SEO Blog

Thoughts and tips from the expert minds of our team

11 Feb 2010

Paperchase Alleged Copyright Theft

The big news on Twitter at the moment is how an artist on The Hidden World of Eloise has had some of their artwork copied and then distributed by Paperchase. Apparently they’ve contacted Paperchase who have promptly ignored them, they’ve also found taking them on too costly and so now they have resorted to the viral nature of Twitter and social media to spread their story and gain support. It is working.

I’ve been looking at the search term on Twitter and so far whilst typing this there are 84 more about Paperchase and how they are allegedly stealing artwork and selling it.

What is worse, when I jumped on the bandwagon to complain through their contact form, I made sure that I did not opt-in to their newsletter, yet they seem to have added me anyways. So they are also spamming!

If you check out their brand term, paperchase, you will see that the Hidden World of Eloise is currently number 6 for the term, but after today and all the links it will get, I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets to number 3.

So Paperchase, you have a real reputation management issue on your hands, well done

Update: 20 minutes later and the complaint website is now ranking at #3 and “Paperchase” is now a Worldwide trending topic on Twitter, lets hope its not a fake like the whole Save Jon fiasco.

David Whitehouse

11 Feb 2010

UK2.Net Web Hosting Fail Updated 12/2/10

As a part time job I do car valeting (Car Valeting Pro) on evenings and weekends. Since its winter I don’t get many enquires so I tend to only check my website monthly, whilst still checking my emails daily.

Yesterday I was alerted by a customer that my website wasn’t working and it just came up with “This Account Has Been Suspended”.

As you can see Google cached my website on the 3rd of February, so it had been down for at least 7 days, but since I couldn’t log into my site I couldn’t get any exact date or time.

I got straight onto UK2.net who I host the website with and had to submit a request form asking why my account was suspended. I kept up with checking the online chat support that they offer as it was offline at the time. By chance I managed to catch their online chat working so proceeded to get my site back up and working.

Now that the issue is resolved, I have been into my site to check the date when it went down, and i happened to notice that the first recent visitor is UK2.net, so in my mind they clearly had pushed some buttons at their end to get the site working again then proceed to check it hence logging themselves as the first visitor.

I’m currently in contact with UK2.net via their ticketing system but they seems to be under the impression that this is a sporadic error, even though I have stated that the problem is now solved I just want to know why I got a “This Account Has Been Suspended” error and also why I got no email saying that there was an issue.

If a customer hadn’t brought this to my attention it could easily of been the beginning of March before I noticed this problem.

*Updated 12/2/10*

So we finally have a reason as to why my account got suspended.

Thanks UK2 for the months free hosting.

rory

08 Feb 2010

WebmasterRadio.fm Strikepoint Show February 8th

So tonight myself and Mikkel did another live episode of Strikepoint on Webmasterradio. Apologies for the slight lag in the show, sometimes it’s really hard to keep the conversation flowing when there is a time delay but we try to work around it, plus in the last segment I dropped out for a few minutes altogether.

Mikkel started the show and talked about how it is now legal to allow gambling adverts in Denmark and what this now means to the gaming SEO industry. Gaming laws in countries opening up is good for the public as well as us

Then we spoke about what Google allows in the UK on the PPC, and some strange things that can be bidded on such as beer, wine and whisky, but not vodka?

After the first break I discussed the hacking issue that I have been seeing for search terms like “buy windows 7” across all the search engines. What I’ve seen recently was about 50% of the top 80 results were results from hacked servers. The situation is getting worse and even the PPC is getting flooded with hacked sites as well as the usual or illegal / fake sites.

This then set me off on a rant again about my favourite fake products … the ghd hair straighteners! Google need someone in the UK who can actually monitor and do something about these issues to improve the quality of adwords for the average users who trust the results. Mikkel asked whether it is Google’s greed to allow these adverts to go through, or the quality team are either powerless or incompetent.

Then Mikkel spoke about how Hell has frozen over as Google decided to do a 1 minute TV advert during the Superbowl last night. The reason behind the ad was to target search users mainly, but do Google need to advertise their core product? Are they threatened by the likes of Microsoft and Bing, and their advertising campaigns?

Then Mikkel told us he had given in and actually gone out and bought an Iphone due to working with a client who is promoting an App. Mikkel thought I already owned an iPhone I corrected him by stating “Me, I’m a Microsoft boy… I have Microsoft Keyboard and mouse on my Windows 7 system with my HTC windows smart phone, the only Apples you will find in my house are fruit.. oh and Becky’s Ipod lol!”

You’ll soon be able to download the show from Webmasterradio, but we’ll be back next week for another show.

DaveN

08 Feb 2010

Buy windows 7 – part2

Yahoo Promotes Hacked site ! wtf : I was doing quick search for the Strikepoint radioshow and saw this

The Jobsite is a hacked server and Yahoo are giving them a side box listing what the HELL ! When I click the link I get 100’s of hacked server pages :

Dave

DaveN

05 Feb 2010

Buy Windows 7 – state of the index

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

03 Feb 2010

Why Google Wants You to Use it’s Url Shortener

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

03 Feb 2010

Affiliate Link Building – Link Farm Evolution

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