Smackdown!
A couple of days ago I posted my assertion that Rand Fishkin had lied about the details of the new Linkscape tool on SEOmoz. During the discussion that followed, Rand continued to maintain that they owned the bots that collected the data that powered the tool, despite several points on that being very unclear, and that his bots had collected those 30 billion pages.
Right in the heat of the argument, someone decided to drop a comment on my blog that struck me as a little odd
Ok, so, looks like Rand and gang finally decided to reveal their top-secret recipe about how they gathered all that information on everybody’s websites without anyone noticing what they were doing. There was quite a bit of hoopla over the fact that when they announced their new index of 30 billion web pages (and the new tool powered by that index), due to the fact that they never gave webmasters the chance to block them from gathering this data. In fact, they never even
If your reputation management strategy is going to be centered around lying about things, then you should at least have the sense to lie in ways that aren’t easy to refute. For instance, you should steer well clear from
Last night Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) introduced 35 articles of impeachment against George W. Bush. This would be, to most reasonable thinking persons, newsworthy. CNN, however,
Network Solutions apparently wasn’t happy just being slimy in the domain purchasing arena (see: WARNING: Do not check domains at Network Solutions by John Honeck for background on that one), and have now moved into the realm of not caring if they damage your existing sites as well.
According to TechCrunch, NetSol is now engaging in the practice of Hijacking Unassigned Sub-Domains, which put simply means
Ok, so I just had 2 of my WP installs hacked, on 2 different servers. This is not the same thing that Shoemoney reported on a few days back (hidden link injection), and as of yet I have not seen any definitive answers as to what it is. All of my blogs were upgraded to 2.3.3 last month, and in all but 2 of them the only thing that was kept
Last Friday, poking around, I came across an article that had been submitted to Sphinn at the beginning of the week entitled “1:1 Interview With Search Marketing Authority and Visionary Hamlet Batista”. In the description it is billed as “a great interview where Hamlet discusses his introduction to SEO/SEM, touching on his immensely successful projects”, so I click through to see what he has to say. There I am greeted, no doubt whatsoever, with…
… an infomercial. That’s right, this “great interview”
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.
I have blogged in the past about how annoying Rand Fishkin’s tactic of avoiding direct questions by obfuscation is. It especially irks me because in order to work it relies on taking advantage of people’s low attention spans, and in making the conversation too painful for most to bear. Often times pursuing winning an argument with someone using those tactics runs the risk of appearing obsessive, since doing so involves repeating the same questions over and over, and to let it go is to allow the other person to appear to win.
It is a politicians trick, not one to be used in polite conversation, and it is inherently slimy. Verbally wrestling with someone who uses it to answer questions that would otherwise make them look bad can leave one with an unwashed, unwholesome feeling, and I personally much prefer to debate with someone who can simply show me that I am wrong.
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.
