Where did my PageRank Go? Overview of the “Bablo. me. uk” ht.access Hack

Very recently, I noticed a the PR of this very site was dropping with little to no reason. We DON’T condone any Black Hat techniques, we use no paid linking to promote the site, and we have a very good domain history. But, still our PR was precipitously dropping with no reason. I started to dig into this last night and found out we had our ht.access file hacked!

There was a suspicious redirect we could diagnose in Google Webmaster Tools – that alerted us to the problem:
Google WebMaster Tools for Diagnostics - To the Rescue!

The malicious 301 code that was inserted in our ht.access is below:

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Googlebot|Slurp|msnbot)
RewriteRule ^ http://bablo .me .uk/ [R=301,L]

I decided to follow the redirects and find out where they lead to. What I found was a server hosting hundreds of sites optimized for trojan virus downloads.

Here are a few things that Webmasters and site owners shuld be on the lookout for with this hack/exploit:

– PHP-driven site. (Especially Joomla, Drupal or WP CMS’s)
– Problems with having web site properly indexed by Google.
– Some pages don’t get indexed, some pages disappear from the index.
– When checking web pages in Unmask Parasites, there is a chain of two 301 redirects reported and the first redirect points to “http://bablo .me .uk/”.

I recommend using some tool that shows HTTP headers and allows to change User-Agent string. For instance, web-sniffer with the Googlebot user agent. If the site is compromised, you’ll see the following lines in the response headers:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://bablo .me .uk/

Please be careful out there – this was a huge hit to our traffic and business – but with simple and careful diagnosis this issue was fixed and we can move on to grow our business PR properly again!

Dude – where’s my Pagerank? – SEO Blackhat

I have no idea why, but my user friendly sitemap (that links all posts by title) and my about page on this blog have lost all page rank even though they are linked from every page on the blog.

Some of the category pages suffered the same fate
- Google
- Doorway Pages

While most others did not:
- Myspace Friends
- Black Hat Site Reviews
- Poker

I know, I know – who cares about page rank? But still – this does mean something – I just have no idea what.

Any thoughts?
Dude – where’s my Pagerank?

Top 21 Signs You Need a Break From SEO (2008 version)

From Small Business SEM:
It’s that time of year again: Time to find out if you’re spending too much time on SEO and in desperate need of a break. Here’s the 2008 version of “Signs You Need a Break from SEO.” Enjoy!

1.) While everyone else searches for wedding photographers, senior portrait photographers, and the like, you’ve spent weeks looking for a “social media avatar photographer.”

2.) The thought that SoloSEO is actually a team of two gives you a slight headache.

3.) You travel to so many conferences that your spouse struggles to keep track of your whereabouts. And one day, while trying to update her calendar with your schedule, your wife says to you, “Okay, SES in March. SMX and SEG in April. And what’s the one in May? SEX?” (This actually happened.)

4.) Instead of showing the number of RSS feeds you’re subscribed to, your feed reader just says “TILT.”

5.) There’s an indentation in your mousepad that exactly mirrors the path from the “What’s New” tab on Sphinn to the “Report As Spam” button below the most recent submission.

6.) You know how to “match client sites to the 70+ part algorithm formula that is used by Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and every major search engine worldwide.”

7.) You know where that quote came from.

8.) It doesn’t strike you as strange that you sometimes communicate with your spouse via your blogs.

9.) When Danny Sullivan moved his family from England to California, you tracked their travel on FlightAware.com.

10.) Your spouse says your family is “going green.” Your first thought: “Did our PageRank increase on the family blog?”

11.) While telling your son about your favorite childhood books, you wax poetic about the “Wikipedia Brown” series. You never correct yourself. He doesn’t, either.

12.) You get in line at the public library, and while your son checks out a book, you whisper to the librarian, “Eric Ward says you have the best links around. Can I get one?”

13.) One day your wife tells you, with no prompting, “I really like the name ‘Mihmorandum’. I wish we had a cool last name that we could do something with.” (A true story.)

14.) You spend the next four days trying to come up with clever puns for “McGee.” (Also true.)

15.) You think Lively, Google’s virtual world, offers a lot of marketing potential.

16.) When Matt Cutts posts his personal travel schedule, you sync it to your own calendar.

17.) When your alma mater emails you about its new Alumni Directory, your first thought is, “Ooooh. A clean link from a .edu? Gotta check that out.” (True story.)

18.) You vow to never make a donation when you learn your alumni listing is blocked to search engine spiders. (Also true.)

19.) You’ve never been on TV, and never will be, but you still create a TIVO “wish list” search for your name. You convince yourself it’s all in the name of reputation management.

20.) You use social updating services like Ping.fm and HelloTxt, but those aren’t enough for you. No, you need a master service that updates your updating services. You’re that connected.

21.) You laughed at anything on this list!

Top 21 Signs You Need a Break From SEO (2008 version)

Is SEO Possible Without Inbound Links?

Hello SEO Experts,

I know most of the SEO techniques, but one important factor as we all know is pagerank, and to have a higher pagerank we should get inBound links to our site.
My question is, can we make our site appear in top Search Engine Results, without having any inBound links? even for challenging keywords?

Everything related to SEO seems very logical to me, but the most important thing is to have inBound links to your site. It’s really time consuming, to send emails to web masters and ask them for a link. I know a good website will result people to link to us without we ask for, but what if my site is a personal site for example, and it is a normal site, I don’t think people will link to me just like that in my case ! Does that mean I will never be in first page? (Note that I am now in page 10, but I’d like to be in page 1, for a challenging keyword).

By the way, I have submitted my site to some free directories, but I am not sure if this will help my pagerank (currently I am 0/10 and i published my website 4 months ago)

Please advice and let me know how should I go on from now, because concerning the content of my site, I assume it is * VERY WELL * optimized for Search Engines, the only thing remaining is the PageRank issue.

Best regards,
Wassim

Forum discussion continues at HighRankings Forum.
Is SEO Possible Without Inbound Links?

Page Rank Explained: PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

The original PageRank algorithm was described by Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin in several publications. I really enjoyed the series, start at the introduction and read them all if you have the time.

“Contrary to the concept of link popularity, PageRank is not simply based upon the total number of inbound links. The basic approach of PageRank is that a document is in fact considered the more important the more other documents link to it, but those inbound links do not count equally. First of all, a document ranks high in terms of PageRank, if other high ranking documents link to it.

So, within the PageRank concept, the rank of a document is given by the rank of those documents which link to it. Their rank again is given by the rank of documents which link to them. Hence, the PageRank of a document is always determined recursively by the PageRank of other documents. Since – even if marginal and via many links – the rank of any document influences the rank of any other, PageRank is, in the end, based on the linking structure of the whole web. Although this approach seems to be very broad and complex, Page and Brin were able to put it into practice by a relatively trivial algorithm.”

Very good in depth explanation in the article, and simple to follow…kudos

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What Is Page Rank And Why Do We Want It?

PageRank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determine a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

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Google Page Rank Overlay Analysis

This is pretty cool – iWebTools Visual Page Rank tool allows you to see the page rank of all the links on a webpage at once, and with an intuitive visual overlay.
See a screenshot below of SearchEngineWatch’s homepage using the tool:
Google Page Rank Analysis of SEW Homepage

As you can see we circled the interesting areas of interest, the SES Event links. All events have a Page Rank >7 – except France, it’s PR=0, I wonder why?

Also note, the tool allows you to look at do not follow links, as well as external links. We like it :)

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