Hosting accounts has an access to a shared secure server. Its not really a separate server but the web pages are displayed through an encrypted connection. Every page on a website can be called through this secured server.

You can access the web pages through the secure server using following path:-

Replace “servername” with the name of the server on which your domain is hosted. Replace “yourdomain” with your domain name without the TLD extension, and replace “filename.html” or “scriptname.cgi” with the name of the file you want to call through the secure server.

https://servername.safe-order.net/yourdomain/filename.html

Use this path to access scripts located in CGI-BIN-

https://servername.safe-order.net/cgi-yourdomainscriptname.cgi

Note: Always use “https” instead of the usual “http”. Secure calls require the use of the “https”.

Every computer which accesses the internet or is connected to a network uses ports to communicate. Ports are almost like individual conversations going on over the same telephone line but which each port talking about a different thing. For example, every time you access a website using http, the chances are you’ll be using port 80. For other protocols such as ftp (file transfer) different ports are used, in this case port 21. Email, secure connections, streaming etc. all use different ports which helps control the flow of data and filter desired information from undesired.

Now for many people, you never see or need to know that your computer is doing this automatically. However in some special cases, a program wants to use an unusual port number and if you have a firewall installed, it may be set to block the port, preventing the program from communicating. You may get pop-up windows telling you about the request but you may not so if a program tries to communicate across a network or the internet and  fails, it could be worth trying it without your firewall turned on to see if that is the problem. If it is, you can set up rules to allow that program access.

There are two key types of firewall: hardware and software based. Hardware firewalls are often built into routers or similar (you can often change the port you access your router admin on and use the address http://routerip:portnumber) and are generally more of an outer barrier preventing any obvious attacks on a system. These can sometimes cause problems but it is more often than not the software firewall will be blocking a connection and will need to be configured. Software firewalls are generally more configurable and allow you to choose which programs can access the internet or network and individual ports can often be opened (you will be able to find out which ports certain programs need by using a search engine) or closed down as necessary. Generally software firewalls have more flexibility than hardware based and have the advantage that they go with you wherever your computer is.

The need for a firewall more than anything is to only allow desired programs and information to be sent from your computer. Hackers and malicious code can exploit security holes in a firewall allowing data to be sent. Port scans often detect weaknesses and firewalls help to identify and protect against these. Hardware firewalls are particularly effective for this. Software firewalls will often alert you if a program wants to access the internet so if it is one you don’t recognise, don’t allow it. You can the investigate it further and if it turns out to be malicious, antivirus or anti-spyware software will help to remove it.

As a firewall is there for security, use it wisely and only have the ports open you need. If you’re not sure what a program is, deny it access and investigate. You can always change it later!

One possible solution is not to use any sitemap file at all. In that case, scraper bots can still parse your web pages through the normal links on your web pages but that would be more difficult for them than using your sitemap file.

Another solution is to set up a sitemap file and delete as soon as search engines have indexed that file.

Do not use free sitemap generator tools. You don’t know what they will do with your data and they might even use it to create scraper sites with your content.

Unfortunately, there’s not much that you can do to stop spammers from abusing your content. Use a tool such as CopyScape to find sites that have duplicated your content.

The big search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask) introduced the Sitemaps protocol earlier this year.

In its simplest form, a sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site, etc.

That information helps search engines to more intelligently crawl your site. The Sitemaps protocol is a standard that makes it easier to create a sitemap that can be parsed by all search engines.

Some webmasters reported problems with duplicate content after adding a sitemaps XML file to their web sites.

The content of their websites appeared on dubious websites that had nothing to do with the original sites. The content of the original websites had been duplicated on many other sites. The result was that the original sites might have received ranking penalties due to duplicate content.

Some search engine spammers used the sitemaps XML files to easily find contents for their scraper sites.

A scraper site is a website that pulls all of its information from other websites using automated tools. The scraper software pulls different contents from other websites to create new web pages that are designed around special keywords. The scraped pages usually show AdSense ads with which the spammers hopes to make money.

The new sitemaps XML files make it very easy for scraper tools to find content rich pages. Although the original intention of the sitemaps files was to inform search engines about every single page of your web site, they can also be used to inform spam bots about your pages.

IP Spoofing is a technique which is used to gain unauthorized access to computers, whereby the squatter sends messages to a computer with a false IP address to indicate that the message is coming from a trusted host. In other words it is a process of returning IP address that is different from the one that is actually assigned to the destination website.

To involve in IP spoofing, the intruders use a variety of techniques to find an IP address of a trusted host and then modify the packet headers so that it appears that the packets are coming from that trusted host.

In case IP spoofing is used to hijack a browser, whenever any visitor types in a legitimate site’s URL, he is taken to a fraudulent Web page of the intruder. For example if the intruder has spoofed a popular ecommerce website, then any Internet user who would type in the URL of that particular site would be redirected to the spoofed content created by the intruder.

If a user interacts with dynamic content on that spoofed page, the intruder can gain access to sensitive information on the particular computer or network such as a credit card number or password, or install malware.

IP Spoofing is a big no no when in terms of SEO as it is considered a black hat seo technique. Newer routers and firewall arrangements can help protect your network from these malicious cloaking and cracking techniques.such as IP spoofing.

The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a high level and commonly-used security protocol for protecting the confidentiality and security of a message transmission on the Internet. SSL is more commonly used by most commerce servers on the World Wide Web for secure transactions. SSL is an open protocol that has been submitted to several industry groups as the industry security standard and it is denoted by the letters https:// in the URL. Based on RSA Data Security’s public-key cryptography, SSL uses a program layer located between the Internet’s Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Transport Control Protocol (TCP) layers. The “sockets” part of the term refers to the sockets method of passing data back and forth between a client and a server program in a network or between program layers in the same computer.

SSL has more recently became known as Transport Layer Security, or TLS for short.