Google announced yesterday that they’ll be changing how they track users across all of their different sites, including YouTube, Gmail, and the big G’s search engine. There is some concern from various places (including the Washington Post)  that this is tracking that can’t be opted out of, but the truth is, you still have that option. It goes live March 1st, you can see all details here.

Google tracks for advertising purposes and associates your activity on the web (and multiple sites they run) with different demographic information. In this way they can personalize ads and limited content based on what you watch, search for, +1 on Google Plus, and so forth. You can find out details on how exactly this is done by checking out Google’s Advertising and Privacy page. Previously this was not done in a consolidated way for all different sites and businesses run by Google, but this change is what Google announced on Tuesday.

The Washington Post had an article yesterday about this new change from Google and included a major comment on how there was no option to opt out of the revised tracking methods. Not to fear – Google’s slogan of “Do No Evil” seems to keep true, even when there is concern that they are straying from it.

To opt out, simply visit Google’s Ad Preferences page. Here you can choose to remove different demographics and categories Google has determined you are part of, edit them, or even just opt-out completely. Google keeps a cookie stored with your browser to track everything. By opting out Google will disable the cookie and no longer associate your interests and demographic info with the browser you’re using.

Keep in mind you’ll have to do this for each separate browser you may be using if you really want to opt out completely, but the concern that there is no way to opt out of their tracking methods is simply erroneous. You may have no issue with the tracking Google does (I’ll admit, it does tend to make the ads a little more digestible when they’re things that actually interest you instead of not), but if you do you can simply opt out.

For full details on Google’s revised Privacy Policy you can check out their new Privacy Policy page. On this page there are links to the areas where you can adjust your preferences and find out more details.

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If you haven’t heard yet, some major, major sites are taking action to protest two major acts that are being run through congress. SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) in the House and PIPA (Protect IP Act) in the Senate are both set up to change the internet in a huge way if they pass. Essentially – the freedom we enjoy to express ourselves and communicate freely online may be in jeopardy.

SOPA has also been titled “The Great Firewall of America” and would allow the DoJ or related copyright holders to have sites blocked by search engines, advertisers, and even internet service providers to effectively shut down any sites that are deemed a threat to national copyright in any way.

The biggest issue with this posed by most opponents is that it will essentially cripple the Net as we know it. And some of these opponents are rather… well known.

As a response, several of these opponents will be taking action tomorrow, January 18th, 2012, in an online “blackout” to help educate many of what a real threat this could pose. Some of these organizations are as follows (all links below go to relevant pages regarding each site):

• Reddit.com – Will be completely shut down from 8 AM to 8 PM EST, instead displaying links to educational resources.
• Wikipedia.com – Will be blacked out for 24 hours starting at 5:00 UTC.
• Google.com – Will not black out, but will post a link on the front page to help educate users.
• Imgur.com – Will black out their gallery from 8 AM to 8 PM EST with a message about the acts.

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The news is out, Google is not a fan of Microsoft Windows. The main reason is security concerns, the vulnerability that is present with the hackability of the operating system.The biggest case of this was when Google’s Chinese operations were hacked through security holes in Windows.  The threat from China hacking attacks has caused a bit more concern at the Google offices regarding security measures.

Now the operating systems that are allowed at Google are Apple’s OS X (or other Macintosh OS variants) and Linux.  In order for any employees to install Windows permission must be granted from CIO level or above.

Details on this story can be found at the Financial Times.

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As many blogs that get decent traffic know, you often get a lot of spammy comments on your posts, even when you have a decent anti-spam plugin or two.  Well, there are other routes to go when you STILL get spam comments.  And I’ve found a nice one.Any good web designer knows what the htaccess file is and what it’s used for.  What a lot of people don’t realize is how powerful this file can be, when used right.

The htaccess file is a file that works properly from the root directory of your domain.  Usually it’s used to handle issues like canonicalization, but can also adjust the traffic you get in different ways.

In my case, I had found a few individuals from China that seemed to like trying to comment on my blog about luxury shoes.  Now I understand the general misunderstanding from people trying to do SEO on blogs with comments, but really – commenting on internet marketing blog entries about shoes?  That was enough to make me go ahead and take action.

So what I did is collected the IP addresses from all of these spammers (easily findable through any of my multiple log tracing tools, in addition to being blatantly visible through the blog back end comment tab).  I took these addresses and then created two lines on my htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} 222\.79\.17\.112
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/spammer.php [R=301,L]

Once these lines were entered, what it will do is take any visitors from the specified IPs and redirected them to a lovely page I made, just for them.  And no, the IP address has NOT been hidden to protect the guilty.  To make this work properly, all you need to do is make sure you put these first two lines in your htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on

After that, just change out the IP address for the one you want to redirect, and then make that page one which you want to point them to (can be another domain entirely, if that’s your choice).  Then they can spam no more!  Or cease to bug your site, with whichever way they have offended you.  Have fun with it!

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There are a lot of standard black hat SEO methods that have been around for a while, but those that stray a little on the darker side of SEO keep busy.  There are several new tactics that these people are using.

As SEO becomes a more prominent form of marketing, black hat methods are also becoming more well-known.  The latest term for these techniques is “poisoning”, which I find appropriate.  These SEOs will put their poisoned links (which contain malware and installations of other nefarious elements) into various places where people will find them through either particular keywords or through social media.

As a lot of people are not aware that these attacks happen, they can often give away account information, trusting that the sites they are visiting are reliable.  These attacks come through Twitter and Facebook as well as through standard search engine results.

For more info on this, check out this article by Last Click News.

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The iPad is the latest Apple news and it’s been getting a lot of attention.  Considering this, some not-so-nice SEOs are using the fresh keywords to do black hat SEO to infect computers across the globe with malware.  They’re targeting laterally related keywords such as “Apple Tablet” and “Apple iPad Rumor”.

Be cautious if you see some weird results when you do searches on these types of terms.  The eWeek Security Watch has more info on this.

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The tragic news of Brittany Murphy’s unexpected passing affected many.  However, there are some to whom this news affected in a different way – they saw a way to make a buck.

Personally, I think it’s rather sick, but there are some individuals who have taken this opportunity to take a hot news item and push spam and malware.  Quick dirty black-hat SEO methods can often get high results quickly, but then are found by Google and taken offline.  The issue is that even the short amount of time listings like these stay online can be enough to infect several machines.

Newer black-hat SEO attacks use news events to get attention to sites that pose as news sites, but act only to infect machines with malware schemes.  Be cautious when visiting unknown news sites that are “reporting” on hot news items.

The Tech Herald has more information on this particular attack, and F-Secure has more information on the specific malware details.

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This is kind of older news (as in more than four days old), but you may have seen Facebook’s new privacy settings on your account.  It’s caused a bit of a hubbub for some people – there’s concern about private information being available to the major search engines.  Is there truth to this?

Well – yes.  And the settings they asked you about were just a touch on the full privacy settings.  If you care about what’s freely available to the world, you’ll want to step in to the main privacy screen.  Here there are additional settings that Facebook didn’t display on that first update on the settings.

And there’s even more to it.  Danny Sullivan has gone through it all in explicit detail on his blog, in this listing.  I’d highly recommend going in and checking it out, to make sure you’re happy with what Facebook is showing the world.

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Most people nowadays use Google as their primary search engine.  Well, something not everyone realizes is that when you’re logged into your Google account, Google keeps track of all searches you do with their search engine.

What this is intended to do is to enhance your experience with Google (although many people have conspiracy theories as to what their purpose really is).  The results are varied, but Google will keep track of every site you visit and display that on their search results, in addition to adjusting the order of the search results for you based on which sites you showed a preference for.

So that means if you visit one site several times while logged in and found them through Google, the next time you do the same search that site will be quite a bit higher on the results pages.

For any SEOs, this means it will not show accurate search results for keywords you do searches on.  Which is not something SEOs want to happen, if they’re looking for accurate results.

To get around this, you want to use Google when you are not logged in to your Google account.  Only then will it show unadjusted search results, which may still vary based on which server serves up your own results.  But it will not be affected by Google’s personalization of your own search results.

Whether or not they still track you based on IP address is something I’ll leave up to the conspiracy theorists, but for those of you who want a more objective search result, I recommend staying logged out of Google unless you need one of their services at that time.  Or else use a different computer/browser to do your Google searches that you want raw unaltered search results with.

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So it seems like some security guys have found a few new attacks, posted as image links on blogs.  These posts are engineered to end up on high Google results, but point to malware sites.  It apparently doesn’t work on up to date server software, so keeping your updates current is a good idea.

You can get more details here and here.

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