WDTalk

Unfortunately, a ton of websites get hacked or defaced everyday around the Globe. I’ve seen statistics that state up to 90% of all hacked websites are related to (CMS) – Joomla or WordPress, at least those not related to compromised cPanel logins. And apparently Joomla gets hacked twice as much as WordPress.

I believe all websites are vulnerable to attacks, but Joomla and WordPress more so because of their popularity. There are shell / cracking scripts specifically written for both. These cracking scripts are installed using the default database table prefixes which are jos_ and wp_, and in the case of Joomla, FTP functions which are enabled but never used.

Some recommendations to help protect your websites:

Use secure passwords like 4#gty+TeQ^Rf37! (take the guesswork out of play).

Change your default admin login

Delete all the stuff you don’t use, including templates and plugins. This includes Hello Dolly, twentyten, twentyeleven and ASKIMET.

With WordPress, disallow bots from scanning crucial directories by adding Disallow: /wp-* in your robots.txt file. And CHMOD your wp-config.php file to 640.

Keep your CMS websites updated to the latest version, and recheck your security settings after each version update.

And don’t use anything related to timthumb.

I read some predictions this morning that really opened my mind to the possibility of mobile, and the most significant was that 2/3 of mobile traffic would be consumed by video. Here’s the predictions:

A prediction for the future of smartphone growth makes some bold projections:

By the end of this year, there could be more smartphones on the planet than humans, and by 2016 there could be 10 billion smartphones. That’s 1.4 mobile devices per capita.

In its global mobile data traffic forecast, Cisco predicts that a solid chunk of growth will come from the Middle East and Africa, with a compound annual growth rate of 104%, followed by Asia Pacific with 84% growth.

What will people be doing with their smartphones in the coming years? Cisco predicts that by 2016 two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be from videos, increasing 25-fold between now and then. ^[1]  source

I knew YouTube had grown to the second largest search engine in the world, surpassing Bing, Yahoo and Facebook, but these numbers are staggering.

Cisco’s prediction includes more than just smartphones, though. It also takes into account tablets, laptops, handheld gaming consoles, e-readers, in-car entertainment systems, digital photo frames, cameras, and machine-to-machine modules.

Cisco believes all of these gadgets combined will put the total number of mobile-connected devices over 10 billion by 2016. This expected 18-fold growth by 2016 is certainly believable, given that in 2011 global mobile data traffic doubled for the fourth year in a row. ^[2] source

App developers have to be loving these predictions.

River City Internet Group

River City Internet Group (RCIG) is an Internet delivery ‘holding company.’ RCIG (http://www.rcig.net) is a Missouri Corporation founded in 2001 that owns or invests in companies that are predominantly focused on providing Enterprise and Carrier class Internet solutions.

Through its wholly owned companies, RCIG offers a broad array of Internet solutions.

• Internet Access- MetroEthernet, OC3, DS3 and T-1 (Primary Network)
• Hosting - Colocation, Dedicated Servers and Shared Hosting (Hostirian)
• Network Monitoring Management (NPG)
• Off site data protection (E-Backups) for a variety of of industries including financial services, legal, health care, banking, state and local government, and manufacturing.

River City Internet Group is committed to fulfilling solutions for their customers in a complete, flexible, scalable and professional manner. Their customers rely upon Hostirian’s expertise in enterprise hosting, as well as other technicial matters – offering superior network connectivity, an unmatched guarantee and accommodating terms, making RCIG a logical business partner.

Hostirian

Hostirian (http://www.hostirian.com) is a leading web hosting and colocation provider in the Saint Louis area. By focusing only on web hosting and colocation, Hostirian is able to provide a level of customer support and consultation that remains unmatched by other providers, and at a cost substantially less than national web hosting companies. Hostirian offers shared and fully managed web hosting services, and colocation to businesses operating mission critical systems. Hostirian also offers web hosting services to a growing number of application service providers, enabling them to more efficiently deliver application services to their customers over the Internet. Hostirian also offers related value-added services, such as fully managed firewall services, and consulting services (including capacity and migration planning).

Hostirian provides 24x7x365 live telephone technical support, including customer requests for server re-boots (provided at no charge). Hostirian also manages two network operation centers, monitoring servers – then notifying customers when alerts are necessary - to ascertain what course of action the customer desires Hostirian to initiate. Hostirian guarantees a 15 minute response time to begin evaluation of any problem (24x7x365). The customer is given an Escalation List that contains the office and cell phone numbers of the actual engineers responsible for and most familiar with their hosted architecture.

Hostirian manages three data centers. See Tour and Technical Specifications at (www.hostirian.com/tour/)

• Network Services Headquarters
  11756 Borman Drive
  Saint Louis, Missouri 63146

• Bandwidth Exchange Building
  900 Walnut
  St. Louis, MO 63102

• Globe Building
  710 N. Tucker
  St. Louis, MO 63101

Hostirian understands bandwidth and network redundancy requirements. In it’s downtown data center, Hostirian offers free cross connects from the ‘meet me’ room for providers who supply an extension to the customer’s rack or cage. Current promotions include an assortment of plans with 2U, 10U, rack or full cage options – ranging from $99 to $4000. Each plan has an allotment of bandwidth in Mbps, power, set up options, and guaranteed uptime SLAs.

Hostirian is the fastest growing and most reliable web hosting company in the Saint Louis region. It is profitable, consistently adding significant new web hosting business each month. And it has a track record of greater than 99.9% uptime.

More importantly, every customer receives the ‘home town’ and individual attention that it deserves – so that they can do what they do best – run their business.

Have you ever wondered why Google loves WordPress sites, and why they seem to get indexed faster than other sites?

Even Alexa shows greater movement in traffic trends for new WordPress sites. New sites are currently ranked at about 21,000,000 on Alexa (not good). Put just a little traffic on a WordPress site though, and it’ll jump to the one million mark in a couple of weeks.

What helps generate that traffic? The answer is the blog’s ability to PING.  Its an incredibly powerful tool.

Whenever a blog pings, multiple background processes happen which get your blog quickly indexed by search engines as well as bringing traffic from many other sources.

There are tons of blog directories and ping services which accept pings. When you add a new post on your blog, it sends a ping to all these websites saying, “Hey, I’ve just added a new post in my blog”.

The downside is that every time you edit a post on WordPress, it pings that revision (by default) – and that can get you banned from ping services (not good).

How do you prevent this? Download and activate MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer 3.0. It’s been tested through the current version of WordPress. This plugin will manage your pings so you won’t get banned.

The ping services we use on WDTalk are listed below. Once you’ve activated the plugin, simply insert the following services and save – and you’re off to the races.

http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogcatalog.com/
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://rpc.odiogo.com/ping/

What is Google looking for – pretty simply, results that are helpful (in the user’s locale or their peer groups). When their raters are researching queries and landing pages, they want to find useful relevant content.

We all hear about Google’s algorithms, but what’s the big picture? In the basic framework of rating a site, if your landing page is off topic or contains useless content, you won’t score many bonus points (and maybe lots of negative points).

If you site is deemed to be of little benefit to very few or no one, or gets flagged as “maybe” spam (or straight up spam), has porn or malicious content – don’t expect to rank very high in SERPS (search engine results pages).

Google doesn’t just look at the query. They look at the intent of the query. The same query in different locations can mean very different things. A great example would be American versus UK football.

Sometimes, their interpretation of a query will be very clear, but more often than not, it’ll fall into a general or common interpretation. What they look for is intent, in terms of action, information or navigation.

Tip: If a query’s intent is determined to be directed to your official (desktop) website, but instead takes the user to your mobile site, that’s not good.

Google has changed its algorithms – over 200 times recently, in an effort to return the most relevant results to search queries. Link farms are in their cross-hairs now. In the headlines, J.C. Penny and Forbes.com were both penalized, the former for using paid links to advertise their website and the latter for selling links.

What worked well in the past – will not necessarily work well going forward, especially if you used the following methods to increase the ranking of your website:

• Keyword stuffing
• Fully automated, unrelated and centralized link farms
• Cloaking
• Pages loaded with irrelevant content
• Hidden text
• Made for AdSense sites that consist entirely of scraped content
• Hidden links
• False redirects
• Link wheels

Who wins with this most recently tweak – of Google’s algorithms?

• First, Google wins because HUGE advertising revenues are at stake, and this makes them more relevant and marketable.
• Searchers win because they’ll receive more relevant results to their search queries.
• Ethical website owners win because they’ll receive a more targeted audience open to the products and services they offer.

What should you focus on going forward? On page and off page SEO optimization remain as primary ingredients in any marketing strategy. Optimize your existing web pages, title tags, H1 tags, meta descriptions, keywords and content. Follow that with steady growth of organic (high quality) inbound links from relevant sites.

Google’s take on link farms

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest.

I watch and participate in a ton of webinars, but the latest one I tuned into talked about automating stuff like distributing your YouTube videos to different video sites, and the same with PodCasts and on and on. The one site they discussed that caught my attention was Fiverr.com, “The world’s largest marketplace for small services, starting at $5.”

Then this morning, one of the threads I read posted a number of other sites similar to fiverr, which I’ve listed below.

Each of these were highly recommended, but to be honest, I haven’t used any of them quite yet. I am leaning toward contacting Fiverr first, then if that works, possibly trying some of the others. Which of these would YOU recommend?