Category Archives: Internet

Humour, Internet, Rants

Spam aimed at religious idiots

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Religious people, by their very definition, are gullible. After all, if they’re stupid enough to believe in fictional ‘gods’ then obviously they’re gullible enough to believe in any old bollocks. This makes them prime targets for scammers, particularly if you play on the ‘Jesus card’.

There’s nothing the religious like to hear more than someone else showing how much they too love Jesus, because of course another follower of their particular bogus faith will no doubt be a trustworthy sucker like themselves.

Therefore, you’ll often get scam emails sent around that bang on about Jesus and Christianity for ages in order to establish some sort of affinity with their target sucker, the religious freak. One such scam email I received recently was this:

From: Hizbeith Carlson <hizbeith_2@hotmail.com >
Subject: From Mrs Hizbeith Carlson

From Mrs Hizbeith Carlson
Sicogi-Marcory
Abidjan Cote D’ Ivoire

Dearest in Christ,

As you can see from the first line, this one’s gonna lay it on nice and thick. Any religious idiot worth their salt will be impressed with a ‘Dearest in Christ’ intro, and will read on, their heart warmed at such a message.

Greetings in the Name above all names, Jesus Christ our Lord and saviour, I am Mrs Hizbeith Carlson. I am married to Mr.Livingston Carlson who worked with Kuwait embassy in Ivory Coast for many years before he died in the year 2005.We were married without a child. He died after a brief illness that lasted for only four days. Before his death we were both born again Christian.

It gets better, this woman is a born again Christian. She must truly be worthy of knowing, and as her husband died quickly without suffering, god must have looked kindly on him, or some such shit.

Since his death I decided not to remarry or get a child outside my matrimonial home which the Bible is against. When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of (($3.200.000.00) Three million two hundred thousand dollar in a Bank in Ivory Coast. Presently, this money is still in bank. Recently, my Doctor told me that I would not last for the next Eight months due to cancer problem.

Here we go, there’s money involved. Who saw that one coming? She’s got cancer and millions of dollar US. The broken English isn’t some attempt to play on people’s sympathy mind you, it’s partly because the author doesn’t use English as a first language and partly because the target audience is too stupid to notice anyway.

The one that disturbs me most is my stroke sickness. Having known my condition I decided to donate this fund to a charity organization that will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct herein. I want an organization that will use this fund for orphanages, school and church, widows, propagating the word of God and to endeavour that the house of God is maintained, Isaiah 56:7 For my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.” The Bible made us to understand that “Blessed is the hand that giveth”.I took this decision because I don’t have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are not Christians and I don’t want my husband’s efforts to be used by unbelievers.

She’s donating money to orphanages. How noble. God’s good work being carried out once again. She’s quoting the Bible, which means she must be a Christian, and she doesn’t want her money going to people who aren’t Christian. The essence of religion, anyone who doesn’t follow the same fairy story you do is clearly not worthy of your help.

We must read on.

I don’t want a situation where this money will be used in an ungodly way. This is why I am taking this decision. I am not afraid of death hence I know where I am going. I know that I am going to be in the bosom of the Lord. Exodus 14 VS 14 says that “the lord will fight my case and I shall hold my peace”. I don’t need any telephone communication in this regard because of my health hence the presence of my husband’s relatives around me always. I don’t want them to know about this development. With God all things are possible. As soon as I receive your reply I shall give you the contact of the Bank.

More Bible quotes and bullshit about the money being used for evil if you don’t take it from her. Any good Christian will be reaching for their bank details as they read this, feeling it is god’s will that they stupidly fall into this bullshit.

I want you and the church to always pray for me because the lord is my shepherd. My happiness is that I lived a life of a worthy Christian.

Whoever that wants to serve the Lord must serve him in spirit and Truth. Please always be prayerful all through your life.

I’m struggling to believe at this point, that even someone stupid enough to believe in god would be so stupid as to believe this horse turd. But then I guess some people must do.

Please assure me that you will act accordingly as I Stated herein. Hoping to receive your reply with the above information.

Remain blessed in the Lord

Yes, remain blessed in the Lord. Stupid bastards.

Take care,
In Christ’s Holy Love

Yours Sister in Christ
Mrs Hizbeith Carlson

What a sign off, in Christ’s Holy Love… your Sister in Christ.

You have got to be one dumb fuck to actually believe any of this, which as I stated is why they target the religious imbeciles who believe in god.

Be wary of spam emails like this, they’re not all this easy to spot 😉

General, Humour, Internet

The Ten Commandments; why god was rubbish at Internet Marketing

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I’m sure you’ve heard of the ten commandments (I actually had to look them up for this, but there you go). They’re the supposed rules handed down by some bloke with a beard, to another bloke with a beard who looked remarkably like Charlton Heston.

Anyway, the ten commandments aren’t particularly well optimised for SEO. You’d think a list of items made by god would be great link bait, but sadly god didn’t really put much effort into the whole thing, he didn’t read SEOchat.com and didn’t take any advice from John Chow or Shoemoney, otherwise he’d have created a wicked piece of link bait.

For example, writing the ten commandments on stone tablets and smashing them? Not particularly indexable. Google struggles with querystrings and session IDs, it’s not going to manage to index something scrawled on stone. Then, much like creating a splash page with no text, he shoves them in the ark of the covenant and shuts the lid.

Googlebot won’t get past that in a hurry.

Then of course there’s the total number of commandments, ten. Not the ideal number for a list is it? We all know the best number is seven items. Ten is too many, people get bored. Who’s going to stumble a list of ten and read them all? Nobody, that’s who. They’ll get down as far ‘no committing adultery’ and then move on, probably to a site with a funny video of a old woman falling off the roof of her house. Much more entertaining.

Also the content is a bit, well, tame. When you create a list (of 7 items, not 10), you want the content to be controversial, entertaining and funny. Honour they father and mother? Pretty forgettable stuff.

Let’s look at the original list as created by Charlton Heston.

  1. You shall have no other gods before me
  2. You shall not make for yourself an idol
  3. You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God
  4. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy
  5. Honor your father and mother
  6. You shall not murder
  7. You shall not commit adultery
  8. You shall not steal
  9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor
  10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house / You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife

Nothing there that would make me want to link it or Digg it.

Interestingly, the not committing adultery is a funny one. It classes adultery as a sexual act between a man and a woman who is married to another man. So… if the woman isn’t married, a married man can have an affair with her, in the eyes of the Christians.

Guess they were a little bit sexist back then.

Anyhow, back to the seven commandments. Let’s have a go at optimising that list for SEO purposes, and see if we can’t make it better link bait.

  1. You shall have no other gods before me, unless they’re really cool, like Eric Cantona or Paul Gascoigne – they’re OK
  2. You shall vote for your favourite idol so long as you disagree with Simon Cowell
  3. Sunday’s are for shopping in Tesco, there’s less religious tossers on a Sunday
  4. Wrongfully using the name of your god is funny, especially when swearing at ethnic minorities – but as we all know god doesn’t exist, so what the hell!
  5. Murder who you like, religion is the cause of all wars anyway so just blame god, everyone else does
  6. Adultery is fun
  7. Shag your neigbour’s wife, she’s probably gagging for it anyway. While you’re there nick the fucker’s lawnmower too, he ain’t using it

There, that’s better. An optimised list of the Seven Commandments. If only god had thought about how he’d rank in Google when he came up with the original ones.

Internet

Spam emails really should improve

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We’ve all had spam emails in the past, some of us receive hundreds of the damn things each day. They’re usually very easy to spot, some more so than others. However they still get sent because generally, there are still people who fall for them.

I just received this prize winning notification email, which could be described as a classic, but I wonder if the spammers are really trying anymore.

—–Original Message—–
From: Mrs. Becky Owen [mailto:info_europeanlotterycompanydavid@yahoo.com.hk]
Sent: 06 May 2008 10:36
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: [SPAM?]: REF: WE67/4360/34

EUROPEAN PRIZE AWARD DEPT
1 Plough Place,
London EC4A 1DE
UNITED KINGDOM
REF: WE67/4360/34
BATCH: 11/4578/GN

OK, so far so good. The email claims to be originating from London and there’s even an address. But wait, the email address is .hk… what’s that about?

Attn:Sir/Madam.

Top of days greetings to you.Finally today, we announce that you are one of the winners of the ELECTRONIC LOTTERY PROGRAMS.

held on 6th MAY,2008. Your company and your personal
e-mail addresses, attached to ticket number: 7-1-8-36-4-22 under agent ID: 18 and lucky ball number 7363789,which consequently won in the Tenth lottery category.

My email address and my company? I don’t have a company… I’m getting suspicious.

You have therefore been awarded a lump sum pay out of 860,641.28 Great British Pounds(GBP) which amounts to $1,500,000.00 (One Million,Five Hundred Thousand United States DOLLARS).

Now, why would they tell me the amount in US Dollars? The email is supposedly from a UK address in London, I’m based in the UK… so why mention US Dollars? I’ll tell you why, because the kind of people who usually fall for these scams are based in the USA, they’re Americans.

Americans are the most gullible race on the planet, particularly when they think there’s some sort of financial gain heading their way.

The online draws was conducted by a random selection of email addresses from an exclusive list of 29,031 E-mail addresses of individuals and corporate bodies picked by an advanced automated random computer search from the internet. No ticket were sold but all email addresses were assigned to different ticket numbers for representation and privacy. This is to encourage our prominent and consistent Microsoft Internet Explorer users all over the world, and for the Continues use of E-mail.

Whoooaaah there! Internet Explorer users??? Now I know it’s a load of shite. I haven’t used IE for years, it’s an awful browser full of security holes. It is used by Americans quite a bit though. Notice a recurring theme?

Your fund has been insured with your identification number {CPEL/OWN/9876}. To claim your winning prize, you must first contact the claims department by email for Processing and remittance of your prize to you.
***********************************
Mr. Mark David
Executive Secretary,
TEL:+447 045 740 589
+447 024 098 309
EMAIL:info_europeanlotterycompanymark2@yahoo.com.hk
**********************************
Do email the above email address all at once. In order to avoid unnecessary delays and complications, please remember to quote your reference and winning numbers in all correspondences with your claims officer.

You are to keep all lotto information away from the general public especially your ticket number and ballot number.All your personal datas are to be sent to YAHOO/MICROSOFT ACCREDITED AGENT via email for the processing of your winning.

‘personal datas’? ‘processing of your winning’? The grammar is really starting to break up. Evidently the author of this scam doesn’t use English as a first language.

FILL THE FORM BELOW WITH YOUR DATAS.

1.Full Name:____________________ 2.Address:______________________ 3.Nationality:____________________
4.Age:______________________________
5.Occupation:____________________ 6.Phone:________________________ 7.State of Origin:_________________ 8.Country:______________________ Sincerely, Mrs. Becky Owen Online Co-ordinator Secretary ====================================================

Again, if they’re in the UK, I’m in the UK, we’re all in the UK together… why ask for my STATE OF ORIGIN??? We don’t have States in the UK.

OUR Executives:
Dr. P. Swier (CEO), Mr. Gerald Goodman (Manager
Foreign Operations), Mr. Franklyn Van Der Weijden
(Manager Domestic Banking Operations), Dr. James
Williams (Director International Credit Department),
Mrs. Lonni K Anderson (Legal Representative), Mrs.
Lyudmyla Marchukova(Regional Manager), Mr. Stephen
Boer (Chairman), Mr. Chris Moritz(International
Relation Officer).

And they print out a list of impressive sounding names to give the scam credence. That’s me sold, have my bank details so you can send me the monies without delay.

Seriously, if you’re an Internet scammer, please at least try to make an effort with your emails. It’ll make all of the difference.

Affiliate Marketing, Internet, Rants

Text Link Ads refuse one of my sites

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I just received a refusal from the advertising network Textlink-ads.com for one of my websites. This came as something of an annoyance to me, rather than a surprise, because the site itself is one of the newest of my portfolio, but one of the fastest growing.

The traffic on the website is very good, slightly below MrDaz.com presently, but should eclipse this site in the next month. However, as I said it is new. Which means it doesn’t have any Netcraft data, it doesn’t have any Google PageRank and it doesn’t have any history.

All of the useless stuff that pointless networks take into consideration when deciding whether they’ll take on a website or not.

Textlink-Ads said:

Hello Darren,

Unfortunately, at this time we feel that your site http://www.*******.com, does not meet our internal requirements to be accepted into the InLinks publishing program. We recommend that you continue marketing your website and generate a significant more amount of traffic to your site. Once you feel you have strong enough traffic — this normally takes a few months at least — you can feel free to contact us back and we will be happy to revisit the opportunity to work with you.

I was a bit annoyed and replied straight away with:

You probably shouldn’t base your decisions on Google PageRank.

Just a hint.

😉

As a consequence I won’t be using Textlink-Ads on the site even when they consider it to have met their ‘internal requirements’. I offered them the chance and they refused, their loss.

It’s frustrating but as I say, they’re the ones who will miss out.

Affiliate Marketing, Google, Internet

Play.com miss the point with PPC restrictions

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Today sees Google changing the rules with regards to brand bidding on its Adwords platforms, meaning that you can now bid on terms such as HMV, WHSmith and Play.com… should you wish to.

So what does this mean? Well, for one it means that you’re likely to get clued up companies bidding on the brand names of other companies, so for example Tesco may bid on the keywords ‘Asda’, ‘Sainsburys’ and ‘Morrisons’, meaning they’ll get search traffic for people looking for their competitors. There’s nothing the other companies can do about.

Or is there? What they could do is allow their affiliates to bid for them. You see, now that there are no restrictions on brand bidding, there’s nothing stopping HMV, GAME, WHSmith and everyone who sells games and DVDs bidding on the Play.com brand. Therefore, Play.com will be losing a lot of traffic and sales to their competitors. If they were smart, they’d allow their affiliates to bid on their brand name as well, meaning the affiliates would be shouldering the PPC costs for them, in exchange for the commissions. Then, anyone looking for Play.com, rather than finding their competitors, they’d find Play.com through the affiliates.

That’s if Play.com were smart. Sadly, they’re not. They’re quite stupid. They, and a great many other retailers have panicked at the change in Google’s brand restrictions and have sent out this email.

Hi Darren,

Bearing in mind the Google changes on brand bidding which come into effect on Monday, we would like to take the opprotunity to draw your attention to Play.com’s PPC restrictions:

“Unless specifically agreed in writing with Play.com, Affiliates must
not:

i) purchase, license or operate any domain name which is confusingly similar to ‘play.com’;

ii) bid on the ‘play.com’ keyword, or any of its misspellings, on any of the search engines that currently operate web services; possible derivatives of the brand term are:

Play.com
Play
Play .com
Www.play.com
Play.com uk
Play com
www play com
www Play
www.play
play dot com
playdotcom
play .com uk
Play.c
Plya
Play co
Playcouk
Play.co.uk
www.play.co.uk
play uk

and also:

Playusa
Playusa.com
Play usa
Wwwplayusa
www.play.usa
www.playusa.com
ww.playusa.com
playusa.com
play usa com
playusacom
play.usa.com
playusa.com play usa

iii) use the keyword ‘play.com’ to perform paid search activity across any search engines that operates web services  and to that effect, Affiliates must add the ‘play.com’ keyword and its derivatives as above as negative matches to their PPC campaigns.

iv) use the term Play.com or its derivatives in the Affiliate’s ad text for driving traffic from Play.com’s competitors’ brand terms to Play.com’s site nor the affiliate’s sites.

v) drive paid or unpaid traffic from search engines directly to Play.com pages or the Play.com site overall. The affiliate has to use their own sites for traffic from search engines.

For the avoidance of doubt, the above restrictions or the specific terms of agreement regarding authorised PPC activity shall supersede any conflicting provision that may be found in any section of this Agreement.

These rules are effective immediately and should the Affiliate not comply They will be banned from the Play.com affiliate programme with immediate effect and also face potential lawsuit. “

‘Face a potential lawsuit’? What are they thinking? How stupid are they?

I worry for the sanity of these people. All that will happen now is they’ll lose business to their competitors, and I hope they do. I hope they lose a lot of business. Come on GAME, HMV, WHSmith and everyone else… bid on Play.com and the rest of the keywords Play have listed above. Take the customers from them. As they won’t let affiliates bid on the terms you’ll find them quite cheap too!

Happy bidding.

Google, Internet

Christians threaten Google with legal action

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This is why I hate religion, it’s the cause of all arguments. Christians in particular make me sick, they’re always trying to ram their own beliefs down the the throats of everyone else. This time the pompous bastards are trying to force Google to spread their own brand of stupidity via Adwords, but Google quite rightly has said no.

Google has rules on advertising on Adwords that states that you cannot advertise a website that is irrelevant to the chosen keywords. The Christians want to advertise their own Christian institute website on keywords for abortion, so that they can spread their views on abortion.

It’s WRONG! say the Christians. Google has said they can’t do that because their website, a religious website, has nothing to do with abortion. In the true tradition of Christians being meddling, interfering tossers they’ve threatened to take Google to court over it.

Er, Google can do what it likes. It’s Google’s own website, if they don’t want you opinionated, self righteous morons spreading your waffle on irrelevant searches, then they can do that.

The evil Christians have even roped in bible bashing MP Anne Widdecombe.

It does seem to me to be the most appalling and blatant case of religious discrimination.

Religious discrimination? Stupid woman.

You can read the full story on the GetUpdated website.

Internet

Facebook launches ‘People you may know’ feature

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Facebook has just launched a new feature called ‘People you may know’, which crawls through your friends list and finds people who share more than one friend with you. I’ve already found several friends I didn’t have on my contacts through using this tool.

Facebook

The best thing about this feature is that it shows you people you may know, together with a list of your mutual friends. This has led to some ‘small world’ moments for me already as I’ve noticed a few people who know several friends of mine, who I know from completely unrelated parts of my life.

Facebook

For example, a girl I went to University with is friends with several people I worked in Cardiff with… how? Then some girl in Bristol is friends with my flatmate, and someone I work with now… and they’ve never met each other? Plus they’re all from different parts of the UK!

This is really starting to open up some networking questions and could be one of Facebook’s best features to date.

Google, Internet, SEO

Seomul Davis knows nothing about SEO

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Today I received one of those awful spam emails trying to tell me how to SEO a website. I usually delete them, but occasionally read a few extracts just to see what the gist of the message is. The one I received today had me in hysterics. It’s from some idiot called Seomul Davis, and it’s blatantly clear he knows absolutely nothing about SEO.

He’s written an article on the top ten myths in SEO, and some of his ‘myths’ are quite frightening. Let me begin…

From: SEO News [seo@seo-news.com]
Subject: Organic SEO Top 10 Myths

Organic SEO Top 10 Myths
By Seomul Davis (c) 2008

There are many SEO myths circulating on the Internet. These misconceptions are often crazy and while some are based on partial reality, others have spread due to the lack of being proved wrong.

OK, fair enough start. There are a lot of myths on the Internet about SEO due to people not knowing what they’re talking about… sadly Seomul Davis is one such person.

Organic SEO Myth 3: For higher rankings, update your website regularly. Regular updating of your content pages may certainly increase the crawl rate for search engines, but not your website rankings. Only update your website content if it is necessary and not because search engines will like it any better. As a matter of fact, the highest ranked websites on Google are those that haven’t been updated in years!

Oh you have got to be kidding me? You couldn’t be more wrong, you could try, but you’d fail. Content is the single most important aspect to SEO. Fresh, original, unique content. Anyone who listens to this idiot will find themselves nowhere, more importantly no one will find them… in Google at least.

What’s more interesting is that Seomul Davis contradicts himself in an article he wrote here:

If rising high on the SERPs is your goal, then update your content as often as you can, but on a regular basis. Google, MSN, and Yahoo! reward regular updating with higher SE rankings.

So which is it? Does content increase your rankings, or does it have no effect? I know the answer, you obviously don’t.

Organic SEO Myth 7: Header tags or H1 should be used to ensure high ranking. There is no evidence to prove this. However, this is one of the most common myths. You can reach top Google positioning without H1 but they certainly don’t hurt so use H tags correctly.

There’s no evidence to prove that H1 tags help your ranking? OK mate, you believe what you want. I hope no one else believes you, for their sake.

Organic SEO Myth 10: Your pages should be optimized for the long tail keywords. This is not true. Nowadays, long-tail keyword phrases are no longer effective as not many pages use them and not many people search using long tails. You can include these keywords in blogs or even an article, but that is not really optimization.

Long tail keywords are no longer effective? Oh for fuck’s sake. This guy is a fucking muppet. Long tail keywords are vital for SEO, not least because you get a higher conversion rate with them. Seomul Davis… you’re a moron.

I absolutely loved this last paragraph though.

Remember don’t go spreading any SEO myths that you believe may be true. Test it yourself several times on different websites before reaching any conclusion as there are other factors involved as well.

No, you’re right there. Don’t go spreading myths that you believe to be true. Shame you don’t take your own advice, idiot. If you want to spout your shit on your own website then fine, but don’t email this crap to me.