May 08, 2007

Random | Feedburner Hack: View Anyone's Subscriber Count

Well not anyone's, but anyone who is using Feedburner to track and manage their feed. I'm not sure how well known this exploit is but I just came across it and will post it here for posterity. It's simple really...

If someone using Feedburner is hiding their subscriber count you can often grab it by using a url formed like so (notice the /~fc):

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/seomoz

Since most sites want to use their websites name with Feedburner (duh), you should be able to figure out what to put after the ~fc directory. So while their might be some guess work involved, any eager beaver should be able to stumble upon the right site name.

That's one to add to the old covert spy tools am I right?

Posted by Miles Evans at 02:57 AMComments (5) | Del.icio.us | DIGG!

May 02, 2007

News | Digg gets 0wn3d by its own Community

Forget about what I was blathering about yesterday over the autodigg hack. What happened shortly after I posted that was much crazier. As it turns out the HD DVD cypher was cracked and posted on the internet recently, much as it was for the original DVD back in 2001 when Jon Johansen (DVD Jon) released DeCSS.

Back in 2000 when the MPAA was using their powers to get DeCSS removed from websites like 2600, hackcanada and others, a grass roots campaign was launched for DRM haters everywhere to host the files on their own servers and spread the word. This worked except that the MPAA used the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) to successfully sue 2600 magazine, and offend everyone with any common sense the world over. The MPAA won and a movement was born.

This time around it's a bit more interesting as you can see from the screenshot below:

Props to Kevin Rose for having this to say late yesterday:

"But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying."

Now we all know Kevin Rose has way more dollars and media pull than Emmanuel Goldstein (Owner of 2600) had then. Emmanuel had real big balls to try and fight back then. Kevin's not a dumb guy and this decision to not stop the community from posting the HD DVD cypher is going to only improve his golden boystatus. Call me crazy but the way I see it is that Kevin really had no choice in the matter as everyone proved yesterday. Am I wrong?

I guess we can all applaud Kevin and digg for biting the hand(s) that feed them. I think the only problem digg is going to have as their future unfolds is that they have a whole lotta hungry hands to keep happy.

If you're interested Ars has a great write-up on the history of DRM.

Posted by Miles Evans at 10:00 AMComments (1637) | Del.icio.us | DIGG!

April 30, 2007

Random | AutoDigg Exploit Confirmed!

I saw something quite amazing today, and had to make sure I wasn't seeing things before I posted this. This story might go away also so I figured I would get it up before digg pulls the rug out. If this is old news and has already been posted I apologize in advance.

As near as I can tell Jacob Dehart has h4x0r3d digg.com's inline voting tools. Having said that it also might not be that trivial to remedy. Am I crazy? Maybe:

1. Take a look at this submission to digg: http://digg.com/general_sciences/Scientists_Red_squares_really_are_ bigger_than_green_squares
2. Make sure you are logged in but DO NOT digg that story.
3. Now go to Jacob's site here: http://jacobdehart.com/red_square.html

You should have noticed that you automagically dugg that story. Go ahead confirm it. How cool is that? Here is a screen capture in case the page gets pulled or moved:

I poured through the javascript on Jacob's page but I couldn't find how he was doing this. I'm late for a trip so if anyone knows please let us know!

Posted by Miles Evans at 02:59 PMComments (1) | Del.icio.us | DIGG!

February 25, 2007

Random | Oh Canadian Fedex Lady!

This video is simply too funny not to post and it is really making the rounds. It also has the side benefit of ripping on Apple!

Seriously this is why I love YouTube. This guy performed a poem at the Apple Talent contest that suprisingly resulted in him losing his job. Some manager at Apple clearly has some mysterious issues with true comedy. I wish I knew more about the reasons behind the firing. Nothing like half a million people thinking you're an R-Tard to reign in those anti-Canuck hostilities.

Strangely Gizmodo seems to have pulled this story. Near as I can tell, the original article URL is now 301'ed to their home page. Check out this search and clickthrough to the cached page to see what I mean.

I'm not sure if he is actually Canadian (or really got fired for this) but respect to slam poet Erik Ott, aka Big Poppa E (wiki) for his hilarious prose. Did anyone check out Def Jams on HBO to see if he actually was stuck wearing an Apple shirt on the broadcast after they fired him?

Posted by Miles Evans at 12:44 PMComments (2) | Del.icio.us | DIGG!

February 01, 2007

Papers | SEO Penalties Revisited

Maintaining top SERP rankings is a full time job. Chances are you have watched your hard earned rankings plummet before and know the agony involved in determining why it occurred. So what are some of the main penalties and causes for losing a stellar ranking? Several factors old and new apply.

• Competition. The most obvious reason for losing rankings is simply that your competitors are outgunning you by obtaining more trusted and properly formed links than you are. As a good measure always be sure to track at least some of your competition’s keyword progress. It is nice to know who to keep an eye on, and with some hard work and clever linking, you may just end up becoming allies.
• Too many reciprocal links. The days of automated reciprocal link bombing are behind us. If 90% of your links are reciprocal or not one-way links, they might be doing you more harm than good - especially with Google. Targeted reciprocal links are a decent way to build a foundation and get the spiders visiting, but aside from that they don’t accomplish much.
• Duplicate content pages are removed from the Google index. This one has been beaten to death and while some people say it isn’t much of a factor, I can see from my own testing that it isn’t always that accurate/fair to publishers. Todd has a great write-up on avoiding the dupe filters. On that note, you should also always choose to redirect your www or non www domain.
• Subdomains. The search engines view each subdomain as a different entity. For this reason it is also wise to structure a site like domain.com/forum rather than forum.domain.com.
• Crawlability. Again, the best way to overcome crawling issues is by using Google Sitemaps - and while you're at it constructing a Yahoo sitemap as well. In your Google Sitemaps account you can see specific crawl info including any errors. Google Sitemaps made some changes late last year so you may want to take a look at it again.
• 404, 403, 500 and other script based errors will remove your pages from the index. If swaths of pages are not there to be crawled or are spitting errors this is an obvious quality issue. We know Google monitors some of this via sitemaps so it makes sense they might potentially penalize for it as well. I mean aside from removing those pages from the index. The point is to always maintain quality listings.
• Accessibility. This never seems to get mentioned much. One of the lesser known SEO tricks I learned way back, was to always make a site accessible - to spiders, users, and for those with disabilities. This means descriptive title and alt tags, or title tags on all of your menu links at the very least. And again always deploy a proper sitemap strategy and correct linking within your site. There is an increased quality score associated with a fully accesible website, so why not go for it? Google admits this is something they watch in their webmaster guidelines. Alistapart has a great read on site accesibity for seo.
• Google’s supplemental results. If your site ends up in the supplemental results there is little chance of you appearing in the search results, therefore, your SERP traffic will be way down. This one gets a lot of airplay as it has begun to affect a lot of users. Most people report being able to avoid the supps through proper accessibility and onsite SEO combined with, you guessed it, a proper sitemap.
• The Google +/-30 penalty. Peter at v7n gives a good report on this one. I’ve personally seen this on some of my best earners and test domains recently. Many people have reported that their rankings drop +/-30 spots and many are stonewalled at this position for some time. Check this thread at WMW for some dicussion.
• The Google 950 penalty. Somewhat like the penalty above. People are noticing their pages fall to within the last 950 results from top positions. There are some examples floating around - again WMW has the discussion covered here, and here.
• Grey bar in the Google toolbar. You have been doing something spammy and removed from the Google index. This is akin to having your testicles ripped off and being forced to eat them. Seriously, you can resubmit your site after correcting the problem, but why would you bother? Game over dude.
• Loss of Pagerank. In most cases a loss of Pagerank is due to excessive linking from the page in question. Fluctuations in PR are to be expected so I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. For serious.
• Bad neighborhood links. Links from cheesy directories, link farms, and splogs don’t do you any good. The same holds true for linking to them. As always avoid the snake-oil at all costs, which leads me to...
• The obvious ones: keyword stuffing, hidden text, doorway pages, misshaped redirects, cloaking, and other oldskool blackhat tactics will quickly get you in trouble - and out of the SERPs.

Hope this helps. If it did you could always grant us a digg ;)

Posted by Miles Evans at 08:04 PMComments (29) | Del.icio.us | DIGG!

January 31, 2007

Random | Crazed Fanboy Plunders Newegg

When I was younger I used to work in a PC shop building and fixing computers for customers. It was a crappy job with low pay but the work was really rewarding. The manufacturers used to send OEMs reference boards and beta hardware, and the thrill of using something before anyone else is a damn good one.

Now a decade later I am a lowly consumer again without any cool hardware hookups - and man do I feel left out. Where is my final copy of Vista? My DirectX10 SLI Video cards, or my quad core CPU?

What’s more ordering enthusiast PC parts in Bangkok is fine if you don't mind paying double for stuff that is 6 months old. Before any white guy taxes. You simply cannot be bleeding edge buying locally here without a lot of hassle. Thank God for online resellers! Here is what I scored just now from newegg for rock bottom prices:

• EVGA 122-CK-NF68-AR LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard - Fanboy recommended.
• 2 x XFX PVT80FSHF9 GeForce 8800GTX 768MB 384-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Video Card - Yep that is 2 cards. $1200 on video cards. I so don't need this.
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz LGA 775 Processor - Uhhh...Zoooom.
• SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD501LJ 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - For all my *cough* movies.
• CPU FAN | ZALMAN CNPS 9500 LED - LEDs. Need I say more.
• S/W MS WIN VISTA 32BT ULT 1P DVD - OEM - This is obviously not a development box. games baybeeee!

Once I get everything setup I will throw up some shots of my, uhhh, work space. Next I need to procure three l33t 22" LCDs. Getting those in without paying duty will be a real challenge. Who has display opinions?

Big ups to devhead mytE at allbsd for shipping this stuff way out to the jungle for me.

Posted by Miles Evans at 11:04 PMComments (3) | Del.icio.us | DIGG!

January 29, 2007

Dev | SEO Metrics: A Programmer's Guide

My team took a small break on youmash and while I wait for batteries to be recharged I thought I would start enhancing the SEO toolset we started deving towards the middle of last year. Although I got sidetracked with more pressing projects the tools are quite usable and I think we should be able to make a formal release soonish.

Since I have been researching this again I figured I may as well publish a comprehensive list of the most common and useful SEO metrics along with their method of retrieval. Might be handy if you are deving out your own SEO tools or just curious how some of this is gathered.

Google

Backlinks (link:www.profitpapers.com) – Infamously annoying, Google does not reveal much of their backlink data. What you get instead is a small sampling (between 5-10%) of what seems to be a fairly random link set. People still want to see it of course.

Gareth Davies has a video via YouTube on gathering backlink data with Google if you’re new to SEO.

Google recently deprecated their Soap Search API and no longer hand out API keys. This is an odd thing to do as there was literally volumes written about interfacing with this API and it was quite flexible. Google is now urging developers to use its AJAX Search API to obtain search data. Of course, there is always good old regular expression parsing in PHP to collect this data if the new API changes scared you off. I talk about regex briefly at the end of this article.

site:www.profitpapers.com shows how many pages are indexed. This will also reveal if your website has landed in the supplemental results. Check out Gareth’s video on the site: command.

Different from link count, a search for your domain will give you an idea how much chatter there is about your website. Some people call this domain visibility. To see how many times your website address appears on other people's pages use this syntax: "www.profitpapers.com" -site:www.profitpapers.com

Google results for allin commands are fairly useless but here is how they are done:

allinanchor:organic seo will show you how many pages are using the keywords ‘organic seo’ in links within their pages. Check out Gareth’s video on allinanchor.

allintitle:organic seo will show you the pages using the keywords ‘organic seo’ in the title’s of their pages. Check out Gareth’s video on allintitle.

Yahoo

Yahoo has recently started redirecting all backlink requests to its Site Explorer app. You should also be sure ‘except from this domain’ is selected when viewing your results or sending API calls.

Yahoo returns a strong sampling of most of your backlinks (80-90% ?). The results also seem to be improving in relevance with more important pages appearing first. The data is accessible for developers via the Yahoo Site Explorer API which uses a very convenient REST based system and overall seems to have been widely adopted.

Gathering inbound link numbers with the API is fairly simple. Start here for the programming parameters available. For a quick example pulling backlinks you can try this rough code.

To see live Yahoo backlink data:

linkdomain:www.profitpapers.com - shows all pages linking to anywhere in the domain www.profitpapers.com.

link:www.profitpapers.com/papers/performance-tuning-mysql-for-load.php - shows all pages linking to the URL provided.

What’s more you can also use search modifiers with Yahoo to see how many links from a particular domain you have - like .edu, .gov etc. IE: linkdomain:www.profitpapers.com site:.edu

site:www.profitpapers.com reveals how many pages are indexed in Yahoo. The results are shown in Site Explorer.

MSN Live!

MSN counts nearly as many backlinks as Yahoo in most cases. Like Yahoo MSN has recently shown interest in providing link data and for that reason their results are really quite useful. The data can be retrieved via the MSN Search API together with nuSOAP.

linkdomain:www.profitpapers.com - shows pages linking to anywhere in the domain www.profitpapers.com.

link:www.profitpapers.com/papers/performance-tuning-mysql-for-load.php - shows pages linking to the URL provided.

MSN does provide allin commands but the results are so far off they seem almost useless to me. They are also a bit wonky to use so you will want to check out the official syntax.

site:www.profitpapers.com - reveals how many pages are indexed in MSN live.

Domain Age

Older domains carry more weight in the eyes of SEs particularly Google. There are a few different ways to get this data but I would just scrape the wayback machine like everyone else does. IE: http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.profitpapers.com

Class C IPs

These are useful for tracking as links coming from the same IP range of servers, holds little to no weight for SEO. People have A/B tested this in the past and it is still relevant today I suppose. Collect the data through DNS queries. This is pretty straight forward to do in PHP.

Alexa

Alexa’s toolbar data has long been a talking point for SEOs. Is it useless? Not completely. The data is based off of the surfing habits of the small subset of users who have installed the Alexa toolbar. I won’t get into it too much here but the common metric SEOs concern themselves with is Site Ranking.

Another cool feature with Alexa is dynamic graphs of one or more websites with their rankings. The graph is highly configurable via simple query string commands. For an idea of how this works check out Iconico’s Alexa graph tool.

Alexa also provides thumbnails of websites, search, and other widgets. They really have a robust and well implemented set of API’s for developers, and they seem to always be releasing new features. The cost is $0.15 per 1000 queries which is also quite affordable/scalable.

Technorati

Recently people have become more and more interested in Technorati numbers - me included. Technorati provides blog rankings based on inlinks to various blogs. The relevant SEO data from them includes: blog ranking, inbound links, and inbound blogs. IE: Here are Profitpapers Technorati numbers.

Technorati makes it ultra simple to collect their data via a REST based API returning formatted XML for easy management.

You may also want to check out Ducksoup which is an easy to use and straight forward API library for Technorati written in PHP.

DMOZ

Getting into DMOZ is notoriously difficult and for all intents and purposes is really just a discarded relic from Google’s oldskool reliance on the directory. Data from the ODP is downloadable in RDF format. In most cases I think a lot of people scrape their data. I wouldn’t expect a usable API or any future developments coming from DMOZ.

Del.icio.us

Many SEOs are watching social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and digg for SEO metrics as these types of sites are now directing huge swaths of organic traffic and link love. del.icio.us will display how many users have saved your website to their bookmarks. IE: http://del.icio.us/url/6b59b61d5221b3699496d9f5c1a40d9e. They also have a newish API in developement with a few nifty features.

Digg

Digg is my favorite social news type of site. There are others but digg is definitely the 800lb gorilla of news promotion. They are always working on tools and developments but sadly nothing in the way of story metrics. It might be cool to display the amount of dugg stories for a particular URL. For that you could scrape away at something like this I guess.

A Note on Screen Scraping

Okay so we all know that if you can see it on a website you can data mine it. One problem with screen scraping HTML is that if the website changes at all, your code may break. So there is some maintenance involved in many cases. Another issue is that most companies do not take kindly to your plundering of their hard work. Use a little diplomacy. You will want to use an API over some kludgy parse and scrape, so always try to keep that mindset. The 90’s are over.

However, if there is no other option, the easiest way to do some complex and maintainable screen scraping is with PHP using regular expressions. Ruby might be another fine option. For a primer on scraping data of all sorts see the wiki.

Well I think this covers most of them! This article was a bit of a brain fart and I may have missed some useful things to gather, so feel free to chime in ;)

You may also want to signup to be invited to use the current beta build of our own SEO tools employing many of the metrics outlined above.

Posted by Miles Evans at 07:47 PMComments (24) | Del.icio.us | DIGG!

January 26, 2007

Papers | How is Google Detecting Link Bombing?

Whoa first Wikipedia blows away all our authority links and now Google is tinkering with their algorithm to defuse link bombing. I for one have been wondering for some time why they didn’t hand edit these suckers out as I would guess many people assume Google itself thinks George Bush really is a miserable failure.

Matt Cutts official post on the Google blog :

“When we're faced with a bad search result or a relevance problem, our first instinct is to look for an automatic way to solve the problem instead of trying to fix a particular search by hand.”

So what about all of our fun SEO contests? Alright this isn’t really such a big deal as I doubt it will affect SEOs and we will dream up new contests. We can never forget that anything that taints G’s index is prime for correction. You really have to applaud the team at Google for making the change algorithmically rather than using lowly human editors. I guess the real question is ‘how on earth could this actually function?’ or 'will this effect my SEO work?'

Most of these ideas were brought up in Danny Sullivan's article when this story broke but I will list them here for posterity...

Detection. Some type of trigger must be happening when x% of all anchor text is identical for links pointing to a page. This simply has to be happening on some level so I will assume it is the means of detection. This can actually be tested as rankings fluctuate quite quickly so I imagine people will make some interesting finds in the coming months.

Link age. A link bomb campaign will normally have a huge surge of links while it’s trendy to link something up. Over time there will be less and less new incoming links. What’s more, we already know link age is a metric being actively recorded at Google so I would be surprised if this is not a factor.

Malformed referring page. This could be metadata, title tag, keyword frequency, headers, and all of the other onsite stuff a properly built page should have. I guess with this point the impression is that a malformed page would be missing some or all of these items while a properly structured safe page would not.

Trust. Large trusted portals and brands are less likely to engage in someones link bombing endeavor. Perhaps authority page links are compared to the rabble.

Phrase based indexing? Patent watcher Bill Slawski brought up this point. I am a bit fuzzy on this one but it stems from this Google patent. Paraphrasing: 'A related phrase bit vector for document URL0 eliminates the reliance of the search system on just the relationship of phrase A in URL0 pointing to URL1 as an indicator of significance or URL1 to the anchor text phrase.'. Huh? Yeah I cannot really get my head around this point but it has to do with determining relevency through phrase matching - I think.

Since all of this can be tested I would expect this stuff will surface again with some interesting data. We might even learn something new. In the mean time we will have to find other clever ways to bend the SERPs to our political agendas.

Check out the discussion at DigitalPoint and Cre8asite Forums for more.

Posted by Miles Evans at 01:51 AMComments (14) | Del.icio.us | DIGG!

January 14, 2007

Random | Why the iPhone Sucks

So I saw the keynote, the videos, the renderings, the fanboy rants, the Engadget traffic slurp, the digg gush, the Dvorak whining, and all the assorted iPhone blather. I mean it was unavoidable. Easily the most successful and least expensive viral marketing bulldozer since panty hose. Amazing!

That’s where my fascination with this self proclaimed breakthrough product ends and just plain common sense takes over...

Warning to Mac cultists/fanboys: The following list contains spoilers concerning the iPhone that you may have mentally blocked out and/or already dismissed as fiction. Epileptic style seizures may ensue:

10 reason why the iPhone sucks

1. MP3 Player? Hey cmon you got us with iPods for the last 7 years. I got 3 of them.
2. OMFG no 3G? Wifi is great for modern American cities but out here in Asia free and ample wifi coverage simply doesn’t exist. The same holds true for many more countries. This is really a deal breaker for me.
3. GPS. Works slick on my Samsung Blackjack or any other Windows Mobile phone. Not that I ever use it. As in never.
4. Email, IM, IRC, Skype etc - See above. Really what does this phone do that a Treo running Windows cannot?
5. 5 Hour battery life under heavy use. no really, that’s 5, like the 5 in $500 you will be blowing on your iPhone.
6. No removable battery. So on top of weak battery life we cannot bring along a spare battery. Don’t tell me for a second a touchscreen and all this gooey gadgetry is not a battery drainer either.
7. Useless 2 Megapixel camera. Why bother including it? Especially considering competing models are offering amazing 5 megapixel variations like the Nokie N95. My wife’s Nokie N71 even functions as a video phone and sports a 3.2 megapixel camera with flash. And hey let’s face it Nokia really does blow.
8. No expansion slots. As in none. This means no flash memory. What you buy is what you get, meaning a new model with slightly more size and an extra feature will likely appear each year for you to buy. Also 8GB is the storage capacity which i will admit is pretty reasonable. Oh wait did I mention its $599 for the 8GB model?
9. Touchscreen. Okay who didn’t see this coming? Is this what we are supposed to be gushing over? Alright I will admit this is somewhat cool but I quickly get the feeling this is the killer feature. Honestly it looks like something that would be expensive to replace and easily damaged as well. Most of the negatives around the screen also revolve around the fact it looks as though one handed operation will be limited to those with gorilla size mitts. But yeah I guess the juries out on the touchscreen so I will stop there.
10. OS X. Alright so this is what this is all about! The iPhone as a new Mac platform. Right? Everyone’s favorite BSD based OS on a slim and trendy portable device. Well except it isn’t free or open source like BSD. Or altogether easy to dev apps for. Or not even altogether that friendly to developers at all.

Alright the above might be a bit harsh and certainly a bit ranty but I for one am getting indigestion from all the Apple is the future of innovation blather. I think Apple is a great company with an amazing history. I have most of their products. So let me rescind for a moment and admit that the iPhone is one helluva sexy looking product with definite mass market appeal. I definitely get it. The problem for me is that the hype has reached a really dubious state. Apple has done much less for computing than they and others take credit for and all the gushing and heavy petting is almost evidence of that in my eyes.

Sure sure the iPod was a great product but there was a plethora of reasons why the iPod was so successful, including luck and timing, none of which I see manifesting for the iPhone. Of course it has already been demonstrated that you can sell a Mac user a piece of doodoo in a shiny white box and it will still sell, so I would expect nothing less of this latest 'breakthrough'. So yeah the iPhone will be a killer product that sells a gazillion units. It’s inevitable. But I really think it will achieve this for the same sorts of reasons a movie about Ben Stiller and a CGI dinosaur clean up at the box office.

My prediction! iPhone does the Edsel in Asia. In fact I would bet the farm on this.

Japan already gave the gadget a Yawn.

Apple VPs confirm no 3rd party iPhone apps.

Crave probabely has the best ripping review with Thirteen reasons to doubt the iPhone hype.

Joel does some well deserved ripping on Apple for not allowing a platform for developers.

This is how not to trash the iPhone coutesy of John Dvorak and YouTube.

Posted by Miles Evans at 11:12 PMComments (11) | Del.icio.us | DIGG!

January 06, 2007

Random | Tagged

I just noticed Marc Macalua tagged me back on Dec 30th (found in my referrer logs!) and since I don’t have anything useful to write about lately why not blather on about myself for a few minutes.

5 things you didn’t know about me...

1. I got married a few weeks ago on Dec 17th, 2006. Heh, no seriously.
2. I lost a small fortune during the web 1.0 bubble era. I am slowly gaining it back.
3. I survived the Dec 2004 tsunami in Patong, Phuket where hundreds of people lost their lives. I have been back every Christmas since.
4. Before I got married I was a self proclaimed mPUA. Neuro linguistic programming and social engineering continue to fascinate me.
5. By far my fondest childhood memories involve myself, a screwdriver, a Tandy 1000 SX, and a bank of 2400 baud modems. I still have the Tandy.

Phew that’s enough.

Posted by Miles Evans at 03:14 AMComments (4) | Del.icio.us | DIGG!