Category: Issues, Rumors & Scandal

Dreamhost asking clients to block GoogleBot

Yes, it’s quite true. DreamHost representatives are asking their clients to block GoogleBot trough the .htaccess file, because their websites were “hammered by GoogleBot”.

Dreamhost representatives are also guiding their clients to make all their websites “unsearchable and uncrawlable by search engine robots”, because they cause “high memory usage and load on the server”.

Dreamhost email

PS: This is NOT a rumor. Multiple people are already complaining about Dreamhost asking clients to block search engine spiders. A post in QuickOnlineTips confirms this too.

Initial news bit via Zoso.

Google: A banned Adsense website, can rent the space to other publishers

A friend of mine has had his AdSense account banned for click fraud.

He sent a reply to the AdSense Team, explaining that he didn’t do any fraud, or if fraud was the case there, he had no knowledge of it. Part of his reply was :

Considering that I can’t create a new AdSense account, will you allow me to rent the space in my website, to other AdSense publishers ?

Continue reading Google: A banned Adsense website, can rent the space to other publishers

Want a backlink from Ask.co.uk ?

Just point a link towards their results, and Google will give a nice and juicy backlink.

The cache is new :

This is G o o g l e’s cache of (URL above) as retrieved on 18 Apr 2007 23:45:09 GMT.

Ask.co.uk doesn’t have a valid robots.txt file, and the search results from Ask.co.uk don’t have a nofollow (not that they should’ve).

Enjoy!

Update: Here’s another indexed page from Ask.co.uk, and guess what ? It’s cache is from yesterday :)

Matt Cutts Hacked ? April 1st or …

Matt Cutts’s blog is hacked ? or is it an April 1st joke again, as Google got us used to… :)

If this is indeed a hack, apparently, it’s a Romanian hacking team :(.

Matt Cutts Hacked

Still, the move seems pretty prepared.

Thanks for the tip Michael M..

Update: Matt now “hacked” the “hacking team’s website”. Way to go Matt :)

Of course I’m lying when I make everyone believe that content is King.
Of course black hat SEO and spamdexing are the only Kings.
Google is just a stupid algorithm relying on spammy backlinks.
But you guys had no right to let everyone know. That’s why I defaced your bloody DST site. To show the entire world how evil a white hat can be.

In fact, I’m as evil as my employer ;-)
All your backlinks are belong to us !

Dark SEO Team

Update, thanks to Eric.

Michael Arrington > TechCrunch. What’s that ?

#1. Sorry for not blogging these past few days. My daily schedule has gone crazy.

#2. This is true for the next few weeks too, between 20 December and about 5 January 2007, because I’ll be in UK. I’ll bring my notebook on, but blogging will still be fairly slow. If anyone wants to meet with me there just give me an e-mail.

Continue reading Michael Arrington > TechCrunch. What’s that ?

Google Adsense is banning users with “Google” in the domain

Ionut Chitu, one of the most proficient bloggers out there, just got banned from Adsense because he uses the word Google in his blog’s domain name: googlesystem.blogspot.com.

The truth is, Google states (in their Google Brand Permissions page) :

Don’t register Google trademarks as second-level domain names.

Continue reading Google Adsense is banning users with “Google” in the domain

CNN: “100 million sites on the web”. Oh really, CNN?

CNN, through Marsha Walton, just published a truly disturbing article about 100 million sites on the web today, worldwide. First of all, there are maybe 100 million domains on the WWW, not websites. That’s a HUGE mistake and CNN should be more careful about delivering such information to millions of listeners.

Continue reading CNN: “100 million sites on the web”. Oh really, CNN?

GooTube faces serious copyright infringement problems

YouTube deletes 30,000 files after Japanese group complains about copyright infringement. That’s what MIT’s Technology Review reports.

If we think of all the other copyright infringement situations that people are predicting, should Google really NOT be concerned ? We all know that this was a pretty easily recognizable situation. When a bigger company buys a smaller company, lawsuits can appear simply because the larger company has more money to settle with, thus the increased likelyhood for the complainters to receive some cashflow.

Continue reading GooTube faces serious copyright infringement problems

Digg banned Text-link-ads.com

So I wanted to Digg this great blog tool that Patrick and the rest of the guys at Text-link-ads came up with, the Blog Juice Calculator, and Digg tells me :

Digg banned Text-link-ads.com

How not cool is that ? I really don’t think that these guys spammed Digg. And if Text-link-ads’s users spammed Digg with their USEFUL tools, why should they be blamed ?

Update: It seems that Digitalpoint and other websites are banned too.

How to get unlimited links and content on a .edu domain

Each day I’m getting so many spam comments, with links to files hosted on .edu domains. I am wondering, how are these people getting access to them ? Most of the time they put a certain URL in their comment URL field, as well as in the body, that lead to redirects to porn websites. Here is an example :

.edu spam

The .edu link above redirects to : http://italianpiacere.com/ (warning, it’s p0rn).

Why aren’t these things under control ? I found spam on .edu domains in the past too. On a much greater scale.

I decided to see how the heck this(ese) dude(s) managed to do this spam. It’s EASY. Just go to cdm.berkeley.edu which is a Wiki. Click on upload file (lower left toolbar) and there you go. Have a look at that SPAM and p0rn. As a total unauthorised person, you can upload any file, link to it, redirect it, etc.

The amount of spam generated in this way on .edu domains is unacceptable. Schools should REALLY enforce security on what their students can do (if this was done by a student). Or maybe the whole subdomain + the wiki (not just the upload of pages) were created by someone with access to the servers, with the sole reason in mind, to spam.

Rumor: Google to aquire YouTube ?

Michael Arrington estimates a 40% chance of the rumor beeing true was right.

The price tag swings around $1.5 – $2 billion.

So is Google Video’s winning streak so far, that Google is paying 2 billion to not see YouTube in front ?

Update: It’s the real thing. Google and YouTube are in acquisition talks. The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times are also publishing concrete reports about the acquisition.

Threadwatch goes nofollow on the user profiles

It seems to me (can’t know when this was implemented, but it was recently anyway) that Threadwatch has just put a robots noindex, nofollow on all user profile pages, like this one for example.

So what do members that never submitted a story (which gives you the chance to have a link as a small “give back reward”) get, who comment all the time and maintain most of your site’s content Aaron ? I always seen you against nofollow-ing.

I hope you’re not going towards SeoChat. It would be a shame.

The Digg effect

StuntDubl just wrote an absolutetly wonderful article: 18 Questions Your CEO Forgot to Ask When Building Your Website.

This article ended up in Digg, with 251 Diggs after just 1 hour 33 minutes and still counting. Off course, Stunddubl.com is now DOWN :)

The Digg/Slashdot effect people. It happens to bigger houses too.

I recommend the article to anyone at DuggMirror or after he gets his website back up :)