YBO Interactive Blog

Al Gore’s website was hacked by spammers that added outbound links from his site to other sites they wanted to promote.

apparently, the new type of hackers, the SEO hackers constantly look for high ranking sites, (Al Gore’s site has PR7) just for adding outbound links. It is clear that this is happening a lot, and Al Gore’s site is just one of many sites that were hacked.

It seems like a vulnerability in WordPress has left many bloggers open to attack by the same method.

This is a new era of hacking. They didn’t come for money, credit card numbers, nor user passwords. They came for Link Juice!

How exciting is that!

Wouldn’t that be funny if this page also has hidden links to some extremely disrespected sites?

Long time ago, I have started working on a tool that will scan a given website for all outbound links, will check the PR of every outbound link domain, and will compare the results to the previous scan.

The original purpose was finding outbound links to bad neighborhoods, like sites that lost their ranking due to illegal activity. This tool will easily detect seo hacking on our customers websites.

Stay tuned!

Here is a nice post from stoney-degeyter discussing Ways to Get Your Visitors To Contact You From Your Contact Us Page

I would have a also add one bullet - put a small contact us form on every important page.

This is the most important thing on your site, don’t hide it.

Brendan Kowitz reports on his blog about serious problems ASP.NET 2.0 sites are facing.

Apparently, a bug in ASP.NET 2.0  caused google to remove sites using this technology from google index.

oops…

It was said so many times, google explained exactly why they don’t like paid links, and even published a special form to report paid links, but people tend to ignore warnings and pretend they didn’t hear.

And one day, guess what. Google has commenced punishing PayPerPost bloggers by completely removing their page rank.

It is very sad that people loose their business because they don’t listen.

It feels like talking to my kids - “how many times did I tell you not to do it?”

htaccss is used to manipulate URLS on Apache web servers.

As we all know, URLs are a tremendously important factor in SEO, and the easiest way to improve them is htaccess.

here is a simple example for htaccss file. The file we have is called /aboutthecompany.html but we want out viewer to see a clean path - /about/

Options All -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule ^about?$ ?aboutthecompany.html [L]

That was simple, here are some more tricky examples:

Zen-cart product pages urls usually look like

/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=7

how powerfull would it be if we could auomatically change them to look like

/gemstones/7/Aquamarine-Round-Blue

here is an htaccss file that will do exactly this:

Options All -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule ^gemstones/(.+)/(.+)/?$ index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=$1 [L]

isn’t that nice?

another nice example is changing the url of images

instead of /images/1212121212.jpg

we’ll see /gemstones-images/1212121212/Ligh-Blue-Aquamarine

Options All -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule ^gemstones-images/(.+)/(.+)?$ images/$1.jpg [L]

and this example shows how to redirect all the gemalaya.com traffic to www.gemalaya.com

Options All -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule ^gemstones/(.+)/(.+)/?$ index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=$1 [L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^gemalaya\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.gemalaya.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Isn’t that cool?

all the examples above can be seen live on Gemalaya Loose gemstones

The domain cowboys.com was sold for $275,000 at the recent TRAFFIC auction to a phone-in bidder - an attorney representing the Dallas Cowboys.

The thing is, he missed some zeros…

He thought he is buying the domain for $275.00, not for $275,000
Poor guy.

He probably needed new pants…