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Based on the past google update schedule, it's likely to happen again in short time. During the last update in April, many webmasters' sites got affected. This update is well known as google penguin update which is the next generation technology to deal with web spam and low quality sites. We did not pay too much attention to this google tech since there's not any effect to our site, since the next update is coming soon, I would like to discuss it with real experience and share some ideas on how to co-work with it.

Google penguin introduction

Google penguin was firstly announced on April 24, 2012 when the last google update happened. It's all about a google algorithm update which is aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by using black-hat SEO techniques.

How does google penguin help with SEO?

From google reports, the penguin affected approximately 3.1% of search queries in English. What does that mean? Basically the google cleaned at least 3% search results and made the search more accurate for people's requests. From the google's algorithm history, every update will force webmasters to follow their optimization guidance and improve their website quality. From the google panda to google penguin, it's actually improvement of google and the entire industry.

At the meanwhile, it's good news for people who are doing right SEO. Maybe your website ranked low because your competitors were using black hat SEO tricks on their websites. However, the penguin update simply dropped most of their rankings from search result and you will surprisely see that your keywords ranking got improved!

Don't be confused that penguin update is to abandon SEO. On the other hand, SEO is recommended by google and there's guidance on how to. It's designed to deal with those websites that are over optimized or doing bad ways.

How to recover if your site is affected by google penguin?

When your site got penalized by google penguin, the first though in mind would be how to recover the lost rankings. But before you make any change, make sure to understand where the problem is and how google think about, or else we're just doing work for nothing. Here're some important rules on how google penguin recognizes a quality website

Authority, Content, Natural Backlinks are actually the core ideas for white hat SEO. From the last update, the points are almost golden rules for google. It tells every webmaster to pay more attention on website content building and attrack more natual backlinks for better ranking. If our site are targeted to provide honest and useful info to visitors, the site authority will be improved automatically and potential high ranking is expected. In case our sites get penalized by google penguin, following actions would be useful to recover the lost.

Remove pages ready for search engines only — At the meanwhile, make sure your sitemap and robots file is correct and up to date, make sure to remove duplicate content and add more authority content.

Remove unrelated links to your website topic — Such links will simply decrease your site authority. Such case always happen on link selling sites. If you're selling links, you might stop now.

Content is still king — If you want to get recovered from penguin effect, content building would be the most important task. Fresh and user friendly content will help with the site ranking quickly.

Do not use low quality link directories — If your site is always submited to such directories for SEO purpose, stop it now.

There're several articles on web state that EIG(endurance International Group) has acquired hostgator. Indeed, it's absolutely big news to everybody in the business. The effect is wide and related to millions clients on the globe. If it's the first time you hear of the news, let's learn more about the event and see how will the deal goes.

The news firstly posted on webhostingtalk forum by someone and provided a link to Brent Oxley's letter writing. From the letter, Brent seems pretty satisfied with the deal which is $225 million. He says the EIG CEO Hari pretty understand how to continue with the hostgator success and promote the business to the next grade. Here're the original reasons Brent list why he would like to sell hostgator:

* I want to travel the world before my wife and I have kids.
* I've been doing HostGator since I was 18, and I'm looking for a newchallenge.
* I'm extremely worried about the financial path our country is headed down.
* Taxes will be going up significantly in 2013, making it more difficult for business owners.
* I've failed more times than I can count to launch software that would allow us to compete as a registrar.
* We have tried and failed to develop a billing system that has automated and can integrate with our key systems such as chat, phone, affiliates, and tickets. I think we are finally on the right track, but unfortunately I no longer have the patience to wait for it to all come together. Thankfully EIG has tackled a lot of these challenges already.
* I have practically 100% of my chips in HostGator and if something should ever happen to the company, I'd more than likely be bankrupt in a matter of a few months.

Hostgator business statistics

• Over 12,000 servers under management
• Over 400,000 global customers
• Hosting over 8 million domains
• The largest reseller hosting provider

As we see, the hostgator is running a very huge business on the planet. If EIG finally acquired hostgator, their overall business will even bigger than Godaddy and become the largest web hosting company.

Worries about the take over

The main worries would be from the existing hostgator staff and clients. For such business acquisition, current workers will worry about the potential redundancies and replacement of company cultures etc. However, from the previous experience such problems never happened. "Bluehost was at 280 employees when the sale closed and they have 450 today. Their management team has stayed the same and the culture has stayed the same." Brent explained. He also assures hostgator’s management team won’t be going anywhere if the deal is completed.

As about the worries from clients, it would be the service quality from the EIG support. Based on many people's experience their support is not so responsive (the very limited EIG supports are mainly Inida based). However, EIG is well known of it's powerful technologies and stable system. They introduced advanced server managing skills and make all hardwares/softwares up to date. In this way, no much service outage happened. The main support requests are not from server problems but websites themselves. Most likely the EIG will keep the current cpanel and plesk system for users so people no need to change anything and be familiar to a new software etc. On this point on view, the acquisition doesn't actually affect anything to end users.

How do we think about the event?

It's not a surprise to see any hosting acquired by EIG. No matter how popular the hosting is, if there's opportunity to be more profitable, their owner will consider it. Hostgator has been the industry leading name and recommended by almost every webmaster. I can't say how much better EIG will bring to this brand but surely it will keep the popularity and gain more success. What actually changed is the owner but not the service itself. Don't be surprised when you see more promotions with hostgator in future.

Visit http://www.Hostgator.com and see current promotions

Hackers are very active at the moment. Many popular services have or being attacked which caused huge loss to both service providers and clients. In any case, the online security protection should be treated seriously for every operators.

Hacking issue in web hosting

All recent hacking events are related to the UGNazi group. The team cracked the popular web hosting billing software WHMCS and hacked into the system database. they gave WHMCS' web hosting provider admin credentials, and was able to gain access to its hosting account, change the email and then request a mailing of the access details. Some sensitive materials like credit card information are in high risk. It's said there might be up to 500,000 client records have been leaked.

Another hacking from UGNazi is to the popular CDN service cloudflare. Facebook seems also included in the hacking list. The FBI has got into the urgent research and arrested one of their members, but the hacking never stopped! The events simply showed us how insecure the internet is. In order to protect our privacy, it's always recommended to set good surfing policy to ourselves.

How to protect account privacy?

No matter if it's for web hosting account or other login account, since it includes our sensitive information, we should always secure it as possible as we can. Generally speaking we can deploy the following to protect it.

• Set a strong password and change it often.
• Keep the password at a safe place where you have access to only.
• Restrict the login to your account, we can apply IP restriction and number of login attempts to avoid potential hacking.
• Do not login from a public computer and always scan your computer virus.

if we can follow above strictly, our accounts would be pretty safe. Of course there're many more methods to secure our online accounts, just do everything you can to protect it.

How to secure your website?

Website hacking would be the most well known issue on the web. How to protect the sensitive info on our website? We can apply all above rules for account protection, plus we can add the following for website purpose.

• Contact web developer and optimize the coding and fix potential security leak.
• Secure the site using SSL if you're operating an Ecommerce site.
• Password the directory where contains your private data

For nowadays web development, we always use some popular CMS software like joomla, wordpress and drupal etc. For this concern, it's always recommended to sign up their official website newsletter so we can get the security update in time. For wordpress, we have prepared following especially.

• Replace the default secret keys in wp-config.php file. We can get a set of random unique keys by visiting this URL directly.
• Change the default admin user to something else other than "admin". The methods and related tips can be found on this wordpress sql queries article.
• Configure wordpress firewall. There's a plugin called "wordpress firewall 2" developed by Matthew Pavkov. When someone trying to hack into your wordpress site, it will send your email notification so we can take actions!
• Add the limit login attempts plugin. The purpose of this plugin is to lock out the person from login trying if they have typed wrong id/password for several times.
• Keep the wordpress core and plugins up to date.

Is that enough? Absolutely no. Because no matter how we secure the site, it's acually being served on hosting server. That means the hosting server security is the most important. We should always keep in touch with the hosting support for any security leak. At the meanwhile, get a quality and secure web hosting is pretty essential to block any potential attacking or hacking.