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Android Market gets a Bouncer

Google has released an automated service for the Android Market to help detect malicious apps when they are uploaded. The new service – code-named Bouncer – “provides automated scanning of Android Market for potentially malicious software without disrupting the user experience of Android Market or requiring developers to go through an application approval process,” VP of Engineering Hiroshi Lockheimer wrote in a blog post . “Once an application is uploaded, the service immediately starts analysing it for known malware, spyware and Trojans. “It also looks for behaviours that indicate an application might be misbehaving, and compares it against previously analysed apps to detect possible red flags.” Once scanned, if the app has been identified as malicious it will be scanned manually for confirmation.

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Android Market gets a Bouncer

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Google’s New Page Layout Algorithm Penalizes “Above-The-Fold” Advertising – A SPN Exclusive Article

On Wednesday, February 23, 2011, a category 5 hurricane named “Panda” swept through the Gulf of Google devastating businesses large and small alike. The hurricane was reportedly named after one of Google’s engineers. So what was the reason for this catastrophic and “game-changing” update? Well, according to Google: “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites – sites which are low-value, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites – sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on. It is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.” (Source: Google Blog ) Mission accomplished. Anyway, in the aftermath of the Panda update, there are 11 important SEO facts I’ve learned based on my own personal experiences, the experiences of my clients, and from listening to top SEO professionals across the Internet. The above passages are from an article I wrote last July titled, Google Panda Update: 11 Important SEO Facts You Should Know . In item #7 of the 11 SEO facts I wrote: 7.

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Google’s New Page Layout Algorithm Penalizes “Above-The-Fold” Advertising – A SPN Exclusive Article

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Social networks Focus on the User

Fed up with being ignored by Google , engineers from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have joined forces to create a new tool that gleans search results from social networks other than Google+. ‘Focus on the User’ uses Google’s algorithms to “determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded.” By using the tool, users can see search results from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, along with LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr, Foursquare, Crunchbase, FriendFeed and several other social networking sites across the web. Instead of automatically being met with Google+ results, users can see the most relevant social media results on any given search. “When you search for ‘cooking’ today, Google decides that renowned chef Jamie Oliver is a relevant social result,” the website said . “That makes sense. But rather than linking to Jamie’s Twitter profile, which is updated daily, Google links to his Google+ profile, which was updated nearly two months ago.” The bookmarklet – dubbed ‘Don’t be Evil’, after Google’s own motto – runs in Chrome, Firefox or Safari and automatically checks for any social profiles associated with a given search term, replacing Google+ profiles.

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Social networks Focus on the User

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Social Networks and Privacy: Learning From Facebook’s Mistakes

Observers of Internet trends often pronounce that privacy is a fiction and that it is futile to try to reclaim it. Whether that perspective is correct or not does not matter when faced with a Complaint issued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The Facebook Complaint and Consent Order recently issued by the FTC provides valuable lessons for how to stay out of the FTC’s crosshairs. Internet attorneys, businesses, consultants and advisors should study what the FTC views as deceptive in order to make necessary adjustments to business plans and operations. In the U.S., there is no federal law that requires a website to have a privacy policy. However, California requires any website that collects personally identifiable information from California residents to have a privacy policy

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Social Networks and Privacy: Learning From Facebook’s Mistakes

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Website Legal Compliance – Congress Struggles With Protect IP and SOPA Legislation

Website legal compliance is now under serious consideration by lawmakers in Washington. The U.S. Congress is now considering two proposed bills, which if enacted into law, would provide ground-breaking weapons for law enforcement and content owners to enforce intellectual property rights. If you’re a content owner that provides content on the Internet, you have an important stake in the current legislative process. The competing bills currently under consideration – The Protect IP Act (Protect IP) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) – are both aimed at websites that are focused on infringing the intellectual property rights of content owners. What’s both creative and controversial about these proposed laws from a website legal compliance perspective is the enforcement mechanism – shutting down the offending websites regardless of whether they’re U.S. based or foreign based websites. The typical offenders that are the targets of Protect IP and SOPA are websites that pirate and illegally stream movies, TV shows, and music. However, if you’re a content owner with valuable content that may be the target of infringers, these proposed statutes may provide important legal remedies for you to protect your intellectual property

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Website Legal Compliance – Congress Struggles With Protect IP and SOPA Legislation

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Local SEO for Small Businesses: What You Need and How to Get It — A SEO-News Exclusive Article

Never has there been a more overused and often less understood term than Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Millions (I am not kidding) of freelancers are in front of their PCs across the globe with the shingle out that says “SEO Specialist.” And you know what? Some of them really are. If you’re a business owner with a site on the Internet, unless this is your game, SEO specialists are likely better than you at optimizing your site. But how do you find someone who will make a difference for your business? Why You Need to Be Optimized First, let’s define Search Engine Optimization as all the on page things you can do for your website to increase its Page Rank (PR) on the major search engines, Google being the biggest kid on campus with upwards of 65% of all worldwide searches. Your efforts should be designed at getting you to page 1, and if possible, in return results 1-5 which tend to show up above the fold, or before the user has to scroll down. It is conservatively estimated that less than 5% of online searchers ever get beyond page 1 when finding a source. That means if you’re not coming up on page 1 for your keywords, you are a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it bud

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Local SEO for Small Businesses: What You Need and How to Get It — A SEO-News Exclusive Article

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Local SEO for Small Businesses: What You Need and How to Get It — A SEO-News Exclusive Article

Never has there been a more overused and often less understood term than Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Millions (I am not kidding) of freelancers are in front of their PCs across the globe with the shingle out that says “SEO Specialist.” And you know what? Some of them really are. If you’re a business owner with a site on the Internet, unless this is your game, SEO specialists are likely better than you at optimizing your site. But how do you find someone who will make a difference for your business? Why You Need to Be Optimized First, let’s define Search Engine Optimization as all the on page things you can do for your website to increase its Page Rank (PR) on the major search engines, Google being the biggest kid on campus with upwards of 65% of all worldwide searches. Your efforts should be designed at getting you to page 1, and if possible, in return results 1-5 which tend to show up above the fold, or before the user has to scroll down. It is conservatively estimated that less than 5% of online searchers ever get beyond page 1 when finding a source.

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Local SEO for Small Businesses: What You Need and How to Get It — A SEO-News Exclusive Article

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Facebook’s photo fail

It appears that not even the man who created Facebook is immune to the social network’s increasingly infamous security issues. Instructions on how to circumvent Facebook’s privacy settings have been floating around cyberspace for a couple of weeks. However, the security glitch has now come to wider attention as images from Facebook head honcho Mark Zuckerberg’s private photo albums were released to the world. Users discovered after reporting a public profile picture as containing inappropriate content they were offered the chance to report additional photographs by the same user. Facebook then presented them with a thumbnail gallery of private images that otherwise would have been invisible to the person making the complaint. Those pictures could easily be enlarged by making a simple change in the browser address bar and downloaded. By using this method, anonymous intruders were able to access private photos of Zuckerberg, his girlfriend Priscilla Chan and their puppy, Beast. Fourteen candid images were published on the image site Imgur under the headline: “It’s time to fix those security flaws Facebook.” Facebook has now issued a fix for the loophole. In a statement, the social network said: “Earlier today, we discovered a bug in one of our reporting flows that allows people to report multiple instances of inappropriate content simultaneously.

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Facebook’s photo fail

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Android users download 10 billion apps

The app war between Apple and Android rages on as Android announced it has passed the ten billion download mark after accelerating past Apple in app download rates earlier this year . The Android platform became the world’s most popular smartphone after surpassing the Nokia Symbian earlier this year. “This past weekend, thanks to Android users around the world, Android market exceeded 10 billion app downloads – with a growth rate of one billion app downloads per month,” director of the Android Developer Ecosystem Eric Chu wrote on the Google blog . The milestone is particularly impressive considering the accelerated growth in Google’s Android Market – while it took 22 months for Android to reach 1 billion downloads, it took just once month for the smartphone maker to jump from 9 to ten billion app downloads.

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Android users download 10 billion apps

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10 Questions for New SEO Clients

Hello Jill, If you could only ask 10 general (non-industry-specific) questions of your new SEO customers, what would they be and why would their answers help you help them? Thank you, Andrew ++Jill’s Response++ Hi Andrew, Great question! I have a variety of different questionnaires that I send to clients, depending on the type of SEO consulting that I’ll be doing with them. For any SEO service, the more information I get from the client about their business and website, the better I can help them with their SEO. Here’s a selection of some of the questions I ask and why they’re important to the overall SEO process: 1.

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10 Questions for New SEO Clients

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