A week or so ago I had a ping from my mate Dean Hunt. Dean has a site in the top 50 online money making blogs and he had a problem.

He had spotted that someone, somehow had managed to insert about 50 links into his site linking off to lots of parasite hosted pills sites.

Not good for business even worse for rankings. We have since found that he wasnt the only one!

(There are in fact over 13,000 sites with this issue from what I can crawl)

So after a bit of advice from DaveN and Ben I managed to clear the problem and since then Dean’s rankings have returned!

Without going into much of the detail about how they did this (If you’re interested I did a small write up on Deans site) the end result did seem to pose a problem for a lot of blogs.

Dean like everyone else couldn’t see the links in his site as they had been cloaked for Google only so I decided it might be useful to create a simple tool that would show you what you linked out to from Googles perspective via the cache copy or your page.

Cachechecker is a simple tool that shows you what links are present in the Google cached copy of your page. Click here to try the tool for yourself, its cheap free and easy.

Its simple granted but the story made the front page of Sphinn so I know its something that worries a lot of folks.

Anyone have any comments or suggestions ?

Times are hard and they look like they will be getting harder for most people. Spammers however have some advantages over the rest when times get hard: -

The click based spammers (Adsense, AFF ppc offers etc) don’t suffer the same problems as those selling a physical product as they don’t actually have to sell anything. They get paid for the simple action of a ‘click’

Even if you are skint you can still window shop and click.. They also have the advantage that they aren’t tied to a product or service so swapping out to an alternative offer is pretty painless, as long as there are advertisers they will prosper.

I think that there will be advertisers throughout any downturn as it remains one of the most measurable ways to spend on advertising there is.

Those spammers who have created networks to promote a set niche will have to do some adjustments it seems but they are often in a position of power where they can sell their cheaply gained traffic to the highest and most desperate merchant.

Spammers often also have the luxury of being able to earn a living whilst the spam adds to what they earn, giving them security and making the downturn less painful.

So if your feeling the credit crunch fire up the spam and ride it out.

If you use a free theme from a Google advert you are an idiot..

Yeah you are, admit it. You would have to be unless you knew what you were doing. Having spent some time recently helping out when people have had their blogs hacked I decided to take another look at the free theme scams and was shocked by what I found.

I say I was shocked, thats a lie really. I knew what to expect and I knew where to look. I have to also admit I know all this and how effective it can be as I have done some of this in the past too.

OK so what I did was nip over to Google and search for ‘Free wordpress themes’ and heres what we get: -

Now as you can see we have a few paid adwords ads for free themes, suspicious? Yeah me too…

We also have a couple of decent organic results from upstanding places like Smashing Magazine etc.

So what we will do is grab a random theme from the top adwords adverts and the top organic result and have a poke around to see whats there.

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Had a great time at SEOroadshow over the weekend but a couple of the conversations I had got me thinking. I know thats unusual but bear with me and we will see what falls out of my fuzzy brain this morning…

When running a typical link building campaign most agencies and SEO’s will do the normal things to make sure they minimise the potential footprint of the campaign itself.

• They will make sure they spread the links around
• They will vary the footprints and anchors
• Etc etc

But most people will have a set of criteria that they will look for when finding places to buy build links and one of the factors people use will inevitably be PR.

I know all the debates about what PR is actually good for and im not going to get into that, lets just say that as a indicator of crawl frequency it does offer us a good insight into how the campaign will be perceived by the search engines

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Many people who have met me will testify to the fact that I could do with losing a few pounds (I expect that MickG, PaulH, DaveN, Pilky, Esrun, TheKaptain and VSloathe and many others will all now be reading the rest of this with a smile and some enthusiasm at the thought of more ammo for taking the piss, I give as good as I get though! – Im not linking you lot as youll have to find this yourselves )

So in the past month or so I have taken on the task of running to get rid of some of that excess baggage. I started last month at the top end of 13stone (If your a yank use Google to work out that just in pounds or learn that our way is better) and so far I have lost about 8 pounds, that included a weeks holiday so im happy so far although id like to get down to 12 stone 3 pounds – Top end of ideal for my height.

Spending all day and night in front of a macbook isnt the ideal way to keep slim and I reckon like most of IT most SEO’s could lose a bit of weight.

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