Be 508 Compliant, and SEO will Follow

Really simple stuff…

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

Malware? Me?

Okay, this is really embarassing since I am supposed to be an SEO guy, but Google has decided that my site has malware on it and I have been BLACKLISTED.

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

Is Valid HTML Important? Google doesn’t think so.

Take a peek:

Google Is As Google Does

So now, talk among some of my SEO buddies involves the assertion that Google is penalizing folks who optimize their sites too well.

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.

Get your Blog Indexed on Google Almost Instantly

All you have to do is Digg it.

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