Website and Server Monitoring Blog by AreWeOnline.com

Website Blacklisting? What Is That...

noreply@blogger.com (AreWeOnline) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 21:51:00 +0000

Being blacklisted is one of the worst things that can happen when you run a business website or e-commerce website. From a basic user experience perspective, nothing can break trust quicker than people interpreting your website to be spam, malware, a phishing site, or even worse a hacked website. Website blacklisting doesn’t just happen, and with Are We Online’s website monitoring utility and website content checking tools you’ll be a step ahead in the game of preventing it.

How Does a Website Get Blacklisted?

Most people run legitimate websites designed to offer quality content, services, and goods, but sometimes the content can be delivered in such ways that have all the signatures of spam and malware. Other times, people intentionally hack into websites, alter their content, or redirect the website to another phishing site and steal people’s information or deliver unwanted content.

Once people and search engines start visiting your website, and it’s been hacked, is spammy, or installs malware, they report it. Your web site can become blacklisted rather quickly. Here are a couple scenarios showing how that can happen:

People report via their browser (or search engine) that your website has spam, malware, or content designed to phish.
Your website finds its way on to one of the blacklists and malware lists around the internet.

How Can I Tell If My Website Has Been Blacklisted?

You can manually test if your website has been blacklisted by visiting your website in any modern browser. If you can access content without any warnings, you’re good to go. If you go to your website and you see this type of message:

There’s a good chance you’ve been flagged as spam or malware, or even been blacklisted.

Alternatively, you can have Are We Online monitor your content and validate your website as being all good. Our service scans the most important spam, malware, and blacklisting databases to validate that your website isn’t listed amongst the ranks of “bad websites”.

Additionally, Are We Online’s website content checking and website content monitoring service lets you select which keywords you want to have validated on each page. It’s a pretty simple process. Say you pick a keyword phrase in your footer, we’ll use our website as an example. We’ll say that the keyword phrases the content monitor should check for are:

1901 S. Congress Avenue. Suite 350 ( our address at the bottom of the page )
has your website been blacklisted ( a random line on the page)
Are We Online's Website, FTP, and Email Server Monitoring Features (a heading on the page)

How Can Are We Online Help My Website Not Get Blacklisted?

When the Are We Online content monitoring utility crawls your web page, it will make sure that those phrases show up exactly as you have them typed in. If they don’t it’s normally a good sign that

Someone has changed content – who isn’t an administrator
Someone’s redirected the homepage away from where it should be

Spammers and people that develop malicious malware are notorious for hijacking websites and pointing them to their websites. It’s a damaging tactic that can easily ruin your website’s credibility. Are We Online’s website content monitor and blacklisting notification is designed to help you act quickly if your website’s attacked.

Imagine if your website was attacked on a Friday night, and you didn’t find out until Monday. How many customers – or worse, potential customers – could have been affected?

Do you have a blacklisted, spam, or malware website horror story? Drop a line in the comments and we'll offer you ways to help prevent it from happening again.

How Website Performance Monitoring and Content Monitoring Can Improve your Online Store this Holiday Season

noreply@blogger.com (AreWeOnline) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 13:51:00 +0000

So we all know that the Holiday Season is coming up quickly. November starts the beginning of the early birds getting a little shopping done for the Christmas, Hanukah, and Kwanzaa rush. Regardless of the season you and your brand’s website celebrate, if your website is an online store, you better be prepared for the rush.

You may ask yourself how exactly can Are We Online’s affordable server monitoring and web monitoring help my business’ website during this holiday season? It’s quite simple actually, our service gives you the tools to make sure that your website’s running as intended, experiencing uptime, and performing well enough for your customers to convert.

Website Performance Monitoring Improves Sales

For 2011, the international accounting and consulting giant, Delloite, forecasts a growth of 14% in non-store purchases. Imagine what that means for online businesses. That means a monumental increase in traffic, an increase in the number of customers researching products and greater opportunity to convert these customers.

We know from dozens upon dozens of studies that slow response time and downtime for a website means less customer satisfaction, turning into higher bounces. Let Are We Online’s website monitoring tool set monitor your website and make sure that your website response-time is up to par.

Our website performance monitoring tools (aka response-time monitoring) lets you know exactly how long it takes for your customers to load your website. Because our online monitoring system functions exactly how a user’s computer would function. Because we download the rendered HTML file, we are able to provide your site with website content checking, not just a ping.

How Could Content Monitoring Improve Customer Conversions?

Are We Online’s content monitor lets you specify the keywords, tags, phrases, etc you want us to validate on your page. That way, if someone were to maliciously attack your website and replace the home page with a forwarder or some illegitimate copy, you would be notified instantly. Content monitoring is another utility that Are We Online offers with our website performance monitoring and website blacklist notification tools to make sure that your business’ message is going out as intended.

During this holiday season, with an increase in the number of consumers switching to online purchasing for their gifts (nearly 46.7% of all customers will be e-customers), your web store can’t afford to miss one customer because you said “I don’t have to constantly be monitoring my website”.

Make Are We Online Your Website Monitoring Service and Know Your Website’s Online

Are We Online’s full suite of website monitoring tools keeps you in the know. Our online monitoring system makes it easy for you to check your site’s history, and our SMS and email alerts make it easy for you to guarantee that your site is experiencing uptime and that you’ve got an eye on website performance. Couple all of these features together, and Are We Online will help you keep your store open longer and with less issues – making your customers happier.

Losing Money

noreply@blogger.com (AreWeOnline) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 00:31:00 +0000

I came across a good blog the other day by David Merrill from earlier this year. In it he talks about how much sites lose per hour they are down. It is amazing. Larger eCommerce sites lose $600,000 per hour of downtime. The average company loses $100,000 for every hour of downtime. Even a bank loses $14,500 in JUST ATM SERVICE FEES for every hour of downtime.

This shows clearly how much the web is a part of our every day life and how every second of uptime is vital. It is imperative to know immediately if your website is slow or down.

Website Performance, Content Monitoring, and Search Engine Ranking

noreply@blogger.com (AreWeOnline) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:48:00 +0000

As everyone in the search engine optimization (SEO) world knows, Panda is the tidal wave of confusion that most website owners never saw coming. We've heard stories of people losing ranking entirely, becoming completely de-indexed, and being out-ranked by websites that are less relevant than theirs. In the website monitoring world, we've done a little bit of research into how our services can help your website rank better; and here's what we've come up with.

Monitoring Website Performance

In case you haven't heard. Google's obsessed with speed. They built a browser that would be the fastest. They show you the amount of time it takes to load their search results. In case you never saw their Google Chrome promotional videos, check this out:

One of Google's new ranking factors is website speed - how quickly your site loads for a visitor. For website owners, if your website's performance is extremely slow, you're going to be shooting yourself in the foot twice.

First, Google, in an effort to ensure that poor load times aren't negatively affecting a website visitor's experience, tracks the amount of time it takes for your site to load. That means content, images, external files, etc. Slow loads times - AKA poor website performance - means worse rankings and possibly being weeded out of your niche search term.

Second, Google is also ensuring the highest quality content for its users. How do they do that? They measure bounce rates. A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your site that view one page then leave. They don't commit any other actions. (Read this Google Blog on Bounce Rate Success Tips) Websites with high bounce rates reflect to the search engine that the content, design, or something is wrong with the website and visitors simply aren't finding what they're looking for. However, we all know that slow load times can make users simply jump back to the search engine. And although they technically didn't visit your website because it was loading before they left, they've still registered a session and so were marked as a "bounce".

So how does Are We Online website performance monitoring help?

Easy. We monitor your site. We report to you when your response time passes a certain threshold. So, for example, you set the threshold for poor load time to 3.5 seconds. When we open a monitoring session for you, and it takes us more than 3.5 seconds to pull up your website we send you an email alert. As the old PSAs used to tell us, "and now you know. And knowing is half the battle." Being alerted to the problem gives you a chance to fix it before it becomes a serious issue.

Website Content Checking

One of the important statistics in your Google Webmaster Central panel is error pages. We all know that websites with a high number of error pages tend to be ranked poorly in user experience. In addition, errors block Google from indexing that page's actual content. So how does content checking and error checking have anything to do with each other?

Are We Online monitors your website's content

When we access your website, we don't just ping your server like some website monitoring tools, rather we download the actual HTML file that the server returns for your homepage and then we search that document for the specific queues you've given us.

Technically, an error page is an actual page. And if we were simply pinging your server, we would see a response and know that the website is mapped correctly in your DNS settings. With our method, we can tell you if your website's not functioning because of some error, and we can ensure that when Google's crawling your site you'll know whether or not you're having technical problems.

As a website performance monitoring service, a website content monitoring service, and a website response time monitoring service, Are We Online is designed to help you improve user experience. When your website is down, slow, or throwing errors left and right, you can't get visitors to convert into customers. It just so happens, with the Google Panda Update, user experience has become a quality ranking factor. Are you sure that your users are getting to what they want from your site, and getting their quickly?

Are We Online Website Performance and Content Monitoring

... to the rescue!! Right? Well, hopefully, this will give you something to think about with your website and how you can improve it, your users experience, and your search engine rankings. There's some more information available here:

Infographic: The Periodic Table of SEO (from SearchEngineLand.com)
Blog: Optimizing Page Speed - Actionable Tips... (from SEOmoz)
Blog: Measure Page Load Speed with Site Speed (from Google Analytics Blog)
Blog: Site Speed for Dummies (from Distilled Blog)

Add Google Places Review Monitoring to Are We Online

noreply@blogger.com (AreWeOnline) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:17:00 +0000

Ever wanted to see if your business is receiving reviews online? Are We Online Website & Server Monitoring also comes with Google Places and Yelp Reviews/Comment Monitoring. Our service is designed to let you set your personalized alert threshold, and alert you when someone posts a review below that threshold. You'll be alerted via email, voice, instant message or text alert (or any combination you choose). Plus, it shows up in your dashboard for your immediate attention. So here's how it works...

Setup Google Places Review Monitoring

Associate your brand's site with review monitoring

Once you've found your Google Places page (for this example, we'll use ours: Palm Beach Software on Google Places), associate it in your Are We Online administration panel. Under Site Reputation, there's a tab called Brand Associate Monitoring. Click on that, and you'll see your administration panel. Search for your business terms (our search was "Palm Beach Software Design" and our zip code is 33426). Then click the detail button to add the selected business place to your monitoring list.

This will give you a modal popup asking you to set your alert threshold and to verify that this is in fact the associated Google Place account you would like to monitor. By default this value is 3. Anything below that will give you an alert, so set it to a reasonable level. Then click "Add This Place".

Once you've added the place to your Associate Brand Monitoring list, you'll see it every time you enter that section of your administration panel.

Now You're Monitoring your Google Places Reviews!

Now you can monitor all reviews, and be alerted for the bad ones.

When you click on the "View All Ratings" link, you'll see your Google Places current review average, and any new reviews that have come in. When reviews are posted below your threshold, you'll be alerted via text, email, instant message, or voice (or a combination) immediately.

If you have any questions about setting this up, please use our Support Form or ask us a Question on Twitter

Find Are We Online on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (AreWeOnline) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 21:19:00 +0000

We're currently in the process of setting up all of our social media sites. In the meantime, you can follow us for all of the latest updates and information on website best practices. Here's our connections:

Connect with us on your favorite site, and you'll get all of the latest news. As well as information on promotions, events, and discounts. We'll also have more information about our Affiliate Programs.

Welcome to Are We Online Website Monitoring's Blog!

noreply@blogger.com (AreWeOnline) — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 18:24:00 +0000

Welcome to the new Are We Online Website & Server Monitoring Blog.

We'll be keep everyone up to date on what's going on in the website and server monitoring world, while also offering unique perspective on website design, hosting solutions, security concerns, and what it takes to have a successful website that delivers content consistently.

Webmasters, web developers, and business website owners should subscribe to the blog, and ask us questions. We'll be happy to answer them with our blog, keeping everyone ahead of the curve!

Have a question? Submit it to us: webmaster@areweonline.com, make sure to give your email the subject Blog Question. Or, post a comment below, and we'll answer it!