The Moldavian Blackhat

First of all people should stop blaming Google, they are not perfect but still the best on removing spam sites.

If MSN and Yahoo have much fewer indexed pages from this guy's domains, it is only because their bots are lazier and their index space lower.

Some of his sites are already banned from Google, some not, of course you would probably expect G to act faster, but I think they want the banning process to be automatically to avoid further spam. If they ban manually, tomorrow 10 others will spam again.

Here is a quick explanation on how he did this whole madness:

1) He registered a couple of domains (t1ps2see.com, eiqz2q.org, etc)

2) He used some lame automatic page generator to make thousands of meaningless pages.

3) He setup his web server(probably mod_rewrite rules) and DNS to work with anysubdomain.domain.com, we can see this on a random query:
$ host worihqweoirhwqer.t1ps2see.com
worihqweoirhwqer.t1ps2see.com has address 70.87.73.35

4) A little programming on the site for interlinking pages and probably for querying some mysql databases where he stored the generated pages.

5) He setup some kind of cloaking, using body onLoad="document.f.submit()" and also giving a page to googlebot and another to visitor, creating confusion. He even denied page caching, but seems like he missed msn where cached pages still appear.

6) He used a couple of trusted(or ex-trusted) PR5 sites like
www.intermedia.md, www.chat.md, www.faces.md, etc. to get backlinks
Although we no longer see them now, in a cached page of these sites there are entries like:

a href="http://2333.water.eiqz2q.org"
img src=http://images.faces.md/images/0.gif border=0
a href="http://1272.manager.eiqz2q.org"
img src=http://images.faces.md/images/0.gif border=0
a href="http://307.pizza.eiqz2q.org"
img src=http://images.faces.md/images/0.gif border=0

7) He waited a few days for his pages to get indexed


Have you noticed anything spectacular? No! Any webmaster with a few programming knowledge can do this... but it will be totally unethical.

And you should also notice the BAD parts in this: he has nothing stable, he will get banned sooner or later and will have to start over and he had to sacrifice those PR5 sites: faces.md, welena.com, intermedia.md, etc. Another bad part for him is that he attracted too much the attention of webmasters, many forums talk about this now and sending abuse reports to Google.


Some of the white hats maybe now wants to try this? I don't know if it's illegal or not, probably not but you should "Know well what leads you forward and what holds you back".

black hats and massive indexed pages

It seems that a guy who owns domains t1ps2see.com, eiqz2q.org, etc managed to index in google a huge amount of webpages.

Results 1 - 10 of about 1,250,000,000 from t1ps2see.com

Pretty impressive, however the number is not real since google is doing some kind of estimations for site:domain queries, estimations which are not accurate at all.

Nothing new until now, since we know blackhats existed and will exist until google and other search engines would become perfect, but it's amazing how webmasters are so interested in this subject, threads like http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=97090 are so visited.

I also have to mention that he runs adsense on some of his domains, so this is making a very bad image for Google, letting the impression that highest part of adsense income for google comes from black hats.

Enom put REGISTRAR-HOLD because of inaccurate whois info

Although the email was correct, one day I have found that one of my domain was not working(it had the REGISTRAR-HOLD flag). I wrote to my registrar which was actually an enom reseller and he told me to contact enom directly. Enom has only 12 working hours/day so I had to wait until next day. The next day I wrote about 3 emails which and got no reply in about 10 hours so I decided to call them. After 2 phone calls where they told me the problem is because of false whois information, I waited 10 more hours for the whois team to reply by e-mail and the domain was finally working again.
So if you are using Enom or one of their resellers, I suggest you to think twice before using fake whois info.

PHPMyAdmin freezes on databases with too many tables

If you are using phpmyadmin on a database with more 1500 or more tables, you may experience problems. The page will not load at all so you will not be able to operate propery with phpmyadmin.

Of course you can still run commands from a terminal or console but it is not as confortable as using phpmyadmin.

After digging a lot in the config.default.php filesand trying diferent results and limits for various variables, I found out that problems comes from PHP itsels. So the first thing you should do, is to raise the memory_limit in php.ini . It worked for me.

Peakclick PPC program review

A few months ago I have discovered Peakclick.

I was very skeptical, because almost all PPC programs I tried before were not even making 30% of adsense. Once you login, one of the first thing you notice on Peakclick is the top webmaster section where you see that some guys are making $2000/day with the program. So you say "yes, it is possible" and give program a try. First you don't make so much, since after you join you have the "Not Approved" flag which prevents you from getting all ads. However, in a few weeks you get approved and income starts to raise.

One of the best part of this program is that you have a lot of freedom. You can use javascript codes, XML feeds, premade google doorways, etc. You can even create some kind of adsense codes by generating feeds automatically based on page keywords.

Another good thing about program is that you get paid twice a month, even more often if you make requests and many payment methods are supported such as: Epassporte, wire transfers, Webmoney, Western Union, check by mail, Fethard.

In my opinion this is the second program after adsense that you should use(I didn't check YPN yet).

Linux on SONY VAIO VGN FS315S/FS315M

In order to use your lappy in linux to it's maximum power, you need to recompile your kernel and to download and install some drivers. I've installed Debian, but it should be simillar for any distribution. If you have a good Internet connection, the whole installation & setup process should not take more than 2-3 hours.

Sony VAIO VGN-FS315S main specs
- Intel Pentium M 750 1.86 GHz, 2MB L2 Cache (Centrino) processor
- LCD X-Black 15,4 screen with 1280x800 resolution
- 1024 MB RAM
- 100 GB Hard drive
- DVD-/+RW optical drive
- NVIDIA GeForce Go 6400 with TurboCache technology (128 MB)
- Realtek High Definition Audio Soudcard
- Intel PRO/100 VE (wired network interface)
- Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG (802.11b/g standards)

First of all, grab the latest 2.6 kernel from kernel.org.

Then enable ALSA as follows:

Device Drivers -> Sound
Device Drivers -> Sound -> Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
Device Drivers -> Sound -> Advanced Linux Sound Architecture -> PCI Devices

Now enalbe wireless:
Device Drivers -> Networking support -> Wireless LAN (non-hamradio)

But this is not enough, you will also need to get http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net and http://ieee80211.sf.net and follow the installation instructions for both. Reboot and you should see the wireless interfation on ifconfig -a, then you can play with iwconfig.

If you dont need 3D acceleration and 1280x800, you can use the standard vesa driver. But I am sure you wanna go for 1280x800 so you will need http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html. Follow installtion instructions, then add the next lines to your /etc/X11/XFree86-4:


Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Generic Monitor"
HorizSync 28.0 - 110.0
VertRefresh 43.0 - 90.0
Modeline "1280x800" 80.58 1280 1344 1480 1680 800 801 804 827
Option "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "nvidia geforce go 6400"
Monitor "Generic Monitor"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth24
Modes "1280x800"
ViewPort0 0
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "nvidia geforce go 6400"
Driver "nvidia"
EndSection

Now you can enjoy your notebook in Linux.

Article rewrite by rephrasing sentences

Many hire persons to rewrite certain articles and then to republish them in their own site, trying so to avoid duplicate content penalty. How legal is this? I am not very sure and I think all depends on the article author and I assume the more the article is changed, the more legal it gets.

However, if you cannot afford or you dont want to hire human rewriters, you can use this free tool.

I've seen other tools too, but most of them were commercial or hard to use so I could not really test them.