112 Things Not to Name Your PHPMyAdmin Install

phpMyAdmin is an incredibly powerful, useful tool for rapidly creating and managing mySQL databases. However, given its ubiquity and that it grants access to your database(s), it is often the target of widespread exploits. Unfortunately, most webmasters don’t secure their phpMyAdmin. First off, you should read through this to get it secure, but you should at least do the simplest thing: name it something different from what others name it. Below is a list of common names for phpMyAdmin folders that exploit bots regularly scan for… No tags for this post.

Pulling Links: The Pain Thresholds of Removing Common Backlinks after Penguin

Many of you probably heard about the launch of our new tool, Remove ’em, which helps you find and remove bad backlinks. Well, while I suppose it would be nice if everyone got penalized and had to use our tool, I think we would all rather avoid penalties and, on top of that, costly cleanups. So, let’s talk through a little bit about exactly how hard some links are to remove. Let’s start with the easiest to remove, then move down the scale. Oh yeah, and if you want 10% off of Remove ’em just use the coupon code tgc10. So, without further adieu, in order from easiest to remove to hardest to remove… Your own links First let’s be clear. Just because a link is easy to remove doesn’t mean it’s a good link. In fact, links...

Your Site is a Sitting Duck

It is not too often that I speak of doom and gloom, I tend to be an optimist about stuff, especially links. I have defended time and time again that links and link building will remain an important part of the SEO process, if not the most important part. What I am about to tell you may seem counter to this, but in reality it is merely a refinement. Those cheap, low quality links that served you so well for so long are about to be your downfall. I am going to walk you through what I see as the next 6 to 12 months of SEO. Let me know if it sounds realistic to you. Anchor Text Over Optimization You have heard SEOs, myself included, talk about this over and over. The idea is pretty straightforward. Whatever type of links you are getting – white hat, gray hat,...

Why I Am Removing Google Authorship

Some of you may remember that “The Google Cache” began as a protest site years ago. At that time (as I still do today), I believed that Google’s default behavior of “caching” all pages on the Internet was unethical. While most people just confused “indexing” with “caching”, a few people agreed that what Google was doing was at face value a massive copyright violation. It is one thing to index the web and make it searchable, it is a different thing to make a cached version of that page available. One is a card catalogue, the other is a copy. Nevertheless, I eventually pulled down the protest site and put up the blog as you now know it. **See Update at Bottom for New Stats and Evidence** Well, today I am...

Anchor Text Updates: Some straight forward reactions…

So, Google released some new information today regarding 50 search engine updates. In particular, they announced two changes to anchor text processing, which I think are worth looking at briefly. So here goes… Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename “PC”] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust. Thoughts: Google removed a “classifier”. We can’t be sure what that is, but it could be related to a number of classifications we regularly talk about – brand vs non-brand, commercial vs...