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phpBB.com Goes Down Swinging

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phpBB.com, the home of the popular open source bulletin board software phpBB has gone offline today due to a hack. The hack was a result of a 0-day-exploit in their PHPList installation which was responsible for sending out release notices. It is important to note that their have been no vulnerabilities found within the phpBB software itself. However, the hacker has gained access to the user accounts stored in the database for the main phpBB forum.

The attacker gained entry through the PHPList application and was able to dump a complete backup of the emails on file. He then used the same exploit to access the phpBB.com database. Both the email list from PHPlist and a copy of the phpBB.com users table were then posted publicly.

For more information regarding the attack, please see this article on the area51 website. If you think you are affected by this hack, you are highly encouraged to start changing your passwords around if you use the same one on more than just the phpBB.com forum.

Perfcast Episode 23 – Content Generation And SEO

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This week, David and I continue our blogging series by discussing Content Generation and search engine optimization. We highligh a number of topics such as DoFollow or NoFollow, Social Media, and a whole lot more. Plus, at the end of the show we provide a great list of resources for you to check out if you’re into SEO.

Content Generation
Coming up with ideas
Building a voice
Staying Fresh
Tracking News
Inspiration
Commentary on news, social commentary, posting about something written by a competitor

SEO Concerns
What is SEO?
What are factored into deciding the SEO of a site?
How important is SEO?
DoFollow or NoFollow?
What is Pinging?
Do I need a Sitemap?
How much time should be spent on SEO?
How can you maximize SEO in a blog post?
WordPress Plugins for Maximizing SEO?

Social Media
Building Links Naturally
Site Optimization
About Page
Microformats

SEO Resources
WebCEO – Checking server headers can be a problem, but it’s an essential element to ensure authority is being correctly passed between pages. This tool lets you check your pages and route out those 302 redirects.

SEOBook Keyword Tool – One of the best free keyword research tools available online, this allows you to see search volumes for keywords and suggests alternate key terms.

Compete: There’s both a free and paid version of this onlin tool, which checkjs visitor level and keywords driving traffic to a website. A great way to gain insight.

Site map Generator for Windows – Make XML site maps with a free tool from Google to help get your wevbsute indexed by major search engines

136 SEO Tools – Wide range of tools that covers just about everything you’d need to know regarding your website from an SEO perspective.

Link Analyser – This free tool shows the strength of inbound linkls, the anchor text and how many links to your site users follow

LISTENER FEEDBACK – You can give us your feedback by shooting us an email at, [email protected] or leave a comment on this blog post.

LENGTH OF EPISODE – 1 Hour 10 Minutes

NEXT EPISODE – February 12th, 2009 at 7 P.M. EST

ITUNES – Click here to subscribe to the show via iTunes

DOWNLOAD THE SHOW: PerfcastEpisode23.mp3

LISTEN TO EPISODE 23 OF PERFCAST:

History And Purpose Of ALT And TITLE Attributes

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Addicott Web has a great article which provides a bit of history and explanation into the ALT and TITLE HTML attributes. You might think these two attributes provide the same function but they are used for two different purposes.

The ALT attribute is an important element to the accessibility community. It began as a way for people who are blind and use screen readers (or people who use text-only web browsers) to know when there was an image on the page they were reading.

The TITLE attribute can be used with almost all HTML elements on your website. While the ALT attribute emerged from the accessibility world, the TITLE attribute emerged from the usability standpoint.

From a usability standpoint myself, I enjoy articles which have TITLES applied to images if they don’t already have captions so I can get a description as to what the image entails. As for ALT tags, WordPress makes it very easy to add these and I typically use one to three descriptive words. On the topic of SEO, I have at times received an influx of traffic because of the way I have described an image through the ALT tags.

Have you noticed a decent amount of search traffic coming to your blog by way of Google Image search?

Common Sense SEO

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This Thursday, David Peralty and I will be continuing our series this time, focusing on content generation and SEO. So with that in mind, I wanted to take a moment to highlight some key aspects involved with SEO that you don’t need a rocket scientist to help you figure out.

Be Visible – Think about the journey users take to arrive on your site. Keywords, search queries, phrases, etc. Queries that include your domain name, business, or company name. Also think about generic phrases that people use such as ‘blogging with WordPress’. Last but not least, there is the search queries which contain three, four, or five word phrases that identify exactly what the user is looking for. The key to success is to ensure that you have visibility at each point in the user’s journey.

Get Indexed – Make sure your website is able to be crawled effectively by search engine spiders. You can accomplish this by using clean code in your sites design, lack of on page javascript, absence of inline CSS styles, and non dynamic URL paths. The bit about URLs can easily be taken cared of by using a publishing system which supports URL rewriting. This is also a good time to create a sitemap and submit that to the various search engines. Sitemaps tell search engine spiders exactly what to crawl, hence the name.

All About Relevancy – Search engines are based on algorithms, not human thought. So while you might be able to get away with publishing gobbly gook as content on the site that search engines love, it may not be useful for visitors to your site. This means there is a fine line between writing for humans, and writing for robots. My rule of thumb and something I’ve done since day one ands that is to write for humans. I write content that is relevant to my sites purpose, the subject at hand and I use relevant titles to describe content as well as keywords within the content. All of these things put together not only makes sense to humans, but also tells the search engines that my content is relevant towards a specific subject so that I’ll rank higher for when user’s look for information regarding the subject.

Authority Is A Good Thing – Authority is a good thing when it comes to search engines. Authority is generally measured by the number and quality of inbound links to your website. For example, the more inbound links to a site from similar sites known to the engine using keywords in the anchor text, the more authority is given to that receiving site. When talking about Google, they use something known as PageRank to determine a sites authority level. Due to changes in the Google algorithm, it is advised my many to stay away from certain types of link building techniques such as buying links, reciprocal linking and site wide links. If you concentrate on creating good, high quality linkbait, the links will come to you.

These are just a few of the topics we’ll be discussing on this weeks edition of Perfcast so tune in and don’t miss it!

Another Google Burn Victim

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Mark Ghosh who operates WeblogToolsCollection.com recently published an article that describes the terrible support experience he encountered with Google after he made the big mistake of falling for a phishing scam related to his Orkut account. After his Orkut account became compromised, he was unable to gain access to it as the flaw used by the hackers was an old, and well known bug in the way in which the Orkut application stored data in cookies.

The Orkut application stores cookies in such a way that if your cookie is ever recreated by someone else or transmitted to someone else, they can use that cookie to log in to Orkut as you. forever. No matter how you change your credentials, you have no recourse of regaining control. So if you ever get caught in a phishing scam that sends your password to someone else and they recreate your orkut_state cookie, they can login as you forever.

Mark then describes the various avenues he has tried in order to get support from anyone within the Google powerhouse and so far, he has been unsuccessful after two weeks of trying. While the initial blame can be given to Mark (which he admits) the way in which Google has handled the situation is completely unacceptable. After reading what happened to Mark, I’m feeling pretty good that I don’t rely on Google or any web based application to handle my sensitive information.

Have you had a similar experience with Google’s support system? Don’t you think issues like this really need to be addressed before we start leaving all sorts of information into the cloud?

Another Web Service Implodes

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Do you use ma.gnolia? If so, then you already know about the implosion which occurred with the services data on January 30th. According to a statement now on the front page of the magnolia website, the site experienced not only data corruption, but data loss as well.

For Ma.gnolia, this means that the service is offline and members’ bookmarks are unavailable, both through the website itself and the API. As I evaluate recovery options, I can’t provide a certain timeline or prognosis as to to when or to what degree Ma.gnolia or your bookmarks will return; only that this process will take days, not hours.

Magnolia is providing updates on the situation through their Twitter account. Not long ago, a similar incident happened To JournalSpace.

These incidents are stark reminders that perhaps placing all of our data into the cloud is not such a great idea, especially when companies are not establishing appropriate backup procedures. Taking into consideration how cheap storage is these days, not having a proper backup of user data is completely unacceptable. This is also a good reminder that these services need to be providing easy ways for their users to take their data/content off of the sites for end user backup purposes.

Do you think that this is a new trend? Web 2.0 sites and services imploding?

Tips For Getting StumbleUpon Traffic

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Not getting any StumbleUpon traffic? If not, you may want to head on over to Website Host Reviews where Ryan outlines a list of possible reasons as to why you’re not getting traffic along with a list of tips on how to avoid getting on the bad side of StumbleUpon.

Not enough “up” votes on your articles, possibly within a certain duration after submission.

Too many “down” votes on your articles. Maybe your topic is of little interest to SU users, or of poor quality. Or someone doesn’t like you. (Ah the joys of social media.)

Poor categorization. If you don’t have friends submitting your content/ articles, it’s hard to control which categories are being used to tag submissions.

Speaking of StumbleUpon, have you noticed that the amount of traffic you get from the service is highly dependent on the initial submitter? If anyone else has tips or tricks regarding StumbleUpon traffic, please share them in the comments.

Perfcast Episode 22 – All About Advertising/Monetization

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In episode 22, we gave a very broad overview of monetization/advertising as it pertains to blogging. Continuing with the series “All About Advertising/Monetization” David and I cover a lot of ground as it relates to monetizing the actual blog. I have to admit that after producing this episode, I’ve realized that the scope of this topic is huge!

Basic Overview Of Advertising
General Terms (PPC, CPM, REFERRAL, ETC)
Figuring Out Advertising Rates

When Should You Display Advertising
At Launch/After Launch
Should everyone see advertising or limit it to certain types of people

Monetization Methods
Affiliate Advertising
Pay Per Click
CPM
Display Advertising
Sponsorships (“this post was brought to you by”, “this contest was brought to you by”)
Popups and Interstitial

Advertising Based Tools/Services
Perfads
OIO Publisher
OpenX

What it comes down to
Lots of Quality Traffic (from either advertising or search engines)
Leveraging 1% (If you are ranking for a keyword and get 1% of the total searches, and 1% convert through advertising, what is your estimated income?)

LINKS MENTIONED ON THE SHOW
101 Ways To Monetize Your Blog Without Irritating Your Users
The Pitfall Of Tagging Posts
SitePoint.com Has An Opening

LISTENER FEEDBACK – You can give us your feedback by shooting us an email at, [email protected] or leave a comment on this blog post.

LENGTH OF EPISODE – 1 Hour 7 Minutes

NEXT EPISODE – February 5th, 2009 at 7 P.M. EST

ITUNES – Click here to subscribe to the show via iTunes

DOWNLOAD THE SHOW: PerfcastEpisode22.mp3

LISTEN TO EPISODE 22 OF PERFCAST: