I’ve just posted this on the Google webmaster forum. I may have to dig out Google Ripper and start talking about this again. Its a bloody nuisance!

Dear Google,

I’ve just found a couple thousand inbound links that are a pharmacy spam exploit. This may be the remnants of an exploit I reported about a year ago here http://www.trstechnology.com/blog/index.php/k1b0rg-doorway-loader-v02/

These links have been indexed by googlebot and now point to my site, not good. How come googlebot sucks this stuff up and then points them at unsuspecting websites? Surely this is obvious spam? There are thousands of hidden links at the bottom of this blog page. I would have thought it was obvious. Yet here I am again with nasty crap pointing at my site and probably I’ll start to rank for ‘cheap viagra’ again. This pisses me off!

The links are in this blog at the bottom of the page, hidden. Go view the source.

http://www.dr-pier-albrecht.net/

Please remove all inbound spam links pointing to my website. Hint: anything relating to pharma / drugs is spam. Another clue: anything /blog/ph.php* is spam.

Thanks

steve

Well its been too long since I last posted but I’ve had so much going on and I had to put some things on the back burner. I recently had a problem with a malicious script on my WordPress blog and had to write a software utility to help me clean up the mess. I’m going to realease  the software as a FREE tool to help other webmasters  who need to do a cleanup job, bt before I do I need to fix a few minor bugs and finish the installer program. But here’s a brief demo video of the tool in action, so you can see what it does…

Some time ago I was lucky enough to get hold of an ebook called Revenge Of The Mininet by Michael Campbell. In that book and associated tools and utilities provided by search engine optimization guru Leslie Rhode was detailed ideas and strategies about how to control the flow of PageRank through your website.

I did some modifications to my Content Management System to do just that, specifically control the flow of PageRank exactly where I wanted it in my site and my customers sites and boy, it worked like a charm.

The option I chose back then was to modify the content management system to use javascript to redirect menu links. So I changed all the regular <a href links to javascript window.location. This has worked fine and served me well.

However, at the beginning of 2005 Google, Yahoo, MSN and some of the other major players introduced a new <a tag called rel=nofollow. This tag allows you to explicitly tell the search engine spider to either follow the link or not, which is what I had done with javascript code.

Now it’s all the rage to be ‘going natural’ with SEO and I’m thinking that it might be a better option to change the content management system back to regular <a links rather than javascript. I forgot to mention that the only way the search engine spiders currently crawl any of my sites modified in this way is via a site map, either a regular html site map or now xml site maps too.

So I’m going to try and find out if this is the way to go now before making any changes. Maybe I should stick to the old adage “if it aint broke, don’t fix it”?…

I’ve been working on a project using the Google maps API recently. I’ve been using it to return the latitude and longtitude of an address and then comparing it against a geo-coded file in a database.

The Google maps API is pretty extensive and fairly easy to use. However, there are some things that you need to be aware of. The first thing is that Google does not want you to use the GClientGeocoder object to geo-code large files. If you want to do that, they want you to sign-up for an enterprise version of the geo-coder, and the cost is an astounding $10,000!

More on that in a later post. For now, here’s a map to play with…

As, you can see, it’s pretty easy to insert a map. You need to get an API key from here. Once you have that, you’re pretty much up and running.

I’ll post some more on the API later and show you some AJAX code that returns the latitude and longtitude results back to the server side for processing.

If you’ve ever done any keyword research online you’ll know how tedious it can be. But we live in a competitive world and due diligence requires that we perform at least a basic analysis before we spend money right? And where do we go to do that? Well, a very large percentage of the population go to BIG G!

 Now, if I have a legitimate need to perform keyword analysis for either myself or a client either by hand or using decent automated tools, I expect to have access to the same system will take my money and yours. But alas, more irritants along the way because of, ahem, computer viruses or spyware… and of course the need to ‘protect our users’… Here’s one for your viewing pleasure…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

You only have to type the captcha phrase into the box, but it’s bloody annoying! Particularly because it’s often almost impossible to read the captcha text!

Ah well…

I remember reading several articles last year about the death of SEO. The main point of these was that eventually Google will perfect its algorithms and search engine results will be accurate based solely on the content, which will be the most relevant.

Well, I expect that G would be the first to admit that we are a long way, years and years probably, away from that scenario. However, G has come a long way in its fight against search engine spam, making in less easy to force your web page to the top of the rankings without a lot of inbound one way links (it is still possible to do a Google bomb, but they usually disappear pretty quickly).

The most recent buzz is about Latent Semantic Indexing which is a new algorithm that has been developed and for which Google has a patent. The summary of the invention states;

‘An information retrieval system and methodology uses phrases to index, search, rank, and describe documents in the document collection. The system is adapted to identify phrases that have sufficiently frequent and/or distinguished usage in the document collection to indicate that they are “valid” or “good” phrases. In this manner multiple word phrases, for example phrases of four, five, or more terms, can be identified. This avoids the problem of having to identify and index every possible phrases resulting from the all of the possible sequences of a given number of words.’

I don’t know too much about the algorithm and how it works but its main focus is ensuring that the content of your pages, paragraph by paragraph are relevant and on topic. So it appears that G is fighting back against machine generated content and the duplicate content created private label rights articles.

You’ll be hearing a lot of buzz about this over the coming months and people will be devising new strategies to get sites with weak content to rank well. I will be maintaining the same search engine practices as always, for the time being at least. I will however be encouraging the deployment of a new model for web development and structure that incorporates blog pages within my standard web content management framework.

There are two types of traffic and three categories.

Types of Traffic Paid v Free Paid traffic comes in many different forms. Probably the best know today is called Pay Per Click and you may recognize this term as it relates to Google’s Adwords PPC system. Although Google Adwords is still currently the most widely known and used PPC advertising system, both Yahoo and Microsoft have very similar systems that function in pretty much the same way.

With PPC you bid on keywords and when someone clicks your add you pay the PPC system bid amount.

Another paid form of advertising that used to be mainstream and is not as heavily used any more is banner ads. With the advent of PPC many people moved away from banner advertising but it’s a great way to drive traffic to your website if you pick the right venue for your banner!

There are many other paid ways to drive traffic to your site.

FREE TRAFFIC Free traffic can come from many different places too. Free traffic is generally what you get when someone searches on Google or Yahoo or MSN and you appear in the Search Engine Results Pages or SERPS.

Free traffic is the best kind of traffic and is the reason you should optimize your web pages for keywords and keyword phrases. You definitely want to pick up as much free traffic as possible. You can also get free traffic from forums by making posts, articles by having a signature file at the end of the article, blogs that you write and blogs that you post comments on etc etc etc.

Traffic Categories Traffic categories relate to the types of visitor you are trying to get to your site.

Info seekers Are looking for information and just browsing. They are not going to pay you money and are like window shoppers. If you could ask them on your website ‘ Hello madam, can I help you find something’ their answer would be ‘No thank you, I’m just looking. You get the picture. They are a general type of browser and they probably don’t really know what they are looking for. They are not very far into the buying cycle…

Shoppers Shoppers are further along in the buying cycle. They have done some general searches looking for information (as information seekers) and are now likely to be comparing similar products or services for price and features. Shoppers are hot leads and you want to be providing them with specific information, product reviews etc and will definitely want to have the opportunity to let them buy if they want. If nothing else, you want to get your shopper to give you an email address in exchange for some valuable information pertaining to their search.

Buyers Buyers are what you want! Of course Steve, duh! Well now, how many buyers are coming to your site and buying? Do you know? How many are leaving? I bet you don’t know that either and you should. Why? Because you can get that valuable information from your website if you know what to look for. What I am talking here is conversion and you need to know how well your web page is converting, so you can tweak it and make it convert better.

Anyway, buyers are the most targeted type of visitor you can get to your site and as you know by now, you should be directing them to a sales page. You’ll need to know how much you can afford to pay to send the buyer to your web page and what the conversion rate is at the page. Knowing this information is critical if you are using any of the paid advertising methods. But don’t worry, most businesses don’t have a clue about this and are losing money on PPC. If you are a small business owner you can compete with the big companies and literally steal their customers from right under their noses…

Summary Free is better and you target SEO and keyword analysis.

PPC is quick and you should test your offer, sales page and conversion rates before moving to more PPC and other forms of paid advertising…

I’ve been working on a project to increase Google page rank. While a neccessary part of this is to get relevant, inbound links to the website there is also another strategy that should be employed.

This is to contain the page rank within certain areas of the site at pass it, where necessary, to ther pages. While this sounds like a good plan, implementation can be tricky. Most websites have a pretty simple structure of internal links that are often not controlled much at all.

Most web savvy people know that you should only link out to other websites from certain pages so that you don’t ‘leak’ PR out of your site. But with a bit of thought, some javascript and a good old site map, you can control the flow of page rank internally too. Whats more, you can increase the page rank of your best keyword pages by directing it from pages of less importance fro within your site.

For a lot more info on this see Revenge Of The Mininet