Issues, Rumors & Scandal

Brian Pinkerton just released a post letting us know that about a month ago, Technorati started using a new system to count links and rank blogs.

This new “secret” method of ranking blogs in their index is supposed to be both faster and more reliable than the old one.

While stale link counts are a thing of the past, the new system is not perfect. When things go awry the new system produces mistakes just as fast as it had been producing correct answers. As a consequence, link counts and rankings can fluctuate up and down alarmingly in a day. Or, the system gets slow and doesn’t produce answers at all. We’re on the path to fixing these problems and hope to have it completely solved soon. Nevertheless, when you see something amiss, please let us know!

Let’s wait a bit and see if we have any changes in the rankings or the Top100 blogs.

Update: Brian tells us how the new link and rank system works.

Using a new undiscovered security hole, hackers compromised all of HostGator‘s servers, and inserted trojans into their client’s websites :

HostGator says hackers compromised its servers using a previously unknown security hole in cPanel, the control panel software that is widely used by hosting providers. “I can tell you with all accuracy that this is definitely due to a cPanel exploit that provides root access and all cPanel servers are affected,” said HostGator system administrator Tim Greer. “This issue affects all versions of cPanel, from what I can tell, from years ago to the current releases, including Stable, Release, Current and Edge.”

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So my friend Janos messages me, and shows me this :

Can anyone explain this 1649 character description ? Check it out.

More in Janos’s blog.

Edit23 September: I am now seeing this weird problem for my blog too (and the website mentioned above now shows OK):

Can someone at Google have a look at these issues ?

Unbelievable right ? Well you better believe it: Yahoo! Directory is cloaking, and is spamming :)
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So I wanted to see what are the most viewed (according to Alexa) search industry website and/or blogs.

And anyway, I wanted to compare those with my blog too. Here’s what I came up with:
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During yesterday / today (and it keeps going), a HUGE ATTACK HAPPENED with more than 630 websites (Romanian and foreign, but mostly Romanian) beeing hacked by a certain Arab Security Team (AST) (e-mail address : dr-hacker@hackermail.com) an arabian hacking faction, militating for “lebanon innocents”.

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First of all, sorry for such a long inactivity period. I’ve been in a continuous and stressful activity of moving with the office, the equipments, buying and configuring lots of other stuff for the new office, and I didn’t had time to blog.

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An excellent Google video released in February on Youtube.

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Is Threadwatch really down ? or hacked ? or what ? In IE it shows a “page cannot be displayed” error, and in FF a blank page.

This is the first time I ever saw it offline. Aaron ? :(

THe funny thing is that my own blog showed the same EXACT status when I tried to enter the administration back-end of Wordpress. I fixed the problem by overwriting all the Wordpress files from the standard kit.

I came up with the crazy ideea of asking people a dozen questions about search marketing (and related fields) in DigitalPoint. Why did I do this ? Because I often make posts, after I receive a questions/e-mail from my visitors, asking me this and that..

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Previously we discussed about Business.com inserting the nofollow attribute in their listings.

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Some of you may still remember from Digitalpoint, that a few weeks ago, a Blogspot.com blogger stole one of my Adsense tips articles.

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When I saw this:

I was like: Ops I did it again :D. But it seems it was just temporary.

Starting from two days ago, I can’t login into my Adsense account. The message:

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Alexa is starting to use a different session ID url for it’s thumbnails, without the ability to pass parameters in the URL..

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