SEOmoz recently gave a first placement in the “Games and Entertainment” category of their 2008 Web 2.0 Awards to infamous adware vendor Zango (formerly 180solutions).
What Zango has to do with “Web 2.0″ (whatever that means) is beyond my reach: maybe their innovative use of video and social networks MySpace and Facebook?
Must be because of that cutesy logo.
Earlier today LowLevel pointed me to this Google SERP, showing a surge in p0rn spam on Google Notebook (see screen-shot below):
site:www.google.com/notebook/user
Blogs (including mine) are being bombed right now with links to such pages.
I had seen Google Groups spam, but I have to admit the Notebook flavor was new to me. I think it must be related to the cracking of Google’s CAPTCHA (note how the majority of these notebooks have a blank username).
Google, Yahoo!, Live Search. Amen.
And in case you were wondering about ex-wannabe major search engine Ask: their blog is practically dead. R.I.P.
A friend of mine sent me the following screen-shot today (note the row underneath the ad in premium position):
I instantly ran a search for “pscore mcpc thresh” and found zero results, which made me think those must have been internal variables leaking out of AdWords in debug mode. 
Then a colleague pointed me to WebmasterWorld, where a user had posted a similar screen-shot in the Google AdWords forum.
Now, what do those variable names (and values) mean exactly?
Here’s my guess:
What do you think?
Not my fault. My pal Ultra invited me to answer the following three questions. Is this what you call a meme? Oh, nevermind.
Now on to:
I just love MSN Live Search because… well, no other search engine company out there can screw things up the way Microsoft can.
Yesterday we accidently [sic] began including the links from the ads of Google AdSense customers.
Just took SEOmoz’s SEO expert quiz… Here’s my score and rating:
I got two questions wrong, #20 and #22… Tricky ones, eheh. 
Overall, a really well-thought out quiz: nice stuff to test your SEO knowledge and have some fun too.
Just one hint: beware of vodka-filled URLs!
Maybe you’ve already heard of this, since it’s not very recent news, but I thought it was worth mentioning because it hasn’t got the exposure it deserves, plus it appears it’s still going on.
I had been spotting dozens of strange organic search referers in a web site’s stats lately: extremely generic keywords, that do occur in the web site’s corpus of web pages, but for which that web site never ranked on any search engine that I know of.
Today I finally decided to check out the logs, and ran into this:
65.55.165.122 - - [02/Nov/2007:05:07:14 +0100] "GET /requested/url.html HTTP/1.0" 200 51862 "http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=keyword&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
It would look like a genuine Live Search referer, except that:
Hmm… :/
A simple Google search pointed me to the right answer: it turns out that this is a “quality check” [sic!] that the Live Search team have been doing for a while, as officially confirmed by msndude (Live Search’s rep) in this WebmasterWorld thread (msg #3442263).
Now, why the Live Search folks decided to hit web sites with fake referers is beyond me: maybe a stupid attempt to check for referer-based cloaking? I dunno. I had seen Slurp (Yahoo!’s crawler) issuing a spoofed user-agent before, but nothing nearly as sneaky and spammy as this. Many small webmasters are understandably furious about Microsoft deliberately choosing to fill their logs with junk.
The only advice I can give them is to filter out all referers having the string “FORM=LVSP” or “FORM=LIVSOP” in the URL.
A few blog references:
Long time no post… Remember Virgilio’s robots.txt issue (now fixed)?
I wasn’t too shocked today to discover that Netscape Search (whose results are also provided by Google) has the same “bug”: Netscape Search’s robots.txt file does not disallow /search.
As a result, Netscape Search has about 40,000 of its SERPs (that is, Google’s) in Google’s index. Check it out:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Asearch.netscape.com%2Fsearch
The missing “Disallow: /search” is obviously an open door to search engine spammers (yes, some of those pages actually have good rankings).
Come on Netscape, fix that robots.txt!
A nightly-ish blog about SEO & stuff.
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