If you have a growing or geographically diverse team, rallying the troops around a shared message is a great way to keep everyone on the same page. If you’re not sure where to start with your own internal newsletter, I’d be happy to dissect what goes into our “Weekly Breakdown” as an example you might build from.

The Weekly Breakdown kicks off with employee birthdays. We want to make sure all 700+ SLayers know when one of their coworkers is getting a year “better,” and every month, huge birthday cakes are brought to every office to recognize the SLayers celebrating their birthdays. We haven’t written a SoftLayer version of a cheesy-restaurant rendition of the classic “Happy Birthday” song, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.

In addition to employee birthdays, we’ll also call out important days (like SoftLayer’s birthday: May 5!) in the birthday section.

The next section in the Breakdown is similar to the “Birthdays” section, but it’s a little more relevant to our business: “Anniversaries This Month.” When you’re hired at SoftLayer, you basically get a SoftLayer birthday, and we want to recognize how long you’ve been a SLayer:

After we recognize the SoftLayer anniversaries, we have a section devoted to keeping employees informed of various activities going on at SoftLayer. That might be a recent press release, an update on holidays or an upcoming company event. This section is the go-to place for employees to know what’s new with SoftLayer.

The next few sections list available SL Job Openings, New Hires from the previous week, and Organizational Changes. Given that SoftLayer is still growing like crazy, we want to make sure all of our employees see the available positions in the organization so they can share with their network of friends or so they can see any opportunities they feel might better suit their talents and passions. It’s always nice to know who is helping SoftLayer grow (new employees) and how they are growing with SoftLayer, whether vertically or horizontally (organizational changes).

The next two sections are dedicated to employees “personal” lives: Classifieds and Fundraising Events. These sections let employees list anything they are selling or giving away along with any fundraising activities or events that they, their kids, their neighbor or their dog are involved in. We’ve had classified items like car wheels, stereos and animal adoptions, and you can bet that employees were voraciously reading the “Fundraising” section when Girl Scout Cookie orders were being taken.

We wrap up the Weekly Breakdown with my favorite section: SoftLayer Praise. There are so many reasons why the section gives me joy. It’s amazing how many wonderful comments our customers have about SoftLayer on a weekly basis, and it’s a “pat on the back” for teams that may not interact directly with customers on a daily basis. Sharing all of the praise is great for morale, and those little compliments here and there go a long way to making our team continue working hard … even if just to hear those comments again and again! Here are some of my favorite comments from the past few weeks:

Those kinds of comments can put a smile on any SLayers face!

If you have any wonderful comments to say about SoftLayer or an individual employee, don’t be scared to tell us … Your comment might just be featured in our next “Weekly Breakdown.” Comment on this blog, use SoftLayer’s “Get Satisfaction” page, tweet @SoftLayer or post to our Facebook page. We love to hearing from you and working hard to remain the “best hosting company [you] know of!”

As you can see, the Weekly Breakdown covers a lot of SoftLayer goodness in a given week. It takes a little work to keep a 700-SLayer organization on the same page, but that work pays off exponentially when the team is able to share accomplishments, praise and goals. I’d highly recommend you trying your own weekly internal newsletter … Now leave us some SL praise!

-Natalie

When Google’s “Panda” Algorithm Collides with Duplicate Content

If you’re a Webmaster, it’s likely you’ve heard about the Google latest search algorithm — “Panda” — and all the benefits and implications of this update. Today, we wanted highlight what happens when Google Panda collides online with duplicate content. There have been plenty of opinions written about Google Panda and duplicate content, but we want to provide some background and examples to help you better understand how Panda and duplicate content might affect you.

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is a term used in the field of search engine optimization to describe content that appears on more than one web page, within the same web site. When multiple pages within a web site contain essentially the same content, search engines such as Google can penalize/not display that site in any relevant search results.

Should you be Concerned?

When Google released Panda, there was a significant outcry from legitimate business and publishers who were either downgraded overnight in their search engine page rank or dropped all together. For many of the businesses, the Panda algorithm reduced SEO rank and decreased visitors, site revenue and online market awareness. Some websites even experienced damage to their brand, as their customers and prospects questioned whether they were still in business.

We’ve spoken with Cult of Mac, Digital Trends and several Fortune 1000 businesses, and they’ve all said the same thing: They were penalized and downgraded as a result of the Panda release as a result of unauthorized duplication of their content. They had done everything to comply with Google in optimizing their SEO configurations, but the third-party websites scraping and duplicating their content (outside of their control) caused their page ranks to fall.

Google’s Official Stance on Duplicate Content:

“We do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.”

“In rare situations, our algorithm may select a URL from an external site that is hosting your content without your permission. If you believe that another site is duplicating your content in violation of copyright law, you may contact the site’s host to request removal. In addition, you can request that Google remove the infringing page from our search results by filing a request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

Where is This “External” Duplicate Content Coming From?

Sometimes, it’s not clear how third-party sites obtain copies of legitimate work. Typically, they either steal it by manually or automatically scraping the content. The scraped content is then republished onto their sites, providing no credit or link to the original work.

What does that look like? It’s not difficult to find examples, but I tracked one down that seemed particularly ironic. Here’s an original article by PC World on Google’s War Against Scraper Sites:

Here’s a duplicate copy of the same story that doesn’t give any credit to the original PC World article:

It’s clear that we’re not looking at a coincidence here. The title, article content and images are all identical. The scraping site didn’t even attempt to mask their plagiarism with synonym changes. Why would they do that? Just take a look at the ads on the scraper site … They want to profit from the keywords and traffic driven by PC World’s content.

What Can You Do About It?

• Listen to Google
  Google provides a list of tips for using rel=”nofollow” and canonicalization to ensure they are able to identify you as the original author of content and avoid penalizing or downgrading your business’s search ranking results.
• Learn About DMCA and Use It
  If your content has already been duplicated by unauthorized publishers, you should learn more about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and how it can help get help remove your content from infringing websites. Two helpful resources to start learning the law and your rights are Google’s official DMCA policy page and the United States Copyright Office.
• Be Proactive About Stopping Scrapers
  We believe the best solution is to implement practices and or services to proactively prevent people or web scrapers from harvesting or scraping your content in the first place. Although web scrapers can be difficult to detect, there are tactics and/or services that can be implemented to limit certain behaviors on your website(s). Some of the quickest ways to make strides in the right direction are to implement rate limiting rules, to block traffic from blacklisted IP addresses and to use Captcha to help reduce automated web scrapers.

While none of these tactics are fool-proof ways to completely prevent your content from being duplicated, the more barriers to entry you have, the more difficult it will be for web scrapers to repeatedly duplicate your content. Distil built an enterprise-ready platform to monitor and prevent site scraping, so if you want some help in the protecting your content, try our our service. Whatever route you take, the key is to make sure that whatever tactics or services you implement, you don’t forget about your legitimate traffic … You don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Be proactive, but make sure you keep your priorities on the user-experience and quality of your site(s).

-Sean Harmer, Distil

Those who wish to attend will need to be able to provide their own transportation to Banbury, England. Other than that, the tour is completely free!

As there is limited space for the tour, we ask that you email our management team at mgmt@vps.net with proof of travel accommodations and an explanation of your interest in F1.

For those interested in keeping up with the full ongoings of the Marussia F1 Team, we encourage you to subscribe to the UK2Group racing website at http://marussiaf1team.uk2group.com.

Beyond my closet-full of black and red shirts (many of which are visible in Tech Partner Spotlight video interviews on YouTube), even when I’m out of the office I find myself “checking on customers’ servers” quite a bit … I use quotes in there because that the justification I give myself for spending time (that I’d probably spend anyway) on platforms that leverage SoftLayer’s infrastructure.

Because SoftLayer operates with an “Innovate or Die” mentality, we tend to attract customers that innovate in their own businesses. Whether that trend is intentional or not, it makes sense: Why would a fast-moving platform or application with massive growth and scaling needs be hosted with a provider taking “enterprise” time to provision a solution that ends up being “enterprise” only in name? “Enterprise Class” is not the same as “Internet Scale,” and that distinction is pretty significant when a business might have one visitor on Monday and a million visitors on Tuesday. Platforms and applications that grow like that usually operate with a high level of what I like to call “awesomeness,” so when they choose SoftLayer as a hosting provider, I feel like I need to investigate their awesomeness personally … And that’s how I’ve become a die-hard user of many of SoftLayer’s customers.

One of my favorite customers to “check on” is Tumblr. If you aren’t familiar with Tumblr, I recommend that you go to their site right now and immerse yourself in their community. I actually remember the day Tumblr signed on as a customer; I was genuinely excited that they’d be hosting on our platform. Even if that excitement was because I could justify having my Tumblr dashboard open in the background at work. I don’t think anyone could have expected the platform to grow so phenomenally in a few years, but Tumblr’s numbers are pretty staggering these days: 16.7 billion (yes, with a “B”) monthly pageviews of 55.7 million blogs with 23.1 billion posts. I wasn’t one of the first accounts on Tumblr, but I tell myself I have some kind of Tumblr cred … And I use my “limited-edition” black background and Japanese dashboard logo to prove it:

Another SoftLayer customer who’s gotten a lot of press over the past month or two is OMGPOP. OMGPOP scaled “Draw Something” to tens of millions of users on SoftLayer’s infrastructure (which you probably know), but what you probably didn’t know is that as “Draw Something” started growing in the market, it was also spreading virally in our office. You’d be amazed at how many SLayers caught the bug. Here’s one of Steve Kinman‘s works of art from a recent game:

While Tumblr and OMGPOP manage to snag a good amount of my free time, my most recent obsession has been playing NomNom Combo from Eastside Game Studios. I had a chance to meet a few of the guys from Eastside Games at GDC this year, and George Karidis told me that I should download NomNom Combo to check it out before I went to the launch party we sponsored for them in San Francisco. As it turns out, he created a monster … By the time the party rolled around, I had to tear myself away from strategizing the best way to move up the game’s all-time “Top Score” leader board. Two months later, I can say that all of my efforts have been validated:

I guess if I had to make a long story short, if you have an addictive app or game that you want to move to the SoftLayer platform, it would be brilliant move from a growth and scaling perspective. One request I’d have is that you warn me, though. I want to have time to bury my head in the sand so I don’t get hooked on more SoftLayer-powered goodness … I’m running out of “free time.”

-@khazard

The F1™ season has started off with a bang. 5 races, 5 different winners and still all to play for. The event organisers have come up with some great ideas to make Formula One™ interesting, ranging from KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System), DRS and Pirelli have also gotten in on the action by making their tyres a talking point in every race. It really is the most exciting start to a Formula One™ Season that I have ever seen and I’ve been following motorsport now for over 15 years.

As many of you already know, UK2.NET are sponsoring the Marussia F1 Team this season and it’s great to be part of the action and we are thoroughly enjoying giving our support to the team as they fight for places on the track. They had a solid start to the season and the new MR01 has done well so far. Timo Glock and Charles Pic, the Marussia F1 Team drivers, have been working hard with the engineers to build on their race pace and improve the overall balance of the car, so far with great results.

The Marussia F1 Team have a strategy in place which will see them competing for a podium spot by 2014 so they are hard at work trying to get the team and the car ready for then. At the moment Timo and Charles are sitting in P19 & P20 respectively and the Marussia F1 Team is sitting in 10th spot on the constructors table.

To keep up to date with the Marussia F1 Team, Follow our Marussia F1 Blog.

We are fortunate enough to have some very loyal followers who like to show their appreciation in unusual and creative ways.  This goes all the way back to the early days of HostGator, when none other than crunk rapper Lil Jon offered to introduce Brent to some ladies at his show in Florida, in appreciation for Brent having personally assisted him with some technical issues.  Another random caller once offered to send Brent some weed, via the US Postal Service for the same reason.  For the record, both of these offers were respectfully declined.  These days, it’s not terribly unusual to receive the occasional gift basket at the office, but please no more offers of groupies or drugs.

Here’s a couple examples of the art we’ve received:

This Snappy was done by a child of
one of our Customers.

Back when we sponsored the Joe Nemecheck
NASCAR, we received a few racing-themed
comic strips starring Snappy. Please click
on the image to see the whole series.

More recently, a Customer named Richard called us up for some assistance on his account and ended up singing us a song he wrote by the name of “GatorBill Me.”  The recording of the call is posted below along with the lyrics. By way of explanation, the acronym “PSR” stands for Preferred Support Representatives; Richard’s term for our Jr. Admins.  Without further ado, please enjoy:

GatorBill Me

I love my webhost
I love my VPS
Just like I love my mom
And I love my PSRs at my host
They teach me “how to host”

But best of all
I love the hosting HostGator gives me
Don’t talk; shut up
Just GatorBill me
‘Cause I’m feeling kind of creative today
And the business plan makes it easier

My PSRs are great
All they do is help and they encourage me
And I love the Help desk
They’re always available
Even on Christmas day.

But best of all
I love the hosting HostGator gives me
Don’t talk; shut up
Just GatorBill me
‘Cause I’m feeling kind of creative today
And the reseller plans makes it easier

Better off on a VPS
Than to use the shared plan
The control, the ease, the price
Host my site on Gator server one

I love the hosting HostGator gives me
Don’t talk; shut up
Just GatorBill me
‘Cause I’m feeling kind of creative today
And the dedis plan makes it easier

QuickInstall!

QuickInstall!

If you’d like to hear some more “GatorBill Me,” Richard also sent us an .mp3 that he recorded himself:

This saga does not end here. Having been inspired by “GatorBill Me,” a certain HostGator employee, who has requested to remain anonymous, decided to pen their own Gator song as well. Though a recording of this does not exist at this time, perhaps enough public outcry could convince this employee to grace us with a recorded version of their song:

Ode to HostGator

One, two, three and to tha four
Everything you need comes knockin’ at your door
Not really at your door, through your internet connection
Sitebuilders, templates…. what’s that, you need lessons?
Video tutorials; don’t forget the KB
Check it for yourself, don’t take it from me!

What’s that you say, you need a web host?
I’ll tell ya one time, who’s the host with the most
Go on sign up, you can thank me later
Wicky-wicky, wut-wut, check out HostGator

The top-notch staff, always happy to assist
Via chats, phones, twitter and tickets!
twenty-four seven, three sixty-five
Never chat bots, this help is alive!
Money back guarantee, never any hidden fees
If you can find a better host, sign up with them, please!

What’s that you say, you need a web host?
I’ll tell ya one time, who’s the host with the most
Go on sign up, you can thank me later
Wicky-wicky, wut-wut, check out HostGator

If these artistic offerings happen to have inspired you, we’d love to hear your Gator-themed musical stylings or see your Gator-themed artwork.  Feel absolutely free to leave a poem in the comments, or you can certainly always email us at feedback@hostgator.com, ATTN: Blog.

Before I get too far, I should probably back up give you a little context for what the show is all about if you aren’t familiar with it. In his opening keynote, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton explained:

“We call it ‘Citrix Synergy,’ but really it’s ‘Synergy’ because this is an event that’s coordinated by us across a hundred sponsors, our ecosystem partners, companies in the industry that we work together with to bring you an amazing set of solutions around cloud, virtualization, networking and mobility.”

Given how broad of a spectrum those areas of technology represent, the short four-day agenda was jam-packed with informational sessions, workshops, demos and conversations. It goes without saying that SoftLayer had to be in the mix in a BIG WAY. We had a booth on the expo hall floor, I was lined up to lead a breakout session about how business can “learn how to build private clouds in the cloud,” and we were the proud presenting sponsor of the huge Synergy Party on Thursday night.

Our partnership with Citrix is unique. We incorporate Citrix NetScaler and Citrix XenServer as part of our service offerings. Plus, Citrix is also a SoftLayer customer, using SoftLayer infrastructure to offer a hosted desktop solution. Designed and architected from the ground up to run in the cloud, the Citrix Virtual Demo Center provides a dashboard interface for managing Citrix XenDesktop demo environments that are provisioned on-demand using SoftLayer’s infrastructure.

My biggest thrill at the conference came when I was asked to speak and share a little of our expertise in a keynote address on simplifying cloud networking. I like to tell people I have a great face for radio, but that didn’t keep me off the stage. The hall was packed to capacity and after defeating a few “demo gremlins,” I got to show off how easy SoftLayer makes it for our customers to take advantage of amazing products like Citrix Netscaler VPX:

In my “Learn How to Build Private Clouds in the Cloud” breakout session, I had a little more time to speak to the larger question of how SoftLayer is approaching the shift to cloud-specific architectures and share some best practices in moving to a private cloud. Private clouds are a great way to provide real-time service delivery of IT resources with a single-tenant, customized, secure environment. However, the challenge of scaling and managing physical resources still exists, so I tried to explain how businesses can leverage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider to add scalability to a private cloud environment.

Thanks to SynergyTV, that presentation has been made available for all to see:

As I joked at the beginning of the breakout session, an attendee at Citrix Synergy was probably bombarded by “the cloud” in presentations and conversations at the show. While it’s important to demystify the key terms we use on a daily basis, a few straight days of keynotes and breakout sessions about the cloud can get you thinking, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Beyond our capabilities as a cloud infrastructure provider, SoftLayer knows how to have a good time, so after we took care of the “work” stuff in the sessions above, we did our best to help provide a little “play” as well. This year, we were the proud sponsor of the Synergy Party, featuring Lifehouse!

Citrix Synergy 2012 was a blast. As a former rocket scientist, I can say that authoritatively.

-@nday91

Notice is currently being sent out to all customers regarding PHP 4. In the near future, we will be removing PHP 4 from our servers. The PHP development team officially ended support for PHP 4 on December 31st, 2007 and security updates ceased in August of 2008. We have continued to support PHP 4 well past that date as an option to our customers so they may have some additional time to update their software for PHP 5 compatibility.

Although we do not yet have a firm date for this change, we wanted to give you advance notice so that you can take some time to check the compatibility of your software to ensure it will function properly with PHP 5 (the current default). Once we have a firm date for when this change will be made on your server, you will receive another email notice closer to the removal date with that information. Once PHP 4 support is removed, any scripts that require PHP 4 will no longer operate on our server.

To check if your site will function with PHP 5, simply remove the following line from any “.htaccess” files on your account to immediately switch to PHP5 (warning: doing so may cause your site to break if it’s not compatible):

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php4 .php

If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know!

Thanks to Site5 for this post! Site5 provides web hosting, reseller hosting, and managed dedicated servers for webmasters, coders, designers, businesses, and creative people!

Status of PHP 4

UK2.NET is sponsoring the Maurissa F1 team and to celebrate this event, they are  giving away a pair of tickets to the main race day as well as another runner up pair to the qualifying day at Silverstone in July. Business hosting or Business Sitebuilder customers  from now until the end of June will be automatically entered. (No purchase necessary – see T&C’s)

Each affiliate sale you make in May will automatically add you an entry in the prize draw too. The more sales you make the more chance you have of attending the F1 championship in July at Silverstone.

UK2.NET’s powerful packages are designed with the SME’s and start ups in mind and if you buy Business, or Business Cloud package before June 30th you will also be sent vouchers to upgrade your package and receive our state of the art SEO tools, Stats 2 to help you analyse and optimise and free Facebook integration to enable your web site to be viewed from within your Facebook page.

All this and our 24/7 support for as little as £.4.95/m

Or ditch your designer and win F1 tickets with UK2 SiteBuilder Business

If you want to design your own site and ditch your designer, you can also sign up to our SiteBuilder Business package and receive a free entry into the draw for 2 pairs of tickets. (No purchase necessary – see T&C’s)

Our SiteBuilder Business packages come with :-

-           Free Domain

-           Unlimited pages and bandwidth

-           Unlimited email

-           Google Analytics

-           Ecommerce

100 gorgeous, fully customable templates

-           24/7 support

-           30 day money back guarantee

Only £6.95/month (no contract)

Read the May Affiliate email for more information and a full list of UK2.NET offers to promote

UK2,NET MAY VOUCHER CODES

CLOUD10%– 10% off all business cloud hosting packages. Only £8.95/month on a two year plan with voucher. (ends 2.6.2012)

VPN1FREE – Get 1 month free VPN (new customers only) Stay secure and browse anonymously from all devices. Endpoints inUSA,UK,Japan orNetherlands –ends 2.6.2012

UK2SERVER30 – £30 off any server package (new customers only) ends 2.6.2012

USEFUL TO READ

Optimising your web presence and security for Smartphones  

SiteBuilder How to Video

Here’s a sampling into what we have been working on:

• India hosting has been launched!
• Phoenix, Arizona hosting will be coming soon!
• MySQL 5.1 has been deployed to all servers.
• We will be performing the first migration of a central mail server back to localized email services next week. More servers will be done in the coming weeks!
• Softaculous has been rolled out to all reseller servers at this point, and deployment to shared servers will be starting in the next few weeks.
• Work is ongoing on our internal billing system. Progress is definitely picking up, and we’re getting excited about the release later this year!
• We are up to over 100 servers on R1Soft’s CDP3 platform! We will continue to move servers from CDP2 to CDP3 until all have been moved. This improved our restore times plus a zillion other improvements.
• An internal application has been released to our staff that allows our team to perform more advanced tasks for customers in a more automated fashion. This should help to speed up support even further as we add more options to our tool framework.
• Our Knowledge Base is ever-expanding to include new articles and tutorials. If you have any suggestions, let us know!

Have suggestions for a new location? Have a question about something we’re working on? Just want to say hi? Post in the comments! Thanks for your continued business and support!

Thanks to Site5 for this post! Site5 provides web hosting, reseller hosting, and managed dedicated servers for webmasters, coders, designers, businesses, and creative people!

State of Site5: May 2012