you as a webmaster say hey I know I have a lot of different versions of this particular page many URLs that refer to it session IDs and variables and such but I really want users to see only this nice clean version I really want Google to prefer that nice clean version and so what you do is on all the other versions of that page and of course it's best if you can try and minimize duplicate content with your with your content management system or your your blogger software or even use 301s when you can but you know if you can't this real equals canonical is a great option for you you basically insert that link that says hey this isn't the the canonical or preferred version this other one is and you put that on all the pages pointing to that can canonical version and that gives Google then a great hint and great information to tell us hey use that version and with all these tools under your disposal using the 301s and then using this Relic equals canonical option duplicate content really should not be much of a worry and should be much less of a concern and a problem moving forward so let's move on from webmastery to a little bit about optimizing our content so Google indexes is better we see a lot of new websites they come up with these flash flash programs uh videos on them how would you say it would be the best way to go about so Google can index these but uh so yeah Flash and video rich media essentially so it's certainly fine to use these uh type of things on on a website Flash videos images and so on but you do want to take some extra care to make sure that number one this content is understandable by Google and in fact by other search engines and two that it's accessible for users I think flash it can be really it can be a great ornament to a site and in many cases take YouTube YouTube videos are done in Flash so I'm not going to say avoid it however it's important to keep in mind that on many platforms for instance most mobile phones you can't even render flash on that browser and so if you don't have adequate substitute content specifically text that exactly matches the content of The Flash then your user is actually going to miss out on the content you have and it's likely going to go to a different site one technology you can use in this Con what we call gracefully degrade that content would be for instance siffer or sifr and I do know that we've actually made a pretty useful post on using Flash and using rich media on a website also one other quick note about videos in particular again it's great to augment your content with some videos people love watching them you know that but googlebot you know this is kind of an impatient thing it doesn't actually sit and watch the videos uh and all joking aside one way that you can help Google better understand what a video is about is to provide context that means giving the page a good title that describes what that video or videos are about and also context actual text around the video that explains what is this why is it important why do you like it how does it fit with your small business or your website googlebot can take and understand that text and then give your videos the type of info uh see them for the entire importance and relevance that they may have opportunity Adam you spoke about a lot of good webmaster doses uh when you can explain it to our viewers uh yeah webmaster Central I love talking about this so this is our main hub for webmasters it's at google.co.in webmasters and there are four really key parts of this this Hub the first is the webmaster help documentation or the help center and this is where we have hundreds of documents talking about everything from how to make a Google friendly site to linking webmaster guidelines and Beyond we have our blog that I've already mentioned of bits and this is where we have how-to articles and tips and information about new resources and new tools that we're offering within the webmaster Central we also have open comments there so this is a great place for you to offer feedback when we make posts and ask for clarification questions uh the third part is our webmaster tools where you can actually find out more about how Google googlebot sees your site you can change some settings that affect for instance how fast we crawl your site and overall it's a great set of offers a great set of diagnostic tools if you're having problems or questions about your site this is a great place to go to get things fixed and to get answers and speaking of answers and feedback the last component and one that's really near and dear to my heart is the webmaster help Forum so this is our form where you can post questions and post feedback as well that is seen by a whole ton of experts both within India and around the world googlers and non-googlers and the evolution of this this part of webmaster Central has been really exciting for me because when I started about three years ago there was just one Forum with a few small sections and only about two or three of us googlers that were taking part and now fast forwarding we have more than a dozen of these forums around the world and dozens of googlers for that matter that are taking part taking your feedback answering your questions along with the other experts and we actually just upgraded the software The Forum software so now it's easier to ask questions you can Mark certain answers as best answers and you can more easily track the topics and questions that you're interested in so whether you have a question specifically about your site hi how can I do something can you please take a look at my site to see how I might make some improvements and also general questions like you know I'm really trying to engage responsibly in online communities to talk about my site what are some ways that you'd recommend that I do that or I want to know I have a question about the best use of flash pretty much any question you have about webmastering this is a great place to post and again we have folks from the India search quality team that are taking part as well and I'd love to see uh even a more active engagement from the India webmaster community um Adam one way in which Google discovers Neuroscience instruments uh this is a hotly debated Topic in the master Community uh so could you give us some best practices about link building yeah sure and there are definitely there are a lot of important tips to keep in mind and also some misconceptions not just in the India webmaster Community but actually across the webmaster community that I've seen so oftentimes people think wow I just want to get links any links the more the better and it's really important to know that that's not the way to go about it because for us for Google and ultimately for users it's all about the quality of links and that means both the importance of the site that's linking to you and of equal importance the relevance of that site so in a way I actually look at links uh sort of like friends you don't want to buy friends you don't want to beg for friends you sure don't want to be trading friends you make friends says you would make links naturally you can also see them as votes and this is what I'd mentioned actually along the lines of what I'd mentioned earlier about the real core Foundation being quality content so let's say you already have a great website with great content but you don't have any visitors yet well what then right your thinking links well how do you get good quality links so I've already told you now what you don't want to do because in many cases this actually violates Google's webmaster guidelines and is really it's likely to not help your site so then what do you do how do you get good quality links and aside from creating the great content it's also a matter of getting out there so in real life we would call this in the states we'd say pounding the pavement but online what it off often involves is positioning yourself responsibly and thoughtfully as an expert in online communities so if if you have a site for instance a travel site and maybe you're personally passionate about cruises you know about them or you've taken them it's a great idea then to participate actively and thoughtfully in communities around the web giving your insights your expertise and yes also links to your site and it's important to to make a clear distinction here this is not link dropping this is not hi I run this site please visit because you wouldn't do that in person either it'd be considered impersonal or kind of rude but rather contributing the conversation giving information this is where participating in forums whether they're the Google forums or other forums is a great idea because when people respect you and they respect the information you're providing they're very likely to check out your site to trust your site and ultimately to link to your site and it's those kind of links those are really editorially given those are the type of links that matter and and yeah this takes time just like developing any good business takes time but I really believe that in the long run it will contribute to your success and it will help your site help your site's traffic and potentially your site's Revenue in the long term