Google Page Layout Update

We had only one 336×280 ad unit aligned right and only one 160x90px adlink unit aligned left above the main content. There are few 125×125 buysellads banners in the sidebar. Ironically the same day Google Adsense sent an email that we should place upto 3 Adsense ad units to monetize more. High ad to content sites were earlier penalized by the Google Panda update and reducing ads was a suggested measure for Panda recovery.

What seemed to be the problem was the 2 navigation bars on top pushing content lower and there were ads placed high. So it seemed likely that there was low content to ad ratio above the fold. Now the site traffic is down badly by 50%.

Page Layout Changes

Some changes I quickly did to fix the site layout were as follows-

1. Navigation bars were removed from all pages (except the homepage), as this will help to push the content upwards and expose more content above the fold
2. The content area width was widened to allow more content to rise above the fold.
3. Breadcrumbs were made smaller and their high navigation was significantly narrowed
4. Reduced the size of the large rectangle from 336x280px to 300x250px and continued to retain it right aligned. That still retains the single Adsense unit.
5. Removed the 160px wide ad link unit, so that removes the sole ad link unit.
6. Pushed down the Buysellads in the sidebar, from the middle right position to a much lower position. This brings it below the fold mostly and now we need to reduce the ad pricing significantly. We also plan to reduce the number of 125×125 ads from max 4 to 2 in number soon.
7. Used the browser size tool to ensure there was only 1 ad visibile on majority of our pages for maximum users
8. We also removed the excellent related posts widget by Outbrain, the amazing Sharebar plugin, several other sidebar plugins and scripts to reduce confusion with ad scripts, which in turn made site faster and reduced page load time significantly
9. Removed repeated several links for popular posts etc, which might be interpreted wrongly as duplicate content.

Site Traffic Recovery?

Now as mentioned in the Google article, sites affected by page layout algo will be fixed when Googlebot recrawls affected sites, which should restore the search engine rankings, and it might take weeks. But reports are coming in that this was the Google Panda 3.2 update, which might suggest need to fix some other issues and may complicate traffic recovery.

The good part about the strong QOT community is that despite the search engine traffic drop, we will continue to publish great content and every new QOT article will continue to reach 25000 RSS readers, 8700 Facebook fans, 3900 Twitter fans and 1900 Google+ followers.

It has been a learning experience and indeed the site loads much faster, has much lesser ads, much cleaner design and definitely a better user experience… which Google aims for. Please see if any of these issues affect your site and fix them as soon as possible.

Any advice from the readers which might help site traffic recover is most welcome.

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We switched from shared hosting to VPS hosting 2 years back. Many QOT readers recommended some powerful VPS hosting options, and many were very skeptical about Knownhost. Well QOT on Knownhost has been really worthwile. Remember to choose the right hosting package

Why Knownhost VPS Hosting?

1. Super quick response time (24×7) – Webhosting issues occur with any hosting service and it is unavoidable. But what is important is that the technical support is responsive quickly to your site and hosting issues. When you send in a support request, you instantly get a automated ticket number, but then every hosting does that. So here is the amazing part – whenever I have emailed Knownhost, they have ALWAYS replied back within 5-20 minutes, 24×7, even on Sundays and holidays. Ever since the day we joined we have been amazed by the amazing tech support and though many people speculated it was true for new customers, it has lasted these years.

2. They know their stuff – What is the use of quick response if your hosting support is inexperienced and they can’t figure what you are talking about. I am sure all of us have had a chance to get that from customer support – if they cant figure out what we are talking about, how will they fix the issue and will keep recommending unrelated fixes to buy time? Well I have never seen more knowledgeable support than Knownhost. They always respond in minutes, they always seems to understand what problem I am suggesting, and always have a solution for it in minutes. I have had a chance to get support from several different support team members, and all of them were brilliant.

3. They manage everything – The good part about managed VPS hosting is that there is someone to manage your server 24×7. Most bloggers have limited knowledge about the intricacies of hosting and running servers. I am glad I took managed hosting, and they have really helped and guided me all along the way. Getting managed VPS hosting is highly recommended so that you can concentrate more on developing content rather than fixing server errors.

4. They are courteous and never laugh at you - what use is it if you explain technical stuff to me in all geeky mumbo jumbo. I am a curious customer and keep questioning them about technical details, which would seem really elementary stuff, yet they have never scoffed at my request and always clearly explained me in the most courteous way.

5. You can fix stuff yourself next time – This is the good reason – whatever the problem is, they explain clearly with all details what they did to fix your server issues / hosting problem, so it becomes a learning experience, such that you can deal with the issue next time yourself. This has been of amazing help and has helped me gain confidence in dealing with several common hosting issues myself. I learnt new things like setting private nameservers and power of CSF-LFD.

6. Excellent uptime – VPS hosting has ensured that our site has maintained excellent uptime. We monitor our site using Montastic, Pingdom and they have always reported excellent uptime. My VS3 plan has me covered for all traffic spikes.

7. Free Upgrades - Over the last few months, Knownhost automatically upgraded the memory and storage of all plans too. Now that was a cool bonus.  The current packages are bigger and better. They upgraded hosting in 2009  also, so we have a double powerful package for free in 2 years.

8. Regular Backup –  They have regular full backups for your entire server, so when QOT was hacked, they managed to restore the server to the original state quickly. Now we have Vaultpress also to maintain regular wordpress and database backups.

QOT is now over 2 years on Knownhost VPS hosting, and if you are looking for reliable hosting, try Knownhost VPS hosting.

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It will also allow you to access your Twitter and Facebook pages, and look inside your Gmail and see the alexa details of the website you are browsing. Its easy to install and easy to uninstall.

In IE, Run the alert

Dont see the toolbar, Right click on browser menu bar and select “My Toolbar”

In Firefox, Install the Firefox extension

Download QOT Alexa Toolbar

Alexa Toolbar creator

The QOT Alexa toolbar has been created using the amazing Alexa Toolbar creator, using which you can create a Alexa toolbar for your site in minutes. Once installed on browsers (Firefox and Internet Explorer only), it will help regular readers easily access your site and drive traffic.

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Which one of these won?

We seeked your help in choosing our new logo a few weeks back, and we thank each one of you for helping us choose. We appreciate your comments, feedback, votes and expert views in helping us in getting a more branded logo. For just $295, we got 204 design concepts from 35 designers!

The new logo is made by juniango, a very talented logo designer who participated and gave some excellent logo designs. Several other talented designers like mis9inoji, cockcorner, Dr Pixel, joined in to create some beautiful logos. After choosing the design, we were able to modify it a little to make it better.

We chose the current design as it was simple, clean, professional, highlighted QOT (which we have popularly become known as) and gave better branding and would probably look good on merchandise (coming soon…). The orange color signifies the RSS colors, blue has been our preferred color for links and backgrounds for long. The Q is a mix of a comment bubble and the RSS bar.

Well this logo was not cheap (especially since we got our earlier free logo in a logo design deal for bloggers!), but it was well worth the money.  99designs offer a very user friendly, very professional system for the whole process and attracts amazing designers, many of which you can track on high value contests. They are quick to extend deadlines, very helpful, and have an excellent platform to bring together customers and talented designers.

The logos across the network will change soon. See it live right now on this page. Do you like our new logo?

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99Designs is an excellent site to host logo design contests and we had 204 logo entries from 15 designers. We aimed for a very clean, simple and professional logo which would provide excellent branding and look good not only on websites, but also branded merchandise like cups, Tshirts, stickers etc. It cost $295 to run the contest for 7 days and got a few bonus days too! [Do you like our current logo? We got our free logo in a logo design deal for bloggers!

All logos have numbers beside them and you can post a comment with the logo number, and why you like it. You can see our top rated logos here, and vote for top logos,  or see all designs and select one you like and help us choose the next logo for QOT.

Update: See our new logo

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Why Vaultpress WordPress Backup?

There are many WordPress backup services available. Vaultpress is created by Automattic, the same people who brought you WordPress, which powers millions of blogs. So I trust them to best understand the technology which goes behind powering WordPress, and how to back it up.

Vaultpress Golden Ticket

Vaultpress is not available to public at large since it is in beta. First you need to apply for golden ticket. They are giving away 60 Vaultpress golden tickets per day, so if you have a reputed  blog, chances are you will get in 1-2 days.

Once you get a Vaultpress invite in your email, simply sign up. The Golden Ticket is your plugin.

Download Vaultpress WordPress Plugin

Download Vaultpress plugin, a simple php file, and add to your WordPress plugin folder. Activate and you are done. Vaultpress will start to download all your Uploads, Themes, Plugins, and Database one by one automatically.

We got impatient as our database was downloaded only 10% after a few hours. A frantic email to support revealed,  it is normal as they do not want to overload our server. Our entire site backup took nearly 1 full day, but then QOT has a large database. Most sites will upload much faster.

So now we have realtime backup of our site

VaultPress Cost?

Vaultpress Beta does not come cheap at $15 per month. We opted for the basic plan which gives us comprehensive backup of entire WordPress installation.

• Realtime Core Table Backup
• Non Core Table Backups
• Unlimited Snapshots
• Downloadable Archives
• Stats, Activity Log, Support

If you decide to get the Premium Vaultpress plan, it would cost you $40 per month, but will include Security Monitoring as well.

How Vaultpress Can Improve?

Vaultpress backs up all your files in realtime, which can cause considerable load on shared hosting, so you might want to think. We experienced some increase in server load, and they throttled from the backend, and advised we enable FTP /SSH access to take load off the server, but I am not happy entering my FTP /SSH passwords in a third party plugin.

Secondly, many bloggers would not be  interested in  hourly back up of blogs, once or twice a day would be enough, but there is no option to configure that – though many busy blogs would find a realtime back up very useful, to keep comments and latest blog posts safe.

Note Vaultpress backups up only the plugins, themes, uploads and database. So if you have files in the root directory, extra files, htaccess etc, they will not be backed up. Also note you can download these backup files, they will not restore them for you in one click if  your server crashes.

I have had a chance to contact Vaultpress support a few times, and it seems they are available US time as that is when replies occur. A fast response time will go a long way to enhance customer trust. Also an affiliate program will help bloggers recover the Vaultpress expenses and help the service grow. But then its still in beta.

Get VaultPress

Vaultpress is definitely not cheap at $15 per month. But if your blog makes decent advertising revenue, you can afford to spend a small fraction of your profits on backing up your blog in real time, so that you can restore it when you need it. Hackers are for real and servers do crash and your hosting backup might get corrupted. The earning blog is the lifeline and income resource for many full time bloggers, and spending a few dollars more will guarantee you a better sleep at night, so even if hackers strike, your blog is safely backed up at Vaultpress.

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1. Akismet –  this is the single most important plugin for any WordPress blog if you want to moderate comments in a sane manner. It effectively blocks all the spam which hundreds of bots keep posting everyday. We get thousands of spam comments each day, and without Akismet managing comments would be impossible.
2. All in One SEO – claims to be an out of the box SEO plugin. It fixes all your titles and relevant meta tags to help your blog get higher search engine rankings. No wonder it is the most download wordpress plugin. WordPress expert can manually fix a lot of code themselves, but for most bloggers this does the SEO job in one click.
3. Clean Archives Reloaded - is the easiest way to create an archives page for your site. Simply activate the plugin, create a page titles ‘archives’, then cut past a simple shortcode and your fresh archive is live. See our archives page.
4. Evermore –  this is a simple way to abbreviate all posts when viewed on multiple post pages. This makes all posts behave as if there is a “<!–more–>” at an appropriate spot inside the content. See it live on our front page.
5. Google XML Sitemaps –  This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog. It regularly updates your sitemap whenever your posts or pages changes and pings search engines.
6. Grunion Contact Form –  this is the best contact form by Automatic itself, makers of WordPress. It will let you add a contact form to any post, page or text widget. Emails will be sent to the post’s author by default, or any email address you choose. You must have seem it on WordPress.com. See it live on our contact form.
7. WordPress Stats -  this is a light weight analytics plugins (again as seen on WordPress.com) to track site statistics and monitor you site traffic, backlinks, and traffic charts right from the WordPress dashboard. Simple and easy.
8. WordPress Data Backup – provides an automated  as well as on demand back up of your wordpress databases.  It is must have to back your database safely on your email, computer or server itself, to save you on a bad server day.
9. Wp-Ban -  Sometimes you are stuck with a particularly spammy IP which despite getting in the spam queue, keeps posting thousands of comments on your site and overloading your server. Ban IP addresses easily and protect your blog. It works.
10. Wp-supercache –  this is the must have plugin to keep your site up and running not only when you have the Digg traffic hitting you, but also routinely to cache all your content and reduce server load with all those PHP calls. Do not start a WordPress blog without it.

I shared my WordPress plugins. What plugins do you use besides these?

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And in case you missed it here were the best tips and tricks of 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009!

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1. Quick Online Tips That Work – Yes, that was the original name of this blog when we started it on Blogger in 2004. The really earliest readers in 2004 might remember. It was started as a hobby and meant to showcase some how-to tips and tricks, some extra long articles with lots of screenshots. But as the brand developed, “That Work” was cropped out in favour of a shorter brand name (which I think is still too long).

2. Our Short Domain Name - Have you ever used this url QOT.me (QOT.ME) instead of typing the super long domain name quickonlinetips.com. Well it redirects to the main domain name. So the next time you want to actually type out our domain name in your browser or mobile device, you might find it much quicker to type qot.me. [PS If you follow us on Twitter, you probably knew that already.]

3. First Most Popular Post – was called Absolutely Del.ici.ous – This was the first collection of all delicious tools (formerly called del.icio.us, before yahoo! bought it) and was a superhit on del.icio.us and consistenly topped the traffic charts for being the most shared bookmark on del.icio.us.!

4. Top PR linked post - BoingBoing linked to it. Engadget linked to it. It got a newbie blog barely few months old, the most high PR links from the top blogs in the industry (unfortunately we were on Blogger then). So what was it about – a mosquito electric racquet which is sold for a few hundred rupees on the streets on India. It got us higher traffic in a day, much more than we ever got.

5. Longest time highest PR page – Great Flickr Tools was the most highest PR7 page on QOT for several years. Every Flickr tool developer wanted to be listed on it (of course now it is lower) and we sometimes still continue to update the article.

We will continue to share interesting tips about our site as the year ends. Join our 25000 subscribers and subscribe by email or RSS and never miss our articles again.

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VPS Hacked

Accessing as root user gives the hacker unlimited access and superuser powers to all critical areas and power to modify and delete any file on your server. Throughout the unauthorized access period, there was no downtime and the site functioned as usual. Though no critical function was compromised, the hacker definitely tweaked some files and log files revealed access to critical server areas.

Thankfully we secure servers with Configserver Security and Firewall (CSF), a powerful Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) firewall, Login/Intrusion detection and security application for Linux servers, which alerted us of the hacker intrusion and tracked their IP.

Restoring VPS backup

We host our site on Knownhost VPS hosting, and their excellent technical support was super quick to respond, blocked the IP and scanned critical areas for intrusion, file access, file modification, and malware / virus implantation. They advised us to change all passwords immediately for the server, MySQL database  and WordPress. Since the site was online and functioning without a glitch, obviously some stealth changes were done to some critical files.

Since Knownhost automatically keeps regular secure backups of all VPS servers, they offered us an entire of array of dates available for VPS backup. Then they quickly and professionally restored the VPS to a previous date without a hitch in under an hour.

Of course it meant a few latest posts and comments will get lost. So we backed up our latest posts manually and reposted them after the server was restored. A few comments on the latest posts and other comments made from the period of VPS backup to the date this happened got lost.

Security Lessons Learnt

1. Use very strong passwords –  Strong passwords are not good enough. Very strong passwords are needed with long combinations of letters, numbers and symbols – so that even the best password cracking software fails. Also remember to frequently keep changing passwords.
2. Beware of public computers - Only login as root from your most trusted computer, as public computers (even office, friends, library PCs) may have keyloggers and other malware. Its easy to pick up your password as you type it.
3. Back up daily- any server can be hacked any day. If you have regular latest backups, they you can sleep with peace of mind that your server can be restored easily if anything goes wrong. Regularly backup your MySQL database, or even use WordPress backup services.
4. Upgrade and Update –  Always keep your WordPress installation and all plugins updated, and new versions also close up security holes. Don’t give hackers a chance.
5. Install Server Security Software -  your new server usually will not come preinstalled with security software. We have found CSF a very effective server security tool which blocks several intrusion attempts everyday.
6. Use a reliable responsive web hosting –  I am glad that we are hosted in Knownhost VPS. They have consistently shown expert, knowledgeable and superfast response time (24×7!!) over the last 1 year; and how they do it amazes me everytime. I would recommend Knownhost managed VPS any day.

Any server can be hacked, but you have to stay prepared with back up, keep you security antennae alert and chose a reliable hosting for stress free blogging.  So that was our QOT hacking experience and we hope to keep the great content rolling in…

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