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…
How Many of Your Visitors Are Logged In to Google?
With Google’s announcement that logged in users will now be, by default, passed through SSL causing you to lose valuable keyword tracking data, you may be wondering how to find out how many users actually are logged in. While the change was in response to legitimate informational leakage concerns, it has left many in the webmaster community concerned with the impact it may have on our ability to track simple, non-private information such as the keyword which generated the search (more info here from our Analytics team). We have been looking at this number on one particular site for quite a while. In this case, we looked at 135,000 unique visitors from Google to a site over a period of 3 months. As you can see in the graph below, we are able to chart the...
Join Us at the Raleigh SEO Networking Event
Hey folks, we are sponsoring the next upcoming Raleigh SEO event, this Thursday the 21st of July from 6:00PM until late. Free beer and great networking – learn more at RaleighSEO Event: Ding, Ding, Round 2 for Raleigh SEO Date: Thursday 21st July 2011 Time: 6pm until late Location: Isaac Hunter’s Oak City Tavern Sponsor: Virante, Inc
On Black Hat SEO
So, the last few days have been interesting to say the least. I spoke in London at Distilled’s Link Building conference specifically on the issue of social media link building. It stirred up quite a bit of controversy after blog posters decided to give their own spin to what my talk was about. While I am not going to sit here and pretend that I did not discuss a wide range of SEO techniques, I want to make something clear. If you think that we use black hat techniques to promote client sites or our own properties, you are a damn fool. Hell, we run a link spam prevention service for free that blocks hundreds of thousands of spam links per day. We have a free CAPTCHA service that blocks thousands more. Do you think we came up with effective spam prevention...
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Matt Cutts
I spoke yesterday at the excellent Distilled link building conference in London and will be again in a week. While my session covered a range of white-hat to black-hat techniques in social media link building, it was certainly the darker side of marketing that drew the most attention as the conference it self in general focussed on white hat techniques. At the end of the session, someone joked if I was afraid if Matt Cutts was in the audience, and I brushed it off saying “Im not afraid of Matt Cutts” and I think it came across as a bit braggadocios. The truth is that no one needs to be afraid of Matt Cutts. His goal is not to scare people into using particular tactics – in fact, his primary agenda is to protect the integrity of google search...
Signing off for a bit…
My wife and I just had our first baby, Claren Riley Jones, on Sunday. Life is rad.
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