John Nasta » Internet

WOT Internet Security And Ratings Utility

John Nasta — Thu, 07 May 2009 20:41:01 +0000

WOT (Web of Trust) is a free Internet security addon for Internet Explorer (PC only) and Firefox (Mac or PC). This utility allows you to rate web sites for trustworthiness and will warn you before you enter an untrustworthy site. The simple setup offers three levels of protection:

Light – Rating icons are shown only for dangerous sites, No pop-ups
Basic (Recommended) – Rating icons shown for all sites, Search Results ratings shown in pop-up window
Child Safety – Blocks access to sites that contain adult language and content, All unrated sites are blocked

Set to Basic default, WOT will warn you if you attempt to connect to any sites that have a poor level of Trustworthiness, Vendor Reliability, or Privacy. A “poor” or “very poor” rating in any area will trigger a warning. When child safety mode is in place, it will also block sites that contain mature or inappropriate content.

Once installed the security levels can be customized or turned off. Settings include the ability to choose whether WOT will give you a warning that lets you choose whether or not to proceed, or block the site completely. The utility also gives you the ability to rate sites that you visit (if you create a user account) as follows:

From mywot.com…

Trustworthiness: Do you trust this website? Is it safe to use? Does it deliver what it promises?

A poor rating may indicate identity theft potential, Internet scams, credit card fraud, phishing, lottery scams, viruses, adware, or spyware.

An unsatisfactory rating indicates that the site may contain annoying advertisements, excessive pop-ups, or content that makes your browser crash.

Vendor reliability: Is the site safe for buying and selling, or for business transactions in general? A poor rating indicates possible fraud or a bad shopping experience.

Privacy: Can you trust the site owner, safely supply your e-mail address, and download files?A poor rating indicates spam, adware, or spyware.

Child safety: Does the site contain age-inappropriate material (content that is sexually oriented, hateful, or violent in nature) or encourage activities that are dangerous or illegal?

How to rate sites:

Use your mouse to move the user rating symbol
By moving the user rating symbol you indicate what you think of the site
Your rating will be saved when you close the rating window or click outside it

WOT generates these statistics based on user feedback:

Confidence: Indicates the amount of supporting evidence.

Scorecard: Shows rating details with comments from users and trusted sources. You may also leave your own comment.

Download it for free at http://www.mywot.com

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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Excluding Your Web Site From Search Engines

John Nasta — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 00:03:12 +0000

People often write about how to increase your search engine ranking by using noindex and nofollow meta tags to avoid indexing of links & pages that lead to duplicate content, and robots.txt files to invite the search engines in, but what if you don’t want your site indexed at all? This is useful for private organizations and anyone who does not want their site indexed for any reason.

Noindex is fairly self explanatory. Simply put, a noindex tag tells the search engines not to index this page.

Nofollow is a similar tag. It tells the search engines not to follow any of the links on the page.

That’s just the beginning…

By adding this code to <head> section of all of your pages:

<meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />

you can tell the search engines not to do either of the above.

You can also create a plain text file called robots.txt containing this code:

User-agent: * Disallow: /

Upload it to the root directory of your site. This will tell all “user agents” (a.k.a. search engines) to disallow indexing of all pages in the root directory as well as any directory within it.

So, what happens if you found this article too late and your site has already been indexed. How can you get it de-listed?

There are two answers…

The first is to upload the robots.txt file as described above. The next time your site is crawled, it will be removed from the index.

If you want your site removed from Google, and you can’t wait until the next time it’s crawled, sumbit a Google Urgent Removal Request. Google says that this process will take 3 to 5 business days.

Is there more to the story? Of course there is!

You can also use this tag in the <head> section of your pages:

<meta name="robots" content="noodp,noydir,noarchive" />

noodp – Prevents all search engines from using the DMOZ description for your site in the search results.

noydir – Prevents Yahoo! from using the Yahoo! directory description for your site in the search results.

noarchive – Prevents sites like archive.org and Google from putting copies of your pages into their archive or cache.

What about WordPress sites? You may have already noticed that you can click Settings > Privacy and choose the “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors” option. This will add noindex and nofollow tags to all of your site’s pages EXCEPT the Login and Forgot Password pages. A nice way to add these tags to those pages is to use the Robots Meta plugin by Joost de Valk. This plugin actually does more than just that. Read the instructions for a better understanding of the plugin’s features.

So, now your site is not being indexed, but people can still link to it from other sites or manually type in the URL. What can you do about that?

WordPress users have the option of marking their pages and posts Private, which means that only those subscribers whose Role allows them to see those pages and posts can access them. There’s also the User Access Manager plugin that allows you to assign which subscribers can read selected pages and/or posts. You can even assign people who are not subscribed and/or logged in by IP address or IP range.

Static sites can be password protected by putting a .htaccess file in the folder. If you don’t know how to create a .htaccess file, most commercial web hosts will do this for you via your Plesk or Control Panel interface.

Who would have thought that there’s as much involved in keeping people out of your site as there is in getting them to find it and come in?

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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Geocaching – Treasure Hunting the Hi-Tech Way

John Nasta — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 21:54:15 +0000

“Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, outdoors and then share your experiences online. Geocaching is enjoyed by people from all age groups, with a strong sense of community and support for the environment.”
(Source: http://www.geocaching.com)

I’ve recently discovered that a friend of mine is on the bleeding edge of the Geocaching craze. We actually talked about it a year and a half ago when we were both judges at a Lego robotics competition, but at the time I had no idea that it would catch on.

Geocaching is going on all over the world and is considered to be good clean fun. Here in America, demonstrations are being given at colleges and universities by adapting the classic “Treasure Hunt” game to utilize GPS devices.

You could easily say that Geocaching is another of those “time wasters” that have cropped up lately, exploring and somewhat exploiting the latest available technologies. This is an indication that there is a demand for inexpensive and no-cost creative and entertainment outlets. Perfectly timed with recent advances in social media and self-publishing this creates a new era of experimentation and opportunities to make a name for oneself as the creator of some social phenomenon. In some cases careers are bourne of it.

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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Facebook Ads using YOUR name & picture – WTF?

John Nasta — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 08:07:41 +0000

Today while logged into Facebook I looked in the upper right coner of my screen, and saw the word Advertisement. Not much of a surprise except for the fact that the ad below had my friend Jessica’s full name and photo, and pointed out that she had recently joined a certain FB group.

I saw her tonight and asked her about it. She didn’t seem to know that her name and photo were being used in ads on Facebook. Strange, right?

So, I looked it up tonight and found that if I go into Privacy > News Feed and Wall, there is a tab called “Social Ads” where you can turn this feature off if you wish.

I always say “Facebook has its merits” but the one thing I wish they would do is provide a comprehensive settings page where you could see and edit all of the privacy settings. It seems like the hardest thing to do on Facebook is prevent it from giving information out, and find the nooks and crannies involved in shutting things off.

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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SEO Google Search Ranking Optimization Tips – Titles and Title Tags

John Nasta — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:51:51 +0000

Here is a Google SEO optimization technique that anyone can employ on just about any web page. In a nutshell, write better titles and title tags.

Static web pages generally have a <title> tag in the <head> section of the document, and in many dynamically generated sites (blogs, ecommerce, etc.) the page’s Title tag is the same as the on-page title of the page, post, product, etc.

Search engines read up to 255 characters of the page title, but they weigh the relevance of those words based on the assumption that the most important word in the title is the very first word, and the importance of each subsequent word drops accordingly.

That’s why the first word of the title of this article is SEO. That is the single term that I thought people who might click on this article might be searching for. It is followed accordingly with what I felt were important keywords, and written in the exact order somebody might type those words (exact matches score higher). It’s no accident that the title of this article reads exactly the way it does. I want people to find it!

The search engines will also rank your site more favorably if your meta tags (keywords, description, title, etc.) are different for every page and tailored to the content of the page. Very common mistakes include giving every page the same title, no title, or having the first handful of words of every title the same.

Also, bear in mind that if you use a plural or longer form of a word, it will come up in search results for shorter forms of the word (e.g. use Lawyers instead of Law, etc.).

So, if you are a lawyer named John Smith who specializes in divorces and custody matters, you might want to have a page with a title like “Divorces Child Custody Family Lawyers Attorneys John Smith” rather than “John Smith Attorney at Law specializes in civil matters including divorce and child custody” because you want the most important buzz words, especially those that differentiate that page from the other pages on your site, at the front of your title.

Keywords and Descriptions also come into play and I will discuss those separately, but as you can see SEO begins when you write the first piece of content for your web site.

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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SEO – Avoiding Duplicates with Canonical URL Tags

John Nasta — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:04:26 +0000

You may have seen my article about the Ultimate Noindex Nofollow tool for WordPress, but avoiding duplicate content can help the search engine ranking of any web site, including static sites.

Recently, Yahoo!, Live, and Google all agreed to support Canonical URL Tags. You put a line of code into the head section of your document like the one below:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.johnnasta.com/blog" />

This tells the search engines that this page URL should be regarded as a copy of johnnasta.com/blog and that any link or content metrics should be applied to that URL.

When your site contains multiple URLs to the same content (for example blogs and ecommerce platforms can contain links to the same articles or products via the home page, category pages, search results, etc. each creating its own path to the same article or product), your search ranking suffers. The search engines don’t know which ones to index or rank, and your metrics get spread out over all the streams instead of always pointing to the ultimate URL of the individual piece of content.

Examples of links that might point to the same content are:

http://johnnasta.com/blog/?category=1

and

http://johnnasta.com/blog

This happens because this article currently appears on both my home page as well as the page for the category that the post is assigned to, but the “real” URL to this post that I actually want Google to index is (currently):

http://johnnasta.com/blog/?p=296

(yeah, I know I haven’t dressed up my permalinks yet – one thing at a time)

Makes sense?

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The biggest web site mistake

John Nasta — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 07:15:54 +0000

Not long ago a client asked me what was the biggest mistake people make when setting up a blog. At the time I didn’t really have an answer, but having thought about it, the answer is true for any web site.

The one mistake I have seen clients make repeatedly is not having a plan for their site’s content. Many rush to write something because now they are paying someone, so they “have to”. Some put up blogs and then do not follow up by adding content to them on a regular basis. Some create multi-level site architecture maps and then realize that they have no idea what they want all of those pages to say.

If you really want a great web site, work out a plan in advance. Know what you want the names of the pages to be and have content prepared for those pages. If you are planning to put up a blog and you feel that the posting aspect is what you want to promote, then make sure you have an idea for at least one post and then add posts regularly. Also consider changing your blog’s theme once in a while. It’s easy and it’s fun.

Like the Boy Scouts say “be prepared”.

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Google Webmaster Tools

John Nasta — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:27:46 +0000

If you have any sort of web site at all, you need to create a Google Webmaster Tools account at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

This is where you can verify and submit your site to Google, and get all sorts of information about your site, as well as participate in advertising & keyword programs, and (if necessary) get your site off of the dreaded Reported Attack Sites list.

What is that? Somehow hackers can attach code to sites to make them distribute malware. If Google scans your site and finds that it is infected with malware, users will see a warning screen advising them not to visit your site. The only way to fix it is to clean up the code and submit a request to Google to re-scan your site. In order to do that, you need a Google Webmaster Tools account, your site needs to be verified, and most importantly you need to have a clean backup of your site so that you can delete and restore it.

It’s free to sign up.

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Avoiding Spammers and Scammers

John Nasta — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:34:19 +0000

Recently, a friend of my mother’s had her identity hijacked when someone sent an email claiming to be from her to everyone in her address book. The email said that she was stuck at a hotel because her credit card had been declined and that she needed money to be sent to her.

She was sure that someone had hacked into her computer. She asked me how that could be possible. I asked her to consider the fact that she is (or was) one of those people who loves to pass emails along because they are entertaining or interesting, and leaves all of the names and addresses of her friends and everyone who forwarded the message before her displayed. So, how did they get her information? She probably sent it to them!

Spammers and scammers know that at the tops of these messages there are long lists of valid email addresses and they can use that information to try to trick you or send you junk mail.

Be careful about putting your information out there. If someone requests money from you, make sure you have spoken to them in person about it.

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First Steps – Registering your domain name & choosing a host

John Nasta — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 22:19:38 +0000

Twice in the past week clients have gone ahead and registered their domain name and chose a host prior to hiring me, then realized that they are not happy with the choices they made. In both cases they registered their domain name with the same company that they chose as a host. Also in both cases, what they were primarily dissatisfied with was the hosting service.

This can be problematic because ICANN has a restriction that prevents you from moving a domain name within 60 days. So, if you make an uninformed decision, you may be stuck with it for that length of time, and you will more than likely lose any money that you spent on those services.

In one case I have a client whose new web site is finished, but we are having trouble changing the DNS to point to it. In the meantime he is stuck with a template-based site that he is not happy with, and he will lose the money that he spent on the domain name registration and a year’s worth of hosting. All of this could have been avoided.

In the second case, the client is paying double the price for hosting, and has already paid for one year of service and will now have to pay to have the site moved, and has to weigh whether or not it is even worth it at this point.

The moral of the story is: Even if you are only thinking about putting up a web site, it is worth your while to talk with one or two experienced professionals. You more than likely won’t be charged for such simple information. Hopefully you will find a better deal than you would have found on your own. Most importantly you won’t find yourself losing time and money due to an uninformed decision.

My advice is to register your domain name and hosting with separate companies. Then if you are not happy with the service of one company you won’t run into as much trouble trying to change it. I use GoDaddy for domain name registration and Lunarpages for hosting, and my clients are always happy.

Caveat emptor!

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Avoiding Spammers and Scammers Recently, a friend of my mother’s had her identity hijacked when someone sent an email...