“Everything” results are pretty traditional for this query – they are just regular search results. Highlights: #1 is a spammed .edu with a redirect. #2 and 3 are online pharmacies with 37,000 and 48,000 backlinks each, most of which seem to be comment spam. #4 is a bit more interesting – an online pharmacy with top backlinks coming from a network (akin to the one Paul Madden described) built circa 2006. Overall, the prescription for ranking in the top 10 for “buy viagra” seems to be owning an aged (at least a couple years old) domain and spamming a few thousand automated links to it.

“Updates” seem to be all from Twitter. I really like the timeline feature – it lets you discover interesting tendencies in the SERPs. For example, it let me see that the most buy viagra Twitter spam this year occured on March 25 – I wonder why?

In “Images” there is a mixture of actual Viagra images (from online pharmacies and such) and SERP screenshots – watching the “buy viagra” SERPs is getting more and more fashionable it seems (interpreting them correctly is quite another story – but let’s leave discussing the people trying their hand at it for some other time). I wonder if the above screenshot will end up ranking there as well at some point?

“Videos” – surprise surprise – only 1,010 results! Seems like an opportunity, no?

In “Maps” some people are having quite a lot of fun with all kinds of Maps spam – but these SERPs are more saturated than Videos, with over 6,000 results.

“News” – oooo looks like Viagra spammers do not know yet how to plug their stuff into Google News Only 100 results at the moment.

In the “Blogs” SERPs there is more evidence of constantly updated parts of networks used for pushing the main sites up for Viagra queries

In “Discussions” there are a bucnh of spammed forums and question and answer sites such as Yahoo! Answers and Amazon’s Askville. My all time favorite one is a profile of  German speaking Viagra spammer in one of the forums with the user name of “Dr. Pfizer”.

Conclusion: Because so many alternative versions of the SERPs have become more available to the searchers it makes sense not to discount them any more. So, I predict that it’s only a matter of time until “buy viagra” SERPs in those alternative views becoem as competitive as the regular ones.

<div id="google-ads" class="prepend-2"><!-- need a better name for this div -->
        <ul>
            <li><a class="offsite current" href="">Ads by Google</a></li><!-- remove inline style later -->
            <li><a class="offsite" href="">Blog Directory</a></li>
            <li><a class="offsite" href="">Video Blog</a></li>
            <li><a class="offsite" href="">Blogger Photos</a></li>

            <li class="last"><a class="offsite" href="">Blog Gratuito</a></li>
        </ul>
    </div>

Have they forgotten to place the real Google ads in place of this bit? Have they even intended to? “need a better name for this div”? – who wants a better name for a div that will contain Google’s Adsense code? Are Technorati IT people experimenting on a live site with multi-million visitor audience? Do they intend to pass something else for Google ads in the future? If modifying Google ads code is a crime as per G’s AdSense TOS, then shouldn’t this be even worse? (haven’t been messing with AdSense for ages so can’t be sure but seems like G doesn’t like this much either)

Yea, talk about large online media giants’ screw ups… (Hits “Publish” and pings Technorati)

How did this PR update treat the sites? First of all, my list now includes a PR 9 directory – lii.org. It used to be PR 8 but got to 9 this update. Overall, I see many directories which had PR 0 or even n/a obtain PR 3 or even 4. Surely there are some that drop to 0 or n/a – but you get what you deserve. What I notice, though, is that Google has become much faster these days (the effects of Caffeine, I presume) and I have seen sites and pages created 2-3 weeks ago obtain PR 2 and 3 after the update.

Ok you may say this ebook update is not a voluntary New Year present from me since I promised I would update it every PR update – but here is something else many of you will surely like. I have been approached many times by those who ordered the Directory Marketing ebook and those only considering purchasing it, with the same question: are there directories in your list that would suit my [insert your niche here] site? Also, people have been wondering if there is a reliable service that would do manual directory submissions according to the principles described in the ebook.

Well, now you got it! I have just launched a manual directory submission service of my own for those of you who do not have the time or desire to do it themselves but would still like to benefit from the techniques I teach in the book. Since this is my own service, I can guarantee everything is done just like it should for the most benefit for your site. The directories suitable for your site niche are selected from the 5,000 directory list, then your site is submitted to them at the speed most suitable for you, with up to 5 different titles and descriptions, then you get a detailed report so you know exactly what you paid for and what has been done, and what results have been obtained. Nothing like those pseudo “manual” submission services that promise to submit your site to 20,000 directories the list of which you will never see and the links from which you may only be wondering about (and as I have reported already, there is not even such number of directories out these worth dealing with, let alone live ones)!

But it gets even better: for those of you who have already purchased the Directory Marketing ebook or plan on purchasing it, there is a special member-only discount code available. You get it either with the update (for existing customers) or with the purchased ebook download (for the new customers) and can use it to get $50 off the cost of your chosen manual directory submission plan as many times as you wish, for as many sites of yours you wish to submit through this service. Let me remind you that all the updates and goodies are free for the existing customers – all you have to do is check your email box for the info about the update (in case you did not subscribe to the newsletter when purchasing the ebook you WON’T get this info – so if that’s the case let me know and I’ll try to sort you out).

So buy the directory ebook and enjoy the manual directory submission service, and all the best to you in the New Year!

Lately I’ve been getting spam emails posing as correspondence from Google Adwords. They go like this:

We detected irregular activity on your Google AdWords Account.

Please use the link below to verify your account immediately:

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=adwords

But the actual link leads to the phisher’s domain instead of Google. Of course when you enter your account details on the page they offer you, you just hand your Adwords account data (credit card info, all your campaigns data, your personal data, and so on) to the phisher.

There is one more way to see that this email comes from somebody other than they claim to be – if you look at the full headers of the message you will see this:

from copland.udel.edu ([128.175.13.92]:41061) by host02.localhostserver.net with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from )

- which means they are probably using some proxy running on a university server.

How to deal with such emails? First of all, of course, verify that you are on the actual Adwords login page and not somewhere else before entering your login and password. Secondy, I would surely love to see Google’s reaction to these phishing emails. Google has put a lot of effort into getting newbie webmasters involved in AdWords, now I guess it’s their turn to educate people who may not be very savvy about the dangers of phishing.

<h2 class=”hd“>Search Results</h2>

.hd {

height:1px;

overflow:hidden;

position:absolute;

top:-1000em;

width:1px;

}

Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”

Disallow: /search

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

Perhaps the cd=7 (click detail = 7th?) is the ranking and ct=res (click through = results?) is indicating that the click came from organic search rather than a universal search (news or video) result

Upon seeing this post, I rushed to check my own logs and have noticed a couple of similar referrer URLs. However, the ones I have seen in my logs had the traditional /search? element in them, not the new /url? promised by the Google Analytics blog this Tuesday.

What’s surprising about this whole story, however, is that the Google Analytics blog has been the only place so far to ever mention the referrer string changes – and there has been no official comment anywhere as to whether or not Patrick’s guess was correct and Google indeed includes the ranking data into these strings. Matt Cutts has commented vaguely on Patrick’s blog in the key of  “if you experiment some you will confirm your guess ” and tweetted advising “all SEOs” to read Patrick’s post. Well if this is true and all SEOs need to be aware of it why not do an official post or at least a post at Matt Cutt’s blog? Google’s public relations with SEOs amaze me.

This is what you normally post on your blog when you want to verify with Technorati that it belongs to you, in case somebody is not aware of it. Wow, so Eric Ward only verified his blog last December? But he started it almost a year ago, judging by the archives! Of course, once he got it verified he removed the “test” post – but the tricky thing about blog feeds is even if you remove a post it can still stay in the feed. OK theoretically I do not need Google Reader to discover such things – but if it’s your feed reader of choice that’s how you do it

With Google Reader, you can also identify where Google’s right hand does not know what its left hand is doing. As to what Google reader cannot do: it cannot identify feeds on blogs that either have feeds operated by Feedburner (e.g. evilgreenmonkey – btw Rob you still have the old onsite feed listed in your meta), or do not have the feed URL indicated in the blog’s meta tags (e.g. Eric Ward). WTF though, really? isn’t Feedburner owned by Google and isn’t Blogger which is Eric’s blogging platform owned by Google as well? And don’t you index all those blogs anyway as they ping you as they add posts? Come on Google guys, you are accumulating all this data for nothing while pushing all your behavioral ads on us?

Now, what would have been really interesting is if, along with launching comment sharing in the Reader, they let people watch what others are sharing and saying about their own blogs – with a blog ownership verification akin to Technorati’s or Google Webmaster Tools. A reputation management function of sorts – not like it is that difficult to do either. Come on, Google?

…starting today, your friends will be able to reply to shared items with comments, allowing you to have conversations with your friends right inside Reader. Comments can only be seen by friends of the person who originally shared the item.

So there you have it – whether or not Google is going to buy Twitter, it surely adds more and more social elements to its own products.

Yes, as testified by the above screenshot I took, Google external keyword tool now offers you to include adult content in your keyword results. This is something people have been having trouble with for a long time, and I had a similar experience myself when trying to check some keywords.

Technically speaking, as per Google’s AdWords Content Guidelines, adult content is not completely prohibited but restricted:

Sexual & adult content is restricted.

Ads cannot promote child pornography, any sexually suggestive content involving children, or other non-consensual sexual material. Ads also cannot promote teen pornography or pornography that describes models who might be underage <…>

Google does not allow this content at all, regardless of whether or not a site complies with local government regulations.

Although adult-related ads that comply with our policies can show in some countries, certain countries such as Germany, China, Korea, and India will not show any ads categorized as “Adult Sexual Content” at all, such as ads promoting any pornographic content.

Hence, if the PPC usage of these keywords is so limited, this MUST mean these results are geared towards using the tool for the organic purposes. Further proof of it:

The above screenshot shows the tool’s results for the very first one of the terms outlined in the guidelines as completely banned. The only thing that makes me wonder is the “Advertiser Competition” column data – does that show how many people TRY to get these ads up and running? or does it show the hypocrisy of Google’s AdWords guidelines?

On the other hand, I can see the practical use of this new option for AdWords advertisers: a bunch of times, while searching for suggestions for non-adult keywords, I did get some adult terms in the mix – so if this checkbox is intended to filter out the adult results out of their suggestions for sure then everybody should be happy in the end.

Sometimes site owners believe it necessary to disable Google cache on their sites or parts of their sites, for whatever reasons (I can think of at least a couple whitehat reasons and even more blackhat reasons right away ). But what I see every now and then is a lot of people are not doing it right. I see webmasters using something like:

<META HTTP-EQUIV=”CACHE-CONTROL” CONTENT=”NO-CACHE”>
or
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”PRAGMA” CONTENT=”NO-CACHE”>

- but these are ignored by Google and we still see “Cached” in Google results next to these sites.

What really works is described here:

If you don’t want searchers to be able to access a cached version of your page, use the noarchive meta tag like this:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive”>The page will still be crawled and indexed by Google, but users will not see a Cached link in the search results.

There’s another helpful bit here:

To prevent all search engines from showing a “Cached” link for your site, place this tag in the <HEAD> section of your page:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”>

To allow other search engines to show a “Cached” link, preventing only Google from displaying one, use the following tag:

<META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”>

Note: This tag only removes the “Cached” link for the page. Google will continue to index the page and display a snippet.