| LED Digest 2374: iFrame Exploits and 301 Redirects |
|
|
|
================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom www.GetWebContent.com/LED : the LED's Key Sponsor The Web's Most Experienced SEO Content Providers. ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. March 23, 2007 Issue no. 2374 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ======= NEW ===================== --== iFrame Exploit to Run Hidden Adverts ==-- ~ Kevin Houston "If anyone has heard of this happening on other sites, I sure would be appreciative..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== 301 Redirects [was: Moving Sites...] ==-- ~ Jeff Patrick "Do you have an alternative approach that works better?" --== When Clients Don't Pay ==-- ~ Peggy Deras "It's usually the wealthy clients who do this." ~ Leah Driver "...haggling over every last penny is a sure sign that you will have problems collecting..." --== 3rd Party Reciprocal Links ==-- ~ Debra Mastaler "[Google are] not out to get people for swapping links..." ~ James Miller "I've noticed a rather interesting phenomena with reciprocal linking in the last few days." --== HTML Standards and Search Rankings ==-- ~ Lee Roberts "...by 2010 we will see the end days of non-standards compliant Web pages showing up in [SERPs]." ========== NEW =================================== From: Kevin Houston Subject: iFrame Exploit to Run Hidden Adverts Hi Adam, Just discovered that someone has hijacked an index page at a client's site with a zero-iframe [URL unlinked and preceding dots added to iframe tags. -ed] <.iframe>777seo.com/seo.php?username=phhydz<./iframe> The above site loads multiple advertising, some with sound (SO F--- ING ANNOYING! - on the other hand, that is how I noticed it, because this page should not have any sound on it.) I'm still trying to figure out how it was placed into the index.asp page. It was right after another legit iframe on the page.... Was the site hacked? worm? trojan? Corrupt server farm admin? Corrupt developer? If anyone has seen / heard of this happening on other sites, I sure would be appreciative of any info. 777seo.com puports to be a site about proxy servers, but I suspect this is just a front for this ad slamming scheme. I was doing some google searches, and it seems that 777seo.com is blacklisted in the GPT and PTR realms because advertisers consider it cheating to display ads in a hidden iframe (and rightly so IMHO.) Laters, Kevin Houston ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Jeff Patrick Subject: 301 Redirects Folks- This topic recently surfaced on this list but I didn't see any definitive answers so I though I'd refloat it again... [see the thread "Moving Sites" in issues 2368-69: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1769/55/ and http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1770/55/ ] We're looking at how best to migrate a very large client web site i.e. we redesigned and re-architected an existing site and now we're going to make the new site go live. Important to note that the primary domain is staying the same i.e. their old site is at domain.com and the new site will also be at domain.com. But it is definitely true that individual page URLs will change as the client is moving from a static site to a CMS driven site. As you all know, from an SEO standpoint, changing over to a new site can drastically impact your page ranking with search engines; i.e. the search engines have indexed your old site and then you turn on the new site and suddenly *your traffic falls off completely.* Our current approach is to use 301-Redirects on a selected set of pages on the old site. Effectively the 301 Redirects tell the search engine bots that the page they are trying to reach has changed and redirects them to that new page. Apparently a 301-Redirect is very bot-friendly and will help accelerate the changeover in the search engine indexes AND (most importantly) page rankings and traffic will remain while that is all happening. We've tried META Refresh javascript on the old pages (pointing to the new ones) but the search engine bots hate these and reject them -- quickly causing these pages to remove their position in page ranks. So, here's my question: Is this the approach you have used? Did you find it effective in helping to minimize the impact on page ranking and site traffic driven from search engines during the changeover? Do you have an alternative approach that works better? Thanks for any suggestions or insights you might have. Cheers, Jeff Patrick, President & Founder Common Knowledge www.commonknow.com -------- new post - new topic --------- From: Peggy Deras Subject: Bamboozled > This company has received the promised deliveries from > [their designer] and he's getting stonewalled. No answers > to voicemails or emails. Nothing. He hasn't been paid. > Has this ever happened to you? - Adam Audette, LED Digest 2371 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1773/55/ It HAS happened to me. But not ever a completed project like your example. I invoice as I work, so every stage gets an invoice and I try never to let them get above $1000. I once had a wealthy client who refused to pay me beyond my fee to show up at his doorstep. The bill was $900+. I sent invoices and called to no avail. I finally turned him over to a collection agency and they too had no success. I read in the obituaries that he had died and discarded the file in disgust. Some months later I received a call from an attorney who was handling his estate. I received payment within a few weeks, but had to share 40% with the collection company. Poetic justice I say! Usually just the threat of a collection agency gets the wheels turning. It's usually the wealthy clients who do this. I always say that's how they got wealthy. Nowadays I say on my web site "if you are a Pacific Heights dot-com gazillionaire... keep looking". Whenever I am tempted to break my rule and work with the very wealthy; I think back to that experience and "keep looking". Peggy Deras Kitchen Artworks www.kitchenartworks.com Kitchen Design - Problem Solving - CAD Drafting - Cabinetry Design -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Leah Driver Subject: Clients not paying > In general, I have noticed that the clients who whine, haggle and > beat you down on the price at the start of the job are invariably > the ones I have the most trouble collecting from later. - Marty R. Milette, LED Digest 2373 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1775/55/ My husband has been in the car business for several years. He says that invariably the customers who haggle over every detail are the customers who will tell their friends that they were "ripped off." (Stereotype of the dishonest used car salesman aside, with overhead costs being what they are it's hard to make money in the car business.) I've remembered this in dealings at my work and would have to say that I agree 100%... some people seem to believe they deserve to get things for free and that everyone is out to get their money. In my experience haggling over every last penny is a sure sign that you will have problems collecting down the road. Leah Driver ============ Sponsor Message =========== GetWebContent.com has a few words just for you. Relevant words, search-engine optimized words. Words that will impress both your customers and visiting search engine bots. Exclusive words custom written to meet your specs. Many other writing services recycle web content, at http://GetWebContent.com/LED we create it. ============ Sponsor Message =========== -------- new post - new topic --------- From: Debra Mastaler Subject: Recip Linking I wanted to offer another point of view on this short comment found in the LED Digest 2373: > Google will degrade your site ranking if you engage > in link swapping. They are wide awake to it. - Charlie Rufus - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1775/55/ Well, asleep or awake, it's not that simple. I realize it's exciting to make a statement like "Google will degrade your site ranking if you engage in link swapping" but the reality is, that's not the case. If it were true, most of the blogging community would be invisible. Why? Because their intent is to inform and not manipulate. Let's take a look at a comment Google Engineer Matt Cutts made last year on his blog: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/ ------------------------- "The sites that fit "no pages in Bigdaddy" criteria were sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site. Examples that might cause that include *excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying / selling*..." ------------------------- Bold is mine to emphasize the one sentence that's caused all this reciprocal link hysteria. There is nothing wrong with swapping links with other sites. Where people get in trouble is when they try to manipulate anchor text within those links and link excessively with off-topic sites in an effort to boost ranking. The search engines see that and notice the linking patterns and anchors you're using. To reinforce what they do in this regard here's another post by Google Engineer Matt Cutts: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/ ------------------------- "Can't search engines detect paid links? "Yes, Google has a variety of algorithmic methods of detecting such links, and they work pretty well..." ------------------------- His post and quote is about paid links but it stands to reason this is applicable to all types. (Mr. Cutts has also verbally commented they can tell which links are which at the various SES conferences I attend). They're not out to get people for swapping links, they just want to enforce their TOS so their search results produce relevant information. If you owned a manufacturing plant and received low grade materials, your products suffer. You can't afford to have a reputation for selling inferior goods so you stop doing business with those suppliers. The same principle applies here; go against Google and they will stop giving your links popularity and reputation which is a large part of what you need in order to rank well for your terms. Drop out of Google search results because you're doing some stupid linking and you wake up pretty fast. Debra Mastaler Alliance-Link http://thelinkspiel.blogspot.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: James Miller Subject: Recip links I'm not sure what effect that linking to a third party like that would have, but I've noticed a rather interesting phenomena with reciprocal linking in the last few days. One of my clients has a rather interesting blog on Wordpress, where she describes her thoughts, fears and hopes for herself, her business and her family. I won't disclose the blog, as then everybody would rush to it and spoil the experiment we're trying out. But I will be publishing details in full later. Over the last month or so, she's been putting in a lot of links to other blogs in the text of her blog. She is now getting almost three times the hits on the web site, than she was a month ago. We've analysed how people get to her site and find that a lot of traffic comes from reciprocal blog links. By comparing these results with simple reciprocal links in web sites, I feel that the results may be much more impressive. This may well be because people tend to surf blogs much more than they do web pages. Another point, is that it appears that short and pithy stories in the blog, get the largest number of hits. Do large rambling blog entries not get as high in the search engines because they confuse them? James Miller Daisy Analysis www.daisy.co.uk -------- new post - new topic --------- From: Lee Roberts Subject: Standards and Rankings > The W3C "standard" is an advisory standard only and most > people are not even aware of it, much less attempting to adhere > to it. A search engine simply cannot afford to score relevance > on the basis of HTML markup compliance with arbitrary standards. - Michael Martinez, LED Digest 2372 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1774/55/ It's interesting how a person can pick up a hammer and call himself a homebuilder. Every state and every country has standards with which a home must comply. These standards are for safety of the dwellers. However, in some parts of a country or state or county, homes can be built without following the standards. Sure, people can live in the finished products and we can call them homes, but they may not be truly fit to live in. Many people call themselves Web designers and they have no idea how the Web came to be. Nor do they have any idea what the codes mean except that they can use a P tag to represent a paragraph. If we look at some of the codes out there we see a bunch of junk that would make a goat sick from eating. Some people call this tag soup or they call table-laden sites tag soup. Whichever doesn't make much difference to the result -- it's simply a mess. Most people aren't aware that the W3 is the result of the work by CERN (European Council on Nuclear Research) and the United States government. The W3 developed the standards by which the Web operates. In addition, the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.) has developed HTML standards, a subset of the W3 standards that are stricter and less forgiving than the W3 standards. In addition, most people aren't aware of the standards because they are not taught. Web design classes typically teach how to use FrontPage or Dreamweaver to develop a Web page. This results in people not knowing the proper way to do things. Just because one might think they don't need to know the standards doesn't mean the standards are arbitrary and useless. If they didn't exist, FrontPage, Dreamweaver, GoLive and the other nice WYSIWYG editors wouldn't exist. They simply wouldn't have the capabilities to perform the job of developing a Web page. The wild west of Web design is going away. Government regulations such as those found in the UK, Australia, Italy, and the European Union are demanding closer compliance with (x)HTML and accessibility. Businesses that have a sense of self-worth are demanding that their Web sites work in all browsers. This has moved us from the "works in IE" or "works in Netscape" age. By developing based upon the standards, it is easier to have Web pages operate properly in all browsers. Search engines as companies are getting smarter. I expect that by 2010 we will see the end days of non-standards compliant Web pages showing up in the search results. Search engines must pay attention to customer satisfaction. Search engines' products are the recommendations they provide. If they, too often, recommend Web pages that do not work properly their customer satisfaction ratings will drop and they will lose customers. IMHO, it would be in their interests to begin evaluating compliance to standards. Do I develop based upon standards ALL the time? Probably not! However, I do try. People that don't try and know better can judge themselves. For my company, my products, and me standards compliance is important. Regards, Lee Roberts Apple Pie Shopping Cart http://www.applepiecart.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by GetWebContent.com The Web's Most Experienced SEO Content Providers. Free no-obligation proposal: http://GetWebContent.com/LED The Archives: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/126/120/ Subscribe: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/52/77/ Unsubscribe, Change Email, or Hold / Resume Delivery: http://www.led-digest.com/content/category/4/17/86/ (c) Copyright 1995-2007 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "When a man moves away from nature his heart becomes hard." - Lakota |
