Marketing Pilgrim and Other Useful Blogs
A crucial daily exercise in this industry is reading the daily news blogs. Staying informed of the latest news is critical in staying on top of trends and pulling together an amalgamation of insight when it comes time to take action. There are several great ones out there but one in particular has inspired me to lay down my list of favorites; Marketing Pilgrim. They are running a contest over there for $500 bucks not to mention a back link just for entering. (Must have ‘link-juice’! Not to mention I like the ‘link buying’ tactic Andy is using.) The question to be answered; “Why do I read Marketing Pilgrim?†Easy enough: to stay informed. I really like what Andy Beal has to say, it resonates with me and taps into what I...
Evidence-Based Search Engine Optimization
Over the last several years, our industry has produced myriad theories of how firms or consultants should go about SEO, each with their own set of shortcomings. Through these flawed systems, a new overarching theory of how our industry should behave has budded. First, let’s identify some of those flawed systems. Ethical SEO: A do no harm type of solution that strictly adheres to the guidelines of major search engines. Greatly inhibits the ability of a site to perform in the most competitive industries Follows a subjective set of ideals (whose ethics is right? mine is) Forces SEO’s to react drastically to position changes (such as Google coming out against reciprocal links or paid links) Performance-Based SEO: An elusive goal which attempts to create a...
Cross Site Request Forgery in Sphinn
I have removed the XSRF exploit, although you can click on the link below with the text “this story” to cause a vote to happen. Just imagine putting that into an iframe or an img src=, and it would accomplish the same thing w/o you knowing…. Thanks for the vote! If you are currently logged into Sphinn (or simply forgot to logout), chances are, you have just voted for this story. Sphinn’s vulnerability is one of the most common forms of XSRF, where the site allows actions to originate offsite without any authentication aside from the original cookie / session. There are multiple ways to prevent XSRF, the easiest of which is to generate a user-specific token for each action origination point on the site (a form, a link that votes, etc.) so...
Stumbleupon Categorizes MSN Live Search as Porn
Sorry, this just made me laugh today. After following David Naylor’s post on MSN’s new rockin’ search interface, StumbleUpon pointed out to me that the site I was visiting (a search on airline tickets) was pornography. Since the site had yet to be reviewed, I was a little surprised that this happened. It appears that it was not a hit job by some anti-microsoft stumblers. So what gives?
Readability of Web 2.0 Content
Readability. Authors, marketers and webmasters know that it matters, but as communities form up around niches of similar interest, the requirements of “write like your audience is in 3rd grade” have loosened greatly. I recently came upon a piece of software called “Text Master Pro”. The program analyzes the complexity of vocabulary used in content to determine a UV (readability) score. Despite my usual refusal to use any software with the word “pro” in the title, I fired it up and ran it on the sites listed on 8 different popular web 2.0 sites. I continued to do this with their individual feeds over the course of the week to get an average readability of the content posted to their sites. Here are the results. I also include...
SEOMoz Quiz Feeds My Ego
SEO Dark Lord – 100%Are you an SEO Expert? I must say that every time one of these quizzes comes out, I have to go take it. It is an addiction which I am currently unable to crack. The last test I remember had more of a focus on industry news than SEO-specific knowledge, so I was able to perform a little better this go around. Go ahead and take a crack at it!
StopBlock
So, the debate has raged on whether Ad-Block is ethical or moral or whatever word you would like to use to describe it. Regardless of your personal opinion, it has given some publishers so much angst that they have chosen to block all Firefox users (Why Firefox is Blocked) because of an inability to exclude visitors using the Ad-Block extension for Firefox. Well, suffice to say, there is a fairly simple bit of code that can be used to determine if a person is blocking advertisements on your site. The Ad-Block extension not only blocks ads, it hides them. This means that the space previously consumed by an advertisement will disappear. So, the simple solution is two put two elements, in my case 1px by 1px images, above and below the advertisement. I then use...
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