Blog publishing platforms and Google Sets

I was looking for a list of blog publishing platforms and thought Google Sets, a little-known Google labs experiment that takes a list of items as input and outputs a larger set of items of the same kind, might be useful.

I gave it WordPress, pivot, geeklog and greymatter as input and got a pretty comprehensive list of blog publishing platforms.

Google did a pretty good job with that, quite impressive.

Disk Free Human User

I really don’t know how I haven’t heard of that blog until now. Very interesting, high-quality and inspiring content. this is definitely going to be one of the very few blogs I’m regularly following.

Stop your competitors from spying on your work

First of all, I would like to thank nickycakes for his post, “How To Be A Complete Dick to Your Nosy Competition”, who gave me the idea (we’re basically doing the same thing, but my way can identify a much larger part of internet marketers).

So, for those of you who don’t know cakes’s version yet, the idea is identifying when other affiliates/marketers are coming to snoop on your site, and rickroll them.

Cakes did it by building a database of IPs and user agents using a tracking pixel on marketing-related forums,

My idea is checking the user history for sites that are typical for internet-marketers, installed tech-savvy addons (like Firebug, Foxy SEO Tool, etc) in case he’s using Firefox (thanks GNUCitizen) and the referrer (to see if he came from Yahoo’s siteexplorer or a site:, link: and linkdomain: query).

Another more useful use for this could be to make it harder on them to spy on you, by showing another copywrite, design or affiliate program to make your competitors think your work is worse than it really is, and not to give them any ideas to steal from you. Although its much funnier to imagine the look on their face when they click your PPC ad, checking SEO competition or spying on your link building techniques and gets rickrolled.

Obviously it shouldn’t be used when advertising something for peoples who are anything related to online marketing, like designers or programmers (who might have Firebug installed for instance), but it can work well for lose-weight-fast-with-no-effort type of sites that are targeted for the average users.

The technical details:

History

It has a list of  URLs that it checks if the user visited, using the famous computedStyle bug, which checks if you visited a URL by creating a link pointing to it and checking the color its getting

	urls:[
		// Domain registrars
		'http://www.godaddy.com/',
		'http://www.moniker.com/',
		'http://www.name.com/',
		'http://www.namecheap.com/',
		// Blogs
		'http://www.bluehatseo.com/',
		'http://www.seo-blackhat.com/',
		'http://www.blackhat-seo.com/',
		'http://www.slightlyshadyseo.com/',
		'http://www.nickycakes.com/',
		// Forums
		'http://forums.digitalpoint.com/',
		'http://www.blackhatworld.com/',
		'http://forums.seochat.com/',
		'http://seoforums.org/',
		// General
		'http://getyacg.com/',
		'http://linkfarmevolution.com/',
		'http://datapresser.com/',
		'http://www.clickbank.com/index.html',
		'http://www.cj.com/',
		'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization',

		// For the Israeli readers
		'http://www.wesell.co.il/',
		'http://www.isoc.org.il/',
		'http://www.livedns.co.il/',
		'http://www.k.co.il/',
		'http://forums.k.co.il/',
		'http://www.pjs.co.il/',
	],

The script creates an iframe with some CSS and a link:

var ifr=document.createElement('iframe');
ifr.style.display='none';
document.body.appendChild(ifr);
ifr.contentWindow.document.write('


');
var a=document.createElement('a');
ifr.contentWindow.document.body.appendChild(a);

And goes over the URLs to check if any of them were visited:

for (var i=0; i

Installed Addons
To check for addons, it tries to load images with the chrome URI schema that only exists if you installed the addon. if the image loads, it means the addon is installed:
	addons: [
		'chrome://firebug/content/blank.gif',
		'chrome://seoquake/content/skin/menulogo.png',
		'chrome://foxyseotool/skin/logo.png',
		'chrome://searchstatus/skin/classic/searchstatus/pr10.png',
		'chrome://seopen/skin/seopen.png',
		'chrome://senseo/content/neutral.png',
		'chrome://rankquest/skin/delicious.gif',
	]
It tries to create the images, and binds the success function to the onload event:
for (var i=0; i

Referrer
It also checks the referrer to check if the user came from Yahoo's siteexplorer, or used Google/Yahoo link:, linkdomain: or site: query
if (document.referrer.indexOf('http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com') == 0 || document.referrer.match(/http:\/\/[^\/]+\.(google|yahoo)\..*=(link|site|linkdomain):/i)) {
If any of the URLs was visited, any of the addons is installed, or the referrer matches one of the tests, it runs the script in the success function:
	success: function(){
		if (CoLo.found) return;
		CoLo.found=true;
		document.location='http://www.thekickback.com/rickroll/rickroll.php';
	},

Which redirects to rickroll. Obviosuly it can be changed to any other script. if you have any other creative ideas feel free to commeht them.
I'll update the post with the code soon, after some more tweaks when Shabat is out. The post has enough information for you to DIY. I won't be releasing the full source code as I found much more interesting stuff to with it that I might discuss in the future.
			 

		

Come on Google, really?!

The Scotland Yard has shutdown over 1000 sites that claimed to sell designers goods for cheap prices.

The sites main source for suckers… hmm, I mean, traffic was Google searches for terms like “discount ugg boots” (look what happened to the SERP – it has around trizillion DMCA complaints).

The site owners seems to get ranked for those kind of terms for organic traffic using some very shady link building techniques (links to Yahoo’s linkdomain results, here’s Google link results) to make sales.

Most of the links are from Chinese websites, which is quite dubious for a site in English that managed to rank very successfully in google.co.uk for highly-competitive terms.

The links themselves are also very suspicious. I mean, look at it:

ugg boots
uggs
uggs
uggs
uggs
uggs
ugg
ugg
ugg

All of those invisible links (they’re inside a marquee container with 1px height) are stuffed above the opening <HTML> tag of the document. Can it be more obvious?

Most of the links seems to come from sites that were hacked (some Chinese government sites, too), probably in an automated manner that put those links into every HTML file it could find.

What does it take for Google to notice something is wrong? if it didn’t notice such obvious spammy link building techniques that was done using hacking, I think the SEO world is giving Google too much credit.