When I say POODLE, what do you think of? Is it a fluffy dog? In most cases, I would be referring to the fluffy dog, but for this article, we will be focusing on a security vulnerability. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but if you’re currently using SSL version 3.0, you will need to perform some updates to your SSL daemon on your server. SSL stands for Secure Sockets layer. A SSL is what every ecommerce site should have. It allows for you to securely process payments through your website. In fact, if you’re taking orders from your clients, you should be using a SSL. SSL’s add another layer of security and trust for your clients. If you’ve not read my post on PCI compliance and you’re running an ecommerce site, you should read my post on PCI compliance here: (Insert link to PCI compliance post)

With SSL’s as with any piece of software on the internet, there are different versions. SSL version 3.0 is nearly 18 years, however, SSL version 3.0 is no longer secure and remains in widespread use across the internet. Nearly all browsers support SSL version 3, and in order to work around bugs, within HTTPS servers, browsers will retry failed connections with older protocol versions, including SSL 3.0. This retrying of failed connections within SSL v3, allows the POODLE exploit to be initiated. This POODLE exploit works due to the nature of the failed connections and allows for a possible leak of your customers data when processing orders. You can read more about the specifics of the attack here:

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/10/this-poodle-bites-exploiting-ssl-30.html

Browsers and websites should turn off SSLv3 in order avoid compromising users’ private data.  The most straight forward method is to disable SSL 3.0 entirely, which you can see how to do at the links below, however, this can cause a myriad of computability issues. Therefore, the recommend plan of option is to enable TLS_FALLBACK_SCSV. Using the links below, they will show you how to properly secure your servers SSL daemon. These options resolve the issue of retrying failed SSL connections. It also prevents hackers with knowhow from downgrading from TLS 1.2 to 1.1 or 1.0.

For WHM/cPanel servers –  https://documentation.cpanel.net/display/CKB/How+to+Adjust+Cipher+Protocols

For DirectAdmin servers – http://forum.directadmin.com/showthread.php?t=50105

For Plesk servers – http://kb.sp.parallels.com/en/123160

Did you know in August 2014, Google announced that HTTPS would become a ranking credential? This is news worthy of mention and note as Google rarely reveals ranking criteria – and more so confirms that the SEO optimized hosting at TurnKey in fact  does raise your rankings for SEO systems (at least with google, now confirmed).

You can read more about Google’s comments here:  HTTPS as a ranking signal here. [PDF ] 

HTTPS is an added layer of encryption that Secure Socket Layers on top of HTTP or web traffic. This adds additional security to standard HTTP communications or web communications. SSL certificates are required for
e-commerce sites especially if you’re desiring your site to be PCI compliant. You can see my post on PCI compliance here: https://blog.turnkeyinternet.net/web_hosting/pci-dss-compliance-in-the-cloud-for-web-sites-servers-and-colocation/ .   Having an SSL certificate  is essential on an ecommerce site because of the secure transmission of sensitive information like credit card numbers, personal information, and login accounts.

If your website or blog begins with https://, you have likely received an uptick in Google’s rankings. This is currently a lightweight signal meaning that it doesn’t affect your site rankings greatly, but experts believe it will become stronger in the near future.

To turbo charge your web site’s rankings, be sure to use SSL certificates with a dedicated ip address on your web site, TurnKey offers an all-in one ‘turnkey’ solution to this to help you increase your search engine ranking with our Turbo SEO cPanel Web Hosting that bundles in multiple dedicated class-c ip’s and ssl certificates for one low cost in a simple to use interface.

Do You Need an SSL Certificate for Your Website?

REQUIRED: All websites should have some form of protection on them. This form of protection can come in many forms, however, if you’re going to be taking any type of data from your customers such as credit cards, phone
numbers, emails, or any personal information, you need to ensure that the data is transferred securely. SSL’s remain one of the most robust ways to do this.

As an online merchant, it’s your responsibility to make your customers’ private information is secure. If you are storing credit card information in a database on your website so you can manually charge it later, then you need an SSL certificate to secure the credit card data stored on your server. If you have any sort of log-in form where customers enter a username and password, on top of sanitizing the input from the user, a SSL certificate is highly recommended.

NOT REQUIRED: An SSL certificate is optional if you don’t gather personal information and instead forward your customers to a 3rd party payment processor like PayPal. This can be done as simply as embedding a PayPal button to your website. PayPal uses their own certificate to encrypt customers transactions.  HOWEVER, you can still benefit with SSL for search engine rankings, so it’s worth the investment but not REQUIRED for this category.

What Webmasters Should Do Now?

Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate. (More on this in a minute.)
Use 2048-bit key certificates. Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain. Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains. Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt. Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible by avoid the noindex robots meta tag.

Purchase an SSL Certificate from TurnkeySSL.com

Turnkey Internet is a trusted reseller of GlobalSign SSLs. The GlobalSign SSL certificates includes domain validation, quick issuance, re-issues among many other options such as adding a full trusted bar in your browser that allows visitors to see your SSL is trusted across the web.

Turnkey Internet has multiple types of SSL certificates for secure communication with business, system, portals, mail and more.

Our TurnKeySSL alpha certificate  is ideal for small business, blogs, and personal websites which costs $29 per year.

The TurnkeySSL Professional certificate is  ideal if you wish to have multiple subdomains covered (example: corp.yourdomain.com and web.yourdomain.com). This Pro level SSL certificate has full organization vetting which provides higher levels of trust and includes a malware site scan service. This is also preferred for service providers and SEO companies. $150 per year.

Lastly, TurnKeySSL Extended Validation (EV) Certificates are the most secure and offer visitors the green bar and enhanced sales. It also includes malware site scan service. The green address bar that comes with a TurnkeySSL Extended certificate prominently displays your company name, providing immediate trust and improving customer conversions. This certificate is $899 per year.

Keeping your certificate always up to date is recommended as you never want your clients receiving any SSL warnings when purchasing a product from you. Ideally,you would set the certificate to auto-renew annually. You can always check the expiration date by clicking the padlock symbol and then “View Certificate”. Test your entire checkout process in Firefox, Google Chrome, and yes, even Internet Explorer.

Once again, you can go directly to turnkeyssl.com to purchase any of the mentioned SSL types above

To turbo charge your web site’s rankings, be sure to use SSL certificates with a dedicated ip address on your web site, TurnKey offers an all-in one ‘turnkey’ solution to this to help you increase your search engine ranking with our Turbo SEO cPanel Web Hosting that bundles in multiple dedicated class-c ip’s and ssl certificates for one low cost in a simple to use interface.  Learn more
Until next time…

Howdie do Turnkey Lovers,

I have a quick question for you. When you think of Google, what is the first thing that comes to mind? If you’re like most people, the first thing may be Search engine or Gmail. For the purposes of this post, we will focus on the search engine aspect of Google. Now, when you think of panda’s, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? Is it a cute, loveable creature that is known for eating bamboo. Bamboo being the favorite food for pandas. My last question is, how are these two items related?

Do you feel you’re back in high school yet with the metaphors and pandas? If you haven’t figured it out yet, what pandas and google search have in common, I will help you a bit. When you go to Google and enter a search term, you’re immediately greeted with a page that shows the sites that could match the query you’re looking for. The pages are listed in a ranking. With the 1^st site being the most likely result to match your query and the last result, being the furthest away from your query

You’re probably saying, “Hey, I know that. I know that Google ranks sites. What does this have to do with pandas?” Well my friend, did you know that the algorithm used to rank sites is called Google Panda? I bet you thought I was never going to connect Google with pandas 🙂

Google has recently released a blog post that shows that the Google Panda algorithm has been officially patented which you can read about here:

http://searchengineland.com/google-granted-patent-for-panda-algorithm-187573

However, this article isn’t about that update. This article is about Google Panda’s update that is being released to help smaller businesses to gain better rankings. You can read about it here:

http://searchengineland.com/google-working-softer-gentler-panda-algorithm-help-small-businesses-186619

You may be wondering, what does this have anything to do with Turnkey Internet and how does this affect my hosting? I would ask you back, would you like your site rankings increased? Have you ever wondered how sites are ranked so high in Google? Well to answer those questions, we must first delve a little deeper into what Google Panda actually is.

Google Panda was introduced in February 2011. The algorithm was released to help deal with low quality sites or thin sites. These are sites that you visit and are just flooded with advertisements when you view the site. It could be scrolling down the site or clicking a link and you’re instantly bombarded with advertisements. Google in 2011, wanted to fix this by creating an algorithm that would check sites content and rank those higher on in search results. This is what is known as Panda.

Several iterations of the algorithm have been released since its inception in 2011. These revisions were set to increase scrutiny and make it harder for sites to command the first page of site rankings. However, at times, this became to stringent for small businesses. A small business site may not have content that is updated every day. They may only update their sites once a week for a new special.

This resulted in some legitimate sites being listed lower on Google as smaller business may not have the funds to purchase additional resources to increase their page rankings. With this new update, Google is promising to help smaller businesses have high ranking sites within the Google databases. Google did do a softer update last year in July to help in this aspect as well which you can read about here:

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-update-17094.html

Now, you may be saying, how does this affect me? Well, I you’ve been working on improving your site ranks for your business, Google’s new Panda update will make it easier for you. You just need to ensure that you’re following some basic guidelines:

1. Make sure you have valid site content
2. Make sure you have valuable keywords that relate to your site throughout the page
3. Try to use “pretty” links instead of long, hard to deciper links. E.g http://yourdomain.com/pets instead of http://yourdomain.com/page1
4. Try to develop some content on the site even if it’s a weekly update that shows your new specials

There are many other options that you can take, but knowing that Google is updating Google Panda to help smaller businesses get better page rankings is a welcome update in many our eyes here at Turnkey Internet

Until next time Turnkey Lovers

Recently, there has been quite a stir over the EU’s response to Google’s most recent privacy policy…

From PARIS (Reuters): “Google has four months to make its privacy policy comply with requests from European Union data protection watchdogs or start facing the possibility of disciplinary action at a national level.”

France’s Commission Nationale de l’Informatique, working on behalf of the EU’s 27 national data regulators, said on Tuesday it had found legal flaws with a new approach to user data that Google adopted in March.

Among CNIL’s concerns was the way the U.S. group combines anonymous data from users’ browsing histories across its services to better target advertising.

From theguardian:  “Google’s latest privacy policy means that users get a simpler experience when signing up for a new Google-owned service. But it also means that Google can build up a more comprehensive picture of the user for advertising – for example, monitoring a person’s use of YouTube to help better target adverts within Gmail.”

I find it interesting that the EU’s various sanctioning bodies have an issue with this.  What do they think Google is going to do with the information?  Seriously!?  Google is in business to make money.  They make money by helping advertisers get in front of people who are most likely to purchase their products and services.  Let me give a perfect example – Let’s say that a feminine hygiene advertisement is placed in front of male audience members. I dare say, that is a waste of the advertisers’ money because odds are probably REALLY good that there isn’t a single purchaser in the group.

Another example: I watch YouTube all the time.  99.8% of my YouTube views are music.  Actually, I can’t imagine life without YouTube – but that’s another blog.  In the past year alone, I’ve probably watched in the neighborhood of 2,500 music videos – and once, ONCE, was an advertisement placed in front of me that I was interested in.  I actually sat there and watched the advertisement because it was something I was interested in.  That means the other 2499 times that ads were placed in front of me were a total waste.  From both efficiency and user-experience standpoints, wouldn’t it be better if YouTube, Google, or whoever is displaying the content, knew something about the viewer’s likes, dislikes, sites visited, etc.?  It irks me a little bit that I have to wait the 5 seconds before I can click on the “Skip Ad” button.  I’d much rather see an advertisement that actually interests me.

In other words, by being able to target your viewer, as Google is allegedly doing, it serves both the advertiser as well as the viewer.  My question is: Why does the EU want to make it harder on advertisers (businesses within the European Union) and the citizens of the European Union?  Ah, government regulatory bodies at their finest, once again. Apparently the EU wants advertisers to pay for ads that get displayed in front of randomly selected people who might not have any interest at all in the product or service being touted, rather than be able to target their ads to those who have shown some type of behavior that identifies them as a potential buyer.  Also, why should anyone have to sit through an ad that they have no interest in?

Now, I do agree that people should have the ability to opt out of certain things like email, but isn’t what Google is doing beneficial for everyone?

If I were an advertiser and it was costing me X dollars each time my ad was presented, I would want to be darn sure that my ad was being placed in front of people who are most likely to take advantage of what I’m offering.

I’d be interested in hearing other views on whether Google, who is allegedly doing what the regulatory bodies claim, is right or wrong.  Perhaps you are indifferent? How do you feel about the use of this alleged data?

There is a whole new world out there when it comes to advertising and reaching the multitude of potential clients.  For many years companies would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on as many different types of advertising as they could.  One way would include a plethora of ads, whether it is banner ads, text ads, display ads or interstitial ads, to name a few.  All of which take your specific product(s) and post it on the website or series of websites in which you contracted with.  Phenomenal; we can be right in front of anyone who visits that specific website. It’s great to be front and center.

As the years went on these “ads” became very competitive. Companies spending exorbitant amounts of money, and basically fighting over the top trafficked sites on the Internet.  If you couldn’t financially stay in the game with the bigger companies in your industry, then what’s the point?  Now, don’t get me wrong, there are thousands of sites you can buy banner ads on, but when you’re financially competing with “Fortune” companies, it’s frustrating to say the least.

Let’s think about it this way.  Instead of picking and choosing sites to purchase adds on, maybe half of the people that see them are actually interested, why not go after people individually? Hmmmm. Now that’s a thought.  Go after the site or go after the actual consumer.  In comes retargeting.

Every company generates traffic to their own websites.  We work everyday on getting our products and services out there and bringing potential clients to our site.  Imagine a client coming and viewing your website for whatever reason, whether they meant to come, or just happened to stumble upon it while browsing the web.  With retargeting, a “cookie” is placed into the viewer’s web-browser. Think about it like you would a temporary tattoo if you will.  Now the banner ads that you would of purchased on a specific site, follow your potential clients around like a footprint.  The banner ads are attached to the “cookie”, so that when that client lands on a website, your banner ads pop up, in complete view of someone that very well might be interested in what you have to offer.

So what’s the benefit if they already went to your site, but didn’t buy anything?  Find out in part 2

It’s true. With an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau, and a 5-star rating from customers, TurnKey Internet is the hosting provider with the best value and customer service.

Welcome to blog post #2 in the SEO-fu experiment. The truth is TurnKey Internet does have a good reputation. In fact, our reputation is excellent, thank you very much. We work extremely hard, day in and day out, to provide a top-notch service, great customer care and 100% uptime. But that doesn’t make us immune from the SEO powers that be when good customers turn bad. Like it or not, we are all at the mercy of Google. As I discussed in the last article, 2010 is the year for all of us to learn to use the Internet to our advantage—to protect ourselves and our businesses from unscrupulous bad eggs and, for that matter, unscrupulous rival businesses that don’t hesitate to seed negative reviews for their own evil benefit. Yes, I’m being dramatic, but no, I’m not kidding.

It’s an ugly practice, but many companies have taken to posting bad reviews of competitors to influence potential customers. The hope is that Google searches will return those seeded negative reviews, and customers will steer clear of the implicated companies (and steer towards the companies posting the reviews). If you don’t have a superstar PR team at your disposal, ready to re-seed with positive reviews (also an ugly practice) you’re sunk. So what do you do when cheaters game the system to make your business look bad? How do you fight back without stooping to their level?

SEO-fu. Rather than seeding reviews (which is totally cheating), you can improve your reputation by regularly updating your site content to reflect the truth about your business. It doesn’t matter how many nasty reviews your competitors throw to the winds if your well-written, informative content shows up first. Also, as I always recommend, solicit real reviews from real customers. The more real reviews you have, the better, even if those reviews include some negatives.

This isn’t about having a 100% A+ reputation, 100% of the time. A page of perfect reviews can work against you too. Think about it: if you visit a company’s website for the first time and every review you see is five stars, are you going to believe it? This is about a real life business. Every business makes mistakes, the salt is how you deal with them.

In order to protect your credibility, and to provide a quick reference-check for your potential customers, it’s a good idea to employ a third party to manage your company reviews. We use RatePoint:

As the latest round of Google’s algorithm changes take the Internet by storm, SEO marketers around the world are wondering what effect these changes will have on search results. Google’s primary metric, PageRank, named after its inventor, Larry Page, is extremely complex. The Wikipedia entry for PageRank demonstrates the lengths to which many great minds have gone to try and reverse-engineer the algorithm to figure it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank.  But, each new algorithm tweak Google reveals new hints about how it all works.

The latest update is called Caffeine and includes several new layers of complexity for the algorithm. It is rumored that caffeine will be taking into account website age and loading time. This will benefit those sites that are more established and faster, and will hurt newer and slower sites. Evidently, Google aims to reinforce good quality, reliable content, optimized for speed and built over time. This is consistent with Google’s mission of improving the overall search experience.

According to Wikipedia and Mashable, there are two key changes to consider:

1) Caffeine includes a massive speed increase. Search results will now be returned twice as fast as before.

2) Search results will be “blended,” including information culled from a wide variety of sources—press releases, images, video, news—along with traditional results.

While, as a marketer Google’s constant changes might drive me crazy, as a searcher, I appreciate the egalitarian nature of much of what they do. If marketers had the inside scoop, there would, undoubtedly, be millions of dollars invested by those who could afford it to manipulate search results to their own ends. This would be great for those businesses but, in the long run, it would ruin the user experience. When I run a search, I’m not looking for results paid for by wealthy companies, I’m looking results that best match my search terms. As our collective information bank, our massive online reference library, Google has a responsibility to the information above all else. As much as the business people among us might wish for it, as soon as money starts getting in the way of our free access to information, we no longer live in a free society.