Digg Poaching: The Sordid Underbelly of Web 2.0 Promotion
One of the most difficult problems for all webmasters is spam. Whether you are a blogger fighting comments, a search engine fighting doorway pages, or Digg fighting vote manipulation, spam is a serious concern. Unfortunately, the treatments for spam are often very painful and present numerous false positives – a CAPTCHA too difficult to solve, an IP filter that tags large office buildings, or a spam trap that filters good comments. When these treatments become too strong, especially on “democratic” Web 2.0 sites like Digg and Reddit, they provide spammers with easy targets. Virante nor I condone this kind of tactic, nor do we condone this kind of experimentation on an unwilling subject. That being said, the compelling and important nature of...
The Strongest Cloaking Yet – Cross Domain Canonical Tag
For years the most advanced forms of bot detection, ip delivery, javascript and flash obfuscation, etc. have been employed by blackhat search engine optimizers to accomplish cloaking. These techniques, when used successfully, would allow the webmaster to pull the wool over the eyes of bots and feed sales-heavy (or worse) content to end users. Google has fought valiantly to stop these techniques and, by and large, has removed all but the most sophisticated techniques. However, they have fallen on their own sword with the introduction of the new cross-domain canonical tag. The Canonical Tag The rel=canonical tag was a god-send for most webmasters. It allowed us to defeat duplicate content issues by placing a single line of code at the top of the HTML page,...
SEOMoz LinkScape API Functions Library
It is not every day that we get to release code around here, so I am especially pleased about this post. For those of you who don’t know, SEOMoz released their LinkScape Site Intelligence API which gives you programmatic access to their giant link information database. Some of the features are free (the mozRank API) and some are not. The following code library allows you to easily interact with the API. Main Functions: FunctionDescription generateCredentials()uses the global variables of accessid and secret to generate a valid credential query string. apiStatus()accesses the Status API getTransformation() grabs the B and M values from the Status Call transformMozRank()converts Raw mozRank to Pretty mozRank calculateBitFlag()converts an array of plain-text...
Using the IPhone for Unlimited Proxy IPs
One of our premier free tools is LinkSleeve, a distributed link-spam prevention tool that handles up to hundreds of thousands of spam requests a day. In working to improve the tool, we often need to check from numerous IP addresses as we intentionally try to flag our comments in the system. However, those of you familiar with the need for regular proxies are most likely aware of the shortcomings of both public proxies and web proxies. However, we recently discovered a very useful method for acquiring new, temporary IPs for fairly trivial data transfer. We would not recommend using this method for large data transfers, as tethering is not available on all iPhones. The process is rather simple. Jailbreak Your Iphone Head on down to Iphone Dev to jailbreak your...
Five Ways to use Google for Franchise Opportunity Research
Many online marketers fail to see how their skill sets can improve the success of entrepreneurs both on-line and off-line. In particular, search engine marketing gives us an ability to peak into the wishes of consumers across the world. Not only does this give us an idea of their online interests, but when considered in tandem with geographical data, it gives us the ability to predict more intelligently where particular businesses may or may not succeed. In this discussion, we are going to look at franchising research: that is, how one can use Google Adwords, Google Analytics and Keyword Discovery to identify the best locations to start a particular business. We will try to give examples from 2 vantage points – the entrepreneur trying to decide which...
MozRank Per Anchor
Links with targeted anchor text are generally regarded to be the most important factor in search rankings according to search engine optimization experts. However, this factor has remained particularly difficult to nail down as we have had little to no access to the data necessary to correlate anchor text links to actual rankings. Historically, the standard measurement we have had available for determining the extent to which a page was externally optimized was a simple ratio where the number of links pointing to a page with the correct anchor text was divided by the total number of links pointing to that page and then multiplied against the PageRank of that target page. This would allow us to determine what percentage of PageRank could be attributed to the...
In Defense of Paid Links, why Rand is Wrong
Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz fame recently released their corporate position on the issue of paid links. I rarely disagree with Rand on the common practices of search engine optimizers, but I must respectfully disagree with this position because it misrepresents the risk-reward ratio for the overwhelming majority of online business owners. I will try my best to both respond to his points and outline my own position regarding paid links. First, let’s be clear about a few things. Paid Links != Rented Links. There are a wide array of paid linking methods that are not rented, each with its own risk-reward ratio to consider. Cheap, automated paid directory linking may offer very low reward and high risk. Renting links may be somewhere in between. Paid Links != Text...
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