SEO contest hijack

Threadwatch discusses the recent SEO controversy, as John Scott’s original idea for a SEO contest is hijacked by a link campaign to get Google to address canonical issues.
To some, a contest to rank for an irrelevant search term is a piece of fun.
To me, a contest to rank for an irrelevant search term simply provides [...]

Fortune 500 blogs

An interesting list of Fortune 500 company blogs are posted here: Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki
.
Interesting to see the companies that have embraced blogging - Amazon, Boeing, Dell, Time Warner, Ford, etc.

Virus exposes paedophile

Funny story this from Security Focus:

A 20-year-old German man turned himself and his child-porn collection into authorities after believing a message propagated by the recent Sober virus that law enforcement officers were investigating his activities

Apparently, the Sober X (aka Sober Y) virus claims to be from a law enforcement agency - the FBI or German [...]

Indian spammers

SEO is a business with a poor reputation - but the Indian sub-continent is an entire geographic region with a poor business reputation.
We discussed this issue before in the Platinax forums: Business India.
Although I have limited, but equally good and bad, experiences of outsourcing work to Indian developers, I’m generally appalled at the rank amateur [...]

Killing my spam slowly

Last year I set up a series of domain using auto-generated text along clear verticals.
I’m not a programmer, nor technically clever - I used a very basic method anyone with HTML knowledge could have done.
I stripped out sentences from online articles, hosted them remotely, and built a network of pages that would take a random [...]

PR parsing best on links high up page

After an extended absence, John Scott returns to the v7n forums - and in an interesting post, he makes a point that on the Sevenseek directory, those links highest up the page code parse the most PageRank.
It had certainly been my belief for some time that footer links were very much devalued - what’s really [...]

Public moderating on forums

Danny Sullivan - the man behind Search Engine Watch (SEW) - takes a risk and moderates in public.
One of his moderators takes the board to task, and Danny highlights the issue by splittng the post into its own thread, and publically demoting the moderator in question.
Moderating in public is always dangerous for forum admins - [...]

Running a web directory

Setting up a web directory
Setting up and running a web directory on Platinax has been an interesting learning experience so far.
The initial vision was of a directory of actual businesses, where anyone looking for b2b services in a specific business or geographic area, could locate a list of useful websites.
Similar models may be business.com or [...]

Filing a DMCA

DMCA
It doesn’t seem all that long ago that I was faced an apparent DMCA issue with Yahoo!.
That was prompted after Yahoo! search support repeatedly claimed Platinax had been issueed with a DMCA, and therefore entirely delisted from Yahoo!.
Today I’m on the other side of the fence. Today I filed a DMCA against another company.
In [...]

Mike Grehan on speeding

Mike Grehan makes a great post on his recent experience of being caught speeding.
I’ve only ever been caught speeding once, a few years back, and have tried to avoid doing so again.
Mike relates why a police training course, offered in lieu of having points on his licence, has done the same for him.
Worth reading.

Google Sandboxing - again

What people call the sandbox now is to look at a process that has become very complex - and on forums, a word much abused.
A few years back, you could apparently drop a few hundred thousand links for semi-competitive keywords, and expect to rank well for them after a month or so.
This was when text [...]

Google’s Misleading Webmaster Guidelines

Google has updated it’s Webmaster guidelines.
Jim Boykin rightly criticises a number of Google’s claims as misleading, but this one stands out:

Ask your SEO firm if it reports every spam abuse that it finds to Google using our spam complaint form
Ethical SEO firms report deceptive sites that violate Google’s spam guidelines.

Experienced SEO’s know the spam report [...]

Platinax faces legal threat

Today I received a letter through the solicitors for a company, demanding removal of material from the Platinax forums, after people claiming to be customers posted complaints about the company’s sales procedure.
I received two phone calls from a representative of the company in question, telling me to remove the threads or face the legal consequences. [...]

Referral spamming test

Referrer spamming
When the search engines promoted the “no follow” tag earlier this year, I feared webmasters would see a deluge of referrer spam.
Referrer spam is when a script is used to send a bot to access websites, and uses a predetermined URL as a fake referrer string.
In other words, you can run software that makes [...]

Waving a red rag at Google

I think it’s fair to say that this week has been “Wave a red rag at Google” week.
First, Rand Fishkin was profiled in Newsweek. The article effectively pointed out that even small “mom & pop” sites can do great on Google through link popularity.
Rand is a nice guy, and he’s got good publicity from it [...]

Bizal Group Lead Generation Event

Today I attended a Lead Generation Event hosted by the Bizal Group, which brought together a group of companies with a strong emphasis on generating sales and increasing turnover, in front of a business audience willing to listen.
It’s the first time these companies had tried this together, and mixed together informational presentations with self-promotion [...]