Still - the bills haven’t passed the Congress. You can find more information about it and calls to action at the site AmericanCensorship.org.

Fun stuff from a german discussion board about search engine optimization (SEO)…

The case. A webmaster, say Joe, raised his voice about a competitor, say Alice, who would blatantly copy his key to success. Joe claims a lot of ingenuity, thinking constantly of new ways for his secret recipe. Just to find it a few  days later copied by Alice. That’s why Joe goes into the open. He describes a general code of honor among SEO webmasters and explains in detail that Alice isn’t acting according to it. Alice should be punished in his eyes. By Google at the best. So, you might wonder, what is it actually that Alice is copying?

Copyright for backlink structures?

What Joe is so concerned about is his backlink structure. He regards his backlinks as a kind of intellectual property, which must not be allowed to duplicate. As you probably know, one of the key factors for success in the business of SEO is the acquisition of qualified web links linking to your projects. That’s why these links are closely observed by any competitor’s eyes. And if one finds a new source of link to their projects, the others will follow in an instant.

Poor Joe not being aware of this was making a lot of webmasters chuckle. One David coined the new term of “Duplicate Linking”, as a corrolar to a major problem called Duplicate Content.

So you better be careful. If you are trying to get the same backlinks as your competition,  you might get angry mails from Joe for Duplicate Links.

The SEOLINE Case

The first remarkable incident has been just a few weeks ago. A german SEO firm seems to have gotten penalized by Google for presumably black hat activities. Too many Russian backlinks, as the rumors go. Some of the company’s customers might had been affected as well. At least somebody dropped a blog comment claiming to be a customer of the SEO company, saying that she cancelled her business relationship for the reason of inappropriate SEO conducts. The SEO company disapproved of the bad coverage and sent its lawyers to get the blog post removed. This action provoked a tremendous echo among the german SEO community. In the end…

…the SEO company was calling the lawyers back and is still paying Adwords to be found in the serps when searching for the company’s name. The whole Seoline Case is still documented at the blog.

The FAIRRANK Case

Now, a similar story seems to be on its way: the Fairrank Case. I’ll sum it up as it is reported at Thomas Bindl’s blog. The story reads like this:

Somebody has been posting at the online marketing bulletin board omtalk.com to the dislike of the SEO and SEM firm Fairrank. You’d expect Fairrank to contact the board administrator to remove the posts. And the company did. The board administrator kindly removed the posts and claims to have informed Fairrank about further technical measures to prevent similar bad posts in the future.

End of story? No. Instead of a friendly word of thanks Fairrank sent lawyers. Thomas is supposed to sign a paper that his board won’t ever be a source of bad information about the company. But a bulletin board owner can’t possibly sign this. He can’t prevent malicious posts as he can’t prevent the board being abused by hackers or spammers. Signing the paper would have meant for Thomas to close his board. As he isn’t willing to shut his community down he is forced to get the story handled at court.

The thing I’m asking myself is, how come a company is fighting some rather cooperative webmaster? If Thomas’ description of the ongoings is correct, some specialist company is endagering its online reputation. And hasn’t been learning a lot from the Seoline case…

So it’s due time to paraphrase these videos, thought Martin Mißfeld (german artist and SEO). And created a humorous version of Matt’s video statements. Martin is focusing on Matt’s dilemma, that as a Googler he may not be too specific about internals, lest these be exploited, and on the other hand wants to help webmasters with tips for better quality sites. Well, enough of the words, just enjoy:

Weblinks:

• Tribute to Matt Cutts
• Matt’s real videos

You might have noticed a new little critter gnawing at your web server:

Mozilla/5.0 compatible; DotBot/1.1; http://www.dotnetdotcom.org/crawler@dotnetdotcom.org)

The few Seattle based guys (pseudonym on their web site) promise an index of the web available to everybody. They intent to release as much information about the web’s structure (linking) and content as possible. For a fee to cover their costs, though.

Seomoz Linkscape

The entity behind the pseudonym is actually the SEO company Seomoz. One of their best known products is their domain evaluation service Linkscape. Linkscape is building its own version of a web link graph, collecting and computing the relation of all web sites to each other. It is a nice service for webmasters but will provide quite a bit of information to your competition.

The best way to lock out the Linkscape bot from your site is to use an entry in your robots.txt contol file. It should start with the bots you like to lock out completely. For Linkscape you would have to include the following lines:

User-agent: dotbot
Disallow: /

Note that Linkscape is promoting a different way of locking out their bot, that is by including a “noindex” meta tag in the header of a web page. Alas, this version will not prevent the dotbot to crawl your site and to extract its links. It will only prevent the robot to store the content of your site for its search engine.

The Dotbot Technology

The guys tell jokily about their tools. Using C and python as a programming language, flat disk files instead of a database system, some open source software. That’s saying nothing in an elaborate way, of course.

Downloadable Index

The current dotbot’s index is available for download for everybody. The index file is constructed according to the structure: "URL-Without-Protocol NULL Optional-String-Not-Used NULL Complete-HTTP-Response NULL", with NULL as the zero byte. Actually one sees this is rather a web dump, than a searchable web index. The sorting, filtering, and indexing will have to follow. I wonder a bit, why the protocol is omitted, when keeping on the other hand the complete http response.

As of end of January 2009 the index has a tiny fraction of the web available. It comprises about 9 million pages, summing up to an index file size of 68 GB. Find a link to download it on their site (weblink below).

Sample Dump

The example consists of two URLs:

	www.example.com/  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
	Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:43:15 GMT
	Server: Apache/2.0.52 (CentOS)
	X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.9
	Content-Length: 557
	Connection: close
	Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8			

	<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
	<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
	<head>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
	<title>I am an example.</title>
	</head>
	<body>
	...
	<body>
	</html> www.example2.com/  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
	Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:43:15 GMT
	Server: Apache/2.0.52 (CentOS)
	X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.9
	Content-Length: 557
	Connection: close
	Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8			

	<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
	<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
	<head>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
	<title>I am a different example.</title>
	</head>
	<body>
	...
	<body>
	</html>

Weblinks

• Dotbot, including a link to their Index (66 GB, torrent)

5000 crime incidents of the last months and years

The blaulicht-kurier is showing the location of crimes in Berlin and the region of Brandenburg. By default you will see descriptive icons over the crime locations of the last two weeks. If you click on an icon you get to see a crime report.

If you want to see older crimes or if you are looking for crimes at a particular location, you can do so by specifying the times or whereabouts. The database consists of about 5000 incidents from the last years. The latest entries are a few weeks in the past, though.

Icon legend

• Black icons: crime
• fist for violence
• hammer for vandalism
• mask for robbery
• thief with flashlight for theft
• Red icons: fire
• Blue icons: traffic
• Green icons: other
• Target icon: more details available when clicking on it

WebLinks

• Blaulicht-Kurier (the mashup)
• Berliner Kurier (one of two Berlin local major tabloid papers)
• Article from the Search Cowboys

1. knowing what a user really is looking for
2. knowing which of the 10s of billions of web pages or services are most relevant
3. knowing how to distinguish web spam, porn or malicious services from regular services
4. making the gazillions of data accessible to all users asap / instantaniously

This blog will look into the engines and will try to explain them. How are they paying off commercially? What comes next? What is actually available (but nobody knows it)?

I hope you will enjoy this blog. Lots of fun!