Category Archives: Internet

Internet, SEO

UK SEO company uses my website for forum spam

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I received an email last week, through one of my other websites, from a company that specialises in e-cigarettes. E-cigarettes are electronic cigarettes that are used to help quit smoking, as they’re better for you than smoking real cigarettes and you can even smoke them in pubs and bars as they don’t actually produce real smoke (many produce a vapour). Anyhow, I digress; a firm that sells these e-cigarettes contacted me because of the recent Google updates that crack down on dodgy links, spam links and irrelevant links. It seems one of my websites has been linking to their website in an act of SEO spam… me? Surely not!

Indeed not, as SEO spam isn’t something I engage in. However, many other people who claim to offer SEO services aren’t so ethical, and a Transformers forum I run had been used by this firm’s SEO company to build dodgy links. A profile had been created on the forum, linking to the e-cigarette website in the home page field of the profile.

tf-forum

This is a common spam practice and one that many dodgy link builders and spammers have used for many years. Spam link builders will create profiles on forums, adding links to the target of their SEO, and often never intended to even post a single thread. It’s one of the easiest ways to build worthless links, and one of the lowest pieces of link building spam.

Anyhow, the e-cigarette firm (ecigarettedirect.co.uk by the way) asked me to remove the link as they were aware of Google cracking down on this kind of spam. Their request stated:

Google has recently made some major changes to their algorithm and we are taking action to remove certain links in order to keep within their Webmaster Guidelines moving forwards. As a result of this action please can you remove the link from your page and let me know when it’s been removed.

This all seemed fair enough. They had probably received a notification from Google about unnatural links and, as Google requested, were trying to get them removed. In our mutual interests I have removed the link by deleting the profile, but I did ask them which SEO company they used and who was responsible for this spam. They stated it was webpromotionuk.co.uk – an SEO company based in Birmingham, run by a chap named Steve Hill.

Steve – this spam link to ecigarettedirect.co.uk was only added in March, so whether you’re building these links yourself or (as is more likely) outsourcing to someone offshore to do them, you really need to change your link building tactics. Things have moved on quite a bit in the field of SEO, and spamming the crap out of one of my forums isn’t going to get you anywhere.

Humour, Internet

Fire Safety Notice for the Social Network User

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Are you an avid social network user, more interested in Tweeting than actually ‘talking’ to people? If you are, you’re probably uninterested in typical safety notices, the boring ones, telling you about what to do if someone has an accident or if there’s a fire. If this does sound like you (or your staff) then you’ll want this Fire Notice for Social Network enthusiasts.

You can download a print quality version of the notice at StuckOn.

Fire Safety Notice for the Social Network User

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Internet

You must be logged in to comment with that email address

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If you’ve been trying to comment on a WordPress blog and you’ve come across this message:

You must be logged in to comment with that email address.

It appears to be a problem WordPress hosted sites are having at the moment. There is a thread on WordPress about this, but the WP guys themselves haven’t commented or said they’re working on anything.

Personally I suspect it’s not an error, or a problem of any kind, but instead some anti-spam security they’ve enabled to prevent people from spamming websites with comments using certain email addresses.

Anyhow, if you’ve seen this message today or yesterday, or your website’s visitors have reported not being able to comment, this is why.

Internet

MySQL server has gone away – where has it gone?

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For reasons best left alone at this stage, I operate a Windows 2003 Server and have chosen to install PHP and MySQL on it so I can use WordPress. Together with an ISAPI Filter, I can do everything on there that you can do on an Apache Server (more or less). The trouble is… well, the trouble is Microsoft really. Whenever something goes wrong you’re on your own looking for why, and end up trawling through forums and websites where everyone pretty much says the same thing… why have you installed PHP and MySQL on a Windows Server?

The latest Microsoft-astrphe came when all of the WordPress sites went down, with the error message of ‘cannot establish database connection’. Upon attempting to access PHP MyAdmin, I found that too had failed and I couldn’t login to any of the databases. The error message spat out here was:

#2002 Cannot log in to the MySQL server

Oh dear.

This website offered some useful advice on checking whether the connection to MySQL was working or not. After following their advice I found that, in fact, it wasn’t. The reason given for this was, rather distressingly, outputted as:

“MySQL server has gone away”

This is indeed a worrying message. After searching online for solutions, this website proved helpful. But where has the MySQL server gone? Where are the databases? And we have now lost all of them?

I then tried to use the Microsoft Web Platform Installer to see if it could create a new WP install, and a new MySQL database. After following all the usual steps, it failed. The excuse given included the line:

“an existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host”

I then upgraded the version of PHP on the server, hoping that would have an effect. It didn’t. Looking at websites that talked about editing the php.ini file, or editing files within PHP MyAdmin also proved unhelpful.

Finally, the solution presented itself. Due to the stupid way that Windows Servers tend to be partitioned, and the fact that the MySQL, SQL, Logfiles and various other important stuff resides on the C Drive, the space on the drive had reduced to such a degree that the MySQL Server had decided enough was enough, and it was off. This may sound stupid, or simplistic, but that was indeed the case.

After a few moments deleting as many Logfiles as I could afford to lose the MySQL Database reappeared, as if by magic, and all of the sites worked once again. So, if you are also running PHP and MySQL on a Windows Server and you’ve found that, suddenly, your website cannot connect to the database, before you go foraging around on forums and attempting to upgrade PHP or meddle with the php.ini file, just free up some space.

CSA, Internet

Security leak at the CSA, or intelligence leak at the source?

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One of the many websites that I administer is the very popular (or unpopular, depending on your stance) advice website CSAhelll.com. The website features daily stories from parents, both mothers and fathers, who are tearing their hair out due to the incompetencies, errors and bullying tactics at the hands of the Child Support Agency.

One post the site had recently was particularly funny because the woman who posted it came back a few days later, after receiving advice and comments to her post, wondering how her story had wound up on the website in the first place. This woman’s story (which I won’t link to) was sent in to the website by the aforementioned woman using the contact form on the website, yet she was dumbfounded as to how we received her information and were able to post it.

Had there been some sort of security leak at the CSA itself, you may ask? This wouldn’t have been uncommon, seeing as their data is hardly secure anyway. They once posted a woman’s bank details to me by mistake, after printing them out and leaving them on the printer for some idiot to pick up and shove in a letter bound for my address. They have also famously lost data, and had staff sacked for accessing adult websites and material online using supposedly secure computers; their information security is basically a mess, something which I personally told their head of security, Bernard Devaney, when I last spoke to him in reference to the CSA staff member who tried to coerce fathers into killing themselves via Facebook. He agreed, although couldn’t go into detail.

However, this time the error wasn’t the agency’s, not that they couldn’t do without recruiting a few more people to information security jobs anyway. No, this error was the fault of the woman who rather stupidly pasted her entire story into the CSAhell.com website thinking she was contacting the CSA and, even when she returned to the website to retrieve her feedback didn’t remember being there in the first place.

No wonder her life’s in a mess.

Internet, SEO

Cheshire SEO company ‘You Media’ using spam link building tactics

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In another exposé of companies using black hat link building tactics, it is with some relish that I can now offer up a supposed SEO company based in Cheshire using spam comments to build links for their own website.

On the network of blogs that I run I get hundreds of comments each day, and companies that employ spam link builders to post nonsense, badly written comments in an effort to build links to their website are like a red rag to me. This latest company is a Cheshire based firm offering web design and ‘white hat’ SEO services. Obviously their SEO services aren’t quite as white hat as they claim, if the following blog comment is anything to go by:

Name: cheshire web design
Website: you-media.co.uk
Email: nicoleglass99@yahoo.co.uk
IP Addfress: 112.202.13.122
Date: Submitted on 2011/11/16 at 8:31 am

I differ with a lot of individuals right here; I ran across this web site submit We couldn’t leave right up until I completed, though it wasn’t precisely what I had been searching for, had been a great go through however. Let me instantaneously get the weblog supply to remain in effect of the improvements.

The name for the comment was ‘cheshire web design’, the keyword for which they’re trying to rank, and the email address used is a disposable Yahoo email (probably created by a foreign ‘link builder’). The comment itself is gibberish, and has probably been run through spinning software, translation software or just crafted by someone with a passing knowledge of English. Indeed, if you simply Google the first line of the comment you’ll see a number of examples where this dross has been published, linking to other websites that have also used the same link building company.

Rather that create quality back links for them, this gibberish has merely served to expose the black hat SEO tactics they employ, and the fact that they evidently use foreign suppliers for their link building (or they employ link builders who really cannot write intelligibly).

Good work You Media, your ‘white hat’ SEO skills are indeed impressive.

Complaints, Internet, Rants

Jonathan Howson at Evolution Recruitment

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Over the years I have dealt with a number of different recruitment agencies with differing results (I don’t think BD Recruitment will forget their mistake a few years ago) but one thing that has consistently annoyed me is the way recruitment consultants with whom you have had no dealings persist in contacting you, even after you have asked them not to.

One such recruitment consultant is Jonathan Howson at Evolution Recruitment. I have never spoken to Jonathan, nor have I had any dealings with Evolution Recruitment, yet, for some reason, I cannot stop this man from trying to contact me offering me various jobs around the country.

I have been bombarded by emails, as is normal, from Jonathan Howson and have deleted each one without giving a second thought. However, he hasn’t stopped there; Jonathan is also bombarding me with text messages about random jobs, even though I have replied and asked him to stop.

I have also tweeted at Jonathan and Evolution Recruitment asking them to stop, but still I keep getting these texts and emails. It is annoying, it is unsolicited and it has been requested that he stops… but still he continues. He’s like the Terminator in the sense that he cannot be reasoned with but, unlike the Terminator, he’s just trying to earn some commission for sending candidates to job interviews and, in my case, job interviews I’m really not interested in at all.

So, if either Jonathan Howson or Evolution Recruitment are reading this (as I’m sure you will be) please stop emailing and texting me. It’s seriously getting on my nerves… and getting on my nerves, while quite easy, isn’t a good idea.

If anyone is interested, the number used for these unsolicited spam texts is 07515 522 056 and the email is jonathan.howson@evolutionjobs.co.uk.

Complaints, Internet, SEO

Dave’s Scooter Shop using spam links

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Since writing this post about spam comments being used to create backlinks, I seem to have been inundated with the crap. I’ve literally had it up to here (for the benefit of readers, my hand is around my forehead right now) with badly written garbled spam comments being added by black hat link builders ‘attempting’ to benefit their clueless clients… therefore I’ll be exposing the muppets regularly.

This latest shit awful comment written by some pigeon English brandishing halfwit is for a website selling scooters. So, Dave’s Scooters, whoever you’ve hired to do your link building I’d suggest you sack them, it hasn’t really worked.

Author : scooters (IP: 84.241.194.168 , 84.241.194.168) E-mail : ObermanQuispe434@hotmail.com
URL    : http://www.davesscootershop.nl
Whois  : http://whois.arin.net/rest/ip/84.241.194.168
Comment:
Great post, very informative. I’m wondering why the other experts of this sector don’t notice this. You should proceed your writing. I’m sure, you have a huge readers’ base already!|What’s Going down i’m new to this, I stumbled upon this I have found It absolutely helpful and it has aided me out loads. I hope to contribute & help different users like its helped me. Great job.