Traditionally, viruses and malware were activated only after proactive user interaction (for example, double clicking on an infected mail attachment). Unfortunately, hackers today are far more adept at distributing their malicious code and a ‘drive-by-download’ malware attack can be triggered simply because a user visits a web page. Perhaps more alarming is that the owner of the website can often be unaware that their site is hosting this malware.

Hackers use a wide variety of cross-site scripting (XSS) techniques to invisibly insert malicious code on target websites and in some cases, even use served ads as a delivery mechanism. Whatever the technique used, once a service like Google Safe Browsing, PhishTank or Malwaredomainlist discovers malware on a site, they will place it on their official blacklist. In the case of the massively influential Google, this can be a devasting reputation and traffic killer for the website in question as all visitors will be shown a warning message stating ‘Visiting this site may harm your computer’.

The free service includes:

* Automatically recurring, daily malware scans on 3 pages of a domain
* Daily checks that a website is not present on major Internet blacklists
* Immediate notification via email if a problem of any type is detected
* In-application reporting and threat mitigation advice if malware is found
* Fast sign up and easy to use online interface so users can be up and running in minutes

SiteInspector tests webpages for malware from a ‘customer’s point of view’. To do this, it downloads all specified pages and runs them in a sandboxed browser environment. If the browser attempts to execute a malicious activity; crashes; downloads a suspicious file; changes registry entries or exhibits behavior consistent with malware, then its flagged as malicious. A notification email will also be sent to the account holder.

“SiteInspector dramatically reduces the time between problem identification to problem resolution for business websites.” Said Melih Abduhayoglu, Comodo CEO and Chief Architect. “No longer will businesses have to wait for angry customers to complain that their website contains malicious content. To take advantage of this essential service, webmasters just need to take a few minutes to sign up and configure the service. SiteInspector will do the rest.”

SiteInspector technology is also built into Comodo’s secure Internet Browser, Comodo Dragon. User’s can quickly run a malware scan on the page they are visiting by clicking the Site Inspector icon at the top right of the Dragon interface.

Website owners interested in enrolling their website for the service can sign up free at Siteinspector.comodo.com/public

MattCutts has stated that those affected by the algorithm need to “clean things up” to improve their rankings. Here are some Penguin recovery tips that could get sites back on track:

Review your Google Webmaster Tools account to see if there is any feedback from Google; they will sometimes highlight problems that they’ve found with your site and linking strategy. There won’t be specific messages relating to Penguin 1.0 or 1.1 but you can use any feedback from Google to determine how you’ve been affected.
Carry out a content audit of your site, checking pages for duplicate content and making sure that all your key pages are rich and full. Under-nourished pages don’t help your site.
Go back and look at your link building strategy – is this a natural approach, or have you been pushing too far into grey or black hat link building? The Penguin update has hit poor quality link builders hard, so now is the time to reassess how you gain links into your site.
Know that you’re in for the long haul as there is rarely a quick or easy recovery from Penguin (or from last year’s Panda update). If you’ve been affected by the algorithm change then it’s likely that you’re going to have to reassess your strategy, which is akin to turning a very large and heavy ship around.

This suggests the onus is predominantly on webmasters to clean up their sites and see if things change. Check out the video below for more information from Cutts on recovering from algorithm changes

Bitly looked at the amount of clicks that links posted through its service generated on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr (sorry, Google+, you got left out). It also looked at when these sites seemed to have the most activity overall.

Bitly even generated fancy looking plots of clicks and activity, like this:

found it easier, however, to skip the charts and read the findings. Below, my summary of the best times.

Note that all times are in Eastern Time, which makes sense in terms of activity. From 1pm-3pm ET, for example, corresponds to 10am-Noon Pacific Time. During those hours, most of the entire United States is awake.

For those dealing with non-US audiences, I suspect adjusting these peak times to your own local “waking hours” might prove effective.

Twitter

• Post 9am-3pm ET, Monday through Thursday
• Especially post 1-3pm ET, Monday through Thursday
• Avoid posting after 8pm ET during the weekends
• Avoid posting after 3pm ET on Friday and at all on weekends

Facebook

• Post 1-4pm ET during the week
• Especially post midweek 1-3pm ET
• The very best time is Wednesday at 3pm ET
• Avoid posting between 8pm ET and 8am ET during the week
• Avoid posting on weekends

Tumblr

• Post from 4pm ET onward
• Especially post from 7pm-10pm ET onward, with Monday and Tuesdays being good
• Post on Friday evenings

• Identify low value links pointing to your website
• Real Online Competition (usually not who you think)
• Keyword Competition
• Competitive Link Audit
• Export of Your Competitions Link Graph
• Competitive Keyword Difficulty Audit

• Panda Update Analysis
• Duplicate Content Analysis
• Keyword Analysis

We recently added the Panda Update Analysis after the recent launch of the Panda Update to the Google Algorithm. This analysis combs over your content sets and asks a set of questions to assess the quality and value your content provides. This audit assess if our content is at risk of being devalued by the search engines and caught in the Panda Update. A few of the questions we ask are listed below.

• Would you trust the information presented here?
• Does this article have obvious errors?
• Does this article provide additional information beyond what others are saying, and does it present it in a unique way.
• Does this article contain insightful analysis?
• Is this article written by an expert?
• Would you expect to see this article in print?
• Would you give this site your credit card?
• Would you trust medical (replace medical information with your vertical’s information) information from this site.

We analyze close to 50 onsite and offsite variables when doing a website audit, grounded in the TLCs of SEO (Technical, Links, Content, Social). To learn more about some of the questions and data points we analyze please read our SEO Audit Process post.

1. SEO Technical Analysis

This analysis will help identify technical (metrics distribution) problems with your website such as duplicate title tags, duplicate content, or if your web pages are returning an incorrect HTTP status code. Below are some more of the data points we check from a technical standpoint to ensure your site is healthy.

• 301 (Permanent) Redirect Analysis
• 302 (Temporary) Redirect Analysis
• 404 (Client Error) Errors
• 500 (Server Error) Errors
• Pages Where The Title is Missing or Empty
• Duplicate Page Content Analysis
• Duplicate Page Title Analysis
• Pages That have Long URLs (> 115 characters)
• Overly-Dynamic URL Analysis
• Meta Refresh Analysis
• Pages Where the Title Element is Too Short
• Pages Where the Title Element is Too Long (> 70 Characters)
• Pages Containing Too Many On-Page Links
• Missing Meta Description Tag Analysis
• Robots.txt Analysis
• Meta-robots Nofollow Analysis
• Meta-robots Analysis
• Canonical Tags Analysis
• Indexed URLs Analysis
• Total URLs Receiving Traffic
• Total Keywords Sending Traffic

Let us assume you want to rank for a specific term: “Hosting services.” First of all, stop using this phrase on multiple on page SEO areas. Some examples:

• URL of the page is www.domain.com/hosting services
• The page has 12 images and everyone has the Alt attribute  “hosting services”
• The page has 75 incoming links from other areas of your site and every anchor text is “hosting services”
• You are using this phrase 34 times on the page’s body.
• Your Title tag has the word “Hosting services” at the beginning and at the end.
• You are using 10 variations of related tags e.g “hosting services, hosting service, blog hosting..” and so on.
• You have stuffed the meta keywords and meta description with this keyword and similar variations.

It’s not going to help.  You can scratch your head and wonder why your page isn’t ranking at all but that’s the bitter truth. You’re not going to rank for anything which is not natural and which has been done forcibly. It’s that simple

The search bots can determine whether a specific page offers value to the users. They have more than 500 different signals and they judge the user behavior and usefulness of a page in great detail. Hence, excessively worrying about the on page SEO factors won’t help you in the bigger picture. If your page is useful and provides value to the users, it will rank on it’s own even if you don’t stuff it with keywords or don’t have too many incoming links to it.

In short, stop obsessing about too much seo optimization, focus on the user behavior, and value aspect of your page. You should be then in good shape.

Stop Throwing the Same Words Over and Over

When a search bot crawls your page and it finds multiple occurrences of the same keyword and phrase combinations, it gets slightly annoyed. They have this typical reaction:

“You know what, the first time you say a phrase, it’s interesting, the second time you say the phrase, it’s still a bit useful. After a while, we rather realize that okay, you have said it before. There is no need to say the same thing over and over again.”

So instead of using the same keyword and phrase combinations, you should format your content so that it is interesting. Include multiple variations of the content, similar words and meaningful information are a plus.

Do not include the same sentences and phrase combinations multiple times on a page. Rather than helping you to rank for that specific long tail of search; it might go against you.

Remove Any Paid Links : If you have had sold any links on your blog by charging a few dollars then its time you should be removing them because Google can easily find out if its a paid link or not. The point is that the link buyer usually buys links in bulk from similar blogs and all of them get penalized for doing so. A few dollars earned from this would lead you to loose a lot of Organic traffic. If you have still not done this, its time to remove those links and refund the money.

No more Links Buying : If you have been buying links in bulk from different blogs then its time to stop those campaigns because Google has started tracking all the websites which have got huge back-links with the anchor text being the targeted keywords clearly giving them a hint that its a paid link. Natural links are generally earned with the blog name in the anchor text and not the main keyword in the anchor which is why the spiders easily find these and penalize those blogs.

Focus on Ads Vs Content Ratio : If you have still not read our article on Google Page Layout Updatethen you need to read it because we have had clearly informed that you need to start building a active community and not just focus on some quick money by trying to earn from every visitor to your blog. Ensure that you can push as much related content to your readers and try to display very less % of ads on your blogs above the fold area.
Stop Keyword Stuffing : If you follow the suggestions by so called guru’s on the web who suggest you to add some keywords within your articles, then you are doing it completely wrong. Google suggests you to write articles for your readers and not for the Search Engines, which means that you should never add / stuff keywords on your blog post content. If you were doing this from a while, its suggested to fix those articles or delete them and go for clean useful content which is useful for your blog readers.

Send Feedback to Google : Still not able to figure out why the traffic is not back even after fixing up everything, then its time to send feedback to Google in detail about your issue and wait for the webmasters team to check the same. You can access the same here and ensure that your blog traffic was affected on the update which happened on April 24th and not something which happened in some other date rang