Now, I’d love to hear the ways that Google programmatically determines the intent of a webmaster, excluding those with obviously “sneaky” intentions, however I’ve not been able to find an official answer (it’s not something they’re going to tell us I imagine). The big concern on the webmaster’s end is whether or not their “white hat” implementations of hidden text are going to trip the filters. It’s a damn good concern. However, there is some comfort in knowing that Google’s (un?)official stance on hidden text is:

“there are more ways of hiding text than there are flavors of ice cream at Baskin Robbins. What matters to Google is not the way in which you are hiding text, but (1) the text you are hiding and (2) the reason you are hiding it.” - “Bergy” Berghausen

However, if you read the “official” official statement on hidden text from Google, it does not allude to this as clearly as Bergy does. Here’s where you have to read between the lines:

“If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.”

To me that means the same thing that Bergy meant by what he said. In summary, they’re simply saying to make sure Google see what the user sees. That means things like display:none, visibility: hidden, and z-index: -1000px are OK as long as two things are true. 1) The users can (or will in the case of a drop-down menu for example) see what you are “hiding” and, 2) Google does not programmatically misinterpret your intent and remove your site for up to “30 days” causing you to go through the “Reconsideration Request” process to prove your non-”evil”ness. Regarding number two, a very concise but extremely sound piece of advice came from Webado on the Google Webmaster Help group earlier this year:

“Just ebcause you find your own navigation OK, by clicking a link here
and a link there, doesn’t mean a robot has the same experience.”

That makes number two a little more interesting doesn’t it? And I’ll let Christina throw you another big mozza ball to chew on…

“Intent is not quite so easy to judge programmatically. You may want to
ponder that some more.”

So, even though you have good intentions, you are still at risk BUT you have recourse. In summary, hide away but make sure you know how to see exactly what Google sees and how to file a Reconsideration Request before implementing anything. And also be prepared to wait up to 30 days before showing up in Google again should you ever get nailed by the filters.

Post from: AMNET SEO Blog at adammoro.net.

Post from: AMNET SEO Blog at adammoro.net.

Post from: AMNET SEO Blog at adammoro.net.

Post from: AMNET SEO Blog at adammoro.net.

First stop was Google Translate to find out how many different languages I had available to use with the script. Next stop was FamFamFam to get those pretty little flag icons. And finally, the editor. Using the almighty libcurl and PCRE libraries, I wrote a very basic script that grabs the translated text from Google and places it right back on your page (and without anything from Google but the text!). Now that I had a working, but clearly immature, script I wanted to make sure I didn’t do anything right from the start that would put its users at risk. Being a member of Quadszilla’s forum clearly has its benefits but there’s one benefit I would say justifies the $100/mo bill alone. An example of this would be what happened the other day when I PM’d RSnake from Ha.ckers.org (yep, he’s one of the moderators :)) and asked him what it would cost for him to look at the script from an XSS standpoint. Next thing I knew, I had a hardened script (and the confidence of knowing the guy who wrote the book on XSS said he “didn’t find a single hole.”) Once the script is complete (well, ready to release), the next stop will certainly be SecTheory - Internet Security to get a quote. Thanks again, RSnake!

Rewriting the URLs proved to be too difficult for my futile Apache modrewrite skills so next stop was oDesk. Let me just say, I don’t think I could have ever lucked out as much as I did with the developer I hired. His name is Vadim Zanfirov and he..is..the..MAN! If you’ve never outsourced your development and are wondering if it really can be as good as some people say, I can’t give you a better recommendation than to contact Vadim. You can hire him through his oDesk page and he’ll get back to you very shortly afterwards. Then he’ll get on Instant Messenger with you and work on the job while answering your questions (I’m probably a developer’s nightmare with all the questions I ask). I’m sure by now you can tell how impressed I was with Vadim (this is the least I could do for someone who continued to work on the script to change something I failed to mention in the job description and do so AFTER I had already closed the assignment and paid the bill) so I’ll stop now but seriously, check him out if you’re in need of a great (and affordable) PHP developer. He has many other skills as well including: MYSQL, HTML, JavaScript, AJAX, Smarty, Joomla, and yes, he can even be your Drupal developer.

So now I have a working version of the script that’s both search friendly (oh yeah, did I mention the generated pages are also valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional?) and safe from XSS attacks. The cost for me to do all of this? $59.24 (notice the price? $59.24-$11.11 = a $48.13 tip).

Well, I’m off to work on this thing some more and hopefully get it out next month sometime. If anyone’s interested in beta testing (that means you get a free copy of the script to use on your website…I’ll help you install it if you need me to), drop a comment here or shoot me a tweet/im/email/whatever.

Post from: AMNET SEO Blog at adammoro.net.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=T&ct=res&cd=6&url=http%3A%2F%2Fadammoro.net%2F&ei=nBRSSIaoFoHysAOdj6yFDw

HTTP/1.x 204 No Content
Cache-Control: private
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 06:34:12 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Server: gws
Content-Length: 0
———————————————————-

I posted a thread at the Google Webmaster Help Group but I’m still waiting for a response from Google. It was only today that I posted it so it may not have a response yet.

Post from: AMNET SEO Blog at adammoro.net.

Referer (and UA) Cloaking: Two scripts. One for cloaking only to search engine visitors and one for cloaking to both search engines and search engine visitors.

I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on the “Million Dollar Question to Google”…

Post from: AMNET SEO Blog at adammoro.net.

UPDATE 1: The experiment page was indexed by Google 21 hours ago (well, that’s what Google says even though you know that’s not true if you’ve been following this post. Well, maybe it is true. Maybe they just don’t display the page in search results for some time after they index it…hmmm, another experiment?). Anyway, I said I’d update you as soon as the experiment page is indexed so here’s the update. The page is indexed in Google (no Yahoo or Live yet…what a shocker). I’ll be back to update this post and the experiment page once I have something to report.

Just added a new SEO experiment to the SEO section that is essentially testing for potential penalties incurred from Referer cloaking. Check it out here:

Does referer cloaking catch you penalties?

Post from: AMNET SEO Blog at adammoro.net.

• Remember what I was doing before and after the search
• Remember what I was thinking about before and after I did the search
• Remember what I was wanting to achieve with the search.
• Remember what keywords I used for the search and which ones I was going to use next.
• Get busy.

Moral of the story is that you can learn a lot about the online buying process just by paying attention to what you do before, while, and after you buy something online. Who’d a thunk? It’s not news to the experienced but I felt like writing today.

Ok next order of business. I think I might have found my favorite editor since Notepad2. Although I still use Notepad2 (it’s still serves a purpose for me as I often “quick launch” (I have it in my Windows Quick Launch toolbar) it to dump my clipboard and see what’s what…with syntax highlighting :)), Rapid PHP is likely what I’ll be using for PHP development from now on (assuming nothing goes wrong of course…i just got it yesterday). Here are some of the features I’m really digging:

Preview Tab: Write some PHP, hit “Preview”, and see. If you’re on the LAMP/WAMP stack you already know that PHP files need to be in the HTDOCS/WWW to work/be viewed/be executed (unless you make some adjustments that I have no idea how to make…maybe a future post). When you install Rapid PHP, it asks you to locate your php.exe file and HTDOCS/WWW directory so it (as I can only assume) can make “those adjustments” I mentioned for you. In other words, you can simply Preview your PHP code/files no matter where they’re located on your drive. Like I said, there are other ways you can accomplish this I’m sure..I just don’t know how to do them yet so this is working just fine for me. Additonally, Rapid is not the only PHP editor that does this, I guess I just like Rapid’s interface more than those of Zend, Komodo, and friends.

Syntax Checker: Well this blew my mind. I’m sure it’s available in all of the other PHP editors I’ve used but for some reason, it always went missed. All I can say is that this makes life a heck of a lot easier. Essentially, it’s like spell checking for your syntax. When you have an error in your PHP, the tag that contains the error is highlighted in a pinkish red color and when hovered, pops up the error message from PHP. B-e-a-utiful.

FTP: Works pretty well from what I can tell so far. I’ll update if anything changes on that front. In any case, FTP always seems to be a problem with ALL of the editors I like so this is a big deal to me.

The Price: It’s like $39.98 or something for the app (yeah). Just go check out some of the prices of other PHP editors like Zend and Komodo and you’ll know why this is one of my favorite features of Rapid PHP 2008.

Post from: AMNET SEO Blog at adammoro.net.

“Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.”

A little while back I posted a page in the JavaScript section to demonstrate something a group of my friends and I named DLjax (nothing to do with AJAX), a search engine friendly implementation of JavaScript. Shortly after I learned how easy it is to install Lynx on Ubuntu I came across the page on DLjax and thought I’d give it a try with Lynx. I’m still primarily on Windows so whenever I need to use Linux I either fire up a VMware machine or get off my lazy butt and go to my desk where I have more options. Well, that day I was feeling especially lazy so I decided to go the VMware route but unfortunately had forgotten I deleted all of my vmware machines the night before due to a common case of paranoia. So, when I was about to give up save this one for later I saw the cool little PuTTY icon on my desktop and thought why not? Here’s the general howto:

1. Download/install PuTTY and login to your server. If you’re unsure of which one to get, I would suggest using the Windows Installer to make things easy on yourself. Once you’ve installed PuTTY, you can use it to login to your server and access it from its command line interface. Essentially what you’ll need here is the IP address of your server and the port it uses for SSH. Typically it’s port 22 but you can contact your hosting company if that doesn’t work..

2. When you see something like this: [username@hostname ~]$, type lynx, and hit enter.

Post from: AMNET SEO Blog at adammoro.net.