If yes do not panic or think it is some kind of a spam attack to your site or a bug on the webmaster tools. It is not even your SEO or client having a secret spammy link building strategy but this is as a result of Google Caffeine working efficiently to index more and more data per website.

Due to Google caffeine going live from all Google datacenters, indexing is much faster, fresher and it collects more data for every website.

So, atlast you get a clear picture of how widespread your website is as the link:domainname.com parameter in Google never gave the right information of no of websites linking to your site.

Caffeine has indeed made the website data lively !

Bing has lately been getting a lot of attention from the SEO industry. Yahoo and Bing will be coming together in with a mutually beneficial collaboration i.e Yahoo results will soon be powered by Bing and this shall surely make the market share of Bing grow considerably.

In anticipation of this and in order to make sure that the web presence of their websites is assured SEOs surely cannot ignore incorporating Bing in their search strategies.

WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo out at SMX, who presented on this topic.

Lately it has been a crisis management period at WebPro with 2 of our major sites being hacked. I guess we have to accept and live with the evils in the world along with the blessings bestowed upon us. This also truly applies to the virtual web world.

I would like to share the nature of the attack on these websites to help you be prepared with what should be the course of action in case (God forbid) your website faces the same misfortune.

Both the websites nearly faced the same brunt (Lets call them site A and site B) but the problem was detected by us at different stages.

The hacking attack involved the altering of the HTML code of the home page and number of links added which created backlinks from all unwanted spammy horrendous sites for site A and for site B the same task was achieved by the hacker by uploading 2 files one HTML file and one PHP file on the server without any alteration on any of the web pages.

We have a practice of keeping a track of each and every site regularly . Hence, Site A alteration in the code was detected immediately and the necessary action was taken. The indexing and the rankings got affected but got immediately restored before the indexing, caching and webmaster tools (WMT) report was affected for that site.

For site B two files were uploaded as mentioned above. One was an HTML file which had a list of 500+ links with a very weird file name and the other was a .PHP file which had the script to create the horrendous and spammy backlinks. This was detected by us only when we saw the links showing in the WMT and the analytics not showing any targeted traffic as all the site was not ranking for any of the keywords. All this happened in a matter of 4-5 days.

The action taken was as follows:

• Both the files .htm and .php were deleted

• The FTP username and password was changed

• The request for removal from search and cache of Google for each of the 500 – 600 URLs was given individually in WMT

Luckily the domain was not banned by Google as I said it was detected early and the voluntary removal of such content gave an indication of not having this intentionally on the domain for cheap PageRank improvement purposes.

The URLs were removed by Google in a matter of 2 days. But it took 10 – 12 days to get back the rankings and I am actually surprised at the fact that the rankings in fact are better and the keywords which had page 2 and 3 rankings are now on page 1.

The WMT tools data has not been fully updated yet but I guess it’s a matter of time.

Though the SEO is not responsible for the loss of SERPs in such a case but I think SEOs should be equipped with this knowledge also to help the client in every possible way to come out of such a crisis keeping the client’s interest in mind. After all the best way to avoid evil is to know it.

Whether the help is rendered on a chargeable basis or offered free depends entirely on the company policies. But, I think it should surely be one of the points mentioned in the SEO contract.

Last but not the least, it was truly a good learning experience - not that I am hoping for more.

From my past experience I have seen SEOs concentrating and focusing on PageRank and even using it as one of the USPs for selling their SEO packages by mentioning that the SEO pakage they offer shall improve and increase the PageRank.

But, is it so important a factor or feature from the SEO perspective ?

In my opinion the answer is NO. I do not think that link building and Pagerank are the factors which should be given importance and prominence to in a SEO project. As I always say that link building itself is a wrong term - Links should not be built but they should get built in the process of the web journey of the website on the WWW because of great content and information on the website.

So, what are the points that should be given importance in an SEO project?

Now, with the redesigned page of Google with more search options available the focus should be to rank high as possible on all the options. Atleast the efforts have to be geared towards that. The Google search page has got options on the LHS like images, blogs, videos, news, updates, maps, books,etc.

Instead of concentrating on only the ranking on the search page the ranking on all these option results also offers a lot of opportunity for targeted traffic.

Apart from this surely it makes sense to have a presence on the social media sites where people are mostly hanging out. So the relevant and relative postings on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,  etc. surely add to the qualitative and targeted traffic.

Hence, its high time SEOs overcome their baclink and PageRank obsession and concentrate on the factors that really matter - Offer qualitative content in all froms i.e in text, in images, videos, blogs, posts and tweets on social media sites, maps, etc. and see your website go places and attract targeted traffic and automatic natural inbound links like never before.

The only thing required for getting such inbound links and traffic is patience and trust me Patience and Perseverance Do Pay.

WebPro Technologies has been optimizing websites since 2003 and conducting training on SEO since 2007. At WebPro we believe that one never ceases to be a student. The charm of being truly educated is to accept that we all keep on learning something new at every stage of our lives and career. This applies very aptly to the field of SEO.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization is all about optimizing the site as per the algorithm of the search engines and make it rank as high as possible in the organic search listings for the targeted keywords. Hence the SEO has to keep on upgrading his knowledge as the algorithms of the search engines keep on changing periodically.

If you are looking for a career which is challenging, exciting, gives you a chance to always learn something new and give you an opportunity earn well at the same time then becoming a SEO is the right option for you.

At WebPro we firmly believe that the main responsibility of a teacher is not to teach or preach but to help the student learn. Our methodology helps you to understand the art and science of SEO and shows you the way to how you have to continue self-learning on this topic with the endless resources available on the web for SEO.

We conduct in-depth training courses on SEO as well as 2 day week-end seminars for entrepreneurs and marketing executives and corporates who just want to know the basics and how to integrate SEO into their traditional methods of marketing.

The in-depth course also includes how to work out the pricing of an SEO project and develop an SEO contract for a client.

Click here to contact us to know more....

The Internet has had a relatively brief, but explosive history. It grew out of an experiment begun in the 1960s by the U.S. Department of Defence.

The DoD wanted to create a computer network that would continue to function in the event of a disaster, such as a nuclear war.

If a part of the network was damaged or destroyed, the rest of the system still had to work. That network was ARPANET, (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) which linked U.S. scientific and academic researchers. It was the forerunner of today's Internet.

In 1985, the National Science Foundation (NSF), an American research organization, created NSFNET, a series of communication networks. Based on ARPANET protocols, the NSFNET created a national backbone service, provided free to any American research and educational institution. At the same time, regional networks were created to link individual institutions with the national backbone service.

NSF also coordinated a service called InterNIC that registered all addresses on the Internet so that data could be routed to the right system.

More information about the History Of Internet can be found here: http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml