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No More Public Access To Google PageRank Scores
campuscodi writes: Google has confirmed with Search Engine Land that it is removing PageRank scores from the Google toolbar, which was the last place where someone could check their site's PageRank status. Many SEO experts are extremely happy at this point, since it seems that PageRank is responsible for all the SEO spam we see today.
IE Google toolbar
responsible for all the SEO spam we see today
My elderly grandmother lives a secret double life as an SEO expert? Damn, her disguise is truly unbreakable...
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Are you referring to expertsexchange?
Well, if someone were seriously considering a sex change, I would hope they'd look for the best doctor available. It doesn't seem like something you should trust to some bargain basement discount physician you found on Craigslist.
#DeleteChrome
Oh no, they would never do that. They work tirelessly to make sure that their client's pages show up as high as possible when you search using appropriate terms. Anything else is purely incidental.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
When you get a bad result? I have a default string collection of "-site:..." I pretty much have to tack on any search.
Wonder if there's a plugin that does it for you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I recall that Google used to have an option for this sort of thing (it was an option next to the cached page link that would remove that website from the current and future searches) but it wasn't around for very long and my google fu isn't strong enough to find any useful mentions of it.
If you do happen to find a plugin (perhaps a custom search engine for firefox?) that does this, I would be interested to hear about it.
You should turn signatures off.
If you own a blog, or any other place where users can put comments, then it will get tons of comment spam, from bots trying to improve page-rank. It makes it difficult to run a comment section of a website (the other difficult problem being people).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Google block list... By Google.
Available for chrome.
Er. Personal block list.
SEOs hate this one weird trick.
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Are you referring to expertsexchange?
Well, if someone were seriously considering a sex change, I would hope they'd look for the best doctor available. It doesn't seem like something you should trust to some bargain basement discount physician you found on Craigslist.
I dunno, I've got some pretty good reviews on yelp. Come in for some new junk and I'll do your kidneys for free. Now if you'll excuse me I have a client coming and need to fill a seedy motel bath tub full of ice.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Thankfully there are reliable techniques for increasing your Search Engine Optimization but it would be impressive to see some one try to do it with a vacuum pump :)
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I added a captcha field to my blog's comments section and that really cut down on the spam. I didn't opt for a "letters written so weirdly that even humans can't read it" captcha, but for a math based one. For example, my comment form might say: One + [ ] = 5. If you type in "4", your comment gets through. If you type in anything else, your comment gets nuked. The math problems are simple enough for even the most math-challenged commenter but wind up being tricky for comment spam bots. (Some spammers hand copy/paste their spam so this gets through, but Akismet and other tools can help catch these.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
My SEO has the ask.com toolbar installed and has her default search provider as Yahoo.com..
Did you really have that much problem? 99% of the issue went away for me (on a blog that was averaging around 1 million pageviews a month and ~1000 real comments a month) when using Akismet. The rest went away after banning common /16s and /24s which were problematic.
Same here. I added a header that says, with a bit of ascii/unicode steganography, "the password to edit all the pages is DERP" and it went mostly away.... for now :)
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Thing is, computers happen to be REALLY GOOD AT MATH! I can't imagine that it would take much effort at all for bots to start solving those.
Compared to image-based captchas, where one has to enter text from a horrible photograph or just select an image matching specific criteria ("pick the image below that has a cake in it"), I'm surprised that the math captchas have lasted for as long as they have...
It's not just the math. It's a mix up of which place the requested number is, whether the number is spelled out ("ten") or written using digits ("10"), and what operation is being requested. For example, my captcha could be any of the following:
5 - two = [ ]
[ ] + 1 = 7
12 + [ ] = nineteen
Combining all of these makes it harder for computers to solve the captcha while keeping it easy for humans. I was getting 80+ spam comments daily until I implemented the captcha. Then it dropped to one or two a day. No, it's not unsolvable by computers. Captchas and computers solving them will always be an arms race so at some point this captcha method will fail. For now, though, it puts up enough of a roadblock to stop the spam bots while not irritating human readers to much that they don't comment because of the captcha.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Google is still using PageRank, they just aren't showing the numbers to the public. This makes objectively measuring the effectiveness of SEO spam difficult. However, the effect on search is unchanged so I don't see the spamming going away any time soon. Email spam has never had useful measurements of its effectiveness and what there is mostly says it doesn't work. Yet it persists.
The truth is, spammers will eventually get around any form of captcha, if it's important enough to them. As long as a human can decipher your captcha, there's always Mechanical Turk.
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