I’ll respond in more detail to some of the whining that’s taking place over the SEO contest when I get back from vacation. (By the way, the cash prize for 1st place is now up to $3000.00 thanks to our good buddy Mike Grehan) Until then, here’s a great read. I’m a contest troll .

I’m sure most of you remember Search Guild’s SEO contest from a couple of years ago. (Search Guild members were given a phrase that produced no results in Google "and the person who ranked #1 after a month won a prize). It turns out that someone from V7N has decided it would be good for [...]

In my last post, I showed an example of what I thought was an attempt at competitive sabotage. Within a minute of clicking the publish button, I received a good example of real comment spam, so I thought I’d post it so everyone can see the difference. Name : Press Release E-mail: ip_fresh@yahoo.com URL: http://www.media-press-release.com [...]

Last week I received the following comment spam plugging an Arizona web design and SEO firm called MCP Media: Name: Shannon Light E-mail: marketing@mcpmedia.com URL: http://www.mcpmedia.com/search-optimization/SEO.php IP: 202.134.119.9 (Hong Kong proxy) Comment: MCP Media is a professional Phoenix web design company. Get free web design quotes here any time!

OK, so you want to get banned from WebmasterWorld too? Here’s the browser tool I used to get banned. Just fire it up and selected Googlbot as your UA and start surfing. By this time tomorrw, you should get the Linux death screen. (You can read more about what it does on the download page)

I’m happy to report I can once again access WebmasterWorld. Brett announced today in his new blog that I was one of 30 people (another was DaveN) who got caught in his auto rogue bot filter because I surfed his site with a search engine UA. Let that be a warning to all of you [...]

This morning I started getting an XML Parse Error on my WmW feed. I did a quick header check and found: ——————————- (Response for http://www.webmasterworld.com/) HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 19:13:44 GMT Server: Apache/2.0.52 Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 3985 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html (Repeat request) Accept-Language: en-us User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows [...]

Network Solutions to Acquire MonsterCommerce Congratulations to Stephanie Leffler and everyone else at MonsterCommerce. I can’t think of a more deserving group of people.

I was doing some test surfing this morning using a new user agent/header checking tool Dax just built. Just for fun, I loaded up WebmasterWorld with a Slurp UA. Suprisingly, I was able to navigate through the site. I was also able to surf the site as Googlebot and MSNbot. I quick check of the [...]

One of the things about blogging I haven’t yet come to grips with is the idea that anyone other than my 10 drinking buddies will be reading what I write. When discussing search with the brew crew, I always have the luxury of knowing everyone present has a good understanding of where I stand on [...]