Hacked and Whacked

2009/11/29 in Totally Clueless | 1 comment

This blog is a hobby of mine, and for some time I’ve been inactive and haven’t found the time to take care of it. Well, that was a serious mistake on my part.

I checked the stats periodically and noticed a decline in visitors.  Not uncommon with a stagnant blog and I guess its to be expected. What I didn’t realize is that I had been hacked which in turn led me to getting whacked in Google.Hacked

Pure ignorance on my part.

Had I looked at the Webmaster Tools dashboard I would have seen that the keywords associated with my blog were unrelated to the actual content.  Nothing that I ramble on about incoherently was listed. The top 16 keywords are all related to crappy pill peddlers and their wares.

I also did a related:fuzzuck.com search and saw the same thing. I checked the cached version of a number of pages and saw nothing suspicious. I viewed the source code and there was nothing unusual visible to me.

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FTC, Blogging and Paid Reviews

2009/10/05 in Marketing

The Federal Trade Commission has revised the “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising” and will now require bloggers to disclose any freebies or compensation they receive from companies for reviewing their products.

FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials
“The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that ‘material connections’ (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers–connections that Counting Cashconsumers would not expect–must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other ‘word-of-mouth’ marketers.

The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.”

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List of Top Quality Web Directories

2009/09/04 in Directories and Search Engines | 3 comments

I had a chance to visit DP after a long absence and was thoroughly amused by some of the posts in the Directories forum – seems nothing has changed.

Little reason to waste your time there; the same folks are still spamming their crappy directory lists, others are still confused as to what constitutes quality, and the Solicitations & Announcements section is nothing more than a spam fest.

I got a chuckle out of one of the posters’ subtle attempt at self promotion of their web directory called LinKernel.

I followed one of the spammy link drops to an article on a directory about “top quality web directories” and surprise, surprise, their own directory is listed.

Top Quality?

You bet!

LinKernel
18 articles total.
8 Featured Listings – 3/8 are listings for their own sites.
807 regular listings sprinkled across 447 categories.
Can’t seem to find any inbound links that were earned.

I think you get the idea….

Directory Editing Tip

2009/01/24 in Directories and Search Engines

Here’s a quick tip to save directory owners and editors some grief in the future.

Ir’s not uncommon for domains to expire and get snatched up by some one wanting to take advantage of the traffic, inbound links or PageRank.

The new content could be undesirable or even malicious and can really degrade your visitors’ experience. Linking to bad neighborhoods could possibly cause some problems with search engines.

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So, You Want a DMOZ Listing?

2008/08/22 in Directories and Search Engines | 1 comment

The amount of misinformation on webmaster forums about DMOZ (Open Directory Project) is almost overwhelming and only leads to confusion, frustration and disappointment for the average webmaster.

So, you want a DMOZ listing?Let’s clear up a number of misconceptions and try to improve your chances of actually getting a suggestion reviewed and possibly listed.

First off, we need to understand that the directory project’s purpose is not a listing service for website owners or their webmasters. Yes, site suggestions are accepted, but they are under no obligation to process or respond to them.

Editors are volunteers and may choose to perform a variety of tasks which may be of more importance than reviewing submissions from the general public. Updates, errors, category reorganizations, taxonomy, hierarchy, internal projects, editor applications and internal discussions all probably rank well above the mundane task of reviewing suggested sites.

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