Apologies to anyone out there who’s not a Twitter fan (e.g. our very own Carps springs to mind), but this is another Twitter exploit post. If you do use Twitter you’ll likely already have seen this one in action today, and if you don’t, you won’t be interested. Oh well.

The Problem

The actual exploit as I first saw it is quite simple. All it’s based on is sending out a tweet starting with http://t.co/@ and continuing with whatever HTML you want to inject into the page. t.co is Twitter’s homegrown URL shortener, and I would guess that something in their escaping logic is trusting it more than it should. Certainly the http://a.bc/@ I tried didn’t work.

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A few days ago I was over at Topsy setting up my RSS reader ( yer RSS is dead ) and I noticed :

www.davidnaylor.co.uk just got 100/100 points at webutation.org, all giddie inside I shot over there and found this :

My previous feelings of joy soon disappeared when I clicked on the first link of the most popular the “movies links” that’s when I noticed 3 things.

a) They get the same badge as ME 100% SAFE and Trustworthy

b) The thumbshot looked like a FBI page when they seize a page

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In just over 3 weeks I will be speaking in London at the A4U Expo conference being held at the ExCeL London on Tuesday 12^th – Wednesday 13^th October. I will already have had a busy day on the Monday as I am doing a full day SEO Training course for A4U which will cover all levels of SEO from beginner to advanced.

I am speaking in a few sessions at this year’s A4UExpo and if you want to catch me I will be around all day on the Tuesday and most of Wednesday. These are the sessions that I will be in.

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If you’ve been following this blog you will have read the article last week entitled “Is Google AdWords Keyword Tool Now More Accurate?” you will already know there has been a change in the search volume displayed on the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

Well Josh earlier pointed out this thread on the Google AdWords Support forums where this morning a Google Employee has explained the reason behind the difference in the numbers before and after the tool was updated.

“the previous version of the Keyword Tool provides search statistics based on Google.com search traffic and traffic from search partners, while the updated version of the Keyword Tool provides search statistics based on Google.com traffic only”

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You can probably see from trending topics that everyone’s talking about a little thing called “new Twitter”. Announced in the early hours (UK time) new Twitter is an “easier, faster and richer experience”. It’s being rolled out over the coming weeks, and there’s certainly a lot of hype:

Most people don’t even have the new interface yet, but from all the buildup we’re expecting something amazing.

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Dave mentioned today that people have been going on asking how to rank for single letters! This is kind of stupid once you realise how it works – it actually shows the results for the query it is suggesting, so if you type “a” on google.com – it doesn’t show you the results for “a” it shows you the results for “Amazon”.

Some brands are undoubtedly going to benefit from this, so without further ado, here is the “Instant Alphabet” – the brands that are going to benefit most from this new change.

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For some reason that already seems foreign and half-forgotten (my interest in interior decor is slightly dim) I was just searching for ‘brooklyn oak’ and noticed this result in the PPC:

It took me a second to cotton on, but then I realised that the ads were pulling through Google Product review scores, and links through to the reviews as well (indicated by the stars).

I’m a bit out of touch with AdWords these days, so I don’t know if this is new but it’s certainly the first – and so far only – time I’ve seen this.

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So of course everyone’s all over Google Instant this morning. In case you’re not, it’s just an Ajaxified version of Google that brings in the search results as you type.

Because I’m too lazy to make a video, here’s a few screenshots. Notice that as I type, I not only get the usual Google Suggest drop-down, but a light grey predictive text kind of feature in the search box. More dramatically (if you set the bar for ‘drama’ a notch or two below Emmerdale) the actual SERPs themselves change as you type.

Is it any good? Skip over the screenshots for initial impressions!

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