A discussion of earning with Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers

This is scary. I just received this same email almost 10 times, apparently from Google regarding one of the pages on this blog containing malicious software…

Dear site owner or webmaster of affiliatebestprograms.com, We recently discovered that some of your pages can cause users to be infected with malicious software. We have begun showing a warning page to users who visit these pages by clicking a search result on Google.com. Below are some example URLs on your site which can cause users to be infected (space inserted to prevent accidental clicking in case your mail client auto-links URLs): http://affiliatebestprograms .com/2007/ http://affiliatebestprograms .com/2007/12/ http://www.affiliatebestprograms .com/2007/ Here is a link to a sample warning page: http://www.google.com/interstitial?url=http%3A//affiliatebestprograms.com/2007/ We strongly encourage you to investigate this immediately to protect your visitors. Although some sites intentionally distribute malicious software, in many cases the webmaster is unaware because: 1) the site was compromised 2) the site doesn’t monitor for malicious user-contributed content 3) the site displays content from an ad network that has a malicious advertiser If your site was compromised, it’s important to not only remove the malicious (and usually hidden) content from your pages, but to also identify and fix the vulnerability. We suggest contacting your hosting provider if you are unsure of how to proceed. StopBadware also has a resource page for securing compromised sites: http://www.stopbadware.org/home/security Once you’ve secured your site, you can request that the warning be removed by visiting http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=45432 and requesting a review. If your site is no longer harmful to users, we will remove the warning. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

I thought this was a joke or spam but the scariest part is the headers look official…

From - Mon Feb 11 21:10:25 2008 X-Account-Key: account8 X-UIDL: 1202776218.14784.ipdmhg0179mia.pubip.peer1.net,S=4021 X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 X-Mozilla-Keys: Return-Path: <3i-iwRwcKCWwXYbOZViQYYQVO.MYWgOLWKcdObKPPSVSKdOLOcdZbYQbKWc.MYW@google.com> Delivered-To: *********@affiliatebestprograms.com Received: (qmail 14780 invoked by uid 89); 12 Feb 2008 00:30:17 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO smtp-out3.google.com) (216.239.45.15) by ipdmhg0179mia.pubip.peer1.net with (DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA encrypted) SMTP; 12 Feb 2008 00:30:17 -0000 Received-SPF: pass (ipdmhg0179mia.pubip.peer1.net: SPF record at _netblocks.google.com designates 216.239.45.15 as permitted sender) Received: from zps67.corp.google.com (zps67.corp.google.com [172.25.146.67]) by smtp-out3.google.com with ESMTP id m1C0U6nk017398 for <********@affiliatebestprograms.com>; Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:30:06 -0800 Received: from zps37.corp.google.com (zps37.corp.google.com [172.25.146.37]) by zps67.corp.google.com with SMTP id m1C0U50b031219; Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:30:06 -0800 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; s=beta; d=google.com; c=nofws; q=dns; h=received:mime-version:message-id:date:auto-submitted:subject:from: to:content-type:content-transfer-encoding; b=mUYX/kS5CZjP3onahyH5ueo2UgOw/HqPC5rfRCfVlpUo8mag2BSLqxfOtxNP0uNN/ 95cerx4UtuxdMpWeC1YXQ== Received: from smtp-out2.google.com (fpd7.prod.google.com [10.253.4.7]) by zps37.corp.google.com with ESMTP id m1BNFAl2013510 for <*********@affiliatebestprograms.com>; Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:30:03 -0800 Received: by smtp-out2.google.com with SMTP id 7so520822fpd.0 for <*********@affiliatebestprograms.com>; Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:30:03 -0800 (PST) MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-ID: <000feae835ad0445eb285436ce17f6d@google.com> Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:30:03 -0800 Auto-Submitted: auto-generated Received: by 10.253.4.68 with SMTP id 68mr715119fpd.1.1202776203081;a Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:30:03 -0800 (PST) Subject: Malware notification regarding affiliatebestprograms.com From: Google Search Quality To: a***e@affiliatebestprograms.com, a***n@affiliatebestprograms.com, a***********r@affiliatebestprograms.com, c*****t@affiliatebestprograms.com, i***@affiliatebestprograms.com, p*********@affiliatebestprograms.com, s******@affiliatebestprograms.com, w********@affiliatebestprograms.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; Format=Flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Although none of the email accounts listed in the “to:” field are valid and this batch of emails was caught by my “catch-all” address which explains why I received so many copies of the email. Unfortunately, from a network engineer perspective and as somebody who has been running dedicated servers for almost 15 years, this email would normally be classified as “spam” due to the blanket recipients. At least experienced spammers use whois records for a domain to address the owner. Furthermore, my site is listed in my Google Webmasters Tools account (with a a valid email !doh!)

To make this notice from Google even more ridiculous, the pages of this blog Google claims they found malware on “DON’T EXIST”, they are directory indexes that don’t even exist because they are handled by a mod_rewrite setup by Wordpress. Even more uncanny, I removed my blog archives a long time ago in favor of my “Most Popular Articles” page and to lessen the clutter on this blog’s sidebar. Evidently, it looks like Google is trying to index directories found in the permalinks on blogs which should set a lightbulb off for any clever SEO’s running wordpress - hint - hint - black hats can smell a great doorway page by adding an actual directory and an index file :-)

Technically, a search engine should only follow links it finds directly on a page. I once had a problem with Google taking the a url from a “hidden” form field that was used to pass a return url for a successful Paypal payment. The success script also sent a text message to my phone whenever a successful sale was made so I could follow up. As a security precaution, I setup the return script to also page my cellphone with any hacking attempts (ie: accessing the return url with inaccurate or no form data). Well, Google took that url from a hidden text field (again, it wasn’t an href) and was calling the return script with no input. Every time Google did this, it sent me a text message with the “hackers” (googlebot’s) ip. In one sense I was relieved my payment script wasn’t being hacked for real but in another sense, I was amazed Google’s bot actually picks up non-href’ed links for indexing. In my opinion, anything in between the <form></form> tags should never be indexed for obvious reasons.

From an SEO standpoint, my main question remains, “what is Google doing in the malware and virus protection business” ? I guess I’m mistaken that Google is a search engine because now it appears they’ve joined the the PC Cleaning business. Somehow, I don’t find it comforting that Google is taking this approach of putting warnings on pages their google-bots detect as “dangerous”. This could be particularly harmful for webmasters and site-owners who find themselves wrongly accused of their pages containing spyware, or if a bot detects a false positive, etc. On the flipside, Google is also an advertising network and using this new “malware detection”, they could easily use it as an excuse to remove websites or pages using other advertising programs beside Adsense. I am running ADSDAQ with Google Adsense as my fill if there are no appropraite CPM ads and I highly doubt the ads I’ve seen running in ADSDAQ contain malware. Let’s face it, a Google Adsense ad is more likely to lead you to a page with malware or worse.

         

7 Comments Permalink

I’m sure like many bloggers out there, I like to see that little green pagerank toolbar increase instead of decrease. As of this recent Google pagerank update this blog saw our ranking drop one point from PR4 to PR3. Why this happened in totally a mystery because the only things that have changed in between this update and the last update was the addition of over 60 quality posts and over 400 backlinks from reputable sources. There has never been any “link buying” or “link selling” or anything defined by Google’s resident search engine spam expert, Matt Cutts, as “gaming” Google’s search algorithm. In fact, there has been little or no SEO effort going on at this blog and it has been progressing on a natural basis, only focused on quality content and receiving incoming links because fellow bloggers have found interesting information here.

The one thing that seriously pisses me off is Google’s recent punishment of PayPerPost bloggers and others who have been accused of selling “text links” when Google obviously turns a blind eye to people selling text links in their Adwords advertising program. It’s one thing to play high and mighty with bloggers who need traffic from the search engine giant but to blatantly say one thing and do another is not only essentially evil, it’s an inherently dishonest business ethic.

Case in point: The following Adsense ad was found on a directory site I was submitting one of forums to and when I saw it, I was intrigued as to not only why somebody with a PR7 site would be selling a text link for $40 but I was curious as to how this site garnered a coveted PR7 from Google and why the site owner would risk losing their pagerank over blatantly selling a text link for the purpose of gaming Google for such small amount of money. Anyway, here’s the ad :

The link for this ad is leads to the following blog :

http://www.estacioncero.com/

Which is a valid PR7 domain, however, the blog has only 24 posts on it dating back to November 2007. How the hell could it be that this relatively new blog with no comments, no RSS readers, no viable content could outrank not only my blog, but some of my favorite blogs such as the wonderful Andy Beard or the ever witty SEO 2.0 blog.

So, I visited Backlink Watch to check out some of the backlinks coming into this PR7 site and I was amazed to see roughly a thousand less backlinks than this blog and the PR7 blog’s links were all coming from the same sources, except for one magical backlink. That magical backlink was (http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/showcase/index.cfm?loc=es_xla) which is a PR9 page on Adobe’s site, entirely in Spanish, that spotlights a few sites using Adobe/Macromedia’s ColdFusion authoring platform. Adobe’s description of the PR7 site states that it offers free wallpapers, free icons, a photograph gallery and other elements that *ARE NOT* on the site. I also noticed the date on the Adobe page was 27/03/2006, however, the PR7 domain that is using Adwords to sell text links was registered on 25/10/2007. So, somebody got lucky and bought an expired domain with a PR9 link from Adobe and Google’s ranking algorithm is obviously so inaccurate that it can’t detect a domain had been fully dropped and re-registered and that it is not even the same content as it had been. So much for Matt Cutt’s claims that Google has a “duplicate content” filter. That fallicy is pretty much shot out of the water when Google can’t even detect a domain was fully *dropped* and re-registered. The most hilarious part is the Adobe page is to spotlight sites designed in ColdFusion and the last time I checked, Worpress didn’t run on the ColdFusion platform…

Now before anybody goes off thinking I’m against Google, that is not true. I am against dishonesty and corrupt business ethics and when a company pretends to be doing good by causing harm and turns around and does the same thing they punish others for, it reeks of hipocracy.

         

13 Comments Permalink

Most of the blogging community and webmasters on Digital Point and other forums were pretty convinced this recent Google pagerank update had been completed but there are still issues going on such as Technorati.com showing a “greybar” and pagerank N/A when using digpagerank.com to check the various datacenters.

Could it be the update is not completed and Google may still be in the process of updating or has Google now gone after Technorati and exacted a punishment on them like they did so many bloggers in the last update ? Many Digital Point forum members are reporting in that their StumbleUpon blogs and member pages that once had Pagerank are now zeroed as well. I wonder if Google is going against the Social Networking community now like they did with people selling text links?

What do you think ?

         

19 Comments Permalink

I just caught this on Reddit a few minutes ago… Did you see what Google’s stock price ended up at today ?? The data is here, but I took a screenshot for posterity sake. :-)

Actually, this is the third time Google’s stock has closed at 666 in the last few months. I think somebody’s trying to tell us something !!!!

         

1 Comment Permalink