

Pay Day Loan Rankings: The shady tale of Joomla hacks and Drupal leaks - Doyley
http://www.seoconsult.com/seoblog/pay-day-loan-rankings-the-shady-tale-of-joomla-hacks-and-drupal-leaks.html

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bluetidepro
This is quite the HN title/link bait ( _currently: "3 Lines of Code to Rank a
Website to 1# on Google"_ ). The real title of the article is "Pay Day Loan
Rankings: The shady tale of Joomla hacks and Drupal leaks". The article is
about how a Joomla plugin added malicious code to their plugins to get
referral links via spam on websites.

~~~
jaequery
No, this method actually applies to all languages and all platforms with the
same given tactics. Anything with an open ecosystem of plugin/themes where
other users can download will be affected.

I've seem some similar activity in wordpress themes a while back. And if the
results are as good as this post says, this kind of activity will only keep
growing.

~~~
Doyley
The results are exactly as reported. The ones published are from last week,
but today the top 20 results are still dominated by websites doing the same.

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negativity
I seriously despise "search engine optimization" as an "industry" or
specialization of this internet industry.

What a bullshit term. Read it back to yourself:

> Search Engine Optimization

They're already liars. They aren't optimizing anybody's search engine. They're
optimizing HTML so that it can be easily parsed and crawled, but that doesn't
sound as sexy.

It's marketing hocus pocus, tantamount to chart reading for day traders in the
stock market. Just like chart readers, gazing into the Rorschach blots of
spikes and trends in the stock market, they don't truly understand, and can't
honestly answer to, how their composite numbers tie back to reality.

They honestly have no control over the search engines they claim to optimize
for, and have only an outsider's probed understanding of the internal workings
of the search engines they target. The exception to this is when former
employees of search engines are hired as consultants at these places that
claim to offer these services, but honestly aside from that sort of intra-
industry incest, what else do they have to offer?

SEO as a term is a throwback to the late 90's when a lot of people didn't
really understand what search engines do, and got sold on a trend.

Yes, yes, robots.txt. Yes, unobtrusive JavaScript. Yes, structure your DOM in
a well-organized, logical manner. Yes, simplify unauthenticated link URLs, and
try to correlate references semantically. Yes, use the alt, title and name
attributes, to further orient semantics. I get it, okay. Y'know, these same
ideas overlap well-enough with accessibility standards. Anything beyond this
kind of coding practice is really either link spam, or simple tasks like
requesting that a search engine crawl your domain. And that's a marketing
campaign. Nothing is being optimized.

Can I stop putting this archaic buzzword on my resume? I don't optimize search
engines, and unless you're posting an ad for a position at one, neither do
you.

THEYYYYY!

/rant

~~~
patrickwcurl
SEO is just a form of Marketing consulting. I work with lawyers and insurance
agents - and I don't do blackhat,or greyhat, nor do I make promises. What we
do is go after our keywords by writing quality content, and press releases
mostly - as well as very good on-page optimization.

I guarantee that people need the service, I also do web development, which
gives me even more insight into how everything plugs together.

Most lawyers and Insurance agents don't even know what a robots.txt file is,
or javascript, or the dom, or alt / title tags - they just want leads for
their business.

I do think some people place a little too much emphasis being #1 for specific
searches, because #1 doesn't always mean tons of money, or business.

A/B testing is also important, as is other methods of business gathering.
Also, a lot of times adwords can be more beneficial and less costly than SEO
-- if you're paying an SEO 300 a month, vs a 300 a month Adwords budget where
adwords is guaranteed clicks -though there's optimization there as well.

The best solution in my opinion is to hire a web developer who knows SEO and
SEM, because to lower Adwords costs, and rank high requires some level of
programming - for instance I had a site that was costing $2.49 per click, I
made it so that the adwords landed on a dynamic url which would grab the
keyword they searched for, load it strategically throughout the webpage in
specific locations including description, title, keyword tags. This increased
the page value in Google's eyes, and brought my cost per click down to $1.68
which was a huge savings! My client could never have come up with that on
their own, and would've lost a thousand dollars by just spending the extra
money without knowing how to optimize..

Where ever there is something technical, there are people who don't know jack
about it, and sometimes people take advantage of them, sometimes people are
honest, same goes for other industries like Plumbing, or house repairs...

~~~
chrisbennet
"I made it so that the adwords landed on a dynamic url which would grab the
keyword they searched for, load it strategically throughout the webpage in
specific locations including description, title, keyword tags. This increased
the page value in Google's eyes, and brought my cost per click down to $1.68
which was a huge savings!"

This reminds me of shill bidding; instead of fake bids that drive up the
apparent value, your insert fake content (keywords) and thus fake "votes" for
the searched term on your page. That doesn't strike you as a little scammy?

The Google algorithm is supposed to let me find the item I'm interested in.
Your fake "detour" signs may drive more traffic to your web site but they
detract from the usability of the web search for everyone else.

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brador
Interesting article.

Makes me wonder how many Wordpress plugins are rogue. I have seen a few
plugins on the Wordpress site that are suspect, but there is no way to report
them to anyone at Wordpress, there is no report this plugin link anywhere.
Anyone know how to report plugins on the Wordpress site?

~~~
Doyley
I've not seen an Wordpress ones, although I have heard of them. I happened to
stumble across the Joomla one.

I know Wordpress have a user rating system which is pretty good in my
experience.

~~~
brador
The problem I find is most users who leave a rating don't read the code, just
the features. Ratings can be faked too...

~~~
Doyley
Yes, this is true. Nobody really knows how many of these contain elements that
should not be there. I can't think of a concrete way around it that's
realistic. But I think user ratings on an official site are a good thing and
are normally fairly accurate.

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zacharydanger
Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.seoconsult.com/seoblog/pay-
day-loan-rankings-the-shady-tale-of-joomla-hacks-and-drupal-leaks.html)

~~~
Doyley
Yeah we had an issue with the site yesterday after I posted the blog. It has
since been resolved and hopefully Google will update the cache soon.

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speeder
Beside the link bait title (right now "3 Lines of Code to Rank a Website to 1#
on Google"), I found it very misleading that the article mentions that a CWS
being open source is a problem because it can be exploited.

It is implying security by obscurity, and this is always bad advice, obscuring
your source code, won't make it safer, quite the opposite, it will make easy
to if someone find a vulnerability, you won't have enough resources to close
it fast enough.

~~~
Doyley
I am not implying this at all. In fact, I am a huge fan of open source
software. I simply offer the advice to check what you are using first as there
can be issues, as reported.

