Did Danny Sullivan or Rand pay off someone?

But when ThreadWatch.org shut down suddenly, I wondered what would this mean for SEOMoz and SearchEngineLand. They obviously have a lot to gain from the shutdown of ThreadWatch.

http://www.johnon.com/331/threadwatch-sel.html

An interesting question raised this morning… did SEOMoz or SearchEngineLand buy out competitor ThreadWatch? Directly or indirectly?

http://www.johnon.com/330/threadwatchcom.html

Maybe Aaron bought Threadwatch with the intention of killing the best source of free information online all along. At Threadwatch you could get the thoughts of some of the best in the business for free….. thats not really good for someone selling a book on SEO.

Then again… maybe it was Brett Tabke. Brett hated threadwatch and Nick W the founder of the site. Perhaps out of spite to the former WMW membership paid to have the site close its doors?

We’ll probably never know the real reasons.

I miss you Threadwatch…

• How to find your profile directory

By default the UserContent.css file is not installed. There is an example file located in the profile directory though.

You can make the css applicable to specific sites and urls by using the mozilla specific “@-moz-document” rule.

syntax (ref):

@-moz-document url(http://www.w3.org/),
                         url-prefix(http://www.w3.org/Style/),
                         domain(mozilla.org)
{
  /* CSS rules here apply to:
     + The page "http://www.w3.org/".
     + Any page whose URL begins with "http://www.w3.org/Style/"
     + Any page whose URL's host is "mozilla.org" or ends with
       ".mozilla.org"
   */

  /* make the above-mentioned pages really ugly */
  body { color: purple; background: yellow; }
}

To prevent cluttering your UserContent.css file with lots of site specific css nested in @-moz-document statements you should use the @import rule. Create a style sheet for the particluar task you want to acheive and save it in the profile folder. Then add an @import rule to your UserContent.css file o use that stylesheet.

Note that you can not nest an “@import” inside a “@-moz-document” rule.

So this in your UserContent.css is wrong:

@-moz-document domain(SomeSite.com) {
@import url(SomeSite.css);
}

This means that you need to use the @-moz-document rule inside the imported stylesheet.

Example UserContent.css:

@import url(SomeSite.css);

Example SomeSite.css:

@-moz-document domain(SomeSite.com) {
/* the css to customize the site */
background-color: pink;
}

Other things:

• To override rules that are inline on a page use the !important attribute
• To implement any changes you make need to restart Firefox after saving your stylesheet. Someone needs to make a plug in to fix this.

What can I use this for?

I use it to:

• Highlight nofollow links
• Apply standard theme to forums ( vbulletin and phpbb themes are usually similar enough so you can use a standard css file to override a sites default theme)

Cool Ideas:

• Host your UserContent.css imported files on your website… then you can easily make your preferences portable.
• Have a service that saves peoples preferences online then they change their UserContent.css to pull from the service. They can log in to the service and add other popular style sheets on the fly. Write a plug in that edits their UserContent.css automatically to load the css from the service. If you make this give me a shout out! ;-)

What is Tramadol?

Tramadol is a pain medication. It is an opiate. It apparently isn’t as addictive as other opiates so its not a controlled substance in the USA. Its used to treat moderate to severe pain. There are lots of off label uses for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramadol

NIH says that Tramadol comes in tablet form and should not be crushed or snorted. I am wondering if thats a way to abuse it. Would they mention it if people werenlt doing it? Its supposed to be weaned off of so you don’t experience withdrawals. Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/medmaster/a695011.html

The brand names of Tramadol are:

• Ultratram
• Ultratram ER
• Ultracet ( has acetaminophen in it )

How do spammers make money with Tramadol?

Types of Sites
Affiliates and direct advertisement sales seem to be the only way they are making money. I haven’t seen any adsense setups. I have seen two types of setups. The first they collect all the lead information, I assume they then pass it on to the pharmacy. These types of setups are generally appear to look like online pharmacies.

The next types are basically link farms that refer the user to a site that can fill their need. These are generally information type sites with links to the online pharmacy. Some though also appear to be online pharmacy as well but when you click a link on a particular drug they take you to the pharmacy site.

Adsense:

I didn’t see any made for Adsense type sites for pharmacy. Checking Adwords budget creator the terms cost around 70 to 90 cents. That could convert to clicks worth as much as 45 cents, though its likely less with smart pricing and splitting of budgets between content and search networks.

Affiliate Programs

Payouts for affiliate programs tend to be around 40% for something like 6 to 27 dollars a sale. I have no idea what the average sale volume is no do I know if the programs share future revenue per signup. Seems like a pretty crappy deal to me if they don’t share revenue for the life of the customer. All and all payouts are pretty good though.

Some programs that I read good things about:

• http://www.glavmed.com/ 30% to 40% (revshare recommended on syndk8)
• http://www.rxpayouts.com/ (recommended on syndk8 and digitalpoint )\

Pitfalls:

There are lots of warnings though about promoting pharmacy related affiliate programs and being in the US. News on the street has it you can be held liable if the pharmacy ships drugs with out valid prescriptions. There are several related news stories reporting just that.

Once recent story thats getting a lot of attention is the saga of AffPower.

… Covino and Prasad are just two of 18 defendants charged by indictment on July 27, 2007, for their involvement in the Affpower online pharmaceutical business. Defendants include: three physicians (including Prasad), two pharmacists, a pharmacy owner (Covino), an administrator and manager, two recruiters of physicians and pharmacies, a credit card processor, and eight affiliate website operators. … via networkworld.com

Relevent information on promoting pharmacy affiliates

• Info on a legit affiliate program that won’t get you put in jail
• Info on the ins and outs of pharmacy affiliates

Overall it seems risky but extremely profitable. The monetary figures quoted on the news stories were as much as $5,000 to $10,000 a day for the top of the line. With the threat of jail time I wouldn’t do it with out talking to a lawyer first.

What are they doing to promote their Tramadol sites?

Some examples: ( from “online tramadol” )

On Google:

Lots of parasitic pages are being posted on “trusted sites” to promote their particular sites.

http://www1.epinions.com/user-matthewseiler/show_~View_Profile – currently #1

• Not seeing any backlinks for this page anywhere.

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=profile;u=145742 – currently #3

• 2 links via the google link command
• 125 inbounds via Site Explorer

www.youtube.com/PaulTaylort – currently # 4

• Slightly more than 100,000 backlinks via Site Explorer
• 448 backlinks via Google link command

Once result that I thought was particularly interesting was this page on harvard.edu. The cached version of the page and the current version show no “tramadol” terms on the page. To make it rank for tramadol the page had to be referred to with anchor text or on page text from other locations. Checking the backlinks to that page via Yahoo site explorer we see Doc Searls old blog is overrun with spam and a majority of the links come from there. His old blog is also still indexed demonstrating again the power of parasitic links on a trusted domain. Also this points out the power of anchor text thats still in effect with Google.

On Yahoo:

Top result is a “legit” wikipedia entry everything else is I am seeing is just crud. Yahoo is susceptible to the same parasitic pages that Google is with one difference. Yahoo doesn’t detect redirects as well as Google so many of the results automatically take you to the target pharmacy site. I guess thats a good enduser experience (lol). Considering that only one site is good and the rest junk I suspect the Wikipedia entry is a hand job.

One interesting site was the CBS search page… looks like someone is linking in to a search page on CBS in such a way to produce Tramadol results that highlights their site. The search page is a Google site search page and the spammer used the “intitle:” and “site:” commands. It looks like it worked for sometime but the “intitle” command no longer works for Google site search on CBS. The search page isn’t blocked via robots.txt or meta robots. Its notable that Yahoo can’t detect and remove Google site search pages.

[note] Advanced search operators for Google

On Live:

Live is pretty much over run with spam too. The only difference in the spam with Live is that they seem to trust “groups” sites. Yahoo groups and MSN groups dedicated to Tramadol are at the top.

An interesting site that I guess is a legit result is http://www.onlinetramadol.org/. I have always noticed how domain names affect MSN rankings. If your domain is exactly what the term is it seems that you will always rank for that in MSN. (Please note thats anecdotal only ) .

Overall:

I am not seeing much in thats legitimate in the search engines that isn’t paid for. Google seemed to do the best ot of all of them but thats relative. Its almost as if they all have just decided to fly the white flag and surrender the serps for these terms. The only difference in the spam from engine to engine is that Yahoo can’t catch sites with redirects.

In conclusion

There are lots of things I haven’t looked at here like:

• Where are these guys located?
• who are they?
• where are they spamming from?
• how deep are the levels of their parasitic link networks?

Its easy to see why the spammers are promoting this. Its really good money for the most successful. It doesn’t seem to be worth the same as the good old “meso” days. Mesothelioma was an adsense fueled spam phenomena which made it easy and fairly low risk. In comparison this spam craze is fueled by selling something that can earn you serious jail time.

If you need to redirect the location of your WordPress homepage you might find this plug in useful.

You can download it here.

Slightly Longer Version:

I installed WordPress in a sub directory when I first started blogging ages ago. Then I set up a simple homepage at the root of my domain. The homepage pulled data from various locations and married it all together. This worked great at first but when I started customizing my templates more and more it grew to be more of a hassle to make the homepage match. I eventually just mirrored the WordPress homepage at the root of my domain. This resulted in having two pages that were exactly the same and two different locations that were linked to. To remedy that I needed to 301 one of the pages to the other. I chose to redirect the WordPress default to the root of the domain. I wrote this plugin to let me do that easily.

You can download it here.

Install & Configure:

As with all plugins just unzip it and drop it in your plugins directory. That is in the wp-content folder which is in the root of your wordpress install. Go to your admin panel then your plugins section and activate the “Redirect Homepage” plugin. After that you need to set the new location of your homepage. Go to the Options panel and look for the “Redirect Homepage” optiosn panel.

I thought that would be the end of it but wordpress decided to do a few updates breaking the plugin. Prior to the updates the WordPress API didn’t have any events that were fired prior to the creation of the user account. So the plugin I created waited until the user account was created and then checked the new accounts email domain. It was a bit hacky but it worked none the less.

Unfortunately the new API changed the name of the event and added a new event where there should have been one before. So I had to update the plugin to accommodate the new (and better) event model. Long story short the plugin has been updated and if your using it please reinstall it with the updated copy. All you need to do is replace the old file with the new one and you’ll be done.

You can download the updated plugin here http://web-professor.net/shared/wp-plugins/registration_blacklist.zip

Tools for Total Web Domination

The tools I am getting the most usage out of lately are the ones for ppc management. You can check out yahoo bid statistics for six countries ( including the US ). Entering in the phrases you want to check and see what everyone else is bidding. Also my ppc keyword filter tool helps me massage lists of keywords when I am away from my desktop tools.

Even though I am using the PPC tools a lot the domain tools are by far the most popular. The tool that gets everyones panties in a bunch is the Domain Hunter. It generates potential domain names using the overture keyword suggestion tool. You just enter a keyword, watch as keyword rich domains that are free for the taking are spit out at you. A fun one for me is the Typo Squatter tool which is used to find squatted on domains. Alternatively you can use it to find misspellings of a domain that are still free.

I even have a tool to help you with directory submissions and a tutorial on how to use roboform to make it easy.

Do you need another reason to use my tools? Unlike some other popular tool providers my tools continue to work even after I get all the links.

But what about scripts?

I have been pumping out frees scripts and code too. Recently I made two wordpress plugins. The first one is the delicious bookmark plugin that tracks how many times a post has been bookmarked. Then I made the Registration Blacklist that allows you to blacklist email domains from being used to register user accounts ( basically you need to ban all of Russia ). I got a lot of great feedback on the blacklist plugin and the delicious plugin. For developers and seo’s I have scripts to hide text from search engines, obsfucate text and generate common typos. Lets not forget about the PHP class that stores a tree structure in mySQL, that one is popular with the geeks. Thats not even all of them there are plenty more and the script list is only going to grow.

Finally I started making tutorials for you. Here’s a quick one on how to make a referral spammer with c# complete with a pdf, downloadable source code, and executable. More tutorials are on the way….

I hope you continue to find them useful and I look forward to making many more new ones!

To install: download and unzip it in your plugins directory. Then activate it in your plugins menu.

Download is here

After installation you will find a new panel added to in the “Options” administration section called “Registration Blacklist”. Selecting this will show a text box. Simply add domains or full email addresses that host email accounts that you don’t want to be used to register a user account.

For instance I added the “mail.ru” and the “web.de” domains because all the users registered from there were bogus.

LATEST VERSION: http://web-professor.net/shared/wp-plugins/registration_blacklist.zip

 pre WordPress 2.2 version: http://web-professor.net/shared/wp-plugins/registration_blacklist-pre2.1.zip 

1. I have never seen a browser that didn’t convert the domain section of the request to lowercase. So if you hit me with a domain that have uppercase letters in it… its filtered.
2. You have to include the protocol portion of the URI dumbass. So if I see a referrer that say “www.mycoolsite.com” I know its bogus and its filtered.
3. For the directories that are faking traffic to me after I submitted to them. Please stop insulting my intelligence. I know my site isn’t on your front page. At least have your programmer change it so that the referrer portion reflects where my site is listed in your directory.
4. For those trying to fake a link to my site… You need to include a key or somthing that ids where I came from. So you can fake a link on the page if I visit it. Since I use a home grown command line stats script I don’t send a referrer to tell you what to fake.