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Excerpt: Hacking up old web sites sucks.  Many were built without regard for search engine optimization concerns.  Just thinking about fixing the architectural problems sends chills down the spine of the web developer.  However, a few great enhancements can be performed without disturbing site architecture at all.  These items are worthwhile for most web sites and should typically be tasked without concern of detrimental effects.  Everyone knows them pretty much, but it's use…

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Excerpt: What's more annoying than knowing your site has 1000s of supplemental search results?Not being able to conveniently view them to see what's wrong …  The Google hack mentioned here enumerates the supplemental pages of a domain, and seemed quite useful to this end.  Perhaps Google doesn't want to make our lives too easy, though, because it appears that it no longer works as before.Then I recalled that someone had also created a great tool that reports the number of suppleme…

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Excerpt: The NY Bar has a new set of rules for lawyers floating around.  Apparently, they got wind of the blatant cheeseball spamming lawyers are employing to solicit clients on the internet.  I'd cite examples, but they'd probably get me sued :(  They responded in spades, though: 1. "… content …shall be predominantly informational, and shall be designed to increase public awareness of situations in which the need for legal services may arise … "  In other word…

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Excerpt: This recent article cites that many universities are experiencing a sharp drop in computer science student enrollment.  Many attribute it to outsourcing scares and a final acknowledgement that the dot Com bubble did indeed pop.  It is no longer totally rad to be a computer scientist.  I'm a computer scientist, so I can reflect on why I still have a job, and perhaps what the future has in store.  For now:"This fall, Vanderbilt University's computer science departm…

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Excerpt: I think paid links are just dandy!  In every other advertising venue, reputation is purchased.  Branding campaigns are ubiquitous.  It does not take long to spot paper advertisements that have no real call to action; rather, they aim to increase a product or brand's "ranking" in the human mind.  This is a what a paid link is to Google.  It is the analog of a branding campaign.  I'm not saying I think link networks are cool.  I'm saying I s…

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Excerpt: This recent article mentions that XSS and HTML injection are quickly eclipsing the traditional stack smashing and SQL tainting attacks in popularity.  But why?  I posit that the reason is simple — XSS & HTML injection vulnerabilities are frighteningly trivial to find.  I will demonstrate the relative ease of finding injection points in this article.  I wrote a script that sniffs out hundreds of such vulnerabilities rapidly and automatically, in fact.

Both XSS & H…

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Excerpt: 1. Make People Read Your Boring Crap with a Persuasive TitleA title with a persuasive call to action can make or break your Digg.  Pretend you're a Digger.  Would you click on your article?  I don't care how interesting or boring the content is — the title is all that matters at first.  Ask a friend or two to comment on it.  I brainstormed with Quadszilla of SEO Black Hat to tweak a title for maximum effect.  He's got more experience than I do, and aski…

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Excerpt: Traditional SEO is dead.  Gone are the days when we can get to the top by studying keyword densities and trading links.  Gone are the days when optimization involves pious devotion to the H1 tag.  I'm not saying these things are, or will ever be irrelevant, and I'm certainly not saying site architecture is not important; but I posit that SEO will eventually evolve into a branch of conventional marketing. So let's forget most of what we learned about traditional SEO for…