SEO Egghead Consulting Group

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: I'm a sinner!  I violate Google's TOS daily.  But the guy standing next to me on Yom Kippur made me look like Jill Whalen!  He was a spammer — and a pretty devious one at that.  Some of it was muffled by the sounds of unfed stomachs growling for forgiveness, but I managed to hear these 5 things he said:1. I'm sorry, my Lord, for using 1000s of vulnerable .edus as parasites to promote Viagra, a drug that increases the pleasure and frequency of illicit carnal sin. 2. I'm sorry, my Lord, for causing many of those aforementioned individuals to…

Archived; click post to view.
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 useful to summarize those that are easy.  Here's my list:1. Streamline Social Bookmarking Functionality.  People = Lazy. Social bookmarking sites allow users to bookmark and tag content with certain…

Archived; click post to view.
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 supplemental results across DCs, and I wondered if his tool broke.  It didn't.  Why?  He simply appends a "-this_is_a_random_string" to the…

Archived; click post to view.
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 words, keyword stuffing and landing pages are out.  It always amazed me that law firms posted this crap to begin with.  A "Juris Doctor"…

Archived; click post to view.
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 department is less than half the size it was in 2001. This year, enrollment fell again, to 61 students from 78 a year ago….

Archived; click post to view.
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 see nothing wrong with a live link on a prominently placed advertisement.  Google apparently has a problem with that.  Remarkably, Google…

Archived; click post to view.
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 & HTML injection vulnerabilities are the result of similar flaws in web application software.  Typically, a programmer forgets to properly escape or sanitize user-defined data presented in…

Archived; click post to view.
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 asking for advice is never a bad idea.  We came up with "Mattcuttsarama: 21 Great…