Friday, December 29, 2006

Last Post of the Year

As some of you guys know, I'm getting married, though I'm already married, but it's not finished yet, so I'm really gonna get married, but on paper I already am.

Oh whatever.

So here's the last post of the year for me. I'll be back around January 20th, with new articles and new stuff about music and politics and seo and search and the web and marketing and design.

Oh yeah, almost forgot, here's me and the beautiful Mrs. Rumblepup.


Happy New Year!

The President is from Texas

Ever read the term LMAO?

Yeap, me too.

Well, you'd never believe it, but after reading a little at dooce, I just got up off the floor.

“What if the President stopped by? WHAT THEN?”

“Jon. The President is from Texas. He would be impressed that she wasn’t naked and taking a shit on the living room floor.”


Read it all.

I know because I have cousins from Dallas.

I've been blog tagged.

Yeap, I've been blog tagged, by Brian Mark no less.

5 Things you didn't know about me

Geez, thanks.

Link luv on the way.

Monday, December 18, 2006

Infamous spammer using Blogger to Spam the SE's

Last year, this rather infamous spam artist was successful in getting millions of pages indexed at Google. Around the forums and blogosphere, this little spam went down in history as a slam again all the SE's, but especially Google.

Basically, the spammer used a combination of sub-domain cloaking, forum and blog spamming, and various redirects, to get billions of pages indexed in Google.

Of course, is sent a shock wave around the SEO and Blog world, and even wound up on Matt Cutt's doorstep when poster's to his blog demanded to know what the hell was happening.

Well, demanded is a tough term, but there where a bunch of very ticked off people, being that Big Daddy had just rolled out, and this was not supposed to happen. But happen it did. And now it's happening again, but with a Google Property.

The spammer in question? TopSearch10 (dot) com (No link to this rat from me)

This time, however, he (or she, this is almost the year 2007 you know) is using Google property to do it. and it's the same property I lovingly use to communicate with the outside world.

Yeap, Blogger, or more exactly, sub domains of the blogspot domain, are being used as cloaked redirects to this spam search results of paid advertising.

I found this out when I was looking into another Google (apparent) property called SearchMash

I was doing some research for keyword searches for one of my sites, and I found this wierd result set.

That's when I started checking around, and found that these "blogs" all redirect to Mr. Spammer. Of course, I this guy does this every year, but what really freaked me out was that he was using Google property to do it.

For instance http://mb-accomm.blogspot.com/ (NO LINK FOR YOU)

Typically, this spammer uses forum and blog spamming software to flood small forums and blogs that don't have anti-spam measure in place to stop attacks like this. Here's an example

http://seborga.net/ubb/Forum2/HTML/000052.html (No link for you Mr. Spammer)

However, he does it on a MASSIVE SCALE, creating hundreds of thousands of links to his sites, and low and behold, blammo! Spam listings in SERP's all over the SE's.

I don't know enough about spamming technology to say that he's actually using the Blogger service to do this, or if he's spoofing the blogspot url, but it does make your eyes spin in your head.

What really scared me, or impressed me, depends on your point of view, is that this spammer is actually BOLD enough to try using a trusted domain name like blogspot. It's not the first time that trusted domains have been used in this way, but there are over 13 million blospot sub-domains being indexed right now. Last year, this spammer used a few of his own domains, but once they where identified, they where dealt with.

However, this time around, the spammer is using a domain with MASSIVE amounts of indexed links from a trusted url. This is a little scary for a few reasons.

  1. Whether he's spoofing or actually using Blogger to do this, how did it get past the technological Giant that is Google?
  2. How is this going to adversely affect blogger users? When I link to a url, I want that link to be beneficial, because I trust the content, and I'd like to think that my little blog link might give that linked content some SERP juice. I'd hate to think that my little blogger blog will be considered a bad site now.
  3. How will this adversely affect sub-domain indexing. A lot of sites out there use sub-domains as honest methods to create a new "site" or information, such as forums or blogs, that are bona fide reasons for such uses. If this sends the algo keepers in a frenzy, what will happen next?

I mean, those are just a few of my concerns. I'm sure Google will clamp down on this asap, and in all honesty, I'm probably freaking out over nothing. But Google is THE source of search and technology. There's always going to be someone out there that tries to float under the radar and try to abuse it, but on this level?

Actually using Google property, to spam Google? It makes my head spin, and is very disheartening.

rumblepup will be watching this one.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

WebProWord Interviews Brian Mark

I'm really enjoying the video interview format of WebProNews coverage of SES Chicago. This time around, Mike McDonald interviews Brian Mark of Toolbarn and Alan Dick of Vintage Tub and Bath.

And here I'm replicating exactly what I was talking about earlier over on Aaron Wall's SEOBook. There's no way around it, I'm linking to Vintage Tub and Bath

Well, here's the link.

SES: The Benefits of SEO in Online Retail



Enjoy

Saturday, December 09, 2006

Interview with Larry Half

I'm very happy to have had the opportunity to do an interview with Larry Half, founder of Ma.gnolia. Here's the interview.

Friday, November 24, 2006

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

I'm finally chiming in on politics

Here's my very first post on politics. Yuchh!

Now I can have my say.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Google, Yahoo and MSN Team up on sitemaps.org

This kind of breaking news is just too good NOT to blog about. Google, Yahoo AND MSN have all teamed up to support a standard sitemap protocol. WPW has a video interview with Vanessa Fox and Tim Mayer up that discusses this decision.

You can also check out sitemap.org for more info.

Cool

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Interview with Brian Mark

I continue with my little foray into interviews. In all honesty, on the subject of SEO and SEM, I'm not really going to come up with any information that you can't find by researching. I have my opinions, of course, but I find that if you want to know the facts, you ask the experts.

So, I asked another expert. Here's my interview with Brian Mark.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

New Interview - Mike McDonald of IEntry

Just completed and interview with Mike McDonald of IEntry, and I'm preparing more as I write this.
Hope you enjoy.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Blogging my blog

It's been a long, strange trip for this rumblepup. My adventures on the web have yet to come full circle, but I think I've finally got a handle on this blogging thingamadoodad. As I prepare my first set of content, I'm suprised by how much I want to share with the world my personal thoughts on things like SEO, and web design, politics, entertainment, music, and peanut-butter and banana sandwiches. (The king was right about those suckers, lock down your heart in a minute, but damn they're tasty)

So, as I'm winding down my first set of articles, I'm happy to be able to post to my SEO blog some interviews. Great way to start the show, as well as let people know what's coming down the pike.

My first interview was with the forum mod extrodinaire, CTABUK. It was fun doing it, and I got a kick out of learning a little more history about the man himself. For me, it's just a great look into a great mentor.

My second interview to go up was with the venerable NeO, and it was a loads of fun. NeO is a great PSEM (Professional Search Engine Marketer for the doodoo heads) and incredibly informed about Search Engine Strategies.

And, of course, the long anticipated interview with CrankyDave. What CrankyDave don't know, don't exist, that's just the way it is.

But wait, there's more. In the upcoming weeks, I have even more interviews, and articles going up. Hopefully I can make the world a little easier to bare.

Oh yeah, and there's that whole cure for cancer thing I'm working on as well.

Until next time.

rumblepup