Should we move to an all HTTPS web? No.
Joost de Valk has started a great discussion about https everywhere over at his blog and it is well worth the read, however I believe he has come to the wrong conclusions. The discussion was spurred on by Bing’s apparent move to HTTPS which would influence the passing of referrer and, subsequently, keyword data to webmasters from search queries. It is worth noting that as of the writing of this, Bing’s HTTPS version is not working and Bing has made no announcement of a move. Much of this discussion in the SEO community revolves around Section 15.1.3 of RFC2616 which indicates that… Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referer header field in a (non-secure) HTTP request if the referring page was transferred with a secure protocol. Subsequently, as a user...
Simple DDOS Amplification Attack through XML Sitemap Generators
It was all too easy really. Filling up a 10Mb/s pipe, tearing down a website with just a handful of tabs open in a browser seems like something that should be out of the reach of your average web users, but SEOs like myself have made it all too easy by creating simple, largely un-protected tools for unauthorized spidering of websites. So, here is what is going on… Yesterday a great post was released about new on site SEO crawlers that allow you to determine a host of SEO issues by merely typing in a domain name. This seems fantastic at first glance, but I immediately saw an opportunity when I realized that none of these tools – and really almost none of the free SEO tools out there – require any form of authentication you actually own the...
The Disadvantages of Speed: Finding Exact Match Domains in Drop Lists
I recently wrote a post on the advantages of speed specifically dealing with the ability to find exact match domains. One of the disadvantages of speed is that of the classic hammer problem. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Because lookup speeds are very fast, I made the assumption that I could just pound away. Eventually, though, that led to some insurmountable speed problems and would force more horizontal scaling. Because the lookups were so fast, I assumed that the number of lookups could be egregiously large without greatly damaging performance. I. Was. Wrong. It hit me over New Years Eve night that I had been looking at the problem all wrong. The lookup data was structured in a way that required the massive lookups. Subsequently,...
The Advantages of Speed: Finding Exact Match Keyword Domains in Drop Lists
There are a lot of problems out there for which elegant solutions are difficult, cumbersome or outright impossible. One of those that I have dealt with for years is combing through large lists of dropped domains to find which ones are exact match keyword domains – meaning that there is an exact keyword that makes up the entire domain name. To a human this seems like a very easy task, but to a machine not so much. The brute force method of doing this would be to take each domain and break it down into every different potential 1, 2, and 3 word phrase and then look up every combination. ie: ipadminicases.org would be… i padminicases ip adminicases ipa dminicases … i p adminicases i pa dminicases … This would be nearly impossible to do on a...
Google Analytics Style Keyword Suggestion Query Builder
Hey folks, just wanted to show off the new advanced keyword query suggestion builder for GrepWords. We decided to build a keyword suggestion tool modeled directly after Google Analytics Advanced Filters. Most of you are probably aware of what the GA Advanced Filters look like… In Analytics you can drill down through dimensions using containing, begins with, ends with, and RegExp. You can create multiple layers of filters to get down to that perfect result. Well now you can do the exact same thing in GrepWords. Here is a quick video showing it in action… The tool is only available to paid subscribers because it really does traverse our entire 80 million US language keyword database on the fly, no caching involved. Click below to see a full screenshot...
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