There was some rumor flying around this week that Blogger had been successful at deleting all SPLOGS. Worried, I rushed to check my Splogs and found them happily cranking away traffic. 
I’ve since confirmed with some spammer friends that they too have not seen any splogs deleted.
A prominent member of the Webmasterworld community, Ian Turner has not been seen since Saturday June 25th.
Ian Turner attended the Webmasterworld conference in New Orleans but never returned home to his family in the UK. Everyone in the SEO community is deeply disturbed over this disappearence. If you have had any contact with Ian since Saturday morning please contact the listed authorities. His wife Ali Turner is asking anyone that has any information to contact the following:
DC Cole at Woking Missing Persons unit +44 (0)1483 655081
cole10437 at surrey.pnn.police.uk. (From the US dial: 011-44-1483-655081)
Please do not contact US police. All enquiries are requested to be sent to the UK police.
More info is being published by his wife at threadwatch with massive support from the blogger community: ian turner
UPDATE: Ian has been found!
He is in Atlanta with no passport. No further information. 5:37 PM EST
The masses of bogus SEO companies that are springing up are frightening. They are very convincing and most all have the same tactic of guaranteeing rankings in Google. The problem is that most only target useless keywords. Then when they rank on page 1 for these useless keywords they shove the unhappy client away by pointing to their success.
I recently ran across this site by accident which boldly claims “GUARANTEE You’ll Make It On Google!”.
They show many fuzzy screenshots pointing to their success for their clients in Google such as this one from the bottom of the page:
I was suspicious so I downloaded the image and zoomed in. Turns out that the hot item they ranked #1 for in Google was a press release titled “Vegan Shopping New Springtime Additions” for their poor client AlternativeOutfitters.com.
Today I discovered that Best Buy cloaks their product pages. I was searching for a Serial ATA PCI controller.
The Google search (the first result should be the Best Buy link)
Notice the URL for the product page:
www.bestbuy.com/products/1093468959466.jsp
Now click the link and notice that it redirects to the dynamic URL:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1093468959466&type=product&ref=03&loc=01
How did Google Get the Static URL?
Best Buy is cloaking via user agent. To see it in action enter the short static URL into my HTTP Response Viewer and select Googlebot for the user agent.
Notice that you get back HTML with all the product information.
Now enter the same URL into my response viewer *but* select a normal browser for the user-agent.
This time you get back a very short piece of HTML that does a meta refresh to the long dynamic URL. This is what the average Joe will land on.
It seems ridiculous for Best Buy to risk getting caught for cloaking when its so easy to simply use mod_rewrite to create static URLs.
I received a postcard from the North Carolina Secretary of State informing me it was time to file my annual report on my LLC (read “give us $205″). They let me know that I could easily file by visiting www.sos.nc.com. But when I visit the site I immediately feel like I’ve been duped by a spammer posing as an official government office. The site is riddled with links to pages serving up nothing but Overture ads for high dollar phrases such as “North Carolina Real Estate”. Burried in the middle of the page is a link to “NC LLC/LLP ANNUAL REPORTS” which links out to www.sosnc.com. Note the domain name sosnc.com.
So it seems that the owner of nc.com has taken advantage of the fact that the NC Secretary of State misprints their URL on the thousands of post cards they send out. Or perhaps NC.com had someone inside the state government to purposely misprint the card. Hmmm.
