A quick update to the Microsoft Rogue Bot Fiasco. It looks like now they have correctly DNS’d the IP range that they are sending these bogus requests from. Previously, all of the IP’s (which I first mentioned were all coming from the 65.55.165.* block) reverse DNS’d to names such as bl2sch1081901.phx.gbl. They have apparently changed this, so the IP’s are more readily identifiable as coming from Microsoft, reverse DNS’ing to the Live.com domain, eg. livebot-65-55-165-99.search.live.com.
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Microsoft Needs To Quit Fucking With My AdSense Scripts
A few months back I discovered that I was being hit with massive amounts of referrer spam. It was a little odd, because the phrases weren’t made to look like I had links coming from some sleazy little viagra or porn site… no, these were made to look like I was ranking for all kinds of spammy phrases on MSN Search. This confused me, since historically referrer search only benefits the site that is made to look like the traffic is coming from. I couldn’t understand why someone would want to make it look like MSN was spamming my logs.
What never occurred to me, of course, was that my logs were actually being spammed by Microsoft itself. As it turns out, they were.
Single Source Page Link Test Using Multiple Links With Varying Anchor Text – Part Two
Back on October 9th, I blogged about a test I performed that demonstrated only the first link on a given page will count as far as ranking purposes go. In the thread where the test originated, pops (of TOONRefugee cartoon blog) asked what would happen if the first link were nofollowed. Since I had no clue, I decided to test that as well. Similar test as before, but checking the use of rel=”nofollow” on the initial link, and adding in a third link as a control:
You May Be Screwing Yourself With Hyperlinked Headers
If you are like me, then you probably link your header images to your homepage. It is natural behavior these days to click on the header of a page and expect to be taken back to the beginning. However, a recent experiment I conducted over on SEO Refugee, and a comment by Wit, has me rethinking that particular habit.
Finally, PROOF that Google does, in fact, own Feedburner!
Maybe it was just denial that made me reject the reality of Google buying Feedburner, but as of today I guess I can no longer do this. It was real, it wasn’t a dream, the proof is in the pudding, as they say.
It looks like a large number of people today lost all Feedburner subscribers, in all of their blogs:
Announcing Login LockDown – A New Security Plugin for WordPress
Just a quick note to let people know about Login LockDown, a new plugin I wrote for WordPress and have put out for download on Bad Neighborhood Tools website. Basically what the plugin does is it restricts the number of times someone trying to log in can put in the incorrect password in a short period, preventing someone (or some bot) from continually trying different passwords until it gets the correct one.
More information can be gotten from the Bad Neighborhood Blog
