Does Google think you’re a legitimate, quality site?

You’ve done the usual SEO keyword optimization, avoided duplicate content and built backlinks to your pages to improve your rank with Google. But does your site appear “professional” to Google. Does Google think you’re a legitimate, qualified content provider?

AdWords Guidelines

Google is very good about telling us exactly what they want. We just have trouble sometimes in paying attention. AdWords guidelines spells out a number of requirements for a Transparent landing page. It should:

• Openly share info about your business and clearly define what your business is or does.
  [That's a Contact and About Us page]
• Honour the deals and offers that you promote in your ad.
• Deliver products and services as promised.
• Only charge users for the products and services that they order and successfully receive. Distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site content.
  [That's an Earnings Disclaimer]
• Ensure prices or billing methods are easily located on the website and are obvious to users.
• In cases of recurrent billing or subscription situation, the price and billing interval must be present in a clear and obvious location on the page where the user provides their information, and a mandatory opt-in box must be present.
  [That's an Anti-Spam policy statement]
• Unless necessary for the product or service that you’re offering, don’t request personal information.
  [That's a Privacy Policy. Tell your customer about the information you collect]
• If you do request personal information, provide a privacy policy that discloses how the information will be used.
  [Again a Privacy Policy]
• Give options to limit the use of a user’s personal information, such as the ability to opt out of receiving newsletters.
  [That's an Email policy statement]
• Allow users to access your site’s content without requiring them to register. Or, provide a preview of what users will get by registering.
  [That's a Terms of Use page]

The FTC Endorsements and Testimonial Guidelines

Google is not the only one watching your site. The Federal Trade Commission requires some things as well. The FTC has published guidelines on required disclosures for advertisers about Endorsements and Testimonials. In the US you are required by law to make proper disclosures.

Under the revised Guides, advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect. In contrast to the 1980 version of the Guides – which allowed advertisers to describe unusual results in a testimonial as long as they included a disclaimer such as “results not typical” – the revised Guides no longer contain this safe harbor.

A testimonial disclaimer is a must if you’re advertising user’s results.

Real World Test Case

Just how important is all this documentation in a real world example? Andrew Hansen in Does Google Hate Your Site tested comparable pages with and without all the recommended disclaimers and found that AdWords Quality Rating on a site that had all the proper pages rated at 8. A site with no Policy pages rated at 1 and Google wouldn’t even run the ads. A comparable site with only three of the policy pages ranked for a while but after about a week dropped back to 1.

Are you starting to see how important Google considers these pages?

WP Policy Pack

WP Policy Pack provides 10 important disclaimers in an easy to use and manage WordPress plugin.

You get:

• Anti-spam Policy Template
• Disclaimer Template
• DMCA Notice Template
• Earning Disclaimer Template
• E-mail Policy Template
• External Links Policy Template
• Medical Disclaimer Template
• Privacy Policy Template
• Terms of Use Template
• Testimonial Disclaimer Template

The plugin provides shortcodes to automatically insert your required company information into the pages. Pages using the shortcodes will automatically update all pages if you need to change a phone number, address or other information in the future. These shortcodes can be used in any other pages or Post and in Text Widgets to make changing your company information simple sitewide.

WP Policy Pack Screenshot

Pages are inserted in to your WordPress Pages area where they can be edited and customized just like any other WordPress page. Individual Pages may be enabled or disabled at will.

Convince Google You are a Legitimate Quality Site

Improve your quality rating. get WP Policy Pack for $20.00 USD and give Google what they want.

WP Policy Pack available here.

Cloud storage is a generic term for storage supplied for your use on the internet. Since it’s available from anywhere it can be used for transferring files from place to place and can provide safe offsite storage for backups and must have files. Not all storage is the same. Prices and features differ. Here is a review of the storage systems supported by my favorite WordPress backup plugin BackWPup.

Amazon S3

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides it’s Simple Storage System or S3 as it’s cloud storage offering.  It’s apart of it’s more comprehensive Web Services but can be purchased stand-alone. S3 is “pay as you go” which means you are only charged for the actual services you use. But there are several charges involved. You are charged for:

• GB of storage. Currently starting at $0.14 per GB per month with rates decreasing as storage increases.
• Data Transfer in and out of S3 storage currently $0.10 per GB per month in and $0.15 per GB  per month out with the first GB free.
• Requests; GET, PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST currently $0.01 per 1000 requests. GETs are $o.o1 per 10,000 requests.

But for the first year you can take advantage of the AWS Free Usage Tier getting a free package of all AWS services for one year. For storage this includes:

• 5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests
• 30 GB per of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer “in” and 15 GB of data transfer “out”

This is amazingly cheap. particularly for the first year.

Microsoft Azure

Azure is a computing, database, storage, and messaging offering. If you are only interested in storage for backups, videos or music files Azure is not for you. Prices start at $54.95 per month because you can’t unbundle the storage from the other services. If you or your company is already using Azure then adding on other storage requirements are simple. But for the common blogger this is not a good choice.

Rackspace Cloud

Rackspace Cloud Files™ is another “pay as you go” service. Rackspace is primarily a CDN (Content Delivery Network). For doing backups speed is not of the essence, but if you also want to use CDN to enhance the speed of serving videos or other large files, Rackspace is incredibly fast. Much of the speed comes from their use of the Akami CDN network and multiple redundancy, storing files on geographically widely distributed servers. When retrieving a file it is automatically routed to the nearest server with the file.

Prices start at $0.15 per GB per month. Data transfer in is $0.08 per GB, transfer out is $0.18 per GB. Requests are free!

You can also use Rackspace to enhance your WordPress speed with plugins like CDN Tools and W3 Total Cache.

Dropbox

While DropBox supplies online storage, it is primarily a file syncing program. It works by installing a small app on your local machine that communicates with DropBox servers. When a file is uploaded to DropBox it will automatically synchronize that file with any other computer that has been setup to use that file. When a BackWPup backup is loaded it automatically syncs the file to your computer as well in the background. This means that you should provide storage on your computer for you backup files instead of leaving them in the cloud.

If you have more than one machine or have friends that you want to share files with DropBox can do this for your with their DropBox directory. Any file put in the DropBox directory will automatically be sent to the cloud and any other computer set to sync with it. Great for moving files between the office and home.

Pricing for the first 2GB is free for as long as you want! Above 2GB you must buy a plan starting at $9.95 per month for 50GB. If your backups never total more than 2GB you’re golden.

SugarSync

SugarSync is another file synchronizing program. Like DropBox it has a small app that keeps all your computers in sync with the SugarSync server. One feature I really like is the SugarSync Manager which lets you see all the synced files you have on all the computers you sync to and lets you delete move and change syncronization easily.

SugarSync  gives you the first 5GB free, twice what DropBox offers. You can also earn more storage by referring friend to SugarSync. Above 5GB plans start at $4.99 per 30GB per month or $49.99 for a year. Less expensive than DropBox.

This is currently my favorite for backup storage. It will be a while before I can use up 5 GB for backups.

One of the most important tasks in maintaining a WordPress site is to do regular backups and database maintenance. There are only two types of people in the world, those that have lost data and those who are will. A good backup can get you back up and running quickly when your site gets trashed. It MUST be an off site backup because a backup on your host doesn’t do any good when your host goes down.

A good backup can also be used to transfer you WordPress site from one host to another. If your site gets shut down by your host company because somebody has managed to sneak phishing pages on to your site, you may have no choice but to move to another host. Often the deficiencies in security is the fault of the hosting company and not your own.

This video demonstrates the free BackWPup plugin for WordPress. It can do complete backups of both your WordPress files and database, as well as clean and optimize your database. Backups can be scheduled for as often as you like and the backup file can be sent to your by email stored at an online storage service such as Amazon S3.

Enjoy the video.

Click the icon for full screen

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