http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/guide/1194.22.htm

Thoughts? Good place to start, eh? Yeah, it’s *basic* and no it doesn’t account for AdSpend or any of that stuff, but this is plain vanilla boilerplate stuff. The fancy stuff remains a bit of a black art, I don’t care what they promise you.

Best of the best,

J

I attribute this to the Digsby Widget. That’s all I can think of. There is no malware on this site.

Cripes.

Now the process is sisyphean. I have to ask to be reconsidered by a human when it was undoubtedly a machine that considered me MALWARE-infected in the first place.

And I know that this will not be easy. But you know, I will get to see how difficult it really is to come back from a Google bashing.

Thank Goodness I have a full-time job and some contracts on the side. If I depended on this site for a living, I would be in sad shape.

So let’s see how to get my ranking back. I will let you know what Google says. I have officially requested RECONSIDERATION against my MALWARE.

Google is Evil. Watch out for them…

Josh

UPDATE:

Ah, it was legit (semi) after all. I fell victim to a WordPress exploit (wp-stat) and there was a 1 pixel by 1 pixel iframe in some of my pages that was, indeed, evil.

I didn’t put it there. Bad guys did. The good folks at stopmalware.org emailed me and explained to me what was going on. Instead of the generic “you have evil source and are banned until you come back from the dark side” message, I got actualy code snippets that I just would not have found otherwise. Thats a problem with CMS systems – there is so much code. Cheers to you folks at StopMalWare. I wiped the iframe away, uninstalled the guilty module, and will rely on my ISP’s Webtrends reporting for my stats from now on. Webtrends is cool anyhow.

Now I will get cleared by StopMalWare and eventually, Google. I hope. Will keep you posted. It will be interesting to see how long it actually takes. Don’t you think? I’m very excited about it.

Moral: stay current on your software security updates!

Moral 2: Fantastico is fantastic, but there is something to be said for doing it yourself.

UPDATE TWO:

04.22.08 (4 days after blacklisting)

I just got notice that I am off of the blacklist. So much for it being an impossible task. Text follows:

We have received and processed your request for review of your website, mittechnical.com. Google’s most recent test of your website found no badware behaviors on the site. As such, the Google warning page for your site has either already been removed or should be removed shortly. In addition, if your site has been listed in our Badware Website Clearinghouse, we will remove your site from the Clearinghouse list.

Overall moral: Communication is Key! Thanks to the folks at stopbadware.org

People who ranked high with Google, Yahoo, and MSN have found that they have unexplicably lost ranking in Google and Google alone.

At some point this was bound to happen. Indexing and codifying the contents of the web cannot be a true science if the web is expecting to be studied and codified. I know my dog is on his best behavior when I am home, and when I come back from work he acts as though the pillows could have torn themselves up. Point is, it is hard to capture the raw value of something if you judge it by algorithms and techniques that can be anticipated and used as scaffolding for a structure.

It’s kind of like that theorem that puts forth, “as soon as you study something, you change it…”

But it’s not quite like that. I just happen to like that theorem.

It’s more like people finally figured out how bots work, made a business out of it, and the bot owners are finding that they are being spoon fed what they wanted, but didnt want given to them.

Funny stuff.

Ha ha.

I know most of you will be aware of this, but it works, and I have a client that has an entire network of folks in India that go around Digging each other’s blogs.

Seems unethical to me.

But alas, such is life.

You’ll notice, my blog gets almost no Diggs but I get 200 unique hits a day and I dont talk about anything sexy at all.

Besides Use Cases, that is. And Requirements Documentation.

Thanks,

Josh

Microsoft is including an XML presentation layer in Silverlight to address a major problem with Flash: Search Engine Optimization.

Of course, with Flash, you need to use the SWFObject to provide copy to search bots. Otherwise, you are transparent to them.

With Silverlight, you have XML. Quite advantageous. At least, that is what Microsoft would have you believe.

A gentleman over at http://albatroscr.com/seosilverlight/ has made a Silverlight page to see if it got indexed.

Apparently, Google chooses to overlook XML that is application-specific, as would be the case with Silverlight XML.

Remember Accessability. It isnt kosher to require a web surfer to require a specific proprietary plugin of any sort. You need to include alternate text.

So, before you convert all your Flash Pages to Silverlight, do your SEO and create a plain HTML page (how boring, yes I know…) to be indexed.

Then, either swap it out with SWFObject or include it with your Silverlight code. Either way, keep your content out of proprietary software.

Same old story, new spin.

Thanks for your time.

Best,

Josh Milane

MIT Technical, Boston

Of all the Search Engine Systems, DMOZ has classically been the one with the least bias, the most creditability, the toughest one to get into.

Apparently, they are corrupt and have extorted ShoeMoney.

This really is too bad.

And it is things like this that make me doubt a Collaborative Web.

- Josh

Support Open Source!  Or at least, please support Compliance…

Specifics on 508 Compliance can be found at the Section 508 Website

Specifics on W3C Compliance can be found at the W3C Website

It is interesting or at least noteworthy that the W3C standards and not the same as 508 Standards. The W3C standards are more rigorous, so the argument goes that if you follow their guidelines and CYA in regard to what they have put forth, you will be okay with 508. I will look into this further.

The following chart was lifted from: www.chandima.net with regrettable impunity:

Josh Milane

MIT Technical, Boston

You will do ongoing analysis and tweaking. You might want to install something like WebTrends if you dont already have it installed, so you can keep track of where your visitors are coming from. A bot needs to index your content and your site needs to have some usefulness inherent in it so inbound links will be generated organically. I mention this early on because it is something that you can do, right away, to help establish your baseline. An important part of your SEO efforts will be analysing your traffic and inbound links. It is an ongoing process that requires a degree of patience and a mind that appreciates the fact that SEO is as much art as science. Organic links will come, if you build a useful site.

Yeah, I often wonder about the whole “organic” thing myself when it comes to technology. I thought that organic implied “of the Earth” but I guess it means “natural” more than anything else. I hate to think that humankind thinks all this technology is anything but a tool, although in some ways it is an extension of ourselves. It is interesting how viral marketing and organic results work. It is almost creepy, the way the internet has grown and adapted. It is certainly compelling. If you want to see a fantastic example of how useful the overlap between community and technology can be, a site like Yelp or Instructables are good places to start. Soon, the Semantic Web will change the way the world learns and catalogs information. Please don’t sign up with Faceb00k (no link for them). It’s owner, Little Zuckerman, is a real ass, although a pretty saavy ass.

That was a slightly tangential diatribe. I apologize.

Anyhow, back to business. A ‘bot will attempt to ascertain what a page and a site is about and how it is organized. This is an extremely complicated and secretive business that holds very close to it’s core the concept of keywords and keyword combinations. Google uses carefully guarded algorithms to do its indexing, but they have only obviated the importance of keywords. Keywords have been a hot topic in SEO since it’s inception. The search engine systems are aware of various “Black Hat” strategies that webmasters use to artificially make their site look more important than it is. Gateway pages, redirects, embedding either tiny keywords or keywords in the same color as the page’s background are too risky to use nowadays. I would have no problem leveraging whatever I could – within reason – to help a client achieve their goals, but doing something unethical is just too risky. If you get your site blacklisted, it is darn near impossible to get off of that list and become accepted again. Google is too busy to go out of their way for you when you have shown that you actively try to get around the rules they have set. Behave thyself. It is a bit more work, but it pays off in the end.

Google also knows that if someone searches on a specific keyword combination, such as “Boston SEO”,pages with that exact phrase in them are likely to be most relevant. However, pages with those two words in very close proximity, like “MIT Technical does the best SEO in Boston”, and also pages with those two words in looser proximity might be perfectly relevant and useful to the user. A keyword combination, or phrase, can be and is broken down into its component words. That is why if you search for “SEO Bahston” it may ask you if you mean “SEO Boston”. It isn’t that it understands the way we speak in these here parts, it is that there is a bit of intelligence behind the curtain. As webmasters, we can take advantage of that and avoid having to accomodate for misspellings on our pages.

The exact mechanisms that Google uses to determine which of its indexed pages are returned at the top of the list is a trade secret. Even if you found out what it was, you’d be in a boatload of trouble if you told anyone. It changes with fair regularity anyhow, and by the time you figured it out it would have changed. Certain things do not change, however, and these are our guiding principles of SEO. The first is that you need useful content that contains keywords and is visible to the ‘bots. Yes, that is a compound principle.

Another principle is that you want to be the site that is returned towards the top of the list. The vast majority of people searching on a given search term will click one of the top three results that Google or another search engine system returns to them, even though you may have noticed that they are not the best. Majority rules, and the top three spots are coveted positions. Competition is fierce, and the more you or your SEO consultant knows, the more SEO is considered a priority early on, and the more keyword analysis (really part of SEO) you do, the better off you are. Remember what GI Joe said.

SEO Joe?

You might find that your most obvious keywords are also extremely competitive. You might be better off going with keywords that are a little less frequently searched, but have significantly less competition. I will get into this a little later.

Keywords will help drive the bots to properly index your pages. Inbound links will help to properly increase your PageRank (Google’s way of determining how worthy your site is of a high ranking).

Interestingly enough, Google’s PageRank system, as developed by two brainy types at Stanford, is public knowledge because it was Patented:

Read the patent for Google PageRank here

Or take a look at this depiction of how Google PageRank works and prepare for a mind-splitting headache

Of course, Google makes everything (even mathematical madness) cutsey and user-friendly, so you may prefer their explanation of PageRank, as intended for people without a PdD in Mathematics:

There you go. Happy balls of color, pointing their finger at each other. These happy balls are casting “votes” for each other and telling Google who is important and deserves a high ranking (of course, besides the folks who bought theirs). This might be a good time to go into a little more detail about PageRank, but I only want to touch on it here. For now, just note the size of the balls and the number of fingers pointing at them. It is a pretty good little summation of PageRank.

We must first come to master keywords.

It used to be that if you wrote the word “carrots” a thousand times on your page, your site would be rank highly for the keyword “carrot”. This is no longer the case. You have to play it straight now, and fortunately, if you have a substantive site, playing it straight is easy and helps you in the long run.

Because this is indeed such an enormous task, you want to make it as easy as possible for the ‘bots to index you effectively. There are many ways to do this, but I want to start by explaining something that many of my clients do not initially realize. After engaging the services of a Flash designer, they often groan when I explain that.

What is important to the ‘bots and search engine systems:

• Content (HTML code)
  • Meta Tags
  • Text
  • Copy (different from plain old text because copy implies an intent to convey a message via text-based authoring)
  • Filenames
  • Links (inbound and internal, so anchor your content!)
  • ALT text (what the user will see when they place their cursor over an image)
• Inbound hits
• Site accessibility and compliance (a problem for many CMS and MOSS-like systems)
• Grammar, spelling, and structure
• A few other things, many of which are part of their secret algorythmn.

Just as importantly, they do not see:

• Logos (Other than that there is a graphic image there)
• Pictures (If your content is in a .jpg, it cannot be read)
• Flash (sorry, but there are ways to address this. Have no fear.)
• Movies
• Multimedia
• Good intentions

A well-optimized site will take advantage of search engine optimization techniques and keep these factors in mind. While a gorgeous Flash introduction might “wow” your customers (does it really?), search engines will not even notice and in many cases will just turn around, assuming there is nothing there for them to index.

In SEO and SEM, you must be aware of the limitations you face and the peculiar environment you are working within. You have to cater to the one who makes the decisions and calls the shots. Anyone who has had a boss they consider less than perfectly astute will understand this.

Hopefully there is some viable compromise between your ideal presentation and a presentation that will work for the search engine systems. SEO and search engine optimization may involve writing your copy a bit differently than you would if you had free creative license and were writing purely for the sake of conveying your message or talking to your customers. With optimized content, you will use keywords and carefully selected language, filenames, links to images and other files – thereby crafting a site that a search engine spider or bot will understand and appreciate. You do not have to be punctilious in your word selection, but you should at least be cognizant of the environment and do what is not painful to do.

For a demonstration on what a search engine bot view is similar to, you can download Lynx (a text-only browser) or use any one of the many Lynx emulators available online. One such emulator is at: http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html – it may be suprising to you how little of your 10 second, $3000 Flash intro is being indexed. But again, I do not discourage the use of Flash. I only suggest that if people use Flash they also adhere to good SEO practice (and Web Standards) by implmenting a technique I will describe later. Although Flash does a heck of a job at conveying a message to a person, it does a really cruddy job at communicating with search engine spiders.

Sure, Flash may look fantastic and impress customers, but how are customers supposed to find your site if they do not become aware of it? Flash has its place, but many webmasters are satisfied with the visual impact of Flash and do not consider that it may be crippling their site. You can avoid the pitfalls of Flash with careful planning and an informed approach to development. Search Engine Optimization is mandatory if you are to be competitive, and it should be considered when a site is being planned instead of tacked on after the site it built. This is one of the golden rules of development, and sadly, SEO is sold as an add-on. It shouldn’t be. It has as much place in the initial Requirements Document and Design/Planning phase as anything else.

Part II of this article has already been written, and see SEO Tips for Developers for a checklist of things you can do right NOW.

Josh Milane

MIT Technical, Boston