Website penalized due to spamming, – website penalty due to potential spam,

A webmasterworld.com guy reports that his site got banned for using link spam tactics,

he says

“My website got penalized by google. (Congratulations to me 🙂 )Things started
from this JAN (wen Google scheduled to upgrade its PR algo? I am not sure if its
true.) Traffic dropped. So did the earnings. Many people felt changes in their
rankings as well as earnings in this particular month. On te other hand, others
felt more income and traffic (obviously)
Reason of Penalty: I was using my
own automatic Link partnering tool and in few instances posted the link
partnering email on Forums and Blogs too. (accidently)
Google detected this
as “SPAMMING” and the traffic that I am getting on this very website (from
Google only) has decreased drastically.
However, other Search Engines seem
to be BLIND to this “SPAMMING” (Yes! I agree that in some sense this is spamming
what I did). Rather MSN and Yahoo have started sending more traffic.
Though,
the website is a quality website (quality content and all). But my greed to get
more links has put this website down. I will have to relaunch it now.
Furthermore, I will start experimenting and will be enhancing my Link
Partnering tool algorithms to detect these irrelevant websites and filtering out
Blogs and Forums.
Moral of the story: 1 – Google has applied some SERIOUS
SPAM combacting algorithms. Its growing more and more conscious about SPAM. So be
careful. 2 – Other Search Engines are still a lot away from what Google is doing.
I salute Google for their dedication and taking SPAM websites seriously. 3 –
Don’t post your Website links on Comments section of Blogs or forums. (which I
did accidently) 4 – Look out for other ways of SPAMMING that Google has become
resistant to. Kindly post them here for further evaluation by WebmasterWorld
community. “

Please be careful with google they are pretty strong in detecting link spam,

Evidence reveals MSN using editors to maintain quality in its search results,

Some of our referral logs show visits from this URLhttp://64.4.8.28/hrsv3/Judging.aspx , at first look it seems like a spam site but it is not the case,

We see a login screen when we visit that URL mshrs.search.msn-int.com/hrsv3/Login.aspx it looks like human review area for MSN search results,

Google has been doing human review using eval.google.com for a longtime,

What googleguy said about eval.google.com

“walkman, your comment illustrates a misconception that I’ve seen in a couple places. The system that was up at eval.google.com was a console to evaluate quality passively, not to tweak our results actively. But when Henk van Ess submitted his own blog to Slashdot, he asserted “Real people, from all over the world, are paid to finetune the index of Google,” and that made it sound like people were reaching in via this console to tweak results directly, which just isn’t true at all.
I have serious reservations about Henk van Ess taking information from one of his own students (who presumably signed a non-disclosure agreement when the student agreed to help rate the quality of our results) and posting that information online. I also believe these web pages said things like “Google Proprietary and Confidential,” but it appears that the screenshots have been cropped to exclude that information. Those are the two things that really made me sad, not the “breaking news” the Google evaluates its own results quality. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Google evaluates the quality of its results in lots of ways–the fact is that every major search engine evaluates its relevance in many ways. “

I said
But when Henk van Ess submitted his own blog to Slashdot, he asserted “Real people, from all over the world, are paid to finetune the index of Google,” and that made it sound like people were reaching in via this console to tweak results directly, which just isn’t true at all. and you replied
Google Guy, do I read between the lines that you think my postings are irrelevant and misleading? That would be a shame.
I don’t believe they’re irrelevant, but yes: I do believe that the assertions you’ve made are misleading. In my original post, I was replying to walkman, who asked “ok, so how do you know you’ve been manually hit by this?” which implies that walkman thought that eval.google.com was responsible for sites being hit. Likewise, I have a ton of respect for Tara Calashain at ResearchBuzz. But her post about your site says “Basically what Henk seems to have found is a part of Google that allows humans to tweak search results to ostensibly get rid of spam and let the most contextually-relevant search results rise to the top.” Again, Tara wonders whether your posts said that results were being directly tweaked. Then there are assertions from your site like “The Google testers are paid $10 – $20 for each hour they filter the results of Google.” “Filter” again makes it sound like an active process. And your self-submission to Slashdot (“Real people, from all over the world, are paid to finetune the index of Google”), which also gives the impression that people used eval.google.com to change our search results.
So yes, I looked at the wording from when you submitted your own site to Slashdot, plus the use of active verbs such as “filter” on your own site, plus the comments of smart people such as Tara and walkman and how they interpreted what you wrote, and in my opinion your posts have been misleading. Again, this was not a console in which people could directly fine-tune, tweak, filter, or otherwise modify our search results. eval.google.com was for “eval,” i.e. passive evaluation.
Your follow-up question was “Why pay them for something if it has no effect om the index? Must be charity then.” Why are you surprised that we would pay people to rate search results? The job posting has been public, after all. We do provide ways for people to volunteer to help Google (e.g. see our translation console at https://services.google.com/tc/Welcome.html ), but to rate search results consistently and well takes time and training. I think it’s perfectly normal to pay people for their time.
When you quoted me on your site, you said “Google Guy: I’ve serious reservations about Henk van Ess” and in your post you said “Google’s spokesmen Google Guy, who I love to read, has serious reservations about me.” Just to be clear, that’s not accurate: I don’t have reservations about you personally, Henk. I think I stated clearly that I have serious reservations about two of your actions. I mentioned those two specific things in my first post, and I’ll reiterate them: you took information from one of your students, and you posted information that (in my opinion) was clearly proprietary/confidential. Regarding the first, I believe you wrote in a comment on your own site that this information came from a student of yours? Regarding the second, I’m quite surprised that you assert “I’m not aware of restrictions.” Besides the copyright symbol that you mentioned earlier, the very first picture you posted has a link “An NDA Reminder…” on the left in the Important Announcements section, where NDA stands for non-disclosure agreement. Are you honestly saying that if you had realized there were restrictions, you wouldn’t have done five blog posts (so far), posted screenshots, posted employee’s real names on the web without consulting them, and posted two training documents? In that case, I’ll ask politely. Henk, this information was for ratings training. It’s copyrighted, and I’m sure that the evaluation group considers it proprietary/confidential. I’d appreciate it if you would stop posting these documents.
By the way, I apologize in advance if this post comes across as strident. I hate he-said-she-said stuff, and normally I try not to post when I’m at ruffled at all. But I do think that things like posting an innocent employee’s name from internal training documents is rude and unnecessary. Henk, feel free to include this entry on your blog, but if you do, I’d appreciate if you’d quote the entire post.

then we have yahoo’s human review of search results, we can see referrals from corp.yahoo domain

now we have MSN human review of search, I think its mostly for quality control purpose? anyway good to see they are hand reviewing search, their results are spammed a lot by search engine spammers,

Yahoo update – yahoo updates its search index on 23rd january

Webmasterworld.com guys report yahoo update webmasterworld.com/forum35/3814.htm

check your rankings with our yahoo rank checker

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/yahoo-rank-checker.html

SEO Advice: Spell-check your web site – a typical Joke from Matt cutts

Matt cutts seem to be in happy mode today when he blogged about a site which offers 100% money back guarantee, The site which posted this offer has a banner which has typo errors, so how do you get business when your banner has spelling errors, Nice that matt noted this,

See spelling error in this message,

Boris Floricic shuts down german wikipedia even after his death,

Boris Floricic was a german hacker and phreaker, He died a mysterious death in the year 1998, Many reported his death was a suicide, some members of his family reported he was murdered by an intelligent agency,

read more on the wikipedia entry here – Boris floricic hacker

the german wikipedia.de reads as follows due to court rules

“Liebe Freunde Freien Wissens,
durch eine vor dem Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg am 17. Januar 2006 erwirkte einstweilige Verfügung wurde dem Verein Wikimedia Deutschland – Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V. untersagt, von dieser Domain auf die deutschsprachige Ausgabe der freien Enzyklopädie Wikipedia (wikipedia.org) weiterzuleiten.
Wir lassen derzeit durch unsere Rechtsanwälte alle möglichen Schritte prüfen, um Ihnen schnellstmöglich wieder einen unkomplizierten Zugang zur freien Enzyklopädie Wikipedia zu bieten. Bitte haben Sie dafür Verständnis, dass wir aus rechtlichen Gründen bis auf Weiteres keine weiteren Stellungnahmen in dieser Sache abgeben werden. “

askjeeves releases cache dates – when will MSN and Yahoo add cache dates to their cache,

Search Engine Watch blog reports ask jeeves adding cache dates to sites cache in their results, This is a bold improvement, Yahoo and MSN still didnt bring this facility, Hope they will follow soon,

Google is the first search engine to introduce option,

Google talk now open generation – the seo blog news,

Google talk, google’s mservice now offers open generation a new way to communicate with your friends using different IDs,
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/open-federation-for-google-talk.html

As google says you are allowed to interact with users with any ID,

on the help page

“We currently support open federation with any service provider that supports the industry standard XMPP protocol. This includes Earthlink, Gizmo Project, Tiscali, Netease, Chikka, MediaRing, and thousands of other ISPs, universities, corporations and individual users. “

What google says

“We’ve just announced open federation for the Google Talk service. What does that mean, you might be wondering. No, it has nothing to do with Star Trek. “Open federation” is technical jargon for when people on different services can talk to each other. For example, email is a federated system. You might have a .edu address and I have a Gmail address, but you and I can still exchange email. The same for the phone: there’s nothing that prevents singular users from talking to Sprint users.”

Some sites were reporting MSN was showing weird search behavior for current seo contest,

Lots of blogs are monitoring the ongoing SEO contest, Some blogs report MSN is showing weird behavior for the search http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=V7ndotcom+elursrebmem&FORM=QBRE ,

First many thought MSN is filtering out results for this keywords, Now it revealed its not the case, MSN search looks brilliant than what we think of, It seems msn search first try to understand the meaning of the words, Later if it cant find the words in dictionary, it adds the words to adult search keywords,

Now the search V7ndotcom elursrebmem reveals 41,000 results but we have the following note below the search bar,

Web ResultsPage 1 of 41,216 results containing V7ndotcom elursrebmem (0.06 seconds) (with SafeSearch: Moderate)

You can see the mention safesearch moderate, Usually this gets displayed it adult related keywords are searched,

So is MSN so concerned about po*n in its results, if its true MSN looks great,

Million Dollar Homepage back after a severe and malicious DDOS attack,

We reported in our previous posting that million dollar homepage is suffering from ddos attack, Now they are back online,

this is what Alex says in his blog

“I can confirm that MillionDollarHomepage.com has been subjected to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack by malicious hackers who have caused the site to be extremely slow loading or completely unavailable since last Thursday, 12th January 2006.
I can also confirm that a demand for a substantial amount of money was made which makes this a criminal act of extorsion. The FBI are investigating and I’m currently working closely with my hosting company, Sitelutions, to bring the site back online as soon as possible. More news soon.
“

Million Dollar Homepage down for past 2 days, Reports says its because of a major DDOS attack launched against the site,

The Million Dollar Homepage which has been reported to run for 5 years is now down for a considerably long time, Most reports say the site was down because of a major DDOS ( distributed denial of service ) attack against the site,

Infoworld reports

“The wildly successful pixel-powered Web page of a British university student is coming under increasingly intense DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks trying to knock down the profitable brainstorm

The site is hosted on a server in Ashburn, Virginia, in a data center run by Equinix, where InfoRelay has much of its hardware, Weiss said. The high bandwidth use didn’t cause problems for InfoRelay, as the company has a multigigabit network and provides bandwidth for a major search engine, Weiss said.

But The Million Dollar HomePage attracted malicious attention, coming under DDOS fire late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning, he said.

Officials from InfoRelay met to figure out what they could do to stem the attacks within the constraints of Tew’s service package, Weiss said. Tew wasn’t on an enterprise-level deal that often includes advanced hardware, from vendors such as Cisco Systems (Profile, Products, Articles), used to prevent the effects of DDOS attacks, Weiss said.

Administrators implemented several proprietary internal techniques to slow and alleviate the effects, he said. “We sort of volunteered our time to do what we could,” Weiss said.

The attacks are coming from computers worldwide, including the U.S., Europe and Asia, Weiss said. The attacks could be the work of a botnet — a network of computers illegally commandeered for sending spam and DDOS attacks.

“

Sitelutions.com their webhost says the site was burning 200 megabits per second of internet bandwidth ( Oops )

“We are honored that Alex selected us to host his site. With so much worldwide coverage, Alex needed a host that could support [the site’s intense bandwidth requirements,” said Paul Singh, Assistant Director of Operations at InfoRelay Online Systems, Inc.

Sitelutions has hosted The Million Dollar Homepage since September, 23, 2005. At that time, Mr. Tew’s site had grossed approximately $108,000. Since Sitelutions has hosted the site, Mr. Tew’s site has received up to 16 million hits per day, 500,000 unique visitors per day, and has utilized up to 200 megabits per second of Internet bandwidth.”

So when will the site be online?