My companys site was down for about a week due to domain expiration :(
This has hurt our page rank...keywords that used to result in the company's website showing up, no longer do so...
Is there something i can do to mitigate this damage? or do i just have to wait for Google to sort things out with time?
Your input would be appreciated
Most likely your website will slowly climb back-up to (or close to) you're original positions for the various keywords.
Make sure this doesn't happen more often, especially not in the coming months. If Googlebots continues to get bad responses it will remove your listing. Once G hits the site a few times and sees that things are perfectly fine things should slowly get back to what they were.
Have you verified yourself as an owner in Google Webmaster Tools? Check your inbox there to see if G dropped you a message about the website being down.
I'd say you'll just have to wait until Google's spider drops by again and fixes things. If you're registered for Google Analytics, I'd check if Google has left hints for you there, but that's about it.
Besides good readability for crawlers, good keywords, loads of links pointing to your site and all the other SEO-stuff that's out there (which probably is what you already did) there's not really anything you can do to regain your site's ranking right away. (Reporting your site to search enginges can even result in the opposite of the desired results.)
Related
I am trying to contribute to open source particularly Firefox(Mozilla), I have done my installation and set up but I have a challenge determining where to look in the codebase to find the file where a bugs occurs in order to propose a patch. I would greatly appreciate general guidance on how to proceed. This is my first time attempting to contribute to open source with Firefox.
Basically, upon seeing the bug as reported in Bugzilla(a website where mozilla bugs are reported), I am clueless on how to proceed from there.
welcome to SO!
I know that contributing to such a big codebase can sometimes feel overwhelming, but I can guarantee you that the Firefox devs really appreciate the efforts you are already putting (and will put!) in your contribution. So.. thanks for the help!
General tips
Firefox codebase is huge, complex and has many moving parts. Downloading and getting Firefox correctly built locally is already a big step forward, and will save you time later. If you haven't done that already, consider doing it!
Read the How To Contribute Code To Firefox documentation page. It gives a good overview of how a code contribution process looks like in Firefox.
Don't feel shy about asking questions! The bug on Bugzilla (or the github ticket) is usually a good place to ask specific questions or general directions on how to fix a bug in Firefox, and folks are generally friendly, inclusive and happy to support you support them!
a. If you don't receive a direct response within a few business days (usually 2-3) from somebody on the bug, chances are the notification got swallowed in the "immense sea of notifications, emails, messages"(tm) that devs receive. See the next section about reaching out.
How to find who to talk to?
Who knows about a specific part of Firefox or any Mozilla product? This could seem like an hard thing to figure out, but there's a few tips.
If the bug report is on Bugzilla, good people to talk to would be the Reporter (if they are a Mozilla contributor) or the Triage Owner.
Mentored bugs are bugs that were triaged by the dev teams and that were designated to introduce folks to the codebase. For this bugs, a "Mentor" is usually shown under "Assignee" in the "People" section of the bug. That's a good person to ask questions!
Mozilla publishes the list of folks who are responsible about components in Firefox. You can find who to talk to based on where the code is/the bug was filed and then consulting this page.
You can send direct request over Bugzilla to individuals, they are called "needinfo requests". After logging into Bugzilla, on the specific page of the bug you need information on, scroll to the bottom. Type your question in the "Add comment" section, tick the "Request information from" checkbox and either pick the role of the person you want to flag from the dropdown, or select "other" and paste an email address there (that you have identified using the previous points). If the person is on bugzilla, the text field will autocomplete and show the relevant person.
If all the above fails, you can rely synchronous communication and chat with the devs over here in the # developers channel.
How to find what code to change?
If it's not in the bug, ask the reporter or the person responsible of that section of code. For bugs marked as "mentored", ask the assigned Mentor!
If the bugzilla bug doesn't mention specific files and you want to find out yourself without reaching out, your best ally is Searchfox. You can type some keywords from the bug at the top of the page and wait for the results in the codebase to come in. This is highly effective! If the bug asks changing CSS files, for example, you could add a file filter like *.css in the top right.
Another pro-tip is looking at what other bugs in that same bugzilla product/component touched. You would find that by clicking on the arrow next to the component, then picking "Recently Fixed Bugs in This Component": it will show a list of fixed bugs, you can pick one or more, then look at the attachments.
Hope this helps!
We have started to use Lighthouse to track the improvements we make to our sites. While this seems to work quite well for desktop sites, i.e. we see the values improve over time and as we make changes, for mobile sites the values remain consistently low. We do repeat the tests and use the best of three, but still.
Below, we have the results of the New York Times mobile site that appears to perform badly vis-a-vis the desktop site. The other two are sites of ours, the main site and the third one being our own.
Browsing the site (as well as the NYT, of course) this apparent bad performance cannot be felt at all.
The test procedure:
run same test three times for each site
mobile
no PWA
incognito mode
Now, while initially enthusiastic about Lighthouse's capability to evaluate a site by attributing aggregated figures that are easy to digest by management, we have the impression that they are not actually useful as they don't correspond to the users' reality and don't change even though we make changes.
Also, this being a Single Page Application, the first load of the page may take some more time, but any further navigation is quasi-instantaneous. We could not find a Lighthouse feature to take this into account.
No, you can't really rely on Lighthouse. As you've observed, well known fast websites perform badly in tests. While there are some reasons for this, it won't help you measure the actual loading speed. Caching being an important factor. Lazy-loading sometimes is confused as not yet loaded. So even if your website is loaded, Lighthouse might detect missing pieces and deem it not yet loaded.
Pingdom is great for that, and provides you with the options to test different regions, which I believe to be more realistic than one server fits all.
Also the Legacy version of GTmetrix is great because it points you directly to what improvements you can make but it tests only from Canada (unless you buy the PRO version). It takes caching into account.
I have been using PSI for mobile on our sites and worked well. Atleast mobile score was always better than lab data & my motivation was report was consistent on some external sites like https://covid19.ca.gov/.
Coming to tool works well for initial load but does not take into affect for one page app since cls is continuous evaluation has user scroll through CLS changes that is not simulated in tool. That is where field data differs.
Thanks,
I recently installed a Firefox extension and noticed that it was doing something very odd in the background.
I'm a web developer and use Wordpress mainly. One day I was working on a page in WP admin and switched to the Text rather than Visual mode so I could edit some HTML. I noticed a load of junk html in there hidden using display:none
The class names rang a bell, it was the name of the extension I had installed several weeks previous
I immediately uninstalled the extension but of course it was too late. Since it was injecting code right into the text entry boxes in Wordpress, all that junk got saved with my pages. I had to weed through dozens and manually delete this junk, which in some cases had affected the layout.
I contacted the developers, and they gave me some rubbish about it being totally normal, everyone does this sort of thing, its within the Mozilla dev terms, and that it was a feature not a horrific Malware as I was putting forward.
In this case it was just html/css, but what if they were injecting JS/php etc, they could be causing all kinds of damage
I just wondered from a development perspective what peoples thoughts were. Is this legal?
Many thanks in advance
The best course of action is to spread awareness. I would not do here, but maybe write a detailed article explaining which extension it is, what it does, how, why it's bad, how to get rid of it, and alternatives.
Medium, your own blog, Hacker News and other social outlets will certainly be welcoming of such informations. The developers are very well aware of what they are doing so don't expect them to broadcast it and/or take action.
Be also sure to read their ToS again, see what you agreed to. If something seems suspicious you can talk to a lawyer or probably report them, altough this is beyond what I know.
I am a Mozilla Addon reviewer. Please report your findings as Abuse report and/or addon review (it will be read).
We've got a non-profit site that's been up for over 10 years; though it's gone through various redesigns, it's showing its age and needs to be revamped -- inside and out. This includes the layout of the pages as well as the internal structure of the site.
As part of rebuilding the site and designing it structure, we'd like to create a site map that's effective and efficient. In other words, we want to be able to follow best practices for building a site. The site will ultimately reside in a Magnolia CMS, and so we need to know what pages are top-level, what are secondary, etc., while also ensuring that we provide the fastest/most intuitive route to our content.
We have literally thousands of static pages that were created using Dreamweaver templates; many of these pages are "dead" -- nothing points to them anymore. The current site was designed and built piecemeal: A hundred different people put in requests for links and other items to appear on the home page, so there's no coherent vision -- more a collection of links anywhere and everywhere, along with various modules that were added over the years anywhere the developer could fit them.
We'd like to start fresh -- leave the past behind, design the site with brand new links and structure to effectively meet our users' needs. This is in an organization where people hate and fear change, rather than embrace it even if it helps them. Any advice or recommendations you have will be much appreciated as we undertake this process. Thanks.
First bit of advice, take your time! Sounds like you have quite a large project ahead of you, and it definitely takes a lot of time to do it right. You'll need to do some research to find out what exactly your users are looking for from your site, and how you will provide it to them. Analyze your current traffic to see what is most popular, and reach out to some of your customers to see what they feel is missing.
You'll need to organize everything your site will have into a small set of sections, which will be your main areas of the site. Then you can break those down further from there. You don't want to go too deep so everything is accessible within a few clicks. But you don't want to have 20 links on your homepage either. Get some input from users outside your business to tell you what is important to them and what should be most accessible. It's hard sometimes to view your company from the outside looking in. You may be well off hiring a consultant to at least help you get started to give you a fresh perspective.
And finally, I will say you won't please everybody so don't even try. Get input from the various departments in your company that need a web presence, but then once you decide how to lay it out, that's it, don't go back to them to make sure it's ok. I know this isn't always possible depending who has how much pull in the company, but if you can get away with it, it will save you many headaches in the long run. Sorry to ramble on, I recently went through a similar situation at my current company and it is definitely a huge undertaking. Good luck!
Semantically-speaking, it should be built using nested lists:
<ul>
<li>Level One
<ul>
<li>Level Two</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Level One
Level Two
Magnolia will create google sitemaps for you
http://www.magnolia-cms.com/home/magnolia-cms/evaluation/features.html
Go to the second instance of sitemap on the page
So, I've just started working with a new Joomla site, and something we've added has started hijacking various parts of the site and added links to various places we don't want. Unfortunately, I can't give out a link to the live site right now, but I can describe the problems:
In the footer, where it should say "Designed By: " and the name of the place we got our template from, it leaves the "Designed By:" but removes the name of the template author, and instead puts in two links (not giving the hijacker any more hits but here's the text of them), "online album" and "check whois"
When we hover over the site name, the alt text is set to "Forex Trading Home" which is most certainly not what it should be.
Finally, when you hover over the "Home" item in the main menu, a dropdown appears after a short delay, with a link to "cpanel reseller hosting" inside it.
Now, I'd like to get rid of these advertisements, but I've got no idea where they are coming from. If you guys know some commonly-hijacked files I can search in, or good debugging tricks to find them (I've tried FirePHP, but haven't had much success with it) I'd be much obliged. Unfortuantely, since a few people have been working on the site simultaneously, we're not really sure what extensions could have caused it (if that is in fact, the problem) - but all of them seemed ok, and came from the main Joomla extension site.
EDIT:
Here's a list of the modules I know were installed before we noticed the spam problems start happening:
EasyTemplate.
EasyTemplate - MultiPlugin
mod_picasaslideshow
Content - Picasa Album Embedding
Other than that, everything else was installed after the problems started, or was a theme that has since been uninstalled (and hence, I don't know what it is anymore). The theme that's on it now, I've looked at thoroughly, but is version of this Martial Arts Theme with a lot of modified images (and one change in the php from a .gif to a .png)
EDIT EDIT: So, still looking, but seems an older version of picasa2gallery (we had a new version at one point, but uninstalled it) had an LFI vulnerability. Perhaps that was the source. In any case, I think I'll be doing a full wipe, and just start over, really.
So, turns out the correct answer was "none of the above", not that I noticed that until after I erased everything to remove the hack.
Once I restored the theme, and nothing else, I noticed that the "hack" spam links were back, way too fast to even be an automated script.
That's when I discovered that there was a .gif file in the images directory that contained the "bad" PHP code to include the spam links. Ironically, the code they were using to make it was particularly bad, so at least I got a good laugh out of this long ordeal.
Moral of the story: Don't get themes from ThemZa, and if you do, be prepared to dig through them for cruft, if you like the way they look.
Your complete Joomla installation seems to be hacked, follow the guidelines what you should do now (re-installing and securing)
Check the server access logs. You'll most likely see accesses to a particular component (look for the com_* in the URI) that are excessive, or just out of place.
When this has happened to my sites it has been a particular component that hijackers are searching Google for (i.e. com_virtuemart was the last culprit) and then they attempt their exploit on the component hoping it is a flawed version.
If you can't positively identify and fix the hole they broke in through, it's likely the reinstall Tobias P. recommends is the only safe way. If somebody has access to files on that level, you have a big problem. You will need to identify which way they come in. This could have a multitude of reasons:
Somebody exploiting a Joomla security hole (or one in a plug-in)
Somebody having gained access to the FTP account through spying on a client computer
Somebody exploiting a weakness in the server software
this is most likely somebody exploiting a Joomla hole, and there's probably no reason to panic. But you definitely should find out, or do a reinstall. Maybe you'll find more specific help on the Joomla forums or with your ISP.
While you're at it, best change all FTP passwords too, just to make sure.
Good reading at Google: My site's been hacked - now what?