Month: April 2011

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CHMOD Server Setting For Improved Security

If you need to keep your blog secure or just want to make sure you are doing the most to keep website hackers at bay, you’ll want to review these Apache server settings to keep your content and website safe.

CHMOD Explained
“CHMOD is a UNIX term for a server operation to set or change the mode of the file access permissions. When executed, the command can change file system modes of files and directories. The modes include permissions and special modes.”

If you click into the CHMOD Server Permissions website linked above you will be able to read what permissions should be used for which cases.

As a rule of thumb typical website pages should be a CHMOD of 644. Your blog’s wp-config.php file should be 600 or 660 to keep secure. The bottom-line on CHMOD is that using your FTP agent you can right click on any file or directory and change the file or access permissions. Make sure before you start changing things that you review CHMOD Explained and keep track of what you have changed so if need be you can revert back to a prior setting if needed.

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Duplicate Content Revisited

To move up and stay up in the organic search results you have to have a content and link building program. When it comes to syndicating your own content there are a few guidelines that Matt Cutts of Google recommends.

“I would be mindful that taking all your articles and submitting them for syndication all over the place can make it more difficult to determine how much the site wrote its own content vs. just used syndicated content. My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.”

The bottom-line is that you need to tag the location of your original content so you will get credit from Google as being the author. This is especially important when you are using article syndication sites. We even recommend posting the content on your website first when possible and then a week later at the syndication sites. Now this tactic is not always possible, but if you can you’ll want to post on your site first.

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AdWords States Average Rank is for the Auction Silly Not the Ad Position!

Chief Economist at Google, Hal Varian, announced recently that what we had thought all along as the Average Rank was not actually the position of the ad on the page, but rather the average position in the keyword auction. That is very big news! If you are selling on Google AdWords further reading on the AdWords blog is definitely in order.

“To begin with, it’s important to understand that there are two interpretations of the phrase “ad position.” The “page position” refers to the location on the page, such as “top ad 2” or “right-hand side ad 1.” The “auction position” is the rank of the ad in the auction that determines the order of the ads on the page. The critical point is that the reported average position metric is based on auction position, not page position.

Who knew? For years we have all thought the metric in the AdWords control panel that said Average Position was the ad position! And truthfully for years, it may have been. It might possibly be that as AdWords has decided to do away with the campaign setting Position Preference, that it decided to change what data is returned in the Average Position metric in the control panel.

What I find interesting in the blog post called “Understanding the Average Position metric” is that Google finally reveals several very important things that they have previously not clarified. They are as follows:

  1. Position one for your ad is the first position in the colored box at the top above search results. That means that position three or four may actually be the very top ad on the right rail depending on the number of ads in the top colored box.
  2. You can force Google to show your ad in a top colored box by bidding more if there was no colored box before.
  3. By now knowing that your Average Position is really your Keyword Auction position you know have an inkling of what the bids are by keywords and so you may actually be able to effectively decrease your bid with this information.

Hal Varian also revealed additional information that Google has found out about conversions and ad position.

“Some advertisers have asked how clicks from different positions tend to convert. In general, we’ve found that conversion rates don’t vary much with the position of the ad on the page. An ad in a more prominent position on the page will tend to get both more clicks and more conversions than an ad in a lower position, but the conversion rate (conversions/clicks) will tend to be about the same for the two positions.”

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Canonical URLs: The WWW Quandary

To help improve your organic search placement it is important to let Google and other search engines know how you want your links returned and how they should index your website. Should it be linked and named as http://McCordWeb.com or http://www.McCordWeb.com? Specifically I mean in the example is there a www or no www in the URL. Deciding which way you want your links to show and be indexed is just another aspect you should address when you get serious about organic search placement. This issue is called canonical URLs.

I personally like URLs with the www. In all my content, all my links, all my code, I am consistent. I always use a www. You may prefer no www, and that is fine, just make sure that everything you do reflects this decision. The key is to be consistent everywhere. In the Google Webmaster Control Panel, you can tell Google how you want them to link and index your website URLs. This is key to making sure that the do not index both version of your website.

Additionally if you are on a UNIX server I install in the .htaccess file a script to rewrite URLs to my preference. Here is the script to add using my domain name as the example. Make sure to change to your own domain when you do the installation.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mccordweb.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mccordweb.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I have found a great article that very clearly explains this topic on www.searchengineoptimizationx.com and recommend it to you for further reading. This is an important issue for search engine placement and so really deserves your further consideration and action.