A new google penalty?
Arguably the number one detriment to higher rankings is not insuficient linkage, but being hit by an unnamed google penalty. I have observed this penalty since summer of 2006 and it seems to affect sites that are compliant with google’s guidelines.
One such instance of this penalty has happened one of my sites www.myspooz.com. Myspooz.com is a myspace resource site that used to rank well for several competitive terms and was getting thousands of visits a day. Then I woke up one morning and all my rankings had vanished. All my linking pointing to myspooz.com are still intact and the site is still indexed in google; it is just that the rankings are gone.
Why did this happen? Beats me. I didn’t conduct link spam and most of my links came from link exchanges to related myspace sites. Is the sandbox the culprit? I doubt it. Myspooz.com was already several months old when the penalty was applied. The sendbox is a filter that affects sites that were just launched. Nevertheless, it is futile trying to apply any more SEO to myspooz.com until the penalty is lifted and my original rankings come back; the benefits of any further SEO will be negated by the penalty.
Here are some previous sites I know of that have been hit by penalties.
1. Mypimpspace.com The myspace resource site used to rank in google for a slep of keywords until in summer 2006 when it was hit by a penalty. In spite of having a pagerank of 5, a three year old domain name, and a lot of inbound links its rankings have never been resorted. This is a total enigma wrapped in a riddle.
2. Myspacesupport.com used to have good rankings until a similar penalty was applied. Traffic has fallen substantially since. The site doesn’t contain any obvious spam and has numerous aged backlinks. The domain is over two years old.
3. Doobix.com same as #1 and #2.
4. Blingcheese.com. I already wrote about this site a month ago. A lot of inbound links, tons of original content, no good google rankings for some reason.
What is interesting about this penalty is that it affects whitehat sites that seem to be completely devoid of any of the well-known red flag spam triggers. None of these sites have spammy content or spammy links.
More research needs to be done regarding a penalty that is afflicting sites that are compliant with the google webmaster guidelines yet are having their rankings suppressed.
If your site is hit by this penalty I suggest building a new site and stopping all SEO campaigns to affected site until there is sufficient evidence that the penalty is lifted. Unfortunately, this penalty appears to be virtually impossible to lift.
Myspace XSS hacks
I have uncovered come cool working myspace XSS hacks but I am in a dilemma as to if I should reveal them or not on this blog. These hacks will allow you to store myspace user cookies and thus be able take over peoples accounts.
On one hand revealing these hacks will hasten their death, but my my readers would appreciate the knowledge being shared.
The downside with this hack is that it requires that the user click a link. Back before 2007 there were many on-load myspace XSS hacks that were capable of being executed on profile.myspace.com page but those were patched. What this meant was that as soon as a profile page loads the xss would be executed instantly and discreetly without the victim being aware, but I highly doubt this is possible anymore.
The exploit logs complete cookie info when I execute it from an Apple computer, but for some reason why I try it on my PC it only logs the IP address, which doesn’t do me much good.
Hmmm….
Is SEO Book marketed to gullible noobs?
As I was skimming Aaron Wall’s Seobook.com blog I realized that the entire purpose of SeoBook.com is to promote an SEO book that is marketed towards gullible noobs who want to rank better in google.
As I explain in one of my previous blog posts Breaking The Ranking Barrier achieving good search engine results placements (SERPS) is highly desirable, but quite difficult in a lot of cases, especially for competitive phrases. Unless you are a novice no SEO book will help you rank better for competitive keywords, I can assure you.
But thousands of well meaning webmasters flock to SEObook.com everyday hoping to uncover invaluable, clandestine ‘nuggets’ of SEO information. Since the articles written in SEOBook.com tend to be sparse, vague, and unfulfilling, a lot of readers turn to the SEO Book itself for more answers. And for only $79 the ’solution’ to higher ranking can be yours! Um hum maybe not.
I have never read SEO Book, and I have no reason to. But you may be asking how I am qualified to pillory a book that I have never read. After all, it would be disingenuous to review a movie you didn’t screen. But plain and simple common sense dictates that SEO Book comes up short.
Ask yourself if SEO Book was so effective why would Aaron Wall sell in in the first place? Why not just keep the ’secrets’ to himself and rank for tons of completive, high revenue keywords while everyone else wallows in their ignorance? But as I have elaborated before, ranking isn’t easy and never will be, even for the ‘gurus’. It is much easier to pitch a book about SEO than actually doing nitty gritty SEO work.
To make matter worse, with thousands of SEO Book customers any information contained in the book as already been disseminated to the masses and is no longer proprietary. It is hard enough for one person to keep a secret; you expect thousands of customers to keep their ‘SEO Book secrets’ to themselves?
In addition, SEO isn’t rocket science nor is it secret. You don’t need to read a huge ebook to learn how to do SEO. SEO is about getting quality inbound links with good anchor text. This information is readily available on almost any webmaster forum since it is so commonplace. Just performing a few google searches will yield an abundance of SEO information for free.
In conclusion run, don’t walk, from SEO book. Use the $79 dollars to buy some quality links instead with will directly help your SEO efforts.
Coolonlinelayouts.com launched
Today I launched coolonlinelayouts.com
For most of the past year the domain had been parked by godaddy.com and I got around to purchasing hosting and uploading all the files. Coolonlinelayouts.com uses an seo-modified free turnkey template. The advantage of the free turnkey template is that is is free and you can use it on unlimited number of sites. Although the free turnkey solution doesn’t have much content it is very convenient.
So far, coolonlinelayouts.com has no traffic but I hope to get around 4,000 uniques a day within a couple months though SEO.
These are the keywords I am targeting first:
Default layouts default myspace layouts Myspace layouts Skinny myspace layouts Emo myspace layouts
Fortunately, coolonlinelayouts.com is an eight month old domain and is already indexed in google, which should make it immune to the sandbox.