How To Protect Your Blog From Content Thieves

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If you read many blogs, it is easy to notice how rampant content scraping is. For the lucky few out there who haven’t run into it yet, content scraping is stealing content from a site to display it on someone else’s blog, usually with Adsense ads to make money off of your hard work.

Thankfully for all the bloggers out there, experienced coders have been fighting off these content scrapers for years and they are happy to share their latest tricks to keep their content from appearing on other sites. Given, this battle is similar to the ongoing battles against copyright infringers and hackers, in that while these solutions may work for the moment, scammers and scrapers are already at work to find a way around the defenses.

None-the-less, it is better to put up a fight rather than giving up when it comes to these content bandits. Jean-Baptiste Jung, co-founder of Cats Who Code, has offered snippets you can use in WordPress to help fend off exactly these types of content thieves, each with their own unique solution.

One common way scrapers steal content is by displaying your blog within a frame on their page, with the ads in another frame so that they will always be shown, and thus earn the scrapers money. Jung’s first snippet breaks out of these frames so that your blog covers the entire window, effectively blocking the scraper site from being seen.

The single most frequent content scraper method is to simply use your RSS feed, and display it on their site so that they also get to take advantage of your original (or paid for) images, as well as not using their own bandwidth. To solve this problem, Jung disabled hotlinking to images so that every time someone tries to use your pictures on their site, they instead see an image informing viewers the content is stolen from your website. It is pretty entertaining to see the results he shared from one such website.

Source: Cats Who Code

Source: Cats Who Code

Obviously, most content scrapers are using tools that do all the work for them, and these tools normally steal the title as well as the content of your post. The solution here is a simple snippet that adds a link automatically to your post titles that directs back to your original post.

To get the snippets, you’ll have to head over to Jung’s article, which also offers a couple more solutions to content thiefs. If you haven’t been bothered by scrapers yet, you are either very lucky, or not paying enough attention. The bandits may eventually figure out how to thwart these defenses, but at least your content will be safe for a while.

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Who Is To Blame For A Failed SEO Campaign?

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When things go wrong with an SEO campaign, it puts everyone involved in a tricky position. The first step is obviously to figure out what happened and who is responsible in order to fix the problem, but pointing out who is responsible for failure can hurt egos and business relationships if not handled right.

The most problematic situation is when a client is at fault, which is indeed possible. The customer is always right may be a good philosophy to live by in many cases, but it isn’t actually all that true when it comes to implementation. This is especially true when you are working with someone not all that informed about SEO.

Some SEOs will try to cut out the client, but that hurts the campaign as well. Instead, the best option is making sure to educate clients about the process in order to avoid issues, though that obviously can’t keep all problems from popping up. If one does arise, it is your job to talk the issue through with your client. While it may be their fault for not following through on a responsibility, it is equally likely you are also responsible due to a failure of communication.

Amanda DiSilvestro suggested a few ways clients can end up bringing down an SEO campaign, as well as how Search Engines and SEOs themselves can derail your progress. The most common issues for clients include:

  • Failing to Change – Many times, SEOs will suggest changes to make onpage to optimize a website, and often it will mean tweaking content to include keywords or possibly editing a meta tag. Clients are often very protective of their content however, and sometimes ignore these suggestions. In this case, the SEO has done their job, but if the client isn’t willing to cooperate, there is little the expert can do.
  • Failing to Plan as a Group – When SEOs aren’t confident in their client’s understanding of optimization, they sometimes begin to ignore the client all together. But, even if a client doesn’t want to be very hands on with the campaign, they almost certainly had goals in mind when they hired the pros, and those goals should be included in the plan for optimization. If a client tries to avoid being a part of the SEO process, including reading the regular reports, there will be a schism between the SEO expert and the company, which will likely splinter the campaign and weaken it.
  • Giving Up Too Early – Too many potential clients come to SEO agencies wanting quick fixes. No matter how earnestly you try to explain that optimization is a slow process, if the client doesn’t comprehend how long it will actually take, they are likely to get frustrated and shut the whole thing down before they really had a chance to reap rewards. There is little SEOs can do here except try to really communicate about time estimates and benchmarks you expect to hit, or just refusing clients that refuse to understand there is no way to get to the number one spot on Google overnight.

Now, we all know clients aren’t always the problem. In fact, it is usually the professional that ends up torpedoing the whole campaign. SEO firms and experts have the power in the campaign, and it is a tough balancing act to get everything on a site working as well as it can to impress the search engines. There are endless reasons a campaign may not work, but unfortunately the most common all stem from just plain bad practices.

  • Going Black Hat – It seems everyone writing about SEO knows how blatantly terrible an idea black hat practices are, but yet there is are never-ending “optimization” services available that use keyword stuffing, duplicate content, cloaking, shady link building  and several other bad practices that Google already knows to look out for. Sure these services might get a site good rankings initially, but it won’t be long at all before they sink under the weight of penalties.
  • Poor Communication – Just as it was said above, even when the client is at fault, the SEO is sometimes responsible for not explaining the process or keeping the client in the loop. SEO work is a partnership, no matter how independent you may be. The client relies on you to inform them about this unique field and help them make informed decisions. If you aren’t communicating and they make a mistake it is your fault. Similarly, if you make a decision without consulting the company you are working with and they don’t like it, you have no excuse.
  • Laziness – When it all comes down to it, a lot of SEO is maintaining and tweaking things to make a site the most efficient possible at signaling to search engines. Experts can get lazy too, but when a site starts under-performing because you haven’t been paying it the attention it deserves, there is no one to blame but yourself. The solution to this one is obvious. Drink a coffee, get up, and do the work clients are expecting of you.

While these categories cover many mistakes made in SEO, there are also innocent problems like misreading a market, and simply putting your faith in the wrong type of campaign.

No one likes having the finger pointed at them when things fall apart, but it is important to honestly assess who is responsible for the faults.

A bruised ego may sting for a little, but if you are the client can put that aside and focus on the good of the site, you can use the understandings gained about what went wrong to repair SEO mistakes and bad habits. With those lessons under your wing, soon you’re site will be performing as you would like it to.

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How To Avoid A Penalty From The New Penguin Update

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Image Courtesy of Martin Pettitt

Image Courtesy of Martin Pettitt

The entire SEO community is bracing themselves. A new Google Penguin update should be here any time, and it is looking like it will be quite a big deal. Supposedly it will be much more brutal than the already merciless update that came last April.

Judging from what we already know about Penguin, there are some ways to prepare yourself and all of your sites to make sure you don’t get hit by the first wave of penalties. Plus, if you follow these suggestions from Marcela De Vivo, you’ll be improving your SEO all around.

  1. Monthly Link Audits – Knowledge is power, and audits give you a lot of knowledge. Start with the backlinks and get a baseline. Find out how may high quality and low quality links you have. Who are these links connecting to? If there are spammy links, work to have them removed. You can choose from a huge selection of audit tools to make the process easy, and you will always know how your link profile is doing.
  2. Anchor Density – A popular way to try to cheat search engines is cranking up anchor density for money terms, and Penguin already penalizes those that do it too much. There is a good chance they will get stricter on their anchor density guidelines, so it is important to keep an eye out. You want to be under 15% for the money term. Any higher is risking penalties when the new Penguin update arrives.
  3. Link Ratios – Links are all about finding the right balance. Google talks about Earned vs. Unearned links, and when they do that they mean Images vs Mentions or Text, Sitewide Ratios, Deep Link Profiles, etc. De Vivo breaks down the categories a little more, but the main idea is to keep a good balance between them all.
  4. Use Your Webmaster Tools – For every siteowner who thinks this is obvious is another siteowner who doesn’t know what Webmaster Tools is or how to monitor it. This is the best line between you and Google, and watching the links Google displays in your account can help identify problematic links as well as keeping you informed as to how they are effecting your rankings. There are numerous problems that Webmaster Tools can inform you of, you just have to look.
  5. Don’t Do Spammy Link Building – This one is the most obvious out of all of these, but it seems no amount of telling site owners to keep away from this practice will ever stop the problem. If something sounds too good to be true in SEO, IT IS. If you can’t identify spammy links, don’t do the work yourself. Google will penalize you if it hasn’t already, and the money you spent on those links wil be wasted.

Google Penguin isn’t the bad guy, nor is it the authoritarian figure not letting anyone have fun. Google’s spam fighting efforts are keeping our browsing running smoothly, and the “innocent” people affected by these changes are participating in questionable tactics. Read Google’s best practices, and follow them. If you are taking proper care of your site and following Google’s rules, the new Penguin update won’t feel near as scary.

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When You Shouldn’t Suggest A Redesign

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Everyone hopes their next website design work is going to be a big project. Steady income for months and a full website redesign are much more attractive than improving some small aspects for a company before looking for another client. But, sometimes pitching a full redesign could lose you a client rather than win you long-term work.

Companies today have tight budgets and fierce competition so many businesses in the current economic climate are much more interested in revamping what they have rather than building from the ground up. Sure, there are sometimes a full redesign is necessary, but often it isn’t the best choice for your prospective client.

Henry Waterfall-Allen suggests 9 reasons you may not want to pitch a full redesign when you are sitting down with a client you are hoping to work with. It may not be as fun to work with a previously existing design, but it may win you a long term client if you can spot their needs.

The most alluring aspect of not going with a redesign is the lowered development and promotion costs. Obviously tight budgets are a large reason companies are looking for the most bang for their buck, and it is entirely possible to increase conversions and revenue through a website without tearing out the existing page.

With lower costs comes less risk, but the opportunity for similar rewards. Instead of trying to revamp everything, you are just trying to achieve immediate results. Designing a page or tweaking elements of an existing design see results much faster than taking the time for a full redesign.

The smaller scale also allows you to target demographics more with a single page. You don’t have the weight of trying to draw in an entire audience. Instead, you are refining and targeting what already exists to create an instant boost to revenue.

More than anything, having the honesty to tell a possible client that they don’t need all of the work many other designers are trying to sell them on will go a long ways and make you stand out from the crowd. Showing clients a more focused way of spending their money and showing them the possibility for much sooner revenue increases will win over many, while being willing to lose the big redesign in favor of being the best fit for the job will keep clients coming back to you.

Of course, there will always be times when a redesign is the only option. You can’t tweak a bad website and hope to come out with a good page. Being able to spot the times when a redesign is needed and when a smaller project will benefit everyone will make you a valuable asset to clients, and will win you longer term jobs.

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The Difference Between Penguin and Unnatural Links Penalties

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Image Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Image Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

With all of the different ways Google can penalize you these days, it is easy to get confused about what you need to do to fix your mistakes. Between Penguin, Panda, Unnatural Link Penalties, and Manual Penalties, there are more ways to get in trouble than ever.

Google’s increasing strictness is far from a bad thing, but it is also getting increasingly complex which makes for confusion when trying to bounce back from a mistake.

Marie Haynes knows just how confusing it can be. She has been working in SEO and writing for SEOMoz for years, but even she got confused when trying to help someone with what she thought was a Penguin-related penalty. She then saw another respected writer make the same mistake in a recent article but confusing unnatural links penalties with Panda.

It seems we need to go to the root of these issues and break down what each of these different penalties are and how they are different from each other.

The Penguin Algorithm came about last April as a algorithm change aimed at fighting webspam, which explains the initial title “The Webspam Algorithm” and it mainly targeted sites participating in link schemes and other questionable linking practices, though it also looked for indications of keyword stuffing.

The Penguin Algorithm isn’t to be confused with an Unnatural Link Penalty. The main difference is that Unnatural Links Penalties are manually taken against you rather than by an automated algorithm. They mainly place these algorithms when they believe a site is attempting to manipulate search engine results through the creation of links. The real question is what causes Google to investigate your site.

It is widely believed that filing a spam report will flag a site for manual review, but others have guessed that Google monitors more cutthroat niches such as “payday loans” or casino sites and consistently manually checks for unnatural links. Thanks to Google’s secrecy, we may never know exactly what makes Google personally examine a site.

So what is the main difference between Penguin and Unnatural Links Penalties? It really all comes down to the different way algorithms act compared to penalties taken by a living breathing person. Algorithms view all sites the same and is effective almost immediately. All sites hit by an algorithmic penalty will see the damage within the day of the algorithm update. Manual penalties on the other hand are being placed against sites at all times, and can be appealed more easily than an algorithmic penalty.

You can always recover from any of these penalties with effort, as Marie Haynes shows in her article, but you have to clean up your page and your methods. SEOs can’t get away with participating in link schemes or engaging other black hat techniques anymore, and there is no way to cheat the search engines anymore.

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Knowing What SEO Risks Are Worth Taking

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Every successful business or person has had to take risks to get where they are, but they normally downplay the stress and preparation that are involved in taking those leaps. It is natural to be worried, but with the proper forethought and preparation taking risks doesn’t have to be so scary.

The very nature of taking risks is not knowing if it will pay off, but if you listen for the patterns in others’ stories, you can see what risks are more likely to work out well. There are risks worth taking, and risks not worth taking. While you can plan all you want, sometimes it is best to just take a leap and see how it works out, while minimizing losses if it all goes belly up.

Amanda DiSilvestro has enough history in SEO to be able to make some pretty good guesses on what type of risks will benefit you and which are more likely to burn you. Saying yes to smart risks is the only way to get where you want to be.

One smart risk that worries many is hiring a writer with no SEO experience. Our field is so complex that it is easy to assume a writer without any experience would be able to learn fast enough to be a competent voice in SEO, let alone a writer that can take SEO principles and write about other topics accordingly. While writing for SEO is quite different from journalism or creative writing there is a good chance that any good writer you hire will be able to learn the basics of SEO fast enough to help you out.

Another common hiring fear many have is hiring a social media expert because it is so new, and so many people think they are a social media “expert” because they have a Facebook, and tweet all the time. This doesn’t mean hiring a social media expert is bad for your business, it just means your hiring process will have to take some extra effort to vet out the unqualified applicants. If your applicant doesn’t understand how social media and business function together, they aren’t an “expert” and they are more likely to cause a scandal than promote your brand’s image.

There is no path to success that doesn’t involve risks, but it shouldn’t feel like you are gambling. You should be informed enough to avoid the huge obvious problems, and the small bumps are fixable. Maybe one strategy won’t work, but every company has setbacks.

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The Alphabetical Guide To Great Banner Design

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Image courtesy of Alex Ford

Image courtesy of Alex Ford

We see banners everywhere, especially in advertising. Whether they’re online, printed on cloth and draped across an entrance, or splashed across a billboard, banner ads all have the same core principles.

You wouldn’t think there is an entire art to making visually exciting and engaging banner ads, but if we can devote more than one article to the skill of making simple and attractive logos, Onextrapixel can devote each letter of the alphabet to effective banner advertisements.

Some of the entries are a little obvious like “grab attention” but they go the extra mile (or pixel if you enjoy the same type of lame humor I do) by explaining shock or surprise isn’t the real way to grab attention. Making viewers want to interact is the real trick to getting someone’s full attention.

Some of the other seemingly obvious suggestions shouldn’t need to be said, but so clearly are needed in the current marketing environment. There are only so words you can fit on a banner before it becomes illegible, and complex fonts make that word limit somewhere between one and five words. If someone can’t tell you what your ad said with just a one to two second glance, you’re trying to squeeze too much in.

Seriously, clarity is so important their list includes it three times with the entries “Message Clarity” and “Succinctness” and I don’t fault them for it. Keep your banner short. I’ve seen far too many ads at the top of my screen and running along the tops of subway cars absolute packed with words in a variety of fonts and all they ever do is hurt my eyes. Viewers remember the short and sweet.

There is obviously more to banner design than keeping it simple, but it opens up the big question addressed by many more of Onextrapixel’s list; “how do I convey a memorable message with so little?” If you can find an answer to that question, you are already well on your way to a great banner.

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Stop Doing These Things, Seriously

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SEO experts are always happy to tell you how to improve your website, and maybe get some more conversions while your at it, but you don’t tend to hear much about what people are doing wrong. Maybe the SEO community is more positive than I’ve ever noticed, but we tend to prefer telling you what you can do better to telling you how you’re messing up.

Well today we’re going to change that, with some help from Inessa Bokhan. Sometimes it is just easier to tell people what not to do, and quickly put an end to these bad practices. She chose 17 of the most common mistakes website owners have been making for years, and I’m highlighting the worst offenders here.

One of the worst crimes you can commit as a site manager or content creator is ignoring your readers. It is so common for blog posts to go up, and the author to just vanish afterwords having moved onto new ground, even when readers are asking questions in the comments. Why would you just leave them hanging?

Creating content isn’t the whole process. We create content because Google likes it, yes, but you should also just be trying to attract real people with interesting information and a great site. Once you have those people on your site, you should be trying to keep them around as much as possible, and the best way to do that is simply interacting with them. Answer their questions, cement your reputation, and help foster a dialogue.

Another “sin” which personally drives me crazy is the constant use of registration when it isn’t necessary. There are so many times I’ve tried to read a random article, look at a picture, or register in order to leave a comment. The ability to register through Facebook or Twitter eases this problem as it doesn’t feel like such an invasion of privacy, but why would any web owner expect me to give them my private information just to see their content?

Some website owners just can’t help but turn off their “sell” switch, and “hide” advertising throughout their content.This can come in many forms, such as misleading links making you think you are on your way to a nice concise article, only to end up being offered a webinar, e-book, or even paid consulting.

As Bokhan points out, misleading links won’t even help if you have a pay-per-click campaign. Your audience will just leave. There are also those that simply break up their content with ads for those types of resources. This is a better solution than misdirection, but it is a personal annoyance to me to be distracted or have my train of thought misdirected with irrelevant paragraphs with similar formatting suddenly selling me a product.

These all lead me to the biggest mistake any website can make: lying to their customers. On the web, your customers make you or break you. Google is refined enough now that they can even identify when you are lying to your customers, and they will too. The worst case scenario is customers see through your lies immediately, and you go nowhere. The worst case is you temporarily fool them, are found out, and your reputation is destroyed through social media and forums.

Every business should be putting their customers above all else, and this is especially true on the internet where one bad customer interaction can lead to a fiasco.

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Making Responsive Design Easy With Just a Few Tools

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Responsive Screen CaptureYou’ve heard all about the pros and cons of responsive web design. You know it creates a consistent experience across different devices, and how it will save you from developing many different versions of the same site, but you’ve also heard that it “isn’t easy.”

Well responsive design may not be something a toddler can do, but Kendra Gaines has a way to make responsive design easy enough for almost every competent web designer out there. Thanks to the endless tools, frameworks, and plug-ins, responsive design is possible for everyone without too much fussing over the little details.

Gaines gathered 13 different responsive design tools you can use, and if you implement them all in your work flow, making your site responsive will be a simple matter you don’t have to fret over.

Even better, normally when you trade pure hard design work for tools, scripts, and other free resources, you end up sacrificing control and precision. The wide selection of these tools as well as the niche abilities of many of them make it so that you don’t have to compromise any longer.

Responsive websites are quickly becoming the standard, so it is imperative to learn how to adapt your sites to the new design world. You can still get away with your special, mobile-optimized websites if you so desire, but you are giving away consistency and features. Don’t give users a lite version. Use these easy resources to make your full website fit into anyone’s pocket.

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What To Do After Your Manual Penalty Is Removed

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Here’s a theoretical scenario: You’ve been hit with a manual penalty from Google. You take all the time and effort it takes to complete a link audit and remove all the bad links you’ve accumulated, and made sure your link profile doesn’t look questionable to Google’s eyes. You resubmit, but even after weeks your website is still flat-lining. What the heck?

As it turns out, that link audit and resubmission process was only half the battle. Google does use over 200 different signals to determine ranking, but links are still the heavyweights in the arena. Now think back to all those unnatural links you just removed. Often, those “bad” links were some of the most powerful in your profile, and you don’t have anything healthy replacing them.

I have some bad news. If you got hit with a manual penalty, you most likely used questionable or downright spammy methods to climb the rankings before, and that doesn’t cut it anymore. There is a way to recover, but it takes basically restarting your SEO process to get your site back in the rankings, and this time you can’t take short cuts.

Search Engine Watch suggests a four step process to getting your sites ranking again, but if you loved the spammy old ways of the web, these steps may seem counter-intuitive or just boring and difficult. Unfortunately for you if you feel that way, there aren’t many other options, and there will be less the more refined Google gets. Chuck Price put it best when he said, “adhering to the webmaster guidelines is no longer a “suggested” course of action, it is required.”

The four-step process will help you clean house on all the remnants of less savory SEO methods, and make your site look as clean and reputable as it should. Don’t try to toe the line again or take advantage of any loophole you find. You only really get one chance to come back after a manual penalty. If you get hurt again, it will be nearly impossible to fix everything.

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