Malware Hacked into wordpress blog

I have had this wordpress blog for over a year and the other week I found there was a virus on my site. When someone visited my site, the malware image appeared as below:

Malware virus on wordpress

I want to get more visitors to my site, not turn them away. So I started researching how to get rid of this malware virus.

1. Updates
There was a wordpress update, but I did not download the latest version till last week. If you do not download the latest version then you are more prone to hacks into the wordpress blog. So I backed up my blog and downloaded the latest version. I also made sure the plugins were the most up to date.

2. WordPress plugins
I looked at another
site which recommended I download a plugin for wordpress. It helps find potential viruses, javascript and iframe injections. The plugin is called WordPress Exploit Scanner. I downloaded it but it didn’t highlight any viruses.

4. Google webmaster tools
I logged into Google webmaster tools and checked if there were any errors, but there were not. All appeared well. I was running out of ideas so I decided to call my hosting company, Godaddy.

5. Hosting company
I called GoDaddy and they scanned my site. They found that someone had hacked into their hosting company and sent this virus out to everyone who hosts with them. Great, just what I need, I thought. The problem is that GoDaddy were aware of this problem took a long time to sort it out. I had to call Godaddy to tell them to check out my site, not the other way round. Normally I really like the company, the staff are really helpful

So now I have to look for a new hosting company. I asked Judith Lewis who posted a tweet on twitter and I got a lot of recommendations for hosting companies. My GoDaddy account runs out in a month, so I still have time to research where I want to host seojoblogs.com. If you have any other recommendations, let me know.

Sitemaps, do you need one?

Yes and No.

If you have a small site of less than 10 pages and you already have a link building strategy on your site and your regularly update the site, then you do not need a site map.

If you have a big site, then yes you need a sitemap. A sitemap will help to get the pages indexed and ranked in the search engines faster. It is also important if your site has session IDs and duplicate content. A sitemap should automatically be generated through the content management system. If it is not, you will need to manually run a sitemap through tools such as Xenu Sleuth to generate the xml file.

I do not have a sitemap on this blog as it is crawled often. The pages are indexed and therefore a sitemap is not needed.

Now if you have a news site, Google suggests you have a news sitemap for the following reasons (as quoted by Google):

* Discover news articles faster: Sitemaps allow Google News to quickly find all of the news articles on a site.

* Crawl and index all news articles: Sitemaps point our crawler directly to each news articles URL, ensuring full coverage of the content on your site.

* Extract and display article information more accurately: Sitemaps identify the article titles, as well as the publication date for each article.

* Characterise article content more accurately: Sitemaps specify the different types of content in your articles by using and tags.

* Annotate articles with metadata: Sitemaps clearly identify each article’s content based on specific description such as related keywords or stock tickers.

Google suggests you use a News Sitemap if has dynamic content (meaning it is updated often), it is a new site or users have to follow many links to get to your articles. Please refer the Google Help section to see how to generate the news sitemap.

But you can only submit a News Sitemap to Google if you’re already included in the Google News program. Basically, you have to be a publisher before you can have your news appear in Google News results.
So how do you become a publisher? Well you need to submit your site to Google and wait for them to come back to you.

Another sitemap that you should start to consider is the video sitemap. This is important if you have a site with lots of videos, film trailers and clips.

Video sitemap example

Check out Google’s help page to see how to set up a video sitemap.

YouTube is five years old

Can you believe YouTube has only been around 5 years?

It was registered on February 14th, 2005 and has grown so fast in the past 5 years. It serves more than 2 billion videos per day. That is the equivalent of every person in the world watching 10 videos per month, or according to YouTube is nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined.

YouTube turns 5

There were other competitors to YouTube, there were services such as Veoh, Vimeo and Viddler and many more. But it was YouTube that came through and 19 months after setting up the company, it was bought by Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion. Not bad for a couple of Paypal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim.

Check out YouTube’s blog for the “My YouTube Story” which has tales by people around the world describing how YouTube has changed their lives.

Anyone can broadcast yourself on YouTube, politicians, students, even brides and grooms from their wedding videos. My favourite has to be the Wedding First Dance – Baby Got Back . That has been viewed over 12 million times. They are stars in their own right. and many unknown joblogs have used YouTube to show off their talent (Justin Bieber) or show their odd family videos. YouTube was started to give bloggers an easy way to put their videos in their blogs and has expanded ever since. Apparently 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute. YouTube also has content deals with more than 10,000 partners including entertainment titan Disney, and has a fledgling online movie rental service.

It will be interesting to see how much YouTube develops in the next five years especially now that is is part of Google’s “media cloud” for people to access films, books, magazines, tv shows old and new. YouTube will go from strength to strength and who knows how much the video search landscape will have changed when we celebrate its tenth birthday?

Google celebrates PAC MAN’s 30th Anniversary

The Google doodle was back yesterday and this time was to celebrate PAC MAN’s 30th birthday.

Visit the Google homepage and start playing PAC MAN. What a cool game, I have never before seen a game on a search engine.

Mobile websites – Making your site mobile friendly

Mobile search is happening.

E consultancy reported last week that Marks and Spencer launched a mobile site.

Unlike the other high street retailers who have launched apps, Marks and Spencer have put all their efforts into the mobile site. I have tried it on the iPhone and it is pretty good. I also tried it on the Samsung Tocco (not a smart phone) and it was easy to navigate and the pictures were very clear. A full review can be found at E consultancy

This news just shows you that more and more companies have mobile as part of their marketing/business strategy. Then yesterday, I read another article about mobile phones . Android phones outsold iPhones in the USA, last month for the first time. The iPhone better watch out, it is not the only smartphone out there. And for those companies that want to have a mobile strategy, do not just tailor it to the iPhone. Make sure the Android, Symbian and the Samsung handsets are involved as well. According to The Times, BlackBerry controls 63% of the market for business phones, so do not exclude these handsets either.

The trend in smartphones is expected to increase. According to Garner, sales increased by 49% to 54.3 million during Q1 2010. Overall, 314.7 million handsets were sold worldwide, with Nokia the number one supplier in both categories. Symbian was the most popular smartphone OS globally, selling 24.1 million units, with a market share of 44.3%.

RIM came second with 10.6 million sales and a 19.4% share, followed by Apple’s iPhone OS with 8.4 million sales and 15.4% share. Sales of Microsoft Windows handsets were flat at 3.7 million units, seeing its market share falling by 3.4 percentage points to 6.8%.

There is no denying it, these smartphones are here to stay, so it is vital to integrate these into your marketing strategy. Next time you are thinking of redesigning your website or adding new pages, think of making it viewable on a mobile phone.

i-level into administration

So much has happened this week, most of it within 24 hours.

I used to work at i-level, until Thursday when it closed its doors. We were only told just before noon on Wednesday and the next 24 hours seem to be a blur. It was a mixture of packing up our things, making sure all client work was transferred, finding new jobs. On Thursday, different agencies came to i-level to introduce themselves and i-level staff were very helpful in passing on HR contacts at other companies, client side as well.

I had not been working long at i-level, less than a year, so no redundancy pay for me. I had been working on some big clients and was enjoying seeing positive effects of my seo labour. I was also working closely with the paid search team and we were delivering an integrated search strategy which I wanted to see out. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case.

I have met a lot of interesting and clever people at i-level. They should not be out of work for too long as I am sure they will be snapped up very quickly. Good Luck to all you levellers, may you find rewarding work and may the company recognise how lucky they are to have you in their team.

The election for our generation

Who will you vote for?

Today is set to be the election of our generation. Labour is going down, not that we are surprised especially after Gordon Brown’s embarrassing incident the last week. But what future do we have with the Conservatives?

Labor has been in power since 1997 and before that Conservatives from 1979 till then. So both parties have dominated politics for all of my lifetime and indeed everyone under 30 years old.

By 1997, people were tired of the Tories and Labour was seen as a fresh start. But what has Labour brought us? They took us into the Iraq war, drove us into debt and have underachieved in education which was Tony Blair’s motto. Top up fees came in 1999 and is set to increase so education will be left for the rich.

Who will you vote for? I have sent off my postal vote.

Google doodle Election