If there is one post that you shouldn’t skim it’s this one. Last year I declared this would be the year we saw an increase in Hack’s and XSS, and in the last few days I have had a “What the hell just happened!” moment..

It started with Chris Pirillo’s website which IMO has been hacked. (Chris if you see this I did try to get hold of you)

which then redirected me to :

then I found more :

In fact I found so many I started to get worried. I rang a few of the UK sites, explained who I was and asked for some server details, but again I couldn’t get any collation between OS or software on the servers.

Exploited on IIS :

Host: www.siia.net
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6
Referer: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=buy+windows+7&start=10&sa=N
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:58:40 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
Location: http://software-shopping.net/shop/item/325/?cpn=siia_soft

GET /development/ePortfolio/CDSM/?id=5089=Microsoft-Windows-7-Ultimate-(64-Bit).html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.techdis.ac.uk
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6
Referer: http://www.bing.com/search?q=buy+windows+7&go=&form=QBRE&filt=all&qs=n

Exploited on Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:09:41 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6
Cache-control: no-cache, must-revalidate
Pragma: no-cache
X-ENGINE: rx-engine
Location: http://software-shopping.net/shop/item/325/?cpn=www_techdis_ac_oem
Content-Length: 0
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

The only Footprint is the end site. At the moment I’m waiting for the code to be sent to me from one of the exploited servers. It looks to work on search referrer if we had to fake it to wget the pages if you hit the referrer too hard you will trigger a 404 page

anyways check out

http://www.bing.com/search?q=buy+windows+7

several  Hacked sites on the first page and the #1 site hacked

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=buy+windows+7

several  Hacked sites on the first page and yahoo does warn you when you click

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=buy+windows+7&start=10&sa=N

you have to go to  the second page but they are all there.

Dave

DaveN

Not sure if you’re aware  of this or not but normal url shortening services like Bit.ly and tinyurl use a 301 redirect,  and the 301 redirect passes the actual  referrer of the page the bit.ly link was on and that’s why you see twitter traffic in your Google Analytics account, but I bet it  never matches with the real traffic  :

which works fine if the user clicks the link on twitter.com But more and more people don’t do that they use firefox plugins and iphone apps, which destroy the twitter referrer

Which is why you always have that gap in your stats and should see more and more direct hits, but the big issue is when you have custom url shorteners :

You can fake the referrer. Now this is great and bad for a few reasons one Google like to know the upstream and downstream, merchants like to know where your aff traffic is coming from

Imagine if you faked your adwords traffic to a merchant you could cause untold issues especially if they bid on those hard earn keywords you have found

DaveN

DaveN

We’ve been looking around at tools for fast and automated link building today, as “back in the day” and still today by some people, a common strategy, frequently used by affiliates is to build up a Micro site that either targets a small part of there Niche or a single Key Phrase. This entire process (excluding initially highlighting the niche) can be automated via the use of Scrapers.

So the Micro Site gets built, seeded, then is automaticly link built to using a tool. It will then usually rank pretty quickly, the length of time it ranks for before being banned or penalised really depends on  how bad the links are and how competitive the area is. The site will inevitably end up burnt by Google. Its then a case of rinsing and repeating again. Each time making a profit.

To make the process even easier its sometimes beneficial to piggy back of someone elses authority. Simply find somewhere, where you can setup your own profile and then automaticly link build to that, the sites existing authority will immediately bump you in the right direction. A really great example of this can be seen best on Bing:

Dave has given me authorisation today to go out and buy Link Farm Evolution (affiliate link), this product has really nailed the automated process I’ve described above well. Integrated with Wordpress, Pligg and Blogger it provides the capability to roll out large volumes of links fast.

anthony

When I think of the uses for a Tablet I keep coming back to the same thing over and over again..

Email – Communication – Browsing

Email that’s a no brainer, I need access to my Webmail and Office mail so something like the push email features that make Blackberry very strong.

Communication another no brainer, Bluetooth and the ability to let me stick my mobile phone Sim in it. The Bluetooth could also be used for keyboard and mice as well as a headset. I need a webcam for video Voip and some kick ass compression software with the ability to make phone calls.

Browsing with my phone sim and  the built in wifi that should be taken care of but give me a SD memory slot. Lets face facts 32 gig is enough to back up important stuff and the cards are really cheap..

The most import thing is it needs to integrate into my normal day to day, running PC – media player and xbox, give it a removal battery so I can have a spare when no power outlets are available and I will buy one maybe several.

Dave

DaveN

A couple of days ago there was a discussion amongst the the Bronco Team it started with Image results in Google for Kean Richmond when he noticed this picture for James ranking for his name :

Which was little odd, but if you look at the team page you see that James is after Kean in the pictures :

which got us thinking about the image before Kean which is Chris Antcliff and sure enough there was a picture of Kean in the Google serps :

the image files are named correctly and  the alt tags are named correctly but when you look at the source code even though it’s formatted correctly we have it structured IMO incorrectly

Chris Image – Chris Image Title ( H3 ) – Chris Description
Kean Image – Kean Image Title ( H3 ) – Kean Description
James Image – James Image Title ( H3 ) – James Description

My gut feeling  ( due to the fact I can’t be bothered to test and too busy to get Kean to restyle ) is that the correct flow of Image Optimisation in Google should be

Title Image Keyword ( h3)

Image keyword.png

Image Description

so what Google is doing is :

Chris Image Title ( H3 ) – Chris Description – Kean Image

Kean Image Title ( H3 ) – Kean Description – James Image

the correct images still get indexed correctly but the addition of the wrong images has to be down to the H tag passing proximity relevance to the wrong image and of course the more competitive the terms the less the H tag  weighs.

Dave

DaveN