Cyberwarfare has started but not between countries.

Everyone seems to be missing the really interesting aspects of the Google-China events this week.

Most of the emphasis has been on the idea that Google is going to leave China. While Google does state that they may end up closing shop in China, that is not the whole story. It is not even the most interesting part of what is going on here.

First, what happened in this cyber attack?

Google fights back - threatens to use truth

Well according to Google, source in China attacked their computer system and stole intellectual property. In studying the attack, Google discovered that it really seemed to be aimed at getting information from the accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

“Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.” -Official Google Blog

Google also discovered that the Chinese attackers targeted at least 20 other companies.

While I haven’t seen any news about the other companies, there has been some new released by Google on the attack of their system. While some of their intellectual property was stolen (look for it to show up on Baidu the Chinese government run search engine) Google claims that Google app and their cloud was secure. They have also discovered Gmail accounts of the Chinese human rights activists have been accessed by a third party. Google Enterprise Blog

Google’s response has impressed me.

They have decided they will not have a censored search engine in China. Either there will have to be way for it to me uncensored or they will leave. This is where I think everyone misses the point.

It’s not that Google is leaving China.

They are telling the Chinese government “no more”. It remains to be seen how this is going to go. Will China let Google go uncensored? Will Google just leave? Will Google just decide to let things keep running after they leave and turn the censor off? Google is standing up to the communist government.

Who has the power in Cyberwar?

While it may be possible for a government to turn off the internet in their country, a running search engine could really make a difference. Imagine, if during the recent demonstrations in Iran, a running search engine turned all searches into results that aided the opposition. Will the internet works, and the search engine is running, the outcome could be changed if the search engine took sides (and probably even if it remained neutral-truth is the enemy of despotism).

But Google has shown a bit more this time than just it’s ability to search the web and return results.

They even admit that they are letting a bit more information out this time than normal. They know where the attack came from. They know what the attack was targeting. They know who they are blaming. They aren’t insinuating anything. They are telling the world who did it and why. Google is ticked off.

For those who have any doubt left, Google knows what is happening on the internet.

Google has so many bots and so much code, that there is not much that can happen without them knowing about it. They know where the traffic is coming from. They know where the traffic is going to. Google’s move into DNS hosting only further strengthens that knowledge. You really don’t want to be cheating on your Adsense ads. They will catch you.

For the first time, I am glad to see Google using that knowledge.

They exposed an attack by the Chinese government on computers in other countries. An attack that threatens your privacy as well. They attacked companies (including Google) that you may have accounts with.

It’s a cyberwar.

It’s not between countries. It’s between countries and companies. Right now, between Google and China.

Why does the title of this post include Adobe?

Near the beginning of December, a zero day exploit was announced in Adobe PDF products. This means that the exploit was already being used. Adobe decided to wait about a month before releasing a fix. Now, to me, you would have to be an idiot to allow an exploit in your software to go on for a month. That, or you have a reason for that exploit to exist for a full month damaging your customers computers and your reputation. At the moment, I’m leaning towards idiot, but…

The Adobe PDF exploit was used in some way with the Google attacks.

Did whoever make the decision at Adobe want to wait till these attacks were finished? What were they thinking? Were they taking advice from the Chinese government -maybe promised some advantage in China in return? It makes you wonder.

Have you updated Adobe PDF products on your computer yet?

Are you aiding the communists? It does not matter what operating system you use, make sure you have updated it (version 9.3 of Adobe reader was released 1-12-10). Do it now and make sure you are completely updated (I’ve had problems with versions 8 and earlier not wanting to update all the way).

I have just one more question about this whole attack. I think it is kinda cool. It really proves my point about Google knowing what goes on in the Internet. Maybe they should start a network security service.

How did Google know that 20 other companies were attacked? And before they knew.

The power in cyberwarfare has shifted.

Google recently annouced an improved AdSense for search.

After reading it on the AdSense blog I went and checked it out in my AdSense account. You have a had time believing this is not Photoshopped. It is a screen capture I made when it happened.

It is nice to know even someone that defines quality websites like Google can have problems too.

I’m not sure why the sample was messed up. Could it have been a browser glitch? I was using FireFox. Was Google’s CSS messed up?

I know the improvement was in the way Search works not the look.

I still think it was pretty funny. Anyone else notice this happen when they announced it a while ago? I am sure it is fixed by now.

The is a WordPress feature that, used wrong, will seriously slow down the initial crawing of your new blog by Google.

Make sure you get it right.

Getting your site crawled and index by search engines is important.

You want that Googlebot crawling your site and indexing as soon as possible. The sooner a page is indexed, the sooner you can start improving rankings. You won’t show up anywhere if you haven’t been crawled by the search engine bots.

You also do not want to be crawled till the blog is ready.

When you first install WordPress, there are some test pages that you do not want crawled. If they are indexed, Google will not have a correct record of your blog. If your blog is about Pez despensers, you do not want Google thinking the subject of your post is “Hello World” and your blog is “Just another WordPress blog.” You need to have those posts and settings changed before Googlebot crawls.

When you first install WordPress and log in, you are given the option to block search engines.

You will still allow other visitors, just not the search engine bots. This is probably a good idea till you fix the blog title, tagline, and get a real post on the site. Once ready, you can allow the bots back by changing the privacy settings.

The mistake that could cost you time in indexing is not changing the privacy settings back soon enough.

One of the first steps to help indexing is submitting a sitemap to Google and Google Webmaster Central. Doing this will usually speed up indexing.

If you do not allow search engine bots to crawl first, Googlebot will not download your sitemap.

The “block search engine bots” option creates a robots.txt file that block the bots. Google will see this and tell you it cannot find the sitemap.

It could take an extra day before Google will try to read your sitemap a second time. Then it will then take additional time before the Googlebot comes back to crawl your blog.

The same thing can happen if you get links to your blog before you unblock the search engine bots.

The will follow the link to your site. The bot will see the robots.txt file and not crawl and index. It may also take a longer time to return to recrawl your site.

Should you use the option at all?

I think so. It does not help you if Google crawls and gets the wrong information about your blog. It will take time for Google to update that information and fix it as well. Additonally, if your like me, you probably will be changing many posts and pages as you make the initial design and posts on your blog. This will cause excessive pinging. That can get your blog blocked as spam. The privacy setting stops the pinging while you make these changes.

It is important to change the setting before you start to get links or submit your site to Google Webmaster Central.

You would be better off waiting a day or two than making the submission before you change the privacy setting. It will cost you that much time.

Make sure you also get links to your blog.

This is one of the best ways speed up crawling and indexing. Blogging Zoom is one aid that you can use. Getting links and commenting on other blogs is another.*Update-Blogging Zoom is dead while the domain is still in use.*

Just make sure Googlebot and the other search engine bots can crawl your blog once they see the link to it first.

Choose the right domain name for your online business!

How do you know you have chosen the right domain name for your blog or website?

There are a few good rules you should always follow. There are also lots of examples of successful blogs or websites that break those rules. Still, following the rules will help make things easier for you to get your site to rank well in the search engines. Keep in mind that even when I give examples of rule breaking domains, these are the exceptions and you will be better off following the rules.

Let’s get started.

Always, always get a .com domain!

This is probably the single most important rule I can think of. Chances are, if you try to work on a non .com domain, all you are doing is advertising for the owner of the .com. You may be tempted to save money with a .info (I was) but after talking to those who have done some research, .info’s seem to rank lower in the SE’s (search engines) than .com’s.

Darren at problogger.net spent years trying to get the .com domain for Problogger. Now that he finally has it, it is not easy to switch the domain over to the .com without taking a hit from the search engines. At least now Darren can redirect the traffic from the .com that he was losing back to his original domain.

An example of another successful non .com domain would be del.icio.us.

del.icio.us is a popular social bookmarking site. Probably one of the few well known .us domains. Of course, if you have the option of a .edu or .gov domain those might make an exception, but most people will automatically put a .com on the end of a domain if they try to type it in. Avoid the chance and stick with a .com over any local or other type of domain.

Try to have a niche related keyword in the domain.

While not as important to SEO anymore, it may still help you rank a bit better if you have a popular keyword for your niche in your title. Also, Google bold faces the keyword if it is in the domain. Also, when someone sees the keyword in the domain itself, they know that site is likely to be about the subject they are searching for. Every little bit helps.

Keep is short and simple.

Shorter will be easier to remember, write down, and spell. Avoid too many words. Avoid words that are easy to misspell. We all want success, but can everyone spell it? Is that with one or two C’s and S’s?

Check your spelling.

I remember a demonstration video where the author did a search for possible domains and purchased a domain before realizing it was misspelled. Double check your spelling before you click the purchase button (triple check if you spell like me). Google is a play on the word googol. Sometimes spelling may not be that important.

Don’t use hyphens or dashes.

These are nearly impossible to tell someone unless they read the domain name. Maybe you will run a radio advertisement or be on a podcast someday. It is really inconvenient to explain dashes by voice. While the dashes or hyphens can make it easier to read the domain in a listing, you are better off just avoiding them.

Avoid trademarked names in your domain.

Even if you are planning to do an affiliate program for a company, avoid using and trademarked names in your domain. Nearly all affiliates will have a list of words that you cannot use in a domain if you wish to advertise their product. Even if you do get permission from someone at the company remember the person that replaces him or her may not feel the same. Don’t become lawyer bait. Find a related generic term. That way if the Zune never takes off your mp3 player site can still talk about iPods.

Avoid using free domain name search tools.

More than once I have read complaints from someone who used one of these services only to find that the domain names they checked were suddenly taken. I understand that there are some sites that apparently use the searches people do to find potential domains to purchase for themselves. Stick with the domain search tools provided by your registrar.

If you have the time and money, a used domain can have advantages.

A domain that has already been used can give your site or blog some advantages from the start. It may already have some page rank associated with it. It may have links pointing to it. It may still have some traffic coming to it. This can help your site hit the ground already running. It could also have been banned or delisted considered spam or associated with bad subject material that will prevent the domain from becoming successful at any level. If you go this route, be careful and check everything you can about the domain first.

Stick with well-known reliable domain registrars.

It will do you no good to save a few dollars on your domain if you cannot renew it because the registrar is messed up. This has happened to me. I also know someone who lost hundreds of domains and thousands of dollars in monthly income after a registrar failed to renew domains that he had renewed.

There are 3 registrars that I trust.

GoDaddy.com , eNom, and NameCheap. GoDaddy is the best known. Avoid purchasing anything other than the domain and whois protection. They will try to sell you everything under the sun. Also, I rarely hear good things about their hosting. I find eNom expensive. I do recommend NameCheap. They have been reliable and very affordable. The GoDaddy link is an affiliate link. This site is registered with GoDaddy, I have one or two with eNom and the rest are now with NameCheap. Personally, I find NameCheap to be much easier to buy from than GoDaddy.

The most important rule is to get your own domain.

Any domain is better than no domain. Use your name (unless your last name is difficult to spell like mine). If you are putting your traditional business online, using the company’s name would be good, or using part of the company’s name.

There are lots of examples of very successful blogs and sites that do not necessarily follow the rules I have given. Many popular blogs are on domain names of the author’s name. There is whatever.com that has become a million dollar business for a teenage girl. However, these recommendations should help your site get more traffic from the SE’s.

Several days ago I started using post excerpts on the main page of this blog.

There are several reason for using post excerpts on the front page of your blog. Once before, I started to use post excerpts before and stopped. I am convinced that it is probably best to use them for SEO. There are other reasons for using them and at least one for not using them.

The main SEO (Search Engine Optimization) reason for using post excerpts is to avoid duplicate content on your blog.

When you make a post without using excerpts, the exact text is duplicated not only on the page for the post itself, but also on the main page and its archive. The search engines can see this as duplicate content. This can cause problems for your post to rank well for its keywords. The ranking can sort of get split between the different pages. This can be made worse if your blog also shows full posts on category and tag pages also. In most cases, your main page will outrank the post in WordPress because PR is focused toward your home page.

Ever do a search and find nothing about the subject on the main page of the blog you were sent to?

Very likely, the home page of the blog had the post on it when the search engine bots went through it. After the post moved off the home page, it was still not ranking for the keyword as well as the home page.

The duplicate penalty can cause a page on a site to be placed in the supplemental index.

Even on a single site. One thing that I have seen trigger this is duplicate meta tags for description and keywords. While I am not sure this is still something that will still show as much, but I had this happen on a web site where I had copied a page as a template and changed the content. I forgot to change the meta tags and title. Even though the content was completely different, the page showed supplemental.

A second reason for using post excerpts is to keep the main page of the blog from getting too long.

if you have the occasional long post, your home page can get very long with just 3-4 posts. When I go to a blog, I not only read the content, I look at the sidebars and other parts of the page. Are there other posts that look interesting. Who’s commenting. Who is visiting. I admit, I like eye candy. Also, many blogs are now putting more information in the footer. Fine, but if you have long posts most likely your sidbars end long before the bottom and readers there may not know there is anything more to look for at the bottom. If your sidebars are that long, then you have the opposite problem. The content ends the reader may stop scrolling down and again never see the footer.

You will notice I have a Blog Catalog widget in my footer. I want people to see it, I just did not want to increase the length of the sidebar by placing it there. I think it works well horizontally and I have placed MyBlogLog in this position on my photography site. My goal is to keep the sidbars about the same length as my average post. Keeping the home page close to this help make that easier.

A third reason is it helps the home page of the blog load faster.

Graphics are great, but they can slow a page. I find video seems to be especially likely to slow page loads. The more you have, the more likely you are to see an item that takes long or fails to load. Keeping those to a minimum on the main page does wonders.

My fourth reason is to show more posts on the home page.

Using excerpts and limiting other things, it is possible to show 10 or more posts on the home page with few problems. A visitor can see quickly what topics are being covered on the blog with out have to scroll and scroll and scroll to find a post that might interest them. While I don’t usually have this problem, if you post very often, having more posts on the home page gives readers a better chance to see your all your posts before they disappear off the main page.

Why not use post excerpts?

Well, there is the concern that some readers might not not like it.

This is an important concern. Does it matter to a reader if the post is on its own page instead of with a bunch of others?

I actually don’t see the main page of most of the blogs I usually read. I subscribe to the feed of any blog I regularly visit and then click through the feed to read the post nearly always (it’s something about the look of a blog that makes me do this, occasionally I skip it but I usually click through and read on the blog even with full feeds). I find using a reader simply the best way to keep track of what I want to read and when. I may be in the minority, but I suspect more and more people will be using readers. This also meant I had to go see what the main page of many of the blogs I read looked like as I made my decision.

I found use of post excepts to be a bit random on the blogs I read.

Some SEO blogs use excerpts, some do not. Some non-SEO blog use excepts while many do not, even with make money online blogs. I would think that most of us should really know better by now and use of excepts would be more common in the niche. I was a bit interesting to see that Gary Conn just switched back to using post excerpts and posted about it today. I wonder if it is a good sign that I am thinking the same way he is.

A second reason for not using excerpts is that it can cause excerpts in your feed.

This depends on how you use excerpts on your blog. There are two different ways of doing it.

My next post will discuss the different ways of making post excerpts and the advantages and disadvantages I saw as I decided what I think would be the best way create post excerpts.

I am bringing AdSense back to this blog.

Most readers should never see them!

One of the many features of the Semiologic Pro theme is that is comes with the Who Sees Ads plugin built in. I am setting it up so AdSense only shows for readers who come from search engines. I’ll first show you a bit about the Who Sees Ads pluging then I will explain why, after no AdSense ads for over a year, I would bring them back.

Here is a screenshot of the Who Sees Ads plugin in the Semiologic theme.

The Who Sees Ads plugin allows you to control when an ad shows and who it shows to.

You can set an ad to show to a reader only the first time they visit or show for a particular number of times a visitor visits and then not again. The plugin allows you to have an ad not show until a post is older.

One other feature of the Semiologic Pro theme is that nearly everything on the blog is widgetized.

This makes arranging just about everything related to your blog as easy as arranging the widgets in your sidebar. It’s pretty cool.

Here is a screenshot of the widget admin screen in Semiologic Pro

Now, about the return of AdSense.

First, I do not feel that AdSense is something that would be appropriate for most of my readers. Let’s face it, most bloggers that would regularly read this blog avoid clicking AdSense ads out of habit. Also, for social network visitors, an AdSense block right at the top is a bit of a turn off.

AdSense does have an advantage for search engine visitors.

Often, a vistor from a search engine is looking for something related to what is on a page, but the information is not quite what they are looking for. These are the types of vistors that AdSense is good for. AdSense will serve up ads related to the post that may be closer to what the visitor is really looking for. I have posts that get search engine traffic that is probably not related to the main theme of this blog (making money, in case it is not too obvious). The normal ads that I have on this blog are not related to many of the searches that I get.

I am hoping that AdSense will monetize some of this traffic.

Otherwise, it is wasted traffic. At the same time, I want to keep the number of ads for my regular readers to a minimum. I also like to keep some control over ads to regular readers since there is an implied endorsment since they are on my site.

So, if you are a regular reader, no AdSense for you.