Received this email from Zappos early this morning warning me that Zappos’ customer database was hacked:

First, the bad news:We are writing to let you know that there may have been illegal and unauthorized access to some of your customer account information on Zappos.com, including one or more of the following: your name, e-mail address, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, the last four digits of your credit card number (the standard information you find on receipts), and/or your cryptographically scrambled password (but not your actual password).THE BETTER NEWS: The database that stores your critical credit card and other payment data was NOT affected or accessed. SECURITY PRECAUTIONS: For your protection and to prevent unauthorized access, we have expired and reset your password so you can create a new password. Please follow the instructions below to create a new password. We also recommend that you change your password on any other web site where you use the same or a similar password. As always, please remember that Zappos.com will never ask you for personal or account information in an e-mail. Please exercise caution if you receive any emails or phone calls that ask for personal information or direct you to a web site where you are asked to provide personal information.

We can probably expect a flood of Zappos phishing emails as a result. Not too many details available at this point. 24 million customer accounts are effected and the FBI is involved. You can read the internal company email on the Zappos blog.

As 2011 comes to an end, I thought I would do recap on probably the biggest series of events in the SEO world to happen in 2011; the Panda updates. The shear scope of Panda pretty much guaranteed that everyone operating a web site felt it’s effects, probably in a negative way. It also resulted in the worst words ever; Pandified and Pandification.

It’s About Rankings Stupid

Google’s algo is real-time and is constantly making calculations based on it’s link graph of the web. This includes the hallowed PageRank as well as the other hundreds of other factors that determine day-to-day standings on the results pages.

Panda is a separate algo that operates independent of the main algo and is specifically designed to filter specific types of sites from the search results. Unlike the main algo, Panda does not occur in real-time. Instead, it is manually pushed out, the results evaluated, and changes made before the next manual push.

Panda Timeline

February 24 - Panda 1.0

This was the one that started it all. Originally code-named “Farmer”. In one update, 12% of search results were effected. The primary targets of this update and the following updates were content farms, scraper sites, and any page that Google determined as low quality.

 Biggest losers – wisegeek.com, ezinearticles.com, suite101.com, hubpages.com

Biggest Winners – Youtube, ebay.com, facebook.com, instructables.com

April 11 – Panda 2.0

Original update goes live to all English-speaking countries. Incorporated user data from Chrome extension and block button in search results. Widened the net to longer tail results.

May 10 – Panda 2.1

Minor update.

June 16 – Panda 2.2

Improved scraper detection. Matt Cutts states that there were no manual exceptions made for sites that may have been wrongly affected. Also states that Panda updates are manually pushed out and not occurring in real time.

July 23 – Panda 2.3

Minor update.

August 12 – Panda 2.4

Launched to all international sites. Impacts 6-9% of international queries.

September 28 – Panda 2.5

The longest gap in major Panda updates since 1.0.

October 3 – Panda Flux

October 13 – Panda Flux

November 18 – Panda Flux

Recently I realized that the last dozen or so connections I have made on LinkedIn have happened because I clicked a link or badge in someone’s email signature. This realization, along with my constant need for virtual validation through social networks, has finally convinced me to add some pretty social badges and links to my signature. For years I have kept a pretty neat and tidy sig with a minimum of formatting and absolutely no images. Nothing is more annoying than looking for an attachment from someone and seeing that little paperclip next to every single email they have sent because of those pesky little images in their signature.

I plan on keeping it simple for emails sent to people in my immediate circle of colleagues and friends. But for new business, introductory emails, etc., I will have this new pimped out custom signature with my top social platforms:

So, this is how you do it.

Firstly, go grab yourself some social networking icons over at Komodo Media. Select the sizes and designs that you like best. I chose the  32×32 sizes for the signature above but you also have 16×16 option as well. It’s also a good idea to go ahead and have the url’s to your profile pages ready. Next, open your mail preferences and select and existing signature or start a new one. You can then just drag your icons over to the signature. Once done, select the icon and go to Edit>Add Link or use the keyboard shortcut Command + K and your link will be added to the icon. Then repeat for the rest of your icons. Fun tip: keep adding a new one everyday and see how many it takes to get all of your emails filtered as spam.

If you learn better via the moving pictures, here is the long version by MacFusionTV:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO25YE-g2eM

Last week Google announced that they would soon be placing usage limits on the Google Maps API beginning on January 1, 2012. This move is primarily targeted at larger sites in the travel and real estate industries that have come to rely on Google Maps as an integral part of their services.

To keep using Maps for free, your daily map loads must not exceed 25,000 per day and map loads using the custom map feature must not exceed 2,500. Google estimates that the new policy will affect only 0.35% of users and insists that the new pricing is necessary to continue Maps development.

Google has offered 3 different solutions for those that are exceeding the API limit, the first is to reduce your usage but if you can’t do that then you can either pay $4 per 1,000 map loads over the limit or purchase a Maps Premier License which will set you back at least $10,000 per year but will cover up to 100,000 map loads per day. Pricing also depends on usage so if you are hotels.com, you will probably be paying a lot more. On the bright side, it looks like Premier members will have access to substantially higher resolution street view and larger static maps than those now available.

It really was only a matter of time before Maps adopted a pay to play strategy for big enterprise users as Google Apps and Google Analytics have done. I think we will soon see a similar strategy adopted for other Google services like YouTube and Translate. 

Last week Google announced that SSL search would be turned on by default for users that were signed in to Google. This means that keyword data from these searches will no longer be available to site administrators. Those searches will just show as Google organic traffic. Those of us in the SEO game should have seen the writing on the wall back in 2010 when Google introduced encrypted search. But alas, multiple Panda updates and leaked quality guidelines have distracted us from the real big changes coming down the pike. There is no doubt in my mind that this is a big deal and just one more step on the way to having true search personalization and forcing advertisers to rely on paid search rather than the unpredictable organic results.

How the Change Impacts Analytics

First, no more keyword data from signed in users. Instead, these search queries will be tagged as (not provided). You will still be able to see an aggregate list of the top 1,000 queries via Webmaster tools but no individual keyword data. Users can also navigate to https://www.google.com and have their searches encrypted without logging in.

Conversion information will still track at the Source/Medium level so they will show as google/organic but you will no longer know what keyword query resulted in a conversion. This is a big deal, especially if you are not an Adwords advertiser since CPC information will still track on the keyword level. Is this a ploy by Google to force more advertisers into Adwords? Maybe, but I think it is just the beginning of a new spam reduction strategy.

Bait and Switch?

So Google announces that they are protecting users privacy by restricting the information passed to other websites, how altruistic of them. I think that they are just encouraging more users to stay logged into Google services like Plus or Gmail where advertising can be easily targeted. Google continues to move toward a more intent or interest based search model where search results are determined by user behavior rather than signals that can be easily manipulated like backlinks. This is not necessarily a bad thing but I wish they would be upfront about it instead of trying sell it as privacy protection when it is anything but.

So What Should You Do?

When in doubt, scream and shout. After that, be sure you make use of the annotate function in Google Analytics and note that October 18th was the date your keyword data started to disappear. Remember that you still have Bing data to work with although in my experience getting accurate data from Bing has been more than a little problematic. If you can’t or won’t advertise on certain terms but still need an idea of the volume, the Adwords keyword tool is OK although remember that it only shows Adwords information. Other than that, I guess we just hope that people start using meta search engines again. Dogpile anyone?

This bit from Louis CK speaks for itself but it is especially relevant to me as I sit here cleaning up another mess left by a former twenty-something who thought that he was too interesting for his job. I completely sympathize with Louis. Why wouldn’t you do your job? There is no excuse for doing a shitty job and, in the end, it is just worse for you.

The wait is over. XXX is here and the registrars are already ordering their solid gold toilets and planning their next elephant hunt. Each XXX domain will be selling for $100 to $200 plus $100 per year for registration. ICM Registry, the company behind the XXX push, estimates that over 500,000 domains will sell before 2012. This virtually guarantees the best GoDaddy Super Bowl commercial ever this year.

Not everyone is on board with the XXX. Many in the porn industry hate the idea because it makes it very easy to filter content. Porn haters hate it because they think it somehow legitimizes porn. Big brands and big porn sites hate it because they have to shell out more money each year on yet another TLD.

The registrars are not the only ones making money. Domains are a big business and there will be some major grabs by squatters. There are thousands of non-trademarked domains that will be in high demand. How about girls.xxx or men.xxx? I predict we will soon be seeing a robust secondary market for some of these obviously high-profile domains.

For the next 50 days, trademark holders can register the XXX equivalent of their .com. This goes for both regular trademark holders and for adult trademark owners. After these initial pre-sales, the domains will be open for general availability which means I will finally be publishing and adult version of mostoptimal.com. ICM is calling this the XXX Sunrise. You can read the details here.

ICM has released several XXX domains as part of their Founders program to showcase the new TLD’s. Casting.xxx, iFriends.xxx, and Clickcash.xxx are all up and running but, be warned, they are NSFW.

If you haven’t implemented the rel=”author” and rel=”me” attributes on your blog or site, stop what you are doing and go do it now. Not only is it important that you start building your own personal ranking with Google, but you are also making sure that you receive credit for posts or articles that you author and, more importantly, making sure others do not get credit for your work.

The author and me attributes are microformats, special HTML code that identifies certain types of data on a web page. Why is this important? Well, it keeps third parties, like search engines and API’s, from having to guess the purpose of content on a web page and output more accurate and unified results.There are tons of these attributes for all kinds of data and Google is always incorporating them in new ways. I plan on doing a post that examines microformats in greater detail at some point in the future.

By using rel=”me” sites can link one page about a person to another page about the same person. By  consolidating your social identities you are letting search engines know that these profiles represent the same person.

Twitter includes rel="me" on your profile page

Facebook only includes the me attribute if you have adjusted your privacy settings to allow everyone to see your website. I can’t really think of a reason not to do this if you have added your url to this section.

 

Most of the social networks are incorporating this, all you have to do is link to your blog or site and make sure that you are also using the rel=”me” on your blog. I use my About ME page and link to my Google + profile. Yoast has a great post on adding rel=”me” and rel=”author” to your wordpress blog. He has recently updated the post to show the new, easier method of implementing with Google + so that you get the pretty little profile pics like Matt has here:

So why should you add these attributes? One of the biggest enemies of search quality is scraped content on the web. Googlebot is not the only bot out there and, in some verticals, your content may be scraped before Google can index it. That means it is more likely that some one else will reap the rewards, in the form of rankings, of your work. By closing the loop between your Internet profiles, your content, and your site, you remove the guesswork that Google has to do. This means your content has a great chance of benefiting you rather than scrapers.

Yet another toolbar page rank update a month after the June 27th update. According to SEO Roundtable, there was a bug with the initial toolbar push and Google uncharacteristically rolled out another update to correct the error.

Even though everyone knows that the toolbar page rank is not an entirely accurate gauge of a page’s actual page rank, it is still the only indicator available to the non-technical, non-seo masses. As such, it has a pronounced effect on the perceived value of a web page/site, or a link from that page/site. Even if you have a ton of rankings and traffic, a low toolbar PR can be an indicator to others that Google doesn’t like something you have done.

My main issue with the toolbar PR is that it has created an industry of link brokering that continues to negatively impact search results. Google has been adamant about punishing those who buy and sell links yet they continue to support the device that makes it easy. In two seconds, Google could eliminate the practice of buying and selling links but they don’t.

I say let the PR toolbar die. Google should let third parties, like SEOmoz, assign page rankings based on factors outside of the Google algo. I seem to remember a few other search engines, Boing and Yoohoo or something.

What do you think about the toolbar PR? Should it die a horrible death?