Smackdown!

Don’t Think “If” You Will Get Hacked, Or Even “When” – Think In Terms Of “How Often”

March 3, 2010 by Michael VanDeMar

The following “guest post” was a comment left on “How To Completely Clean Your WordPress Installation” by a gentleman named Daniel J. Dick. He makes some excellent points, and due to it’s length I decided to feature the comment in it’s own post, rather than approve it in place. Enjoy.

I think Nick sums up how most of us feel about malicious hackers, script kiddies, and spambots that wreck other people’s stuff.

My apologies to everyone that reads this that are searching out how to fix your blog. It is obviously meant for the little, no good, no life having, soulless human maggot out there that creates viruses, malicious scripts and hacks other peoples stuff. YOU SUCK BIG MOOSE C#&@!!

– Nick

Most of my sites

Apparently Jason Calacanis Knows He’s Spamming – He Just Thinks It’s No Big Deal

June 17, 2010February 22, 2010 by Michael VanDeMar

Last month Jason Calacanis wrote a rather sarcastic post aimed at Aaron Wall, which I am assuming was written in response to Aaron’s post, “Black Hat SEO Case Study: How Mahalo Makes Black Look White!“. In it Aaron discusses how sites that are composed largely of nothing more than auto-generated pages wrapped in adsense can get accepted and even gain authority in Google if they have enough financing and press. In Jason’s rebuttal to this was a claim about rankings that Mahalo had “earned” (and I use the term loosely) for “VIDEO GAME walkthrough”. I originally misinterpreted what he was trying to say, and thought that he meant rankings for that exact phrase. I commented how that wasn’t exactly a great accomplishment before realizing that what he actually meant was rankings for [{insert video game name} walkthrough], and that Mahalo has a couple top 10 rankings for that genre of search phrases.

Jason sent me an email to correct me on what he was talking about. We replied to each other back and forth a couple times, and a few very interesting things were revealed in that conversation:

Is Google Referrer Spamming Too Now?

February 18, 2010February 16, 2010 by Michael VanDeMar

Yesterday a friend of mine sent me a section of her traffic logs that were showing some odd information. According to what was recorded there her brand new, as of yet unlinked-to website was ranking on the first page of Google for the single keyword, [free]. If she actually had managed to rank for that phrase it would be an amazing feat to say the least. The competition for that single word is enormous. Unsurprisingly, when performing that actual search her site is nowhere to be found. The site in question is barely one week old, and hasn’t even been launched yet.

What is surprising, to me anyways, is that it appears that the traffic is actually coming from a bot at Google… a bot that is cloaked, sending fake

Google Fails 5th Grade Math Test

February 1, 2010 by Michael VanDeMar

So, I think I finally discovered the cause of global warming. No, for reals. From what I can tell, miss Mother Nature started using Google Calculator in helping her figure out what kind of weather she should serve up to us. Now, if she were trying to bake a cake, or perhaps get driving directions, I am sure Google would have worked just fine. But for doing math involving temperatures…? Not so much.

I was playing around with the functions on Google Calculator last week, when I noticed some of the calculations weren’t quite right. Maybe Michael Bolton from Office Space was involved

Why The Renewed Interest In The Linkscape Scams And Deception..?

January 31, 2010January 22, 2010 by Michael VanDeMar

Yesterday a friend of mine, Sebastian, wrote a post titled, “How do Majestic and LinkScape get their raw data?“. Basically it is a renewed rant about SEOmoz and their deceptions surrounding the Linkscape product that they launched back in October 2008, a little over 15 months ago. The controversy is based around the fact that moz basically lied about how it was exactly they were obtaining their data, which in part was probably motivated by wanting to make themselves look like they were more technically capable than they actually are.

Now, I covered this back when the launch actually happened, in this Linkscape post, resulting in quite a few comments, and there was more than a little heated conversation in the Sphinn thread as well. This prompted some people, both on Sebastian’s post and in the Sphinn thread on it, to ask why all of the renewed interest?

It is not extreme, its just that it isn’t new. The fact that they bought the index (partially)? That was known from the beginning. The fact that they don’t provide a satisfying way of blocking their bots (or the fact that they didn’t want to reveal their bots user agent)? Check. The fact that they make hyped statements to push Linkscape? Check. {…} I don’t get the renewed excitement. – Branko, aka SEO Scientist

Well, I guess you could say that it’s my fault. Or, you could blame it on SEOmoz themselves, or their employees, depending on how you look at it. You see, the story goes like this…

Back when SEOmoz first launched Linkscape, it would have been damn near impossible for a shop their size to have performed the feats they were claiming, all on their own. Rand was making the claim “Yes – We spidered all 30 billion pages”. He also claimed to have done it within “several weeks”. Now, even if we stretch “several” to mean something that it normally would not, say, 6 (since a 6 week update period is now what they are claiming for the tool), we’re still talking a huge amount of resources to accomplish that task. A conservative estimate of the average website, considering only html, is 25KB of text:

30,000,000,000 websites x (25 x 1024) bytes per website = 768,000,000,000,000 bytes of data (768 trillion bytes, which is 698.4TB)

(698.4TB / 45 days of crawling) x 30 days in a month = 465.6TB bandwidth per month

Now, I know that one of the reasons that Rand can get away with some of his claims is that most people just don’t grasp the sheer size

Video Games Requiring Physical Action Burn Calories – Duh

September 30, 2009 by DazzlinDonna

I don’t normally get all worked up and sarcastic about research. In fact, I love reading about real, truly beneficial scientific research. So while I appreciate the whole scientific process, sometimes I just have to say, “Well, Duh!” I suppose it’s important to test theories just to be SURE that a hypothesis is correct, but really, was it necessary to test the hypothesis that a video game that requires physical action – such as Nintendo’s Wii Boxing – would actually burn more calories in kids than watching TV would? Well, apparently someone felt the need to see if moving around might expend more energy than not moving around would, and lucky for us, the answer is Yes!

According to Science Daily’s summary of the research done by the University of Oklahoma,

Wii bowling and beginner level DDR elicited a 2-fold increase in energy expenditure compared to television watching. Overall, the energy expenditure during active video game play was comparable to moderate-intensity walking. Thus, for children who spend considerable time playing electronic screen games for entertainment, OU researchers found that substituting that time with physically active games can be a safe, fun and valuable means of promoting energy expenditure.

Let me give you a little of my own research.

Test 1: Sit on my derriere for 10 minutes watching TV. Am I tired? Nope. Not even a little.

Test 2: Play a Wii game like bowling or boxing or even yoga for 10 minutes. Am I tired? Nope. I’m EXHAUSTED.

Still not convinced? Would pictures make a difference?

Research Test 1:

dont burn calories

Research Test 2:

burn calories

I’m not sure what kind of research our universities are conducting these days, but I’m pretty sure this is the kind that does NOT need to be undertaken.

Go get your kids a Wii, let them play some physically active games, and know in your inner soul that they are expending energy. Really, you don’t need any scientific research to tell you that. It’s a Duh moment.