Lockheed, PBS Join Roster of Hacking Victims. When Will Websites Stop Ripping Each Other Off? Cooper Tire Hijacked 2300 Listings at Yahoo Local, Yellow Pages - Search Engine Watch (SEW) Over 2,300 Yahoo Local listings have been hijacked by Cooper Tires for at least the past month and no one seems to be able to address the issue. The problem is also occurring at Yellow Pages but not to the extent of Yahoo Local. I discovered the problem while giving some local marketing help to Victory Chevrolet in Mt Holly, NC. When checking out their presence in local listings, I came across the listings below in Yahoo Local.
Okay some how there was a glitch. But once I started to look deeper in to this the number of local listings that have been hijacked started to explode. In the middle of February there were over 1700, and now the number has grown to over 2300. How do I know this? Getting anyone to do anything about this has been tough. Then someone at Yellow Pages - or should I say AT&T - provided some insights and even a way to block this from happening to you at Yellow Pages. How is a product to be taken seriously when this can happen? SEO: Building Links To Fast? Look What Can Happen To Your Traffic. The graph below is from the SEOptimise blog showing what happened to a new site after building 10,000 spammy links to it in a single day.
What happened was the site tanked in rankings just after a few weeks. He said: I took a new domain that I wasn’t too worried about destroying, picked a reasonably competitive keyword, and built about 10,000 really nasty-looking low quality links in to the home page with a mixture of phrase and exact match anchor text. The site ended up ranking #1 on Google.com for this keyword for about three weeks, which as you can see had a significant impact on increasing the site’s traffic.
Is it about the bad links? New data shows the site is now back in the top 10, after taking a dive in rankings. This case study is continually building upon itself in the comments. Here are some good comments from the post: This is likely a failure of Google’s QDF algorithm. Anyway, if anything, it is always fun to watch people destroy things. Forum discussion at Sphinn. Facebook To Share Users' Home Addresses, Phone Numbers With External Sites. See update below Facebook will be moving forward with a controversial plan to give third-party developers and external websites the ability to access users' home addresses and cellphone numbers in the face of criticism from privacy experts, users, and even congressmen. Facebook quietly announced the new policy in a note posted to its Developer Blog in January. It suspended the feature just three days later following user outcry, while promising that it would be "re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks. " In response to a letter penned by Representatives Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) expressing concern over the new functionality, Facebook reaffirmed that it will be allowing third parties to request access to users' addresses and phone numbers.
Facebook has attempted to tread a fine line with regard to privacy issues even as it has continuously pushed users to share more information, both on Facebook and beyond the social network. Report: Not Optimizing For Bing-Yahoo Means Loss Of Traffic. Being bad to your customers is bad for business. A recent article by the New York Times related a disturbing story. By treating your customers badly, one merchant told the paper, you can generate complaints and negative reviews that translate to more links to your site; which, in turn, make it more prominent in search engines. The main premise of the article was that being bad on the web can be good for business. We were horrified to read about Ms. Rodriguez’s dreadful experience. Even though our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem in our search results, we immediately convened a team that looked carefully at the issue.
That team developed an initial algorithmic solution, implemented it, and the solution is already live. I am here to tell you that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results. As always, we learned a lot from this experience, and we wanted to share some of that with you.
Block the particular offender. SEO Takeaways From J.C. Penney Google Paid Link Penalty. I am sure all of you read the NY Times piece from the weekend named The Dirty Little Secrets of Search. It talks about how major realtor, J.C. Penney, had unbelievable Google ranking for many keywords that brought them tons and tons of e-commerce income for several months - but how those rankings were achieved through link spamming. Of course, J.C. Penney management claims they had no clue what their outsourced SEO company was doing and fired them immediately after speaking with the NY Times.
If you want to learn more of exactly what J.C. There is, as you would imagine, tons of discussion around this in the SEO community. Here is one quote from WebmasterWorld from Tedster, but the forums are definitely worth a read: I thought it was interesting that the algorithmic change is described as taking so long to roll out. Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Sphinn. Hot At Sphinn: Google’s Response To DecorMyEyes, LinkedIn Case Studies & More.
It may come as no surprise that the news surrounding DecorMyEyes.com and Google’s response to the publicity it got dominated the activity on our sister site, Sphinn, last week. Beginning with the New York Times article, the story spread rapidly across the Internet; several stories reached Sphinn’s home page, and it was also the topic of our “Discussion of the Week.” Articles about Google’s Instant Previews and a roundup of LinkedIn case studies for online branding were also popular last week, but none so much as the Google/DecorMyEyes situation.
Our “Discussion of the Week” asked, What Should Google Do About Negative Activity Being Good for SEO? That prompted 23 comments and 96 tweets, both of which were the highest numbers for any Sphinn story last week. It also prompted our favorite comment of week, which came from Sphinn member Mikkel deMib Svendsen, who said: This has been an issue for ages – and it has been abused for just as long. Most Comments Most Tweeted. After Google Warning, Forbes Comes Oh So Close To Cleaning Up Its Paid Links. What do you do if Google warns you about a violation of its paid links policy and you can’t find any such links on your web site? If you’re a small webmaster you might go to Google’s Webmaster Help forums and ask for help. But if you’re part of the website team at a major international publication, you might keep things in-house and deal with the problem quietly.
Unless you’re part of the Forbes.com website team, that is. As Barry Schwartz first posted on Search Engine Roundtable, Forbes.com’s Denis Pinsky went to Google’s Webmaster Help forum to share the letter that Google sent after finding paid links on the magazine’s website. Pinsky asked readers, Can someone help figure out what Links are in violation? Well, yes, as it turns out, someone can. Silly Forbes. But what about Google? Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | Link Building: Paid Links | SEO: Spamming. SEO Poisoning Campaign Targets Bin Laden Searches On Google Images. The death of terrorist Osama Bin Laden has sparked a series of phishing and malware attacks mounted by hackers looking to exploit the wide coverage the event is getting.
According to antivirus software maker Kaspersky, four hours after the Obama announced the death of the world’s most wanted man, hackers had launched SEO poisoning and adware attacks on Google in order to exploit the popularity of the news. “As always, when big news appear in the press the bad guys start black hat SEO campaigns in popular search engines trying to lure users to install Rogueware,” Fabio Assolini, Kaspersky Lab Expert, said in a blog post. “It's not different this time, with the top news about Osama's Bin Laden death being everywhere. The bad guys were quite fast and started to poison [search] results in Google Images,” he added.
SEO poisoning uses the same techniques as other SEO campaigns, but instead of bringing in potential customers or ad clicks, it is used to spread malware. Scraping for Journalism: A Guide for Collecting Data. Photo by Dan Nguyen/ProPublica Our Dollars for Docs news application lets readers search pharmaceutical company payments to doctors. We’ve written a series of how-to guides explaining how we collected the data.
Most of the techniques are within the ability of the moderately experienced programmer. The most difficult-to-scrape site was actually a previous Adobe Flash incarnation of Eli Lilly’s disclosure site. Lilly has since released their data in PDF format. These recipes may be most helpful to journalists who are trying to learn programming and already know the basics. If you are a complete novice and have no short-term plan to learn how to code, it may still be worth your time to find out about what it takes to gather data by scraping web sites -- so you know what you’re asking for if you end up hiring someone to do the technical work for you.
The tools With the exception of Adobe Acrobat Pro, all of the tools we discuss in these guides are free and open-source. A Guide to the Guides. 10 reasons you're not an 'advanced' SEO | Internet Marketing Strategy: Conversation Marketing. I’m warning everyone: I’m blogging angry. I waited 24 hours. I’m still angry. So here it is. I am @#$)(* sick and tired of people telling me they’re “advanced” SEO’s, sitting on “advanced” SEO panels and speaking at “advanced” SEO conferences after three years of screwing up people’s web sites with a nofollow tag. Here are all the bits of knowledge that do not make you an advanced SEO: Knowledge of Robots.txt is not ‘advanced’ So, you know what robots.txt is. Do you know how the different search engines treat robots.txt? Do you know how it compares to the way search engines use the meta ROBOTS tag? You do? Knowing robots.txt in SEO is like knowing not to pour sugar in your gas tank: It doesn’t make you mechanic.
You know what makes you advanced? Using ‘nofollow’ may make you stupid Nofollow does not help SEO. This is not a news flash. Now, if you know how to design a site’s architecture to funnel authority around to the pages that need it, that could make you advanced. It’s also basic HTML.