Free Mystery Software Tool For SEO
I have just released a mystery software tool for SEO free to anyone who wants it. All you have to do is fill in the form on that page to get access. The first copy of the tool was uploaded early this morning.
The tool is a software application that runs on your desktop. It’s written in Java and so will run on Windows, Macintosh or Linux. And it’s free! (Did I already say that?)
Here’s a hint as to what the tool does: it involves Google and search engine rankings. (It’s not AdSense-specific.) I’m sure you’ll find it useful. Give it a go, what do you have to lose?
After you’ve tried the tool, don’t forget to check out Article Gatherer and PLRSiteBuilder.
Easy High-PR Backlink Method
You need traffic to make any real money as an AdSense publisher. Search engines are a great source of free traffic, but these days you need a lot of links back to your pages in order to rank well. Here’s one easy and free way to legitimately get high-PR backlinks. It requires some time and some elbow grease, but it’s worth exploring.
Step 1: Install the SEO For Firefox Add-On
You need to be using the Firefox browser. Install Aaron Wall’s free SEO For Firefox add-on. This extension modifies search engine results pages on the fly to show all kinds of interesting data about the results, including (tada!) Google PageRank (PR). After installation, restart the browser, go to the Add-ons section, select the options button for the add-on and make sure that the PageRank option is selected.
Step 2: Find a “Do Follow” Blog or Social Site
This requires some research, but you only have to do it once. Gather a list of on-topic blogs and social sites that don’t use “nofollow” on user-submitted external links. A good place to start is with the Do Follow Blogs Directory.
Some of the “do follow” sites may surprise you. Digg is “do follow”, for example.
Step 3: Search for High-PR Posts/Entries
For each blog/site in your “do follow” list, search for posts/entries that have PageRank assigned and meet a minimum PR level. It’s very easy to do. First, go to Google and use the site: command to restrict a search to pages from a given site. Then add in your keyword/phrase to find relevant pages on that site.
This is how I find promising pages about AdSense on Digg:
site:digg.com adsense
Pretty easy! All you do is (with the SEO For Firefox toolbar enabled) scan down the list of results and look for pages that have a PR value assigned. Many of them will have no PR assigned (new pages don’t)… it’s hard to find high PR ones, but I’ve definitely come across several PR 5 or 6 pages in my searches.
Step 4: Leave a Comment
Once you’ve found a promising page, see if you can come up with a relevant comment. In the comment, link back to your site somehow. You may not be able to leave a normal link. Digg, for example, only allows you to enter a URL. (This is where having the keywords in the URL will help, of course.) Do what you can.
Be sure not to spam. Only comment on relevant pages and make sure your comment actually adds to the discussion.
Step 5: Rinse and Repeat
That’s it… do this as many times as you can stand it, on as many sites as possible. It takes time, and it takes effort, but it can yield long-term benefits for your own pages.
Some people will charge you $10 for this information, I’ve given it to you for free. Have fun!
More About IFrame Injections
My post on iframe injections generated a few questions which I thought require more public answers.
First, a brief commercial message: check out my new Toolinator Article Gatherer software, which lets you quickly find and format relevant articles from EzineArticles and Article Dashboard. On sale now at an introductory price. See these lovely testimonials for more information.
Now onto the questions…
Q: Aside from looking for a numeric IP address, how do I tell if an iFrame is good or evil? Does WordPress use them or should I just assume that an iFrame is evil if it isn’t from Google?
WordPress doesn’t use iframes, although it’s not inconceivable that a WordPress theme would use an iframe itself. An injection, however, is most likely to occur in the content of a post or page, not in the template that is part of the theme. So any iframes embedded in the middle of a post, for example, are suspicious.
While AdSense uses iframes, you won’t see an iframe directly in your content. That’s because the iframe gets inserted on the fly (when the visitor’s browser runs the JavaScript) into the body. The iframes you’re worried about are the ones that show up in the content directly.
Any unknown iframe should be looked at closely. If you’re using a different advertising program, it may well be that they are using iframes as well. It should be obvious, though, because the iframe should point back to a domain that you recognize. If you don’t recognize the domain, or it’s a numeric IP address, treat it as suspicious.
Q: Also, don’t WordPress databases (MySQL) have a password that would prevent someone from adding bad data to it?
Yes, that database is password-protected, but that’s not the problem. SQL injections occur when programmers write PHP code (or Perl or whatever) that doesn’t take the correct steps to “sanitize” input data or otherwise leave various security holes open. Hackers discover these holes and use them to muck around with the database…. they don’t need to know the login information.
Q: Finally, do iFrames work on all browsers? I thought they only worked with Internet Explorer?
Yes, iframes work on all modern browsers. What you might be thinking of is the iframe problem with ad tracking scripts. It used to be that ad tracking scripts would only work correctly (completely) with Internet Explorer, but that’s changed with Internet Explorer 7, which is more secure. Ad tracking scripts would basically attach “event handlers” to any AdSense iframes they saw (the ad tracker is a bit of JavaScript code you paste to the end of your HTML page, it runs after the AdSense code on the page has run and has created the iframes for the ad units) and using those event handlers they were able to “see” which specific ads users clicked on. Now the very latest browsers don’t let the ad trackers see any details of the content within an iframe, so now all the ad trackers can tell is if the iframe’s been clicked on or not, which isn’t anywhere near the detail they had before.
The point is, though, that iframes work pretty much everywhere. See Inline Frame for more.
BTW, anyone who buys my article grabbing software gets $30 off the Gold edition of PLRSiteBuilder. Pretty good deal!
What’s an “iframe injection”?
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned how memwg.com had been flagged by Google as being a “bad” site because it was hosting “malware”. This wasn’t something I had done, the site was subject to an iframe injection. It took me a while to find and fix the problem, but since I’ve had some questions about iframe injections here is a quick and dirty guide to dealing with them.
The “iframe” Tag
The <iframe> tag is an HTML tag used to seamlessly embed content from another page or site. (The “i” in “iframe” stands for “invisible”, i.e. “invisible frame”.) IFrames are used on thousands and thousands of sites, because that’s what Google uses for its AdSense ads — the little bit of JavaScript you paste on your page eventually ends up inserting an <iframe> into the HTML of your page.
Like most useful things, IFrames can be used for good or for bad.
Injections
An injection is something inserted by a third party into a website. The most common kind of injection is a “SQL injection”, which is an injection into a database (SQL is the language commonly used to program and access databases… many people pronounce it as “sequel“, by the way, which is why I say “a SQL injection” as opposed to “an SQL injection”.)
Most injections are SQL injections. If a website developer isn’t careful, they can easily leave backdoors open that nefarious types can use to insert random data into a database… or even worse do things like wipe out the database.
WordPress blogs are ripe for iframe injections, since they’re backed by a database…
IFrame Injections
An iframe injection is an injection of one or more iframe tags into a page’s content. The iframe typically does something bad, such as downloading an executable application that contains a virus or worm in it… something that compromises a visitor’s system.
If you have a very recent browser (like Firefox 2) then iframe injections aren’t really a worry — these browsers are smart enough not to automatically download and run applications without your permission. But older browsers are more trusting.
Finding IFrame Injections
To find iframe injections, look through the HTML your web server is sending. Open a page in your browser and then use the browser’s “view source” option to see the HTML. Look for <iframe> tags. Injections usually insert iframes that point to raw IP addresses (something like “66.78.2.101″) instead of domain names. Treat these as suspicious.
Once you’ve found an iframe and have determined that it’s not legitimate, you have to remove it from the page or database it’s coming from. On a WordPress blog you simply edit the page in question and look for the &lgt;iframe> and remove it.
That’s pretty much it. Keeping your WordPress (or other database-backed software) up-to-date with the latest fixes is the best way to avoid these kinds of problems.