Industry News

Beyond clear-cut blackhat webspam, the second-biggest category of spam that Google deals with is hacked sites. The most common reaction we hear from webmasters is “The problem is with the Google search. There is nothing wrong with our website.” That’s a real quote from an email one site owner recently sent us. Sadly, it turns out that the site is almost always really hacked.

The single best piece of advice I can give to prevent website hacking is “keep your web server software up-to-date and...

JenSense suffered a database failure, and one of the side effects was the database ate dozens of posts. While I was restoring some of the corrupted posts (thank you Google Webmaster Tools for showing the 404s and archive.org for all the content of those blog posts) I was reminded of the case of Theresa B. [...]

My local newspaper, the Victoria Times Colonist (and a second newspaper owned by parent company Postmedia News, the Montreal Gazette) decided to go with a paid subscription model a week ago – once you have read ten articles per month, you can only view the homepage for free.  And while there are some paid subscription [...]

IFrames are so 1990s but alas there are probably some webmasters out there that are still displaying their AdSense ad units via iframes. And AdSense has quietly updated their AdSense policies a few days ago to include that AdSense ad units can no longer be served within iframes. AdSense code may not be altered, nor [...]

I noticed a couple of days ago that the AdSense ads on some various sites had been slightly altered to give a bit more spacing around the ad units and to help the text “pop” more. However, the change seems to have gone largely unnoticed by publishers and hasn’t been officially confirmed by AdSense.  Unfortunately, [...]