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.

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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.

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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. Read more

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. Read more

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.