Well, it’s almost here.

Immortal Promoter

Thanks to everyone who’s given suggestions and advice. The service will be available soon, make sure to pre-register to reserve a spot and get our heavy discount for the first month.

Forgive me, for I’m late to the party. When changes happen on the SEO scene, I tend to take action before writing about them. Has anyone else noticed the recent trend? Content and on-page optimization seem to be once again playing a huge role in ranking. Six months ago, I could toss some auto-generated crap into flat HTML files with hardly any markup at all and a lousy linking structure, then bombard it with a few hundred thousand links and rank for whatever I wanted. The big G seems to be cyclic in its valuation of factors for ranking, and it’s back to the ole’ content game.

Look forward to discussing how delusional or mislead you think I am in comments.

-V

Since I’m switching jobs soon, I have been interviewing some developers to replace me at my current position. It has astounded me how many candidates don’t really know what I’m talking about when I start asking about securing web applications against injection. In light of that, I thought I would share a simple input validation class that I wrote. Certainly, it’s not the best out there, but looking it over should give you a good idea of what input validation entails. Code below:

<?php

/**
* @author vsloathe
* @copyright 2008
* CCL - Feel free to distribute this work, just leave the credit to the author intact.
* Usage:
* $IV = new inputValidator();
* $IV->input = ‘90210′;
* $zip = $IV->expectZipCode();
*/

class inputValidator
{
var $input;
var $scrubbed;
function expectNumeric()
{
$this->scrubbed = preg_replace(’#^[0-9]#’,”,$this->input);
return $this->scrubbed;
}
function expectAlpha()
{
$this->scrubbed = preg_replace(’#^[a-z]#i’,”,$this->input);
return $this->scrubbed;
}
function expectAlphaNum()
{
$this->scrubbed = preg_replace(’#^[a-z0-9]#i’,”,$this->input);
return $this->scrubbed;
}
function expectPhoneNumber()
{
$this->scrubbed = preg_replace(’#^[0-9\(\)\-]#’,”,$this->input);
return $this->scrubbed;
}
function expectZipCode()
{
if(strlen($this->input) > 5)
{
return(’BAD ZIPCODE’);
}
else
{
$this->scrubbed = preg_replace(’#^[0-9]#’,”,$this->input);
return $this->scrubbed;
}
}
}

?>

Sorry for the lack of syntax highlighting, I haven’t gotten that plugin for wordpress. Feel free to copy the code.

18 84 58 A6 D1 50 34 DF E3 86 F2 3B 61 D4 37 74

A happy Friday to all.

There is an absolute plethora of misinformation out there about SEO, so as my contribution to

the community, I’m going to dispell a few SEO myths.

There is no such thing as a sandbox. Yes, that is correct, there is no Google sandbox.

If your brand spanking new page is not immediately indexed, it’s because you don’t have

enough links, or Google has not updated its index to reflect your site’s inclusion yet.

I’ve had sites that were plastered with ads indexed within 2 hours, and I’ve had sites

white as the driven snow with 50 backlinks from trusted domains take ages to get indexed.

Which brings me to my next point: edu = gov = com = info = net = org = …

The TLD of a domain matters about as much as the color pants you’re wearing when you get a link from it. It’s *trust* that makes a good link, not its TLD.

Pagerank doesn’t matter either. It’s just an arbitrary standard produced by a company who has one and

only one ultimate goal - to make money. The only reason to ever worry about the pagerank of your pages

is so that you can sell links to suck..er…other webmasters who care about such things.

There is no duplicate content penalty! I cannot emphasize this enough. Google itself is just

a giant content scraper. There are millions of blogs and aggregators out there that just copy

other content. As long as you credit the source, you have nothing to worry about if your

content is not original. Just remember who the biggest content theif on the web is, and

that they made 10 billion dollars last year.

That’s all for now. Hope to catch you all later.

-V

42

Probably OFN by now, but I came across this on a certain forum that I frequent and absolutely had to write a post about it.

I’ve never put together a real compendium of what my link dropping service is going to be able to do, so I figured I would give a little overview of what the system consists of:

•  A massive database of URLs, expanded daily by automated spiders and QAed automatically by carefully crafted scripts
• Complete control over all aspects of link building and site promotion in that the user can specify, for each site he or she owns, how many links the service should drop daily. This makes it possible to stay in the SERPs much longer since the links come in more naturally.
• An integrated remote API for use with automated scripts, or if the user prefers, a web interface offering easy management of daily link dropping “jobs”.

So far, that gives a decent overview. Stay tuned as I keep this rolling in development.

Sometimes when I’m listening to Shark Week on the Discovery Channel the smart-sounding doods say that the Great White is the world’s most fearsome killing machine. I have irrefutable proof that this is not the case. Imagine, if you will, that you’re walking along the poopdeck minding your own business, when all of a sudden, you’re ambushed from the topsails by a NinjaPirateVikingRaptor. It first does a crazy backflip to show how incredibly awesome it is, then it ninja kicks you in the face after goring you with its viking helmet horns. After it’s done playing with you, it totally eats your face. How crazy is that?

Seen here is a rare photo of the NinjaPirateVikingRaptor in the wild:

Last night I spent a considerable amount of time going through each country code by hand to determine where G has datacenters. This should help some people for scraping purposes:

.at
.be
.bg
.bo
.bs
.by
.bz
.ca
.ch
.cl
.cn
.cz
.de
.dk
.ec
.ee
.es
.fi
.fr
.gb
.gl
.gm
.gr
.gy
.hk
.hn
.hr
.ht
.hu
.ie
.in
.is
.it
.je
.jo
.jp
.kr
.li
.lk
.lt
.lu
.lv
.ma
.mn
.mu
.mv
.mw
.mx
.nl
.no
.nr
.nu
.ph
.pk
.pl
.pr
.pt
.ro
.se
.sg
.sh
.si
.sj
.sk
.sm
.sn
.st
.tk
.tm
.to
.tp
.tt
.tw
.ug
.co.uk
.uz
.vg
.vn
.vu
.ws
.co.zw

Just add “google” to the front of any of those codes to get the webpage of the corresponding data center.