I typed HYIP into google and saw a bunch of adwords advertisers and the first result was a deffinition by Wikipedia (of course)
“”A high-yield investment program (HYIP) is a type of Ponzi scheme, which is an investment scam that promises an unsustainably high return” The ads were obvious scams and the first organic result was a big warning. The people bidding on “hyip” are fishing for really stupid people. It just amazes me that people are that stupid.
Shouldn’t google adwords watch out for scams?
The Internet marketing industry is buzzing about the possibility of Google switching to AJAX based pages. This would break many programs that scrape Google. Many people scrape Google for many reasons some harmless and some very malicious. Every time a visitor queries Google it costs them a very small am amount of money. This does not seem like a big deal until you consider how many people are doing it and how often.
This will probably only stop armatures. Scraping Google is so profitable that the pros will figure out a way and fast and some may already use tactics that are not affected by it. I’m sure that scraping Google has gotten so out of hand that this switch would save Google a lot of money.
It appears that the first step in making flash content spiderable Google has added the ability for googlebot to execute javascript. I’m not sure how robust it is but I do know that it can. I’m working with a client that had a very large amount of content that was previously not in Google because the content required javascript to be seen. Out of nowhere this site has over 600,000 pages of new content in Google that was previously not there.
I was very confused at first. I knew that those pages were not there before and that Google should not be able to see them. I put one of the url’s in a spider simulator and the text was being shown. I put it firefox and IE with javascript turned off and content would not show up. I put in in lynx and the content did not show up either. I wonder why and how the top spider simulators are running javascript.
I was doing a search today on a product name and I noticed that one of the Adwords results had an address right below it. It does not do this every time. Sometimes is just says Houston, TX.
When I did a search on google for “houston accounting software”. I saw 10 results compared to the one to three they normally show.
I have been working a lot with Google analytics a lot lately and I like it a lot. Before I used it I had asked some friends what percentage of their site visitors were dial up. They gave me these real low numbers like 3-5%. I thought that was real low. Specially in the niche they were in. Now that I have my own stats I see the same numbers. Right now I have 5.32% dail up users and 63.5% broadband. The rest goes to unknown. When you have 27% unknown those numbers are almost worthless. I would imagine that all broadband providers are known so there is very good chance those are dial up. Also T1 users could be dail up. Anybody can start an ISP with a t1 and some modems. These numbers are pretty much worthless.
I mentioned in an earlier post that my asp.net website was showing up in Google with some very weird URL’s. I could not figure out why this was happening. I was using online spider simulators and could not figure out how Google was getting these weird URL’s. With some help from some people at www.webmasterworld.com I found out it had something to do with cookies. So I went to my site with Firefox and turned off cookies and there was the weird url. I did the same thing in IE and it did not.
I mentioned yesterday that I found a flaw in IIS. It turns out it is a flaw in .NET framework. This flaw allows you to create as many URL’s as you want on somebodies website. All you have to do is link to them or submit a bunch of different URL’s to a zillion directories all linking to the same page. You can do even more damage if the site is using relative URL’s because this trick will change the base URL for that page. I have already seen sites listed in Google this way.
The trick is that you can put (X(aBc-123_ID$=1234)). This is not just some random thing. There are rules. The X has to a capital letter and can only be one letter. The 2nd part can be just about anything. You can’t use star, ampersand, or pound sign. This means you can use equal sign, period, underscore, dash, exclamation point, or comas. Percent sign can only be used when used with URL encoding like %20.
http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/(X(aBc-123_ID$=1234))/default.aspx
I can not find a way to turn this off. I don’t know enough about .NET to know how to catch it with programming. I am in the process now of finding out. I will post when I find a fix. One quick fix is to turn off .NET. If you are using classic asp there is no reason to have this installed.
I have a new site that our company is working on. I noticed that in google all of a sudden we have all of our pages listed in Google with very weird things added to our URLs.
http://www.mysite.com/(A(XobqNFPtxwEkAAAAMzk3ZTU
4NzQtZGFjZS00OGUxLWExYzYtZDBiYjc1Mzg1N2YwP7fq1em0HKYJ5
vYMP8lm4NCf3241))/subdirectory/Default.aspx
I found out that this works on any IIS server. Even on www.microsoft.com. I have no idea what this is. I do know it is a bad thing for SEO and any site hosted on IIS needs to address this. This goes back to what I say about site architecture. Your site needs to have a URL policy set up and enforced. Nobody can go to any page unless that URL is already known to the site owner. This means no page can be access from 2 or more differnt urls. The site owner needs to redirect any rogue URL to the correct one and 404 anything you can’t predict. What this does is create duplicate content that the search engines do not like and can even hurt a sites rankings.
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I was telling a buddy about SEO the other day. We got to search engine friendly URL’s and he pointed out that what I was saying could be considered a security feature. When you have the question mark, period, ampersand, and equal sign in your URL you are giving people information about your system. Hackers can try to exploit your system if they know the syntax. It won’t stop them but it might stop the stupid ones. Kind of like an alarm does not stop a good thief. I always recommend removing those symbols for SEO reasons. This just gives me another reason to convince somebody to switch to search engine friendly URL’s.
I was looking at a clients logs today and saw a referrer from a site named www.rankmon.com. I went there and it showed keywords that I rank for and where I rank on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. I then realized “hey I just got referrer spammed”. Oh well at least this time it was something interesting. It seems the site spiders the internet reading keyword meta tags and then scrapes the search engines and gives a ranking report. I really like this. The site does not have an about page or anything that mentions who they are or how it is done or how you can work with them.
