The Ney York Times has an excellent story about a phenomenal black-hat SEO campaign that resulted in super ranking for J C Penney, one of America’s leading retailers, operates over 1,100 department stores throughout the United States.

Search Engine Land has a followup on this, explaining how they did it. Worth reading.

How to take a screenshot in Windows:

1. Click on the Print Screen button, (sometimes it says PrtScn)
2. Click Start -> Run
3. Type “mspaint”
4. click CTRL + V (Paste)
5. Save the File.

How to take a screenshot in Mac:

Just press Command-Shift-3.
The screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop.

What would you do if I tell you that your Facebook account is blocked? Scream is a good answer, but then what?

There are many reports about people who lost their Fecebook accounts. Either because Facebook did that or because someone broke into the account and changed the password.

So if it happens (God forbid), at least have a backup ready. Here is what you should do:

1. Login to Facebook and click on Account -> Account Settings



2. Next to “Download Your information” click on “learn more”

3. Click “Download”

This is it.

In a few minutes you will get an email with a link to your Facebook account files. Put it on a CD and leave it at your grandparents next time you visit them.

Like?

There has been a rumor running around that Microsoft is using Google to improve Bing’s search results. The guys from Bing obviously denied everything and now, Google released their proof.

Google had created fake search results for some jibrish – never searched – queries and waited for Bing to eat the bait. And they did.

Here is one example where for the query “delhipublicschool40 chdjob” Google inserted a search result for a credit union:

A few days past and the same credit union showed up on Bing for that query:

Nice work!

If you need another proof for Google Adwords being DE BEST online marketing tool, here it is:

I have just changed the domain name of my wordpress and it stopped working…
After looking up all over I found the answer here

To make it easier for you, here is what you need to do in order to make your wordpress installation work on the new domain:

1. Add these 2 lines to wp-config.php
define(‘WP_HOME’,'www.yourdomain.com/blog’);
define(‘WP_SITEURL’,'www.yourdomain.com/blog’);

2. Add these 2 lines to functions.php (located in your theme directory)
update_option(‘siteurl’,'www.yourdomain.com/blog);
update_option(‘home’,'http://www.yourdomain.com/blog’);
That’s all!

Those of you who have a blog and didn’t do it yet, it is never too late.

Facebook had released a super easy API that allows you to add a LIKE button to any page on your site. You can put it in your blog, forum, pictures or any other page. Needless to say, these buttons are serious traffic boosters.

Go ahead, the instructions are here.
It looks like this:

Google reported yesterday that their Street View cars have been recorded all the traffic they could gather from open WIFI networks in their way.

This means that if you were there at the right time and the right place and didn’t use any service that will help you connect to Facebook in https, it is more than likely that Google has your Facebook password. Isn’t that cool?

Their statements end with an apology: “Google works hard to earn your trust—and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here. We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.”

Remember the buzz apology? I have a feeling that sometime soon they will apologize again. This is not the last time that our privacy is trashed by Google.

Yesterday morning our Paypal account was blocked by Paypal. There was no prior notification, no questions were asked and no warnings were given. Just like that: No Soup For You!

Users that tried to signup to our service got this error message:

When we tried to sign in to our paypal account we got this error message.

Needless to say how shocked we were as nothing on our account was against the Paypal TOS, not even close to the gray zone. Lucky us we have just opened a new Paypal account and the old account is still active. We have switched back to the old account and got back to full service in just a few hours. We are still working on unblocking that new Paypal account, hopefully we will be able to save the money in the account and keep the subscriptions running.

It is pretty frustrating to build a business using a 3rd party pendor and get a punch in the face just like that without any prior notification. It has been just 3 months ago that my friend Hilit got her Gmail banned, and now it’s Paypal doing the exact same thing.

We have learned an important lesson here, and we’re working hard to add another billing vendor besides Paypal. Since some users trust Paypal more than others, we’ll leave it as a secondary payment method for users that ask for it. We have started integration with Authorize.net and I hope to have it up and running ASAP, hopefully early next week.