New Digg Feature = Friend Spamming: Proof of Concept
Update: Ive added like 200+ friends. This is ridiculous. – Story Buried at 46 Diggs. Hmmm. Who would have thought? Maybe they wouldn’t be able to handle the #of friend requests if it had hit the front page… – Here is my Befriended List – You have to be logged in to Digg for the exploit to work In what has got to be the stupidest move in the history of community features, Digg has created a URL-powered friend-adder. Basically, all you have to do is visit the url http://digg.com/invitefrom/{username} such as http://digg.com/invitefrom/russvirante and you automatically add them as your friend if you are currently logged in to Digg. So, why is this royally stupid? Why should the inventor / everyone who thought this was a good idea go...
Website Launch Flowchart
With our roots in the entrepreneurial world, we frequently get involved with clients at the very beginning of both their business and website. To be as helpful as possible, we thought ‘wouldn’t it be nice to have something visual that shows everything we intend to do”. Off we went to our trusty search engines, searching for things like website design, website development and our new favorite ‘website launch’. While there were some fairly straightforward charts for website design, nothing really captured the essence of what we do – take people from nothing to fully functional websites that are capable of generating income. So we put together the website launch flowchart – what we refer to internally as our optimized design...
theGoogleCache Redesign
Hello All, You may have noticed a couple changes around theGoogleCache; phase 1 of the redesign is complete. We have made graphical updates, improved search capabilities, and added more functionality to the blog in hopes of making for a better overall experience while viewing. We hope to be adding additional functionality and features to the site in the coming weeks so keep an eye out. Thanks for visiting and by all means let us know what you think, we’d love to hear from you. Virante
Cache Wars: Responses to Popular Redditor Comments
Language Issues: Please read this first, or you will sound like an idiot when you comment. First, no one, in any court case (please prove me wrong), has sued on the basis of having their content “cached”. The issue is caching+redistribution. Most importantly, it is caching+redistribution on another site, often a for-profit site with advertisements, without consent from the author. In terms of search engines, we will use the word “indexing” to the simple act of “caching” a page. When I refer to “caching”, I mean the redistributed cache of the page or the process of copying and redistributing the page. Finally, let’s quickly acknowledge the similarity between “quotes” and “paraphrases” in...
Viral Marketing Ethics
In such a nascent industry as online viral marketing, or more specifically, social media marketing, it is important to take a step back and attempt to discern a framework of ethics that will guide the industry. As is the case in almost all new marketing frontiers, a handful of groups have already begun working on exploitative methods that will… Largely be countered soon Smear more legitimate tactics However, hardly impact their effectiveness As predictive (like an SNL skit) a scenario this will be, it is still a valuable exercise to go ahead and outline a few ethical guidelines, ones that Virante already institutes when approaching social media marketing. Participate: Almost all major social marketing sites have or will soon incorporate reputation-based...
Hosting Tips for SEO
Probably 40% of the clients we see require a change of hosting company (or hosting plan). Search engine optimization is not about title tags and keyword frequency anymore. In fact, those 2 mean less than ever in a successful SEO campaign. So what are the requirements of good SEO Hosting? Here are a handful of features we look for in recommending a host to our clients… 1. USE Linux Apache MySQL PHP For a large number of reasons (availability of free software, usage of htaccess and mod-rewrite, ease of community support, etc), don’t get Windows hosting. You can argue about this with me later, but you will be wrong. And people will laugh at you. 2. GET Unique IP(s) While there is limited evidence regarding the matter, it is generally a good idea to go...
Quality Update Live at AdWords
The new quality score column over at AdWords will now begin factoring into minimum bid rate calculations. After last weeks’ debacle which sent our team and many other advertisers clamoring for the phones Friday morning and AdWords subsequent adamant denial that it was related to the new algorithm, Google will be instituting an attempt to increase ad relevance and quality to searchers over the next 3-4 days. (Yet another working week-end…) If you have delayed optimizing your account to this point now is the time to hop-to-it and get those ad groups themed out. If you are like some of the clients we take on who have previously structured their accounts based on search behavior, it’s time to shift to a keyword based structure. I see this whole...
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