Malware attack warning in firefox by Google

Spammer Gets Jail – AOL user spammer gets jail

A spammer who spammed AOL users badly with his junk pharmacy spam got 26 months of Jail term. I am sure the Jail term he got is something he deserved. I wish all email spammers in this world gets Live jail terms. They are terrible low lifes.

Google comes closer to ethical SEOs and SEO companies

Google recently rewrote their SEO page in Google Webmaster help. Before it used to focus on unethical SEOs now they have a more standard document where they give credit to companies who help Search engines deliver better results and webmasters / site owners develop better websites . According to Google good seos

• Reviewing and providing recommendations on your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
• Content development
• Managing online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• SEO training

Well those are good points are most of them are basic stuff handled by any SEO company or SEO consultant. Apart from this good SEOs provide ethical ways to build quality back links. As we know Back links plays a very important factor when it comes to Search Engine Rankings especially in Google. Getting natural links through traditional ways are an important way for top rankings in Google.

1. Write articles which are useful and unique for users. This will help relevancy of the website as well as attract visitors which will result in back links.

2. Provide widgets that are useful and for free which will pay by itself through quality back links.

3. Impress the big authority and GOV sites by providing what they want they will link to your site if you can provide things they want to see and use often.

4. Make your site link worthy by making it as a useful hub for targeted users / customers. Good contents, attractive graphics, tools, forum, blog will all help If you have regular repeated visitors then you have achieved something. Repeated visitors are important since word of mouth referral is important for spreading the word which will result in quality back links.

According to Google some useful questions you can ask a SEO company:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you offer any online marketing services to complement your organic search business?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what time frame?
• What’s your experience in my industry?
• How long have you been in business?

I agree with all those questions they are pretty straight forward and covers a lot of things. If a good SEO gives a clear answer for these questions i am sure he can relied upon. I respect Google and will live by their stance on SEO even before this updation i never had anything against their rules. Its their search engine and they set the rules for it. We need to live by it. If we can’t and if something wrong happens we need to face consequences. This is how it is and this is how it should be.

Vijay

Google uses Search Logs effectively to combar Webspam

Fighting web spam using effective tracking of logs and click through data.

Matt Cutts Senior Software Engineer and Lead of Web Spam Team in Google recently made an interesting post on how Google effectively fights spam using Data collection.

Web Spam is the most annoying part of Internet today. Especially more than 85% people uses search engines to land on any site for the first time Search Engine Spam should be totally avoided when it comes to user search experience. Search engines have always had the taunting task of fighting web spam from the day they came into existence. Google is one of the search engines which used effective anti-web spam methods to combat search engine spam. This is one reason they are keeping their position on top of all search engines.

First time i have seen Google really acknowledge that they are using log data in their algorithm to combat spam. According to Official Google blog

“Data from search logs is one tool we use to fight web spam and return cleaner and more relevant results. Logs data such as IP address and cookie information make it possible to create and use metrics that measure the different aspects of our search quality (such as index size and coverage, results “freshness,” and spam). Whenever we create a new metric, it’s essential to be able to go over our logs data and compute new spam metrics using previous queries or results. We use our search logs to go “back in time” and see how well Google did on queries from months before. When we create a metric that measures a new type of spam more accurately, we not only start tracking our spam success going forward, but we also use logs data to see how we were doing on that type of spam in previous months and years.

The IP and cookie information is important for helping us apply this method only to searches that are from legitimate users as opposed to those that were generated by bots and other false searches. For example, if a bot sends the same queries to Google over and over again, those queries should really be discarded before we measure how much spam our users see. All of this–log data, IP addresses, and cookie information–makes your search results cleaner and more relevant.”

As per Matt cutts IP address and search logs do play a role in judging the quality of results delivered to users. I personally feel this is a good option i know there are some IPs that spam the search engines more than the regular IPs if Google is able to monitor the IPs pretty well they can effectively block automated queries and this can be used in search algorithm. Some keywords will always be spammed more than others, Google as they say can use these type of tracking to impose more filters to those kind of phrases. As a person with more than 5 years of experience with search engines i can see Google imposes stronger filters for certain phrases than others. For keywords like Cancer, mesothelioma more gov, org authority sites rank which for keywords like auto transport, real estate commercial sites do a better job. Really enjoy the way the results are displayed since i don’t like to see a commercial site when i search for medicine related information. Most of the time commercial sites provide much lesser value to users than non-commercial sites. There are areas where we need to see more commercial sites and there are areas that needs more information sites to be dominant. Only way to get this right is to check through the hysterical data and search logs and see what keywords are searched more from where, what the user did after clicking the data etc. User tracking can be done effectively using strong filters and effective methods.

Search Engines are facing problems every day. Apart from Web spam and search engine spam they see DDOS attacks, excessive bot activity, scrappers etc. To stand on top they need to keep working on stronger methods to combat spam.

Official Google Blog post here

How to prevent Google Bowling – Interesting discussion in WMW

I came across an interesting discussion in webmasterworld about how to prevent damage to a site by links from other sites. You can read more about the discussion here. http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3677877.htm

Tedster a long term member and webmaster world Administrator answers pretty well. I am very impressed with his answer and agree 100%.

Even if you block IP addresses or redirect pages, the links that point to your
website are still there, and they’re on other sites that you can’t control.
Those links will have whatever effect they have with Google’s also.
There is
one thing that protects a website against Google Bowling – a solid backlink
profile of its own. The more your “real” quality backlinks grow, the less anyone
else’s malicious actions can affect it.

Regardless of spam backlinks or now as tedster says a good backlink profile will automatically remove any bad PR received from bad links.

Not Enjoying all these spams

I get really ****** off when i see emails like this ending up in our company mail iD.

“Providing you 100% Manual Directory Submissions With Page Rank Details.

I am Niraj from India.
Providing you 100% Manual Directory Submissions With Page Rank Details.
I have one year of experience of directory submissions work.
and I am done 1000 directory submissions work all are manually in 8 to 10 hours or so.
I am doing it every day. It’s my Job and passions as well.
And therefore I get $500 (Rs. 20000) per month. All because of Directory Submissions work.
You would be quite get surprise that my salary increase because of that below reason.
Before six month my salary is $250 (10,000) and I get other same kind of directory submissions job in one of our competitor company suddenly I put resignation in my firm.
And my manager told me that why u should leave our firm. My answer is that I will get $375 (Rs. 15000) per month suddenly my manager double my salary put my increment 100% and give me $500 (Rs. 20000) per month. And told me that never think to leave our company.

I am the only person who done 1000 directory submissions in a one day (8 to 10 Hours).

And then I got an idea to start my business own.

And providing manually Directory Submissions Service.

At this below price I will get some order in small amount directory submissions work like 5 to 10 sites directory submissions in one month.
100 Directories $10.00250 Directories $20.00500 Directories $35.00750 Directories $ 45.001000 Directories $65.00

But I can’t get any regular client yet for directory submissions work.
I think you are one that client that’s why I describe you all that.

R u give me regularly that kind of work.
I have a staff of five person they can submit 500 Directory per day as well.
I am sure u will find grate quality as well.
RegardsNiraj Patel”

I would have expected atleast some good english this letter is horribly written i can’t believe how he can expect to get any business from it.

Google Advisor site diagnostics tool – Google’s free tool

Google now offers diagnostics report for a site for example

For our Site Searchenginegenie.com Google says the following
www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://searchenginegenie.com

Safe Browsing
Diagnostic page for searchenginegenie.com/
What is the current listing status for searchenginegenie.com/?
This site is not listed as suspicious.
What happened when Google visited this site?
Of the 2 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 05/10/2008, and suspicious content was never found on this site within the past 90 days.
Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?
Over the past 90 days, searchenginegenie.com/ did not appear to function as an intermediary for the infection of any sites.
Has this site hosted malware?
No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.

Well though the report sounds great for our site i am not sure how much i can believe Google on this.
I did the same search for serials.ws a popular crack download site. This site has f**ked up my system couple of times just for downloading some useless cracks. I am not sure how Google gives the following certification.

Safe Browsing
Diagnostic page for serials.ws/
What is the current listing status for serials.ws/?
This site is not listed as suspicious.
What happened when Google visited this site?
Of the 1310 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 05/26/2008, and suspicious content was never found on this site within the past 90 days.
Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?
Over the past 90 days, serials.ws/ did not appear to function as an intermediary for the infection of any sites.
Has this site hosted malware?
No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.

Well no malicious stuff on this site according to Google? that’s very weird since this site is very popular for malicious downloads. Don’t have a hint on what criteria Google judges the quality of a site.

tnx.net banned from Google

tnx.net is banned from Google for violating Google’s guidelines. If you see their site tnx.net you can see they are selling text links without nofollow and selling Pagerank links which are against Google’s guidelines. Their site is banned from Google obviously but to avoid looking like a banned site they blocked Googlebot from their site

their robots.txt ( tnx.net/robots.txt ) reads

Useragent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

Well they not only like to violate Google’s guidelines they will also teach you how to hide links using their Spam tool,

forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=526547

The tool promotion page in Digital point forum reads

“Have you ever thought of WHY Google wants to scare you from buying links? Because it works great, when done with care, of course! In the previous thread “How to Rank N1 in Google for a Highly Competitive Keyword – Revealed” I spoke of some tips which will definitely help to stay away of Google’s radars when buying links. Backlink building has to be done with great care – not to get penalized. 2 main points are: moderate link placement speed and a variety of link anchors to make links look natural. When over 100 new links pointing to one page appear in several days, all with same anchors (which is unnatural) – Google will most likely notice you and the pages you were promoting may disappear from SERPs for 1 month. This automated “too many links at once” filter is intended to keep you away from buying links, but it’s very easy to avoid this filter! “

Already we know text-link-ads.com run by patrick gavin was banned now we have an other link broker under Google’s radar go down.

If people think link brokers are the solution i recommend don’t take that page. Instead find ways to improve your site and attract links.

Sanford wallace AKA Spamford wallace awarded 234$ million fine for spamming

Well people in online marketing industry for a long time should be knowing the long term spammer and one of the worst email spammer of all time Sanford Wallace. His company cyber promotions started in 1991 is one of the foremost email spamming company. He closed his company due to lawsuits and public pressure and now is resorted to spamming through more sophisticated methods.

Wikipedia has lot more information on this spammer . Well Now he is faced by a lawsuit by myspace for spamming their members using fake IDs. Now a civic court has ruled against him and he should pay 234$ million as fine to myspace for abusing their services. Well i am sure he is not going to pay this anyway i dont think first of all he has any where near that money to pay. I am sure this is just a warning lawsuit from Myspace to everyone trying to spam their users. Wallace was previously asked to pay FTC more than 4 million dollars as fine which he never paid http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/0423142/WallaceFinalJudgment.pdf now i am sure for the type of low life he lives he will never pay the 234 million.

Spamford wallace runs his personally blog probably started very recently here http://sanfordwallace.com/wordpress/?p=5 . I am not sure whether its his personal blog ( no way to authenticate ) but seeing from the postings it seems its the real sanford wallace.

The thread about recently lawsuit really attracted me.

his post

“$234 million dollar judgment
I just read that a court awarded MySpace a $234 million dollar judgment against me. That’s pretty amazing since I haven’t even been served in this case since the preliminary injunction about a year ago. Regardless, the check’s in the mail.
“

and his replies

admin Says:
Good demonstration of how some people base their thoughts on erroneous information. #1 The poster doesn’t understand the meaning of a civil judgment. #2 The poster clearly feels I send crap in his or her inbox even though I haven’t sent a mass commercial email in over 10 years.

admin Says:
“Innocent until proven guilty” does not apply to civil actions. And I am still waiting to be served. And I haven’t been hiding either. The whole case was one big PR move.

admin Says:
There’s a big difference between crying “its not my fault” and “they won a $234 million dollar judgment without even serving the defendant.” I’m not asking you to care about me. I’m asking you to care about what happens when a huge corporation and the gov’t have a common interest.

I personally want all the email spammers to go to hell or serve Capital punishment they are just a disgrace to internet and Internet freedom

Yahoo Mcafee join hands to pick out spammers in search results

Yahoo has tied hands with Mcafee to pick spammers from search results and warn innocent searches from potential problem they might face visiting a website. If you see the following screen shot

You can see the warning display from Yahoo search results. The site featuring in search seem to be an email spammer. Emails submitted to that site are added to some bulk email lists and results in 1000s of spam to those email IDs. Now Yahoo includes a warning to remove these potential spammers. The note says “Use caution in providing your email address. It may result in unsolicited or spammy emails” The site featuring here is carbonneutral.com a potential email spammer according to Yahoo and Mcafee.

There will be some innocent occurrences of this where sites may get flagged for sending unsolicited email whereas the people who reported the email as spam had actually elected to receive it. But this is rare most of the time email spammers are spammers regardless of whether they are guilty or Not.