Google warning: is your site abused through redirects?

Google recently wrote in one of its official blogs that it is possible for spammers to take advantage of your website without ever setting a virtual foot in your server. Spammers can do this by abusing open redirects.

What are open redirects?

Many websites use links that redirect their website visitors to another page. Some redirects are left open to any arbitrary destination. These redirects can be abused by spammers to trick web surfers and search engines into following links that seem to be pointing to your website although they redirect to a spammy website.

That means that people who think that they visit your website will be redirected to highly questionable web pages that might contain adult content, viruses, malware or phishing attempts.

Which redirects on your website could be abused?

Spammers are very inventive. According to Google, they have managed to use the redirect spam on a wide range of websites, including the websites of large well-known companies and the websites of small local government agencies.

For example, the following redirection types can be abused:

1. Scripts that redirect users to a file on the server can be abused by spammers. The links on your website could look like this:

   http://www.example.com/download.php?url=http://www…

   http:///www.example.com/get/pdf/?http://www…

2. Site search result pages with automatic redirect options. If the result pages of your internal site search feature contain an URL variable that sends your website visitors to other pages, spammers might be able to exploit them:

   http://www.example.com/search?q=keyword&page=1&url=…

3. Affiliate tracking links. Affiliate tracking links often allow people to direct website visitors to other pages. Spammers might enter their own URLs in the tracking links. Example:

   http://www.example.com/track.php?affid=123&url=…
   

4. Proxy pages. Proxy sites send people through to other websites and they can be abused by spammers:

   http://myproxy.example.com/?url…
   

5. Interstitial pages. Some websites show an interstitial page when users leave a website to let users know that the information found on the link is not under their control. These URLs usually look like this:

   http://www.example.com/redirect/http://www…

   http://www.example.com/out?http://www…

   http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/redirect.cgi?http://www…

How to find out if your website is abused

Even if you find none of the URLs above on your website, your site still may have open redirects. Do the following to check if your website is abused by spammers:

1. Make a site search on Google

   Go to Google.com and search for “site:yourdomain.com”. Replace yourdomain.com with your own domain name. If you see web pages that have nothing to do with your website then it’s likely that someone exploits a security hole on your website.

2. Check your web server logs for URL parameters like “=http:” or “=//”. If your redirection URLs get a lot of traffic, this could also be caused by spammers.
3. If you get user complaints about content or malware that you know cannot be found on your website then your website users might have seen your URL before they were redirected to the malware site.

What you can do to protect your website

It’s not easy to to make sure that your redirects aren’t exploited. The reason for that is that an open redirect is not a bug or a security flaw. There are some things that you can do to protect your website:

1. Check the referrer. Your redirect scripts should only work if they area accessed from another web page of your website. The redirect script should not work if the user accesses the script directly or from a search engine.
2. If possible, make sure that the script can only redirect to web pages and files that are on your own websites. You could use a whitelist of allowed destination domains.
3. Use the robots.txt file of your website to exclude search engines from the redirect scripts on your website. That will make your website less attractive for hackers.
4. Add a signature or a checksum to your redirect links so that only you can use the script.

Open redirect abuse is a big issue for Google right now. If you secure your scripts, spammers will move over to other websites and leave your website alone.

How your web page titles can help you with local search

If you’re selling products and services that are related to a special area, it is crucial that your website gets found by the right people. One of the easiest ways to get found by people that live in your area is to optimize your web page titles.

What is the web page title?

The title of a web page is the text that is written between the tags in the HTML code of a web page. The web page title is displayed in the web browser window when someone visits your website and it is usually used as the linked text when your website appear in the search results.

Why is it important to use optimized web page titles?

The web page title is one of the main factors that Google, Yahoo and other search engines use to rank web pages. A good web page title greatly improves the chances of getting high search engine rankings.

In addition, the web page title is used as the bold linked text on search result pages. That means that it should be clear, concise and appealing so that web surfers click on it.

How to change your web page title so that it gets better local rankings

If you optimize your web page titles correctly, they will both increase your search engine rankings and they will attract people from the right local area to your website.

You’ll benefit from targeted traffic and you’ll get more sales than before. Here are some things that you can do to improve your web page titles:

Include the name of your business, important keywords and your city in the title of your homepage:

Smith & Sons – The shoe shop for inexpensive footwear in London

Depending on your business size, change the order of these items. Well known businesses should list their company name first. If your business is new then it’s usually better to list the keyword first:

The shoe shop for inexpensive footwear: Smith & Sons in London

People are probably looking for a solution to their problem (inexpensive shoes) instead of your company name. Instead of your city, you can also use the name of the greater area if your service is available in that area.

Use a different title tag for every page. This is important. The title should reflect the content that can be found on the page. For branding purposes, the titles should contain your company name and a popular keyword for which you want to be found on search engines:

Smith & Sons: About our London shoe shop
Smith & Sons: Buy inexpensive sneakers in London
Smith & Sons: The best prices for boots in London

Use short web page titles. Short titles are much easier to read for web surfers. Do not try to stuff keywords in your web page title. It is much more better if your website is highly relevant to one keyword than somewhat relevant to many keywords.

If you want to optimize your website for different keywords, optimize different pages for different keywords.

Do not use special characters in your titles. Avoid symbols and other special characters. They might not be displayed properly on all computers and your website might look strange in the search results.
If you change your web page titles as explained above, your website will get better rankings on search engines and it will be found by people who live in the right area.

Do search engines think that your website is spam?

About three weeks ago, Microsoft was granted a new patent with the name Web Spam Classification Using Query Dependent Data. Although this patent application was filed by Microsoft, all major search engines probably use similar methods to classify web pages.

How do search engines analyze web pages?

Search engines look at a number of elements that can appear on web pages and within queries that web surfers use to find these pages.

For example, search engines may look for the most frequent keyword in the web page, the number of times a particular keyword appears in the web page, the domain name associated with the web page, the number of links pointing to the page, the HTML tags in which a keyword appears and many other factors.

The patent filing indicates that search engines look at hundreds of different factors to rank web pages.

How search engines try to detect spammy pages

The are so many potential spam pages on the Internet that search engines cannot identify all spam pages manually.

To identify potential spam pages, search engines might manually label some web pages as spam and then take information from that pages to find other spam pages.

For example, a web page that uses keyword stuffing has more keywords than a legitimate page. By training the spam detection algorithm with a few web pages that use keyword stuffing, other web pages that use keyword stuffing can be detected automatically.

In other words, a spam detection algorithm labels web pages as spam or not spam by looking at decisions made by humans. According to the patent application, the algorithm might look at the following factors:

• the number of inbound links coming from labeled spam pages
• the top level domain of the site
• the quality of phrases in the document and density of keywords (spammy terms)
• the count of the most frequent term
• the count of the number of unique terms
• the total number of terms and the number of words in the path
• the number of words in the title
• the rank of the domain and the average number of words
• the top-level domain
• the number of hits within a domain
• the number of users of a domain
• the number of hits on a URL and the number of users of a URL
• the date the URL was crawled, the last date page changed
• many more factors

If your website uses similar elements as the spammy web page then it’s likely that your website will be classified as spam. The usual impact of a website being labeled as spam is that the site might be pushed down in search results, or removed completely.

What does this mean for your website?

You should make sure that your web pages use similar elements as the top ranked pages instead of elements that can be found on spam pages.

How your web page titles can help you with local search

If you’re selling products and services that are related to a special area, it is crucial that your website gets found by the right people. One of the easiest ways to get found by people that live in your area is to optimize your web page titles.

What is the web page title?

The title of a web page is the text that is written between the <title> and the </title> tags in the HTML code of a web page. The web page title is displayed in the web browser window when someone visits your website and it is usually used as the linked text when your website appear in the search results.

Why is it important to use optimized web page titles?

The web page title is one of the main factors that Google, Yahoo and other search engines use to rank web pages. A good web page title greatly improves the chances of getting high search engine rankings.

In addition, the web page title is used as the bold linked text on search result pages. That means that it should be clear, concise and appealing so that web surfers click on it.

How to change your web page title so that it gets better local rankings

If you optimize your web page titles correctly, they will both increase your search engine rankings and they will attract people from the right local area to your website.

You’ll benefit from targeted traffic and you’ll get more sales than before. Here are some things that you can do to improve your web page titles:

• Include the name of your business, important keywords and your city in the title of your homepage:

     Smith & Sons – The shoe shop for inexpensive footwear in London

• Depending on your business size, change the order of these items. Well known businesses should list their company name first. If your business is new then it’s usually better to list the keyword first:

     The shoe shop for inexpensive footwear: Smith & Sons in London

  People are probably looking for a solution to their problem (inexpensive shoes) instead of your company name. Instead of your city, you can also use the name of the greater area if your service is available in that area.

• Use a different title tag for every page. This is important. The title should reflect the content that can be found on the page. For branding purposes, the titles should contain your company name and a popular keyword for which you want to be found on search engines:

     Smith & Sons: About our London shoe shop
     Smith & Sons: Buy inexpensive sneakers in London
     Smith & Sons: The best prices for boots in London
  

• Use short web page titles. Short titles are much easier to read for web surfers. Do not try to stuff keywords in your web page title. It is much more better if your website is highly relevant to one keyword than somewhat relevant to many keywords.

  If you want to optimize your website for different keywords, optimize different pages for different keywords.

• Do not use special characters in your titles. Avoid symbols and other special characters. They might not be displayed properly on all computers and your website might look strange in the search results.

If you change your web page titles as explained above, your website will get better rankings on search engines and it will be found by people who live in the right area.

Unfortunately, the web page title is not the only element that influences the position of your website in the search results of Google and other search engines. If you want to make sure that your site appears in the top 10 results, you should optimize all factors that are needed to get top rankings.

Increase your sales with less traffic

Search engine optimization is not about getting as much traffic as possible. It’s about getting the right kind of website traffic. Sometimes, less traffic can be better.

Many website visitors aren’t necessarily a good thing

Many webmasters try to get as many visitors as possible. They join traffic exchange programs and they optimize their web pages for keywords that have very many searches.

Unfortunately, getting as much traffic as possible is not the right strategy for a successful website. Traffic that doesn’t convert is useless traffic. If your website has thousands of visitors but only a few sales then you have done something wrong.

Why less traffic can be better

If you want to succeed with your website, you have to focus on the conversion rate of your web pages. A website with a good conversion rate will do much better than a website with many visitors. Here’s an example:

• Tom’s website gets 10,000 unique visitors because it has a #1 ranking for the keyword “buy inexpensive brown shoes”. The conversion rate is 2%.
• Peter’s website gets 1,000,000 unique visitors because it has a #1 ranking for the much more popular keyword “shoes”. The conversion rate is .02%

Both websites will get 200 conversions. But why does Peter’s website get the same number of conversions as Tom’s although it has 100 times the number of visitors?

There can be several reasons for this. For example, Peter’s keyword “shoes” is very general. People looking for one-word keywords usually aren’t interested in purchasing. They are looking for general information about a general topic.

Peter’s landing page also might have a poor design. His website might not offer what the searcher is looking for. That is very likely if the visitor found the website through a one-word keyword.

Tom’s keyword “buy inexpensive brown shoes” is very targeted. Web surfers who use that keyword know what they’re looking for and they are ready to buy. That means that Tom needs fewer visitors to get a sale.

Multiply your revenue without working more

Four word keywords such as “buy inexpensive brown shoes” have much less competition than one-word keywords such as “shoes”. That means that it is much easier to get top rankings for these longer keywords.

Suppose it takes Tom five hours of optimization per month to maintain the #1 ranking. Each working hour costs $100. That means that Tom spends $500 per month.

To maintain the #1 ranking for the one-word keyword “shoes”, Peter has to invest 30 hours per month because it is much more work to get and maintain high rankings for such a competitive keyword. Peter’s working hour also costs $100, that means that the spends $3000 per month.

As explained above, both websites get 200 conversions. If each conversion is worth $15 then Tom has a ROI (return-on-investment) of 600% for every dollar spent on search engine optimization. Peter has a ROI of 100%.

If Peter had not invested his 30 hours in a single keyword but in optimizing 6 good converting four-word keywords that each needs 5 hours then he would have multiplied his revenue by 6 without working more.

What can you do to increase your conversion rate?

You can do the following to improve your conversion rate:

• Do not waste your time for getting vanity rankings. It makes no sense to get high rankings for one-word keywords.
• Optimize your web pages for multiple-word keywords that attract visitors that are ready to buy.
• Make sure that your landing pages contain a clear call to action and that the content of your landing pages is related to the optimized keyword.
• Make sure that your website has a professional look so that potential buyers aren’t turned off.

Search engine optimization is not about getting visitors. It is about getting conversions. Search engine optimization is about creating conversion paths for the traffic that comes from search engines. If you optimize your web pages for the right keywords then you’ll save a lot of time and you’ll get more conversions.