I wanted something relatively mindless but productive to do this evening. I decided that a new background image gallery for my background image site, Symmetrical Backgrounds,  would fit the bill.

I wanted some happy stuff, so I decided to make a gallery of colorful backgrounds. Some of them may be too colorful to ever find an application but they are available as options, anyway. To find images on which to base my backgrounds for this gallery I did a Google search for Colorful Pictures and hit the images link. There was a good selection from which to choose.

To make the symmetrical tiles I take a small area of the image and make a cut. Then I flip and stitch a couple of times to make the final image. My photo editor has a panoramic function that I use to stitch the parts of the images. If there is a design in the portion of the image that I choose there can be some interesting geometrics in the tiled background. Check out the Colorful Cuts Gallery.

I use Irfanview for an image editor. There is a built in function to produce html pages. I have modified the templates for use on my sites. The gallery pages that are produced use the subject image as the background image for the page.

I just noticed this evening that Irfanview can be used as a color picker. If you open a file in the window and click on a color that color is displayed as an RGB and html number. This is a feature that I will use from time to time in my design work. I wonder what other wonders lurk within the program, or many of the programs that I probably don’t use to their fullest potential.

Sometime recently I began to notice that my search results were appended with a line that said something like ‘this search took .xx seconds with safe search. This didn’t really impact me other than to say, “so what?”. Then the title of one of my blog posts from the Web Pickups site disappeared from the search results. Since the post in question does not display Google ads even though the code does show in the source code of the page, I thought that Google had deleted the page from the search index.

I finally noticed that the line about safe search had changed and one of the words was triggering the safe search filter. I saw a link for safe search to the right of the search box and clicked on it. This produced a drop menu that allowed me to turn safe search off. With safe search disabled my page was number two in the search results and the listing at number one had a caution for malware on the site.

I investigated safe search a bit further. From Google’s Safe Search page:

About Google’s SafeSearch filter

Use Google’s SafeSearch filter if you don’t want to see sites that contain pornography, explicit sexual content, profanity, and other types of hate content in your Google search results. While no filter is 100 percent accurate, SafeSearch checks a website’s keywords and phrases, URLs, and Open Directory categories to determine and filter out inappropriate sites.

The page goes on to list the various levels of protection and how they affect the search results:

In the SafeSearch Filtering section, choose the SafeSearch level you’d like to use:

• Moderate filtering: This option excludes most explicit images from Google Images results but doesn’t filter ordinary web search results. This is your default SafeSearch setting; you’ll receive moderate filtering unless you change it.
• Strict filtering: This applies SafeSearch filtering to both image and web search results.
• No filtering: This option turns SafeSearch filtering off completely.

It is stated that Moderate is the default setting. What I was seeing fits the description of strict filtering. I did not really pay attention to what level of filtering was enabled when I saw the option to turn safe search off. I think that the default behavior that I saw was Strict rather than Moderate. According to the descriptions above I should have been seeing the page listed in the search results.

At any rate, the setting is saved in a cookie so when you conduct further searches you do so under your desired search behavior. Over all I think that it is good to have the options. I suspect that if Moderate were actually the default few people would even notice a difference or complain about it. I think that the Strict filtering is going a bit too far as a default but has value for those wishing to protect young minds (or easily offended older minds). I have no other complaint with the system as long as the setting is retained in a cookie for my computer and I am aware of the situation.

I wrote a couple of days ago about a possible Google Slap. I have just discovered that the page in question has not been delisted. Ads are not shown on the page, but if you pay attention you can find the page through Google. In fact the page is at the number 2 position in the SERPs. The catch is that it contains the word boob. Even though there are multiple meanings for the word it is on Google’s naughty list.

I looked at some traffic logs today and noticed that there is a label above the search results that says the the word ‘boob’ has been filtered from the search by their ‘safe search’ technology. I looked the page over and saw a link for ‘safe search’ clicking the link produces a drop-box. The option to turn off safe search is available. When safe search is turned off the page appears in the number 2 position.

This may be a bit of an over reaction on Google’s part, but they can run their business however they wish. There is no reason not to show ads on the page, but with millions of sites and probably billions of pages of content manually checking each page where the algorithm noted a problem would be beyond even Google’s reach.

I had never heard of a single page slap, and it turns out that this is not the case. The title includes words with an intended double meaning to draw attention. It turns out that the double meaning causes the word to appear in Google’s filter list. Probably 99% of people that search on Google will never adjust the default behavior of the search results, so I miss the traffic opportunity that I might see otherwise. Another title would produce no results at all, so I will just take what little traffic does come from the post. The link could go viral but I will not hold my breath.

Meanwhile I have two or three other pages that are within the top five SERPs, so I am seeing some traffic to the site.

All of my websites were off line for a couple of hours this afternoon. Hostmonster pulled the plug until I corrected the problems.

On December 31, 2009 my web space was violated by a hacker. A visitor had notified me that they got a virus warning when trying to visit one of my sites. I checked it out and found the damage that the hacker had done (most of it, that is). I spent a couple of afternoons replacing files and cleaning up after the attack.

I had missed a few files, mostly not on public accessible pages.  When I first found the problems I had renamed a few files and left them on the server. I had re-uploaded .js files to the blogs that I had in operation at the time because the .js files were a primary attack point. I had also archived three of the sites that I did rebuilds to in the fall.

Not only had the hackers altered many files, but they had uploaded additional files in the blogs. When I uploaded the replacements any standard files were overwritten with good files, but the added files remained unchanged.

Hostmonster had received a couple of complaints. They had done a scan on my space and found 208 files that were still affected. I had to go through the site via my FTP client and delete or correct each file. This actually did not take as long as I first thought that it might, but it did take some time. The scan had produced a text file with all of the infected files listed. I deleted the archived files and some folders that were not needed on the server and corrected the other problems.

I then called back to Hostmonster support. They did another scan on my hosting space and it came up clean, so they removed their block and I am back in business.

I should have contacted them when I was made aware of the problem. Their scan report would have helped me to clean up the site properly at the time. My traffic is much higher now than it was then, so I would have missed fewer visitors by taking action at the time.

The hackers had full access to my space. That means that they had the password for the account. The first thing that I did when I learned of the problem was to change the password, and that stopped further intrusions. Sometime later Hostmonster changed all of the passwords and made them stronger. They were aware that some accounts had been compromised. The server farm may be just too extensive to run a complete scan of all the sites on their servers. That may have required too many resources and produced quality of service problems for them. For whatever reason (mainly that there were very few public files that I had missed) it took over 5 months for them to notice the problem.

There was very little wait time on either of the two calls that I placed to Hostmonster support today. I wish that the local power company was a bit more like this, but then they are a government sanctioned monopoly and their customers don’t have the option of voting with their feet. The technical staff was knowledgeable and courteous on both calls. The few times that I have needed to call support over the past two and a half years have been the same. I am well satisfied with the service that I have enjoyed from Hostmonster.

I have a website, Web Pickups, where I post the contents of interesting emails from my email network. I recently added a WordPress blog to the site where I have posted the most recent additions. I do not post anything that I consider to be X rated as that would be against the TOS of my hosting account, but some of the things that come in via email may be considered in poor taste at best.

On the 26th of May I posted and email titled ‘Black Woman with With One White Boob and One Black Boob‘. (The title links to the post, if you are interested.) I had been amazed by the search traffic that this post has been generating. Yesterday was no exception. Today, not so much.

I went to my server last evening to check some the traffic log for another site and while I was there I peeked at the stats for Web Pickups. There were several searches for the page listed in the referrers line of the log. I usually look at these searches to see where I am actually coming up on the results pages. When I looked at the results pages I did not see the listing on the first page.

There are many searches for email titles of these emails that go viral and the results page usually shows my site in the top three results. Since the redesign of the search results page several options that used to appear right below the search box now appear at the bottom of the page. One of those options is to change to 100 results per page rather than the default 10 results per page. I clicked on the switch and checked the first 100 results. People seldom get past the first 10 unless they are very interested in a subject, even more rarely past the first 10 pages of search results. The page did not show up within the first 100 results. I did not check further, but it appears that the listing has been pulled or at least sent to the dungeon located many stair steps below the basement of the search results.

As somewhat of a confirmation of the slap, when I checked the page to get the link URL I noticed that of the three ad units and the text link unit at the bottom of the page only one unit on that page was showing a Google Public Service add. The space for the other two ad units and the text link unit are blank on that page. The good news is that ad units are showing normally on the other pages that I checked. I will be watching the traffic over the next few days to be sure that Google is still sending traffic to other pages.

This post displays some political humor. All of the characters in the image are fully clothed. There are many other search results that are returned that include the same search terms, and in this case, the slang usage does not even convey sexual innuendo with relation to the image, although without the image for reference many people would have the wrong mental image. This makes me wonder if Google made this decision or if it was done at the request of some higher power?? I take the fact that whatever slap there is has only affected the one page as an indicator that there may be some outside force in action (can you say censorship??). I suspect that if Google made the call that the effect might be more pervasive.

This particular site is more for fun than for profit. If there were huge traffic to the site it might pay its rent, but the people that visit the site are not in a shopping mindset. There is an occasional click when an ad catches somebody’s eye, but the site is an end point rather than a starting point in a buying process. If the site, as a whole, were slapped by Google I would just convert the space devoted to ads to one of the many other options available, though gaining traffic without the Google organic traffic would not be easy, and considering that this is not targeted shopping traffic, would not be of much value.

Do you have an opinion about this situation? Do you have any experience with a Google Slap, or know of a good slap story? If so please leave a comment!