Yes. My blog is down for more than 8 hours. Traffic drop to more than half. It is due to I am too busy to check my blog. It is unbelievable that this could happen even I have a strong password and updated to the latest WordPress version. However, this security issue does not only affect WordPress but it happens to all websites even your blog is hosted on reliable hosting provider such as Hostgator.

Some sources said it must be one of the folder that is set to executable by public users. Then it is take granted by anonymous users that trying bring the site down.

Symptom

At first I thought it is caused by Hostgator shared server down again but it is not. The reason is that my other blogs are working fine and able to load partially.

It made me wonder why it works on one blog but not the other? As I dig deeper through the files in the server and find out a lot of random number PHP and htaccess files generated in every sub-folders.

The htaccess will point to the random number PHP file when the page hit an error document. Imagine when all of these htaccess separated into each sub-directories, it will force the site down in less than one second. How horrible!

Solutions

I have yet to find a good solutions to remove the unnecessary files generated by remote scripts. To resolve the issue quickly, I am about to remove all the suspicious files one by one by utilizing the FileZilla remote search files feature. It is slow but still acceptable.

After one hour plus of finding solutions and removing thousands of suspicious files, finally my blog is running fine again.

To make sure this issue does not happen again in the future, I also have change all the password, remove some FTP users, and change the permission of the folders that could be affected.

I don’t know the exact reasons of my blog traffic increase in a sudden because I have done many things to my blog during the Hostgator shared server downtime. I have remove two banners at the side bar, disable gravatar profile picture, apply for CloudFlare CDN and trying to make my blog as simple as possible.

Since Google consider website speed as part of the ranking, I don’t see the reason why it will increase to over 10%. What I know is that Google Panda Update is affecting many of the blogs and websites out there. Most of them getting traffic drop.

Most people complain their blogs are affected by the update even though they write original content. Content is still important but now Google is taking consideration of the blog layout. A simple and good navigation the blog can really help to make your blog standout from others especially for individual blog owner.

What to do when your site is affected?

Consider minimizing total number of ads on the same spot. Example having 3 ads on the header section. It may be good to separate it into sidebar or footer section. Don’t let the visitor feel overwhelm.

Things to remove: Tag clouds, having too many tags, broken links, spam comments, lengthy page title or description, and many same sentences repeated in posts

What you need to consider: adding more thoughtful and helpful analysis content, easy navigation at the top, revamp old posts, and improve your site loading speed.

Conclusion

There are many more factors that affected the new ranking. What I know is, in this Google Panda Update, you need to apply “common sense” into your blog. Imagine yourself as the new visitor who first time come to the blog. Do you feel confuse with the navigation? Do you think the content is helpful? Is the site having too many ads that make you feel bad?

I don’t know how long my blog can sustain the traffic at 1500 unique visitor per day. I should continue to write more genuine content to help people find to their information easily. It is happy to know that I am half-way to my target 3000 UV per day. Hopefully, I can reach my target by this year.

How about you? Is your blog affected by recent Google update?

Blog performance speed is very crucial to every site owner. We need to serve our web pages as fast as we can to give the best experience to visitor. This is also apply to search engine like Google. Google like blogs that can load within seconds. You will see your blog traffic will slightly increase as the web pages loading time decrease.

In order to improve wordpress performance, we can apply several simple methods without taking risk to change difficult modification on server configuration files or server settings. We should learn to improve wordpress performance without touching the coding or complex configuration whenever possible.

Let’s look at what we can do to achieve the best result.

How to Speed Up WordPress Load Time

W3 Total Cache – This is must-have cache plugin for every wordpress blogger. It will helps to decrease all the CSS, JS, and HTML pages size. All required files to server will be compress into a folder for faster serving and improve site loading time. I manage to save 5-6 seconds of loading time after install this great plugin. You should tweak the settings on this plugin to match with your blog purpose. Some high traffic blogs require lesser cache time.

CloudFlare CDN – Not many people think of using Content Delivery Network (CDN) for their blog. CDN is a very useful service to improve your wordpress speed. If you have visitors around the world, you will benefit from using CDN. It provides benefit to cache static content, advanced routing technology, help protect your domain and for other security purpose. It is FREE to use. If your blog is hosted on Hostgator, you will an option to active CloudFlare in your cPanel. No signup and configuration is required. You just need to click to active the service and it will take 10 minutes or more to take effect. However, I am not sure how reliable this FREE service is but you can get the Pro account for $20 per month. My blog gain a few seconds loading time decrease after install this service via Hostgator.

WP-Optimize – This is another great plugin to clear unused records in database such as revisions data, spam comments, and option tables. These wordpress tables will grow eventually in the future. WP Optimize will optimize the tables for you and let you know which tables you need to optimize and how much space you can save. Reducing database size can greatly improve wordpress load time.

Premium WordPress Theme – Choosing the best wordpress theme will improve WordPress load time dramatically. Since it is the back-bone of your blog, it will greatly affect the overall performance. My blog is powered by Thesis Theme. It is a very good WordPress theme for SEO benefit and simplifying the framework design to maximize benefit. Many people claim that their blog traffic increase a bit after installing it. Another great framework is Genesis framework which is also very popular amongst its Elegant Theme user.

WP-Smush it – I have been using WP Smush it since the early day. It is a great plugin that automatically compress photos and images uploaded via WordPress. The process is done at the background and it is unnoticeable. It will helps to reduce a few kilobytes of redundant photos size to improve the overall quality of your blog.

Remove Unnecessary Plugins – Beware of some plugins that will cause your blog to slow down. One of the issue that I had face was the YARPP plugin. This is a great plugin but not recommended for blog with average or high traffic. It had call too many database requests to perform its caching operation. Although, it will not make your blog down but it is a good practice to minimize the database requests to improve blog performance.

Disable Gravatar – Disabling gravatar on WordPress will improve load time especially when your blog have a lot of comments. Gravatar will get the profile photos for each commentator and it will add up the load time.

Hostgator is the best international hosting company that I have know so far. They have powerful server and a lot of bandwidth to share with their customers. After transfer my blog to Hostgator, I am really satisfy with their quality.

However, recently due to overselling 20% discount of their shared hosting services, it causes my blog down several times of the day in a week. Today is the most critical day that they are doing a server maintenance and it takes my blog down for more than 2 hours, not including those minor down time in order days. But why there is no announcement or notification of the server maintenance? I received none of the announcement even in their support forum.

When ask about what is the exact time the server maintenance will done. No one staff is able to answer that! What I don’t like about them is that they are lying and hiding the server down time information as much as possible to customers. Is it very difficult to make announcement of server maintenance or expected down time? I really don’t understand.

The Fact

After continuously of my attempt to send several tickets over the issue, still getting no response. But luckily they are able to fix the issue after a few hours. Imagine a few hours of down time for a high traffic blog. Your income will drop within the period, your visitor get page not found and frustrated, and it will take certain time to make Google trust your domain and get your pages indexed again. The staff will never admit or mention the down time issue.

Backup Plan

I should have apply the FREE CloudFlare CDN service earlier to minimize this effect. CDN will help to continue serving the blog to visitor even tough Hostgator server is down. It will display a message saying the blog is currently in offline mode, but you still can enjoy surfing. This is a very good backup plan in case your blog is down several times in a day.

Conclusion

Every company got its cons and pros. Hostgator still provide good quality service and fast response support team. Hopefully, this server maintenance will fix the issue or I will have to move my blog to another stable server. What says you?

limfy.com traffic is increasing slowly and pass the target 1k daily traffic since the new year 2011. As Google update my blog PageRank to 2 and I had change my blog theme to Thesis, traffic is going to increase as well.

As you know, my blog didn’t get update frequently and traffic starting to drop since last few weeks ago because I am busy with moving house, buying new computer, and subscribing new internet broadband. Currently, I am using P1 WiMAX 1.2MB 4G connection and the speed can compare with my existing Streamyx 1MB internet wired broadband.

How to Achieve 3k Daily Unique Visitor Faster?

In order to achieve faster result, I need to publish many articles like 3-4 unique quality articles every day for few months. By doing this, I could achieve my target 3k daily unique visitors because more articles count equals to more traffic amount.

I have come to understand that passion is what I needed the most to achieve the target. Not only I should be passionate of blogging but I also need to be discipline in posting frequency.

Why I Want to Say It Out Loud?

One of the lesson that I have learn from the book “The Secret” was the law of attraction By sharing what I love to do, in return I would getting more of those things that I love. So, focus on what you love and hate bring no different because it is the matter of what you are focusing at.

Do Not Give Up Easily

I had saw many blogs started to fade out and not updating anymore. This is very sad especially no more new posts. I remind myself from time to time, what if I had give up on last time? I will be regret and not going to move forward in my life.

I know everyone has at least one dream in their life and we should make our dream come true. Living without a dream is like living a life without meaning. No matter what we want to do, as soon as we are happy and no regret that should be fine

Hope you are motivated when you read this post. Happy blogging!

Yeah. The latest Google PageRank update has increase my blog PR and limfy.com regain back PR2 that was lost during my blogging idle period in dec 2009. It was a very happy moment for me. Although PageRank 2 is not a high value, but it is good to see the blog improvement over the years of blogging.

Now, do you still think Google PageRank is not important anymore? Many advertisers use to measure the blog popularity by PageRank and still believe it is always the most important factor of all. Indeed, it is not really the most accurate way of calculating the overall value of a website.

So, what do you think? Do you gain PageRank on the recent Google update?

My blog posts always get indexed right on the spot after it is published. Until recently, I am having an issue of some posts did not indexed by Google. As I look through the solution and found out that I have a lot of crawl errors pages showing at Google Webmaster. This is due to after I have revamped my blog design and remove unused links for better organize navigation.

Getting index as soon as possible is very crucial. It is important to make sure your hard written posts able to reach by everyone and new visitors.

Here I have found out that 5 reasons why a blog is not indexed properly.

XML Sitemap Generator is not working properly

This will happen when you have perform an upgrade to newer WordPress version and the xml sitemap plugin is not compatible with the latest WordPress. Making it crash and not able to generate sitemap automatically. In other words, it is broken. There is no solution for this unless revert back the old WordPress or wait for the plugin update.

Too many crawl errors pages

Make sure your blog don’t have too many 404 not found pages because Googlebot is unable to navigate to these broken links. Instead, Googlebot will stop crawling from time to time until you have remove the links manually from Google Webmasters or add the links back again. You can make a request to remove those links at Google Webmasters option. After the removed request successful, it will not show anymore crawl errors. Other unreachable pages issue can be solved by installing WP Super Cache plugins to speed up the performance of your blog.

Your blog looks like a spammer site

Auto-blogging will make your blog fall into spammer site category soon or later. Although some auto-blog site do link back to original post, but the post you make from automated tool does not give any values to readers and search engine. Google will treat your site as spam site very soon and stop indexing your blog.

Try to add the external links with meaningful anchor text to let the readers find information easily. Avoid links like “Click here” or “Download Here” whenever possible.

Lack of new content

Frequent posting is important to make sure your blog is still active. Continue to post more quality post to make your blog looks more lively with fresh content which gives more value to your readers.

Your blog is not important enough

Blog popularity determines the crawl rate of your blog. Most good quality blogs have quick page index rate and it is due to the reason GoogleBot has given it a trust. The total comments on your blog shows how good is the engagement of the topic that you have published. Write a lot of good quality posts to attract more new visitors coming to your blog.

We all want to market and promote our blogs but truth be told it’s too time consuming. The Blog Engage RSS Syndication Subscription Service allows you to take advantage of their amazing blogging community by submitting your blogs content on a daily basis.

Blog Engage has a total of four different memberships to join that will meet the needs of almost all of their members.

What’s Included with the service?

1. Automatic syndication of your blogs content.
2. Automatic submission of all future blog articles.
3. Automatically fills in the title, description and tags.
4. Automatic hourly or daily updates searching for your blogs new content.
5. Automatically submit one or multiple articles per RSS Feed Update.
6. One free vote with all RSS Feed article submissions.

SEO Benefits:

1. Automatically create do follow backlinks for every article you write.
2. Increase your SERP on all Search Engines.
3. Grow your reader base with our real community members.

I think one of the coolest features is you cannot tell the difference between a member that is part of the service or a member that manually submitting their content to the community.

Platinum Membership

Platinum Membership will allow you to have up tp three blogs and select up to five categories from each blog in which articles will be submitted to on blog engage. These are actual categories you have on your blog. We will also allow an unlimited amount of new articles to be submitted every hour your RSS feed is checked.

1. Add up to Three Seperate Blog url’s
2. RSS Feeds Checked Hourly
3. Unlimited New Articles Per Check
4. Five Categories to Update

Gold Membership

Gold Membership will allow you to select up to five categories from your blog in which articles will be submitted to on blog engage. These are actual categories you have on your blog. We will also allow an unlimited amount of new articles to be submitted every hour your RSS feed is checked.

1. RSS Feeds Checked Hourly
2. Unlimited New Articles Per Check
3. Five Categories to Update

Silver Membership

Silver Membership will allow you to select up to three categories from your blog in which articles will be submitted to on blog engage. These are actual categories you have on your blog. Three new articles are allowed every 3 hours the RSS feed is checked.

1. RSS Feeds Checked Every Three Hours
2. Three New Articles Accepted Per Check
3. Three Categories to Update

Bronze Membership

Bronze Membership will allow you to select one category from your blog in which articles will be submitted to on blog engage. With Bronze membership please make sure to select the most popular category on your blog for your one category choice. We will submit all your other blog content to our General Blogging Category. One new article is accepted every 8 hours when the RSS feed is checked

1. RSS Feeds Checked Every Eight Hours
2. Three New Articles Accepted Per Check
3. One Category to Update