When a hacked site isn’t a hacked site

Google News can experience problems with news items if their titles only appear as links. So my news sites always have a h1 header with a separate permalink to the article.
So when developing one news site today, I was shocked to find a couple of posts had links in them to a third party [...]

Blogger hit by autogenerating account bot?

Has Blogger been hit by an autogenerating account bot?
Over the past few days I’ve been receiving a wave of blog spam from SEO lab - all of it to blogspot accounts - and all built around hyphenated money keywords ending in a seemingly random 2 or 3 alphanumeric characters.
For example:
college-loans-zet.blogspot.com
free-slots-lol.blogspot.com
flexeril-huf.blogspot.com
All of them are running a [...]

Buying links for mindshare, not search engines

After Aaron gave notice that ReviewMe was going to be offering half-price posts this month, I figured I should give the service a closer look.
We already know Google wants to devalue paid links, and for once I’m not looking at buying ReviewMe posts for direct ranking benefits - instead, I’m looking to buy mindshare.
One of [...]

Google Adsense testing new link title formats?

Interesting - just visited one of my news sites in development, and noticed something different with Adsense.
Normally, the keyword titles are simply bold text.
However, I’m now seeing both italicised bolded and italicised unbolded keyword titles - here’s two screenshots, side by side, of the same page after refreshing - notice the normal ad highlighted at [...]

Pros and cons of working for clients vs working for yourself

When I’ve chatted with more experienced SEO’s, the one thing that becomes clear is that SEO’s start working with clients, but many drop these to work for themselves.
The argument goes that if you’re good at making someone else money, you should be good at making that money for yourself - and much more than you’re [...]

How I’ve increased Adsense earnings by 50%

I’m not a huge Adsense earner, but at the beginning of this month I decided to more aggressively try to increase my revenues.
I’ve now seen a 50+% increase in my Adsense earnings since I began.
What does that mean in real terms? It means my earnings would now comfortably pay off the monthly mortgage repayments [...]

Examples of why businesses need SEOs

Todd Freisen continues the defence of SEO as a valid and important specialist service for businesses, underlining the points Danny Sullivan made previously that just because a specialist finds their specialist skills easy, doesn’t mean to say everyone else does.
What a lot of people are over-looking, though, is that SEO’s - good SEO’s - are [...]

A Google quote worth highlighting

Michael Gray make’s a long post at Threadwatch about Google, which ends with a comment that just demands highlighting as a quote:

to you Googlers who are out in the trenches every day looking for issues and interacting with the community, and solving problems I salute and thank you. To you the faceless all consuming Google [...]

eyeOS a threat to Google and Microsoft?

I’ve already mentioned before that Google is trying to turn the internet into a customised OS - and that this directly competes with Microsoft’s attempt to focus on remote file hosting.
It seems the future is already laid out - allow internet users to remotely host files online and wall them off in a suite of [...]

Content development for links needs to be remarkable

Last night something hit me - the logical conclusion of Google’s anti-spam drive is that individual pages with rank according to the quality of their link profiles.
In other words - pages will rank best if many people are linking to them.
I know - that in itself isn’t a revelation - but it’s not the [...]

iPhone - I want one!

Looks like the Steve Jobs presentation at MacWorld is winding up: but it’s now official - the iPhone is coming.
I’ve already written up a report on Platinax News - must say, this feels like a really big story.
CNET have been frantically trying to write what’s happening live, typos and all, while Engadget are posting [...]

Should search engines use Akismet?

Should search engines be able to datamine Akismet for obvious anti-webspam filtering?
For those who don’t know, Akismet is an anti-spam plugin originally for Wordpress, that according to reports, filters out something like 99.9% of spam before it even reaches the Wordpress admin panel.
However, it’s now being used to fight spam on SMF, Drupal, and phpbb.
The [...]

Communities needs leadership

An interesting post from Creating Passionate Users highlights the issue of Collective Intelligence vs the Dumbness of Crowds.
The difference is very keen, and as a forum admin it’s something I’ve had to learn myself.
The basic gist is that Plato was right - benevolent dictators are very popular.
And, with online communities, if you’re a user and [...]

Removing low quality Adsense

Since I rediscovered the issue of Adsense Smart Pricing, I’ve been looking more carefully at how my Adsense is deployed.
I have no idea if Google even still employs such a system - but I figure paranoia about it is a good excuse to focus on making my own Adsense campaign leaner.
Now, I’m not a big [...]

Why American business needs the UK

Both Matt Cutts and Jeremy Schoemaker post their blog stats online.
What’s really interesting is comparing the stats together, to peice an image of the English language internet.
For example, Matt Cutt’s site has the largest data sample, and in a simple and succinct manner I think most clearly demonstrates an image of the English language internet:

Combine [...]

Ev1 servers scraping juggernaut

Well, I’d hate to sound too much like IncrediBill - but today I received nearly 9,000 emails to my Inbox - all vbulletin MySQL failure error messages.
Turns out someone at Ev1servers was hitting my comparative religion forum really hard and frequently maxing out the MySQL connections.
Took the site down for an hour in [...]

Adsense Smart Pricing test

I noticed a while back that when I accidentally left AdSense off one of my high traffic sites for a couple of days, the actual revenues seemed barely affected.
I put this down to a lucky fluke and quickly re-added the Adsense.
I’ve also noticed that earnings will apparently start the day with high payments per click [...]

Converting b2evolution to Wordpress

I have some b2evolution installs from a couple of years ago, a couple of which have been used and really need updating to a more efficient software platform - such as Wordpress.
However, there is no official Wordpress converter from b2evolution. Apparently, what complicates matters is that the database structure changes significantly in successive b2evolution [...]

Wordpress on PDA - plugin

Here’s a gift of a plugin for Wordpress install - my CMS of choice:
Wordpress PDA Plugin
Apparently, it works by detecting the user-agent string - if it looks like a PDA browser, it publishes your site on a slimmed down theme to make it much more easily readable on a PDA.
Now that’s nice. :)
Hat tip to [...]

Digg banning domains - open to abuse?

Lee Odden has apparently had his domain banned by Digg.
According to a support email from Digg:

“When submitted stories are consistently reported as spam and users complain via our feedback email about submission spam, we ban the domain. The domain will not be unbanned. The domain would consistently get reported as spam [...]