To all my friends and readers, please be aware that due to some malicious people, there appears to be malware downloading onto computers that visit SEO ROI, or at least an attempt to that effect (some browsers seem to notify users and/or be impervious, eg Google Chrome’s notifications).

I’ve notified my hosting company and asked for their help, as well as posted a job to some freelancers I work with to see what they can do. So I’m hopeful to have this resolved by the end of the week. Thanks for your patience and understanding!

Also, thanks to everyone who dropped me a note about it – your concern and looking out for me are really appreciated.

Cheers
Gab Goldenberg
p.s. Another good reason to add my feed to your reader, ironically – that way you can read without visiting and exposing yourself to bugs and other junk.

I’ve written some posts on A/B testing and split testing that have seen spam from people purporting to be from P*able. Personally, I find it surprising that a VC backed company would bother with poor quality blackhat tactics like such obvious comment spam, so I’m wondering if it’s not someone with an axe to grind against them. They’re not even in public beta yet though, so perhaps some marketing director there just purchased a really crummy SEO package trying to save some bucks. (more…)

It’s a weird thing that some of the smartest affiliate marketers are also the dirtiest. (more…)

…Hacked websites are really no big deal. Sit back, kick your feet up on the desk, grab your coffee and let me tell you a story about Mrs. Yona Sussnovitch and I. (more…)

Actually, this post should be titled: “How did I cloak my way to lower rankings?!” Because the truth is that it was completely unintentional – as evidenced by it causing my traffic to drop like a rock. (more…)

I’ve seen variations on this link building trick, but it’s the first time I see it producing additional links beyond the value you already have. (more…)

by jalb If you’re using captchas to protect your forms, or other forms of logic, you’re probably finding that you’re still getting spammed despite the captcha.
Well, here is a new idea for you to beat those captcha cracka bots, and some ways to implement it. (more…)

Aaron Wall, cuz I love reading his blog and in particular when he releases new fantastic tools like this. Even better when those tools let me gloat about my call on the trend towards  data commodification. (more…)

I was very fortunate with my Internal Link Building plugin to have many East European folks talk about it and give me links, but this time it’s a full post I’ve got translated. Now, by the looks of it, it’s probably done by machine and spammy crap… but if it’s not this is cool. Anyone here speak Japanese?

http://web-tan.forum.impressrd.jp/e/2009/01/13/4760

Standard conversion advice says remove navigation from the landing page (at least for lead generation landers). Standard SEO says use links. The next best thing would be to put the navigation out of sight, in the footer, and have your calls to action above that so visitors won’t use your navigation to leave your page.

But if you put the nav in the footer, it might get less search engine trust, precisely because folks don’t use footer navigation. What’s a conversion minded SEO to do? Here are 4 options to play navigation peekaboo with search engines and humans to convert your SEO traffic better. Blackhats use some forms of this, but I think I’ve also thought of original twists too. (more…)

Trademark Productions steal other people’s content, edit it for the sake of passing through search engine duplicate content filters, and try to pass themselves off as experts you should trust? (more…)

Stephen Shankland blogs for CNet on Digital Media, and he’s a reporter who learns fast and understands search marketing pretty well, especially for someone who’s not immersed in it 24/7 like many of us search geeks. Yesterday, he wrote a post highlighting some of the recent controversies (more…)

Noticed this through Sphinn, and I have to say, Miriam Ellis of Solas Web Design has really hit a home run with her recent (more…)

While I’m usually not the one to swear on a professional blog, there are exceptional occasions where it’s appropriate, and this is one of them. I’m waaaaaay overdue for a links post, and there are so many quality ones here, that I had to use my affiliate friend‘s expression. (more…)

The following has been sitting in my comment queue:

The purpose, imvho, is to find blogs with poor comment moderation practices. The goal of this comment spam isn’t linkbuilding directly – it’s finding (more…)

There are about 2.5 million executable files in Google’s index:
“Results 1 – 10 of about 2,470,000 for filetype:exe” – http://www.google.com/search?q=filetype%3Aexe. (more…)

See here for how to get links from Google by spamming:

In Google’s defense, looking at the source code those links appear to be generated clientside – I couldn’t find the string ‘vox’ (as in searchenginemarketingvox.com) in the page’s source code. So the links don’t count for SEO (yes, yes it’s anticlimactic, I know). Still funny that 3 spammers are getting links that human visitors can follow from an official Google blog. Hmm, maybe the Gmail team are part of a bad neighbourhood and they’re trying to hide it…

One of my favourite things to do when browsing the web is take screenshots of interesting things I notice, particularly in the SERPs, but also on other sites. It’s an easier way of taking notes and learning from others. Featured below are some sites you know, like DoshDosh, Treatment Search, Sphinn and others.

There’s also the genuinely stupid Stupid.com, some much more intelligent Sphinn spammers who’ve carefully observed what tips us off to spam, and more. In the interest of load times, I’ve linked to some pictures rather than post them here. Enjoy! (more…)

At the Domain Roundtable, Matt Cutts said that Google will cut down any sites that get sold back to zero ranking value. So after a site has built up SEO strength for a few years, the asset could be worthless on the search market because Google – which controls the overwhelming majority of North American and most Western search – makes the rules.

This is clearly unfair to webmasters. Not to mention that the Fortune 500 are again on a different playing field, because their purchases are just mergers and acquisitions, not “site purchases”… (more…)

You’re likely to see some of these in future posts here and aroud the various lovely places that take my stories. So check out as many of them as you have time for, cuz there are some real sweet ones in here.

Diorex doesn’t blog anymore, so Smaxor republished some of his classics. (more…)

Formal writing is really frustrating because it requires you to dress up simple ideas in complete sentences, edit your work for grammar and spend an unholy amount of time writing what it would take you a few minutes to express verbally. When you come up with new ideas or discover new stuff as often as I do, that can get really frustrating.

So I’m hereby inaugurating what I hope will be a regular column here: Scratchpad (scratchpad picture courtesy of one eye fish). I’ll share my latest ideas, in a raw scratchpad type format and be paying even more attention than usual to your feedback. (The Post #88 reference was the pre-naming version of this post’s title and I found it quite appropriate to an informal column.)

For this first issue, I’ve got

1. New uses for Google’s Keyword Tool External,
2. Mined ideas from Google’s Press Days 06 and 07,
3. Revelations of what the PPC arbitrageurs (more…)

Eli wrote about desert scraping, which is the practice of digging around expired sites on archive.org, grabbing their content and reposting it on your own sites. Cloning expired sites is a similar idea that (more…)