Google owns a Panda that isn’t near as cuddly as this little fellow above.

After all the havoc it created in 2011, it was certainly not on the Christmas-list of a lot of webmasters out there!

Why?

It killed their traffic from Google… by as much as 80%, or more in some cases!

What Is Panda?

Most people know that Google has a search algorithm that it uses to return search results to people who search Google for information. Nobody, other than a few Google engineers, know exactly what the many factors are that this algorithm looks at. It’s kinda like the Coke-formula… a well-guarded secret!

We do know that the normal “search engine optimization” factors are important because it helps the search engines figure out what the topic of a web page is. We also know that the quality of inbound links are important because each link is seen as a vote in favor of the web page. These things, among others, are part of Google main search algorithm.

Enter Panda… the codename for a new “quality” algorithm that Google applies to results returned by the main algorithm.

Panda was set upon the world of websites on Feb 24, 2011, creating huge overnight traffic losses for many websites, big and small. Since that fateful day, there have been at least ten further updates to the original Panda algorithm, with the most prominent update probably being Panda 2.5.2 on Oct 14, 2011.

What Is Panda All About?

In one word… Quality!

Like Google’s main algorithm is aimed at finding web pages that answer the search question, Panda is an attempt at further refining the search results by identifying the highest quality answers.

As I understand it, the goal is to catch all those websites that are merely regurgitations of other websites (directly copied in some cases), or websites that produce massive amounts of shallow content that offers no real additional value.

Panda does this by applying a penalty to those websites that do not meet the quality criteria that Panda uses, thereby allowing sites that do meet the criteria, to “bubble up” in the results.

What To Do If You Got Panda-Slapped

As with its main algorithm, Google says very little about how Panda works. However, this article by Amit Singhal, one of Google’s top search engineers, gives some insight into the mindset you need to acquire when thinking about your website.

You’re going to need to take a good, honest look at your website.

Does it provide real value and give your visitors the benefit of your unique insight into the topic, or is it something that was hastily slapped together and that borrows heavily from content on other sites?

You want to be able to honestly answer “yes” to the former.

Here are a few things to pay attention to:

1. Give visitors a reason to stick around on your site: 
1. Write good headlines that entice visitors to read the page’s content. 
2. Provide your own, well-written, original content that includes your unique perspective. (Don’t “borrow” content from other sites, and in particular, don’t copy & paste content from other sites.)
3. Structure content properly to make your pages easy to read or scan (many visitors scan over pages).
4. Make sure that links to other pages on your site are well-organized and easy to find.
2. Easy on the eyes:
1. Make sure your site looks professional and instills confidence in the visitor. If it doesn’t, it is time for an update.
2. Make sure that the font and font-size on your site makes it easy for visitors to read your content.
3. Add images to your content where it makes sense. This helps to make content more interesting.
3. Compare your site to your competition:
1. Look at things that your competition provides to visitors that you don’t, and see if you can provide that too. 
2. Look for ways make your site better then theirs, i.e. provide useful things to your visitors that your competition does not provide.

I must say that, based on a test that I did recently, Panda is still a work in progress. I did a Google search for the main keyword of one of the best-performing pages on one of my websites, and compared the top 10 results to my own page. I am completely convinced that my page (at #57 in the results at the time, now at #33) was better than at least 6 of the top 10. (Yes, my own biased opinion.)

The point is, however, Panda will get better at its job as time passes and any website that does not focus on quality and value will lose out on a lot of potential traffic.

They were using my website as a “resource” for their own visitors. My first thoughts were that I really didn’t like that.

Yes, in a way it is a compliment that they considered my content good enough to use as a resource.

However, I would have much preferred an ordinary link that allows my website to be displayed as I had intended. I did not recall agreeing with the site owner for my site to be used in that way.

Furthermore, I was not sure how this would affect other aspects of my site, e.g. the Google advertisements that appear on the site. The bottomline is that I decided that I did not want my site to load in this way.

Initially I considered contacting the website owner to get them to change it. Then it dawned upon me that there might be other sites that are loading my content in this way. I did not want to go on a hunting expedition to track them down and contact them individually. So I decided that “frame busting” code was the way to.

Frame Busting Code

There is a way to use Javascript to check if a web page has been loaded inside a frame, and if so, to cause the browser to reload the page by itself, i.e. outside the fame. This is called “frame busting”.

Here is the script that I used:

<script type="text/javascript">
if(top.location != self.location)
{
	top.location.replace(self.location);
}
</script>

I added this code inside the header (between the <head></head> tags) on every page on my site.

That’s all there was to it, and it works like a charm!

There is another method where you can achieve the same thing by adding some directives to the .htaccess file on your web server. The above Javascript works great though, and is easy to implement.

If somebody is loading your website inside their website and you don’t like it, I hope this article helps you to solve the problem and prevent it from happening again.

This set off all kinds of alarm bells in my head, so I immediately went to the site’s hosting account, looking for the file that Google mentioned in the suspicious URL. And there it was!

(For the sake of privacy of my client’s site, I won’t mention the exact name of the suspicious file – a Google search for the file shows which website was compromised – but I will tell you that it was a PHP file with a name made up of 5 random characters, e.g. bwrts.php)

I immediately downloaded the file to check it out. When I opened the file in my PHP editor, it was base64 encoded, which was basically a confirmation in my mind that this file served some or other dangerous purpose. Further investigation led me to find out that this file was part of a system to deliver fake AV trojans to visitors of other website.

Since I had my own experiences a year earlier with fake AV trojans, this really infuriated me!

I then scrutinized the rest of the website and found an unknown directory named “.files”. It contained a little more than 4,000 HTML files. I downloaded all of those and inspected a few of them. They seemed to be more or less identical, except that they were all named after recent popular search engine search terms, e.g. “super bowl 2011.html”.

The HTML files also contained links to other websites that appeared to have been compromised in the same way as mine, e.g. links like “www.website.com/bwrts.php?search-term”. I did a WHOIS lookup on those sites and discovered that they were all hosted by the same company that hosts my website! It was clear… those bastards had hacked into the host’s server and compromised a whole bunch of sites on the server!

I immediately contacted the website host and made them aware of the situation. A few hours later they assured me that everything had been cleaned up. I don’t really know what they did because I did all the cleaning on my website.

Cleaning Up The Hack

Here are the steps I followed to clean it all up:

1. Deleted the PHP file referenced in the Google message.
2. Looked for further unknown, oddly-named PHP files throughout the entire website. I found one tucked away in my /images folder and deleted that too.
3. Deleted the entire .files folder that contained the bad HTML files.
4. Disabled the master FTP account on the website (done from the Control Panel).
5. Created a new FTP account for uploading or downloading files and created a complex password for that account that uses a mix of letters, numbers, and punctuation characters.
6. Informed the website host of the situation to allow them to take action on their end.
7. Submitted a reconsideration request to Google to inform them of what I found and what I did to fix it, and asked them confirm from their side that the site was no longer compromised.

I hope this never happens to you, and if it does, I hope my story helps you to rescue the situation fast.

To me, the productivity-problem has two components:

1. Working on the right things, i.e. not keeping myself busy with stuff that don’t matter.
2. Getting these things done, and at the right time.

Toodledo

About two years ago, a friend pointed me to a great tool called Toodledo. As I immediately discovered, Toodledo rocks! It helps you define goals that you want to achieve, and then create tasks that you have to complete to achieve the goals. Tasks can be categorized into “Contexts”. You can assign several levels of “Importance” to tasks, assign start dates, due dates, and you can even set up repetitive tasks and sub-tasks.

Toodledo allows you to sort tasks in many different ways, e.g. Due Date, Importance, etc. It also has a very handy sort-view called Hotlist, which uses an algorithm to determine what the most important task is that you should be working on.

So, Toodledo solves problem #1… figuring out what you should be working on now.

I started using Toodledo and it worked great… I always knew what the most important thing was that I should be working on. But there was a problem… I wasn’t always working on the things that I knew I should be working on, or when I did, I would take forever to get them done.

Enter Google Calendar!

Google Calendar

I decided to start using Google Calendar to schedule my activities for each day. I would create several time slots and assign some time to each of the most important tasks that Toodledo says I need to work on. (I read somewhere that it is important to work on big tasks for a little bit each day until it is completed. That way the big tasks are not as daunting.)

This worked like a charm! Each day, not only did I know what to work on, but I also knew when to work on it. Each activity had a specific start and ending time, and I would hold myself to these times.

This added a sense of urgency to tasks. If I was working on a task and I saw that, for example, I only had 20 minutes left to work on it, it would inspire me to pick up the pace. All this led to me getting more done than ever before.

So, Google Calendar solves problem #2… actually working on the tasks and getting them done.

An added bonus to all this was that when I scheduled a little time off, I no longer felt guilty about taking a little time off. I knew that it was scheduled time off, and that I would get back to scheduled tasks later.

(As a side note, both of the tools I am using are online tools, meaning I can get to them from either my laptop or desktop and have no problems keeping everything sync’d. Both of these tools also work very well on my Android phone.)

Ready to try it? Here’s what to do…

1. Sign up with Toodledo. They have a free version, but their Pro version only costs a few dollars per year and offers more. I use their Pro version.
2. Sign up with Google Calendar. This is free. If you already have a Gmail email address, you basically already have Google Calendar.
3. Set up your Toodledo account by creating some goals, contexts, and tasks that support your goals. These are the tasks that you need to work on each day.
4. Look at your Toodledo Hotlist to find the tasks that you need to work on first. I sometimes also use the Due-date view as a double-check.
5. Schedule yourself to perform these tasks by putting time-slots on your Google Calendar. I use Toodledo’s contexts (categories) of tasks (e.g. Admin, Websites, Personal, etc.) and schedule time each day for each of the categories, working on the most important task in the category. This way I am constantly able to get to the variety of things I need to work on. (Let’s face it, we all have multiple different things we need to get to.) At the end of each day, schedule a time-slot for “Planning”, where you spend 30 minutes planning and scheduling yourself for tomorrow. Also, schedule 2-3 “leisure” slots during the day where you take a break, surf the web, or do email (in addition to lunch, that is).
6. Stick to the system. Hold yourself to the times you have assigned. Sometimes, especially in the beginning, you may misjudge the time needed to complete a task. In such cases, modify your schedule where necessary. I only modify my schedule when I need to complete a task that day, or when an additional 15-30 minutes will let me complete the task today instead of tomorrow.

That’s my system! It works very well for me. If you decide to follow it, I hope it works just as well for you!

This happened to a friend of mine a while ago. He spent months working on an e-book that he wanted to market, his computer crashed, and the e-book was gone!

Having a “backup and restore” system in place is absolutely crucial if you have files that you really don’t want to lose, like a school project or music or photos of the kids, or an e-book… Who of us don’t have such files?

I am a happy user of a free online backup service that is saving me a lot of trouble! Let me tell you about it…

Why An Online Backup Service?

Having any kind of backup system in place is already a step in the right direction, be it as simple as backing your files up to a CD or DVD, but here is what makes an online backup service great: It is off-site, i.e. not at your house or business!

That means that even if you have a fire at your house or business that destroys everything, your backups will be safe.

My Choice?

While there are a few choices available, I use Dropbox and I really like it because of some special benefits it gives me.

Dropbox is very simple to use and is truly a “set it and forget it” solution. All you have to do is sign up, download and install their free backup software, and move your important files to a special folder that Dropbox creates.

After that, Dropbox handles everything automatically. It copies all your files to your secure Dropbox storage space on the Amazon S3 Cloud. If you change any of your files on your computer, the new version is automatically and immediately copied to your Dropbox storage the moment you save the file.

If your computer crashes and you get a new computer, all you do is install Dropbox’s free backup software on the new computer, enter your account details into the Dropbox software, and it automatically copies your files from your Dropbox online storage space to your new computer. That’s it! Not a file lost!

What’s more is that if you use more than one computer, you can install Dropbox’s free backup software on both computers and have the latest version of your files automatically available at all times on both computers. So the two computers stay in sync all the time. This is another aspect of Dropbox that I find particularly useful.

A further benefit is file sharing. Let’s say you and a friend or colleague are in two different physical locations and you need to collaborate on a project of some kind. If your friend also uses Dropbox, you can share a folder in your Dropbox with your friend. Your friend will then have access to the files and any changes either of you make to the files are automatically available to both.

How Much Does It Cost?

Initially, nothing! When you create a Dropbox account, you get 2 gigabytes of storage for free. As long as your storage needs stay under 2 GB, Dropbox stays FREE.

It is only if you need more space that you need to pay. Currently you can buy an additional 50 GB for $99 per year, or 100 GB for $199 per year.

Online File Safety?

One of my first concerns was whether my files would be safe from prying eyes or other types of hackers in my online Dropbox account (Amazon S3 Cloud). I checked into this and came up with the following:

• All files are stored in a strongly-encrypted format and are completely inaccessible without your account password. Not even Dropbox’s own employees can view your files.
• When files move between your online Dropbox account and your computer, they are encrypted and sent over a secure internet connection.
• Only those people who you specifically share files with, can see those files, and only the shared files too.

This made me feel comfortable that my stuff would be safe.

Computer Platforms?

Another great thing about Dropbox is that the software is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. Not many of Dropbox’s competitors can say that!

About a month after I opened my Dropbox account, my desktop computer crashed. I could continue working on my laptop because all my Dropbox files were available there as well, and when I finally got my new desktop, I installed Dropbox and a few minutes later all my files were on my desktop too.

I really like this online backup service and recommend Dropbox to all my friends without any reservations.