There have been recent changes with Google AdWords that effects many customers by increasing there bid amounts on a certain keywords. These changes accord when Google changed its algorithm last month.

Advertisers who were paying 5 cents are now paying 50 cents or even more to keep their positions, others are paying the same amount but their places changes two or three pages back.

However, this have not been effected all advertisers as some stay not effected.

This summarise the type of site that have been affected.

• One page sales letter websites.
• Squeeze pages.
• AdSense sites (particularly those involved in AdSense arbitrage).
• Affiliate sites.

The algorithm gives a quality score to the landing page of AdWords.
Here are 3 general methods that will help advertisers who have been affected by the recent updates.

1. Provide quality unique content.
2. Put your AdWord link on the best page that describes your products.
3. Make links from other page of your website to the AdWord page so its not look like a one page website.

Also you got to remove all AdSense ads from the AdWord landing page and make sure that it contain more than 500 words and there is no form to fill in.
As you can see Google is getting smarter everyday so must not trick the search engines but to have truly valuable info to our visitors.

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Today, I recieved an email from my server notifying me that someone was actually trying to brute-force into the server so I thought I’d make a tutorial how to protect yourself or your server.

First, you’ll need APF to be installed, I’m not going to go in details on how to setup the firewall, but you’ll simply need it install so that BFD (brute force detector) can block the IP from trying to “brute force”.

Installing APF
cd ~
wget http://www.rfxnetworks.com/downloads/apf-current.tar.gz
tar -xvzf apf-current.tar.gz
rm -f apf-current.tar.gz
cd apf-*
sudo sh install.sh

Installing BFD
cd ~
wget http://www.rfxnetworks.com/downloads/bfd-current.tar.gz
tar -xvzf bfd-current.tar.gz
rm -f bfd-current.tar.gz
cd bfd-*
sudo sh install.sh

Configuring BFD
Use your favorite text editor (I prefer nano) to edit the configuration file, /usr/local/bfd/conf.bfd

Find
ALERT_USR="0"
and replace it with
ALERT_USR="1"

Find
EMAIL_USR="root"
and replace it with
ALERT_USR="your.email@webserver.com"

Save your modifications and exit your editor, start BFD using the line
/usr/local/sbin/bfd -s

Now, whenever BFD will detect a bruteforce, it will email you at the email set above & BFD will run the command /etc/apf/apf -d the.attackers.ip

The emails you will usually recieve look like this:

Jul 29 08:22:40 yourhostname sshd[21642]: Invalid user manfred from the.attackers.ip
Jul 29 08:22:40 yourhostname sshd[21643]: Invalid user michi from the.attackers.ip
Jul 29 08:22:42 yourhostname sshd[21642]: Failed password for invalid user manfred from the.attackers.ip port 48215 ssh2
Jul 29 08:22:42 yourhostname sshd[21643]: Failed password for invalid user michi from the.attackers.ip port 48223 ssh2
Jul 29 08:22:44 yourhostname sshd[21646]: Invalid user michi from the.attackers.ip
Jul 29 08:22:47 yourhostname sshd[21646]: Failed password for invalid user michi from the.attackers.ip port 48322 ssh2
Jul 29 08:22:47 yourhostname sshd[21647]: Failed password for postgres from the.attackers.ip port 48329 ssh2

Oh, and one thing I have done after I recieved the attack, I immeditaly changed the default SSH port. Use your favorite text editor (nano again!) to edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Find
#Port 22
And uncomment the line (Remove the #) and replace the 22 by the port you want SSH to use (Max. port number is 49151 so make sure you don’t put anything past that. Afterwards, restart SSH. Usually on CentOS it is service sshd restart and in other operating systems, it is /etc/rc.d/init.d/sshd restart

After getting attacked, I did a WHOIS on the IP (Run whois the.attackers.ip). You’ll usually see one of the emails something like abuse@somedomain.com.

Make sure to send them an email including the logs from the email, your server IP and the attackers IP.

Thanks alot for reading

Google recently made many changes to its search engine algorithm. These changes will surely affect your website ranking, so I want to take the time to show webmasters an overview of these changes.

Google was crawl and indexing pages on monthly bases, which means we see changes in ranking monthly. But now this is done continuously one daily bases, which means your ranking can change from day to day but you can see bigger changes when Google change its algorithm.

Last month there was a big change within the Google algorithm, if your website ranking was hurt because of these changes then you should update your website and make it follow the new guidelines for a better ranking.

1. Create a better linking campaign: By RSS feeds, article syndication and submitting to directories and press release.
2. Google sitemap: create a sitemap is vital to increase the pages that indexed by Google.
3. Navigation system: make sure all of your pages are reachable from at least one static link.
4. Manipulative or deceptive behaviour: Never link to linking schemes, don’t use any form of cloaking and never use hidden links or hidden text.

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So your website is new and you need traffic, right. Most of you concentrate on search engine optimization which means months to wait, while you can get immediate traffic and help your site ranking better by using other methods of traffic generation. I’ll show you five free methods to get immediate quality traffic to your website.

Write Articles
Find a good one or two topics that match your site subject and write articles about them, you don’t need to be professional writer to do this, invest some time to collect your article information and write it, simply you must have value in your topic that people like to read about

Now you have an article so you need the whole world to know about. Start submitting your article to article directories, Ezine and all publication in your industry like news sites, blogs and email newsletters. They will be happy to link on your site to give a quality value to their readers.

Use Social Bookmarking
There are highly visited social bookmarking websites like StumbleUpon, Furl and del.icio.us where vistors bookmark websites they like. All you need is an account and start to bookmark your site pages like blog pages and your articles pages. The power of these sites is that other people will bookmark your site and the more bookmarks the more traffic and very soon you will see your website link on sites that have thousand of visitors.

Participate In Social Networks
Write your profile on social networks like Ryze, LinkedIn and MySpace and communicate with other members can do magic for your business. These networks can give a lot of traffic to your website

Creating a profile and interacting with other users on social networks like, , can do wonders for your business. LinkedIn and Ryze are great for connecting with other business owners, but MySpace presents the largest opportunity to drive a substantial amount of traffic to your site.

The key to success in these networks is to keep your friends visiting your profile by giving them quality topics that interest them.

Participate In Forums
Whatever topic you have there are a lot of popular forums for it, to succeed in forums you need to be a part of that forum, you need to have a regular visits that help others by solving their issues. Never talk about your business at these forum, instead put the link of your website in your signature and people who weight your help will click on it and enter your site.

You Need a Blog
Do you have a blog? If not then you must have, it is a fantastic way to express your ideas of your website topic. Blog will give your visitors fresh and quality content that they like and revisit, also it’s a kind of networking; you will have a community that keeps reading your posts and write back comments.

Also it is a good idea to visit other blogs in your industry and write comments that link back to your website, do a search on Google for blogs that have similar topics or use Technorati site.

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