SEO black & white

Virtual child porn and a thoughtcrime.

2007-12-08T22:11:00.002Z

Each time has it's own hot topics to attract drain bramaged logic. Its well known fact that an average contemporary brainwashed zombie could be easily controlled by magic word "pedophilia". Contemporary demagogues are aware of that.

The most indicative in this regard is a situation with virtual child porn. Speaking about virtual child porn I mean any porn-related material where no real children were involved in production - e.g. computer generated images/videos, anime, adult models with childish clothes, etc.

Below is a list of countries where virtual child porn is clearly illegal:

Sweden and Norway seem to be one step away from the join to above club (all they lack currently is an actual courts' verdicts). UK is clearly on the way to that club. What about US - situation seems to be complicated and ambiguous, only future will tell which direction they will choose.

While it may be clear that virtual child porn is purely a victimless crime, what may still have reminded hidden after the first glance is that virtual child porn is rather different from common victimless crimes (e.g. drugs, sex work). It lacks not only an actual victim. It either lacks "the object of the crime" - that part is purely subjective. The actual age of the fictional person involved in such a porn material is a nonsense. The actual guilt of someone in this crime is that guilty person can think about fictional child as of real. That is exactly a thoughtcrime.

Yahweh / Сongratulations to Kasparov and others.

2007-11-26T13:08:00.001Z

Kasparov was not the first jailed to short time slice by famous Article 19.3 of the Russian Offences Code ("Disobeying the lawful order of pollice officer"). This article is just a magic helper for authorities and has nothing to do with reality because too often Russian courts don't even bother to check whether order itsel was lawful or not. This is simple enough and seems to be the most used method of jailing Russian political activists.

The full list of 19.3's jailed activists is a big enough to not be fully known to me. Even I in my contemporary history had a record of 19.3's 10 days of arrest (05.05.2007-15.05.2007) during Moscow part of the GMM.

15 days of arrest - the maximum allowed by Russian Offences Code. In the past in Moscow there were two places (known to me) where you can be send during this time.

Special Russian Offences Code jail (Gilyarovsky str, 65, bld. 3). The place where I spend largest part of my 10 days
Remand center at Petrovka 38 - I was there about 12 hours.

Petrovka 38 is less frequent but more comfortable jail. But even in (1) case this is not so problematic place to spend up to 15 days of your life. Boring but safe place.

In the right corner of the room (1) where we were held there was abandoned spider's net. It was not clear whether spider still exists or not but it was clear that no one from us will see him - just as Yahweh. Kasparov was sended to (2) and so spider's destiny still will be unclear to us.

I believe Kasparov will be no more tired from his arrest's days then I was. In fact Russian Offences Code arrest is the most exciting gift any opposition activist can receive from Kremlins. Starting from this time Kasparov is far more reputable to any radical person then it was before. And 5 days in his situation is not so big price as one can think.

More than 4 ports for Digi Neo serial cards in linux.

2007-11-14T14:40:00.005Z

It's kinda hard to describe to any but die-hard unix administrators and embedded software developers how useful thing like serial console is. But it is "widely known in narrow circles" fact that there are quite a lot of problems or work scenarios where serial console is the simplest or even the only possible solution.

Almost any of "widely known in narrow circles" markets have one disadvantage - hardware for them is far more expensive than for an ordinary market. Of course in the simplest case you can just use any regular computer (which usually has two on-board serial (com) ports) as console server. But imagine dozens of unix servers (this is my situation). Existing specialized console servers are just to expensive.

Simple alternative to specialized hardware is multi-port PCI card (or several of them) installed in yet another server.

I use eight-ports Digi Neo at work. The only problem I've have with these cards so far is that vanilla linux kernel supports (via jsm driver) only up to four-port flavour of this card. In fact nothing serious prevents jsm driver from supporting more than four ports. You can check that by applying this tiny patch against current git tree (should also apply with harmless hunks to any kernel version since 2.6.26). For kernels before 2.6.26 use old patch.

At one time ex-colleague of mine even sended this patch to lkml but Scott Kilau from Digi was strongly against it without any good reason (to me).

We have used our patch in production for several years. Hope it will be useful for someone else.

Update: 20081022 12:00 (GMT)
Orignal patch had been broken since version 2.6.26. Due to:

commit 99da9047e675a4a8d671bbd67b34eb096c308b0d
Author: Scott Kilau 
Date:   Thu May 1 04:35:00 2008 -0700

    jsm: add new supported board to jsm serial driver

    Add new PCI Express Neo/JSM board to the supported list of drivers in
    the JSM driver.

So I've ported the patch to the git tree as of 20081022. Original post have been changed accordingly.

legaliz.info has just been resurrected.

2007-10-17T06:20:00.000Z

Strangely enough repressions saga didn't stop after we moved legaliz.info (Cannabis Legalize League) hosting outside of Russia. In the beginning of August 2007 legaliz.info disappeared from the internet. Ukrainian hosting-provider claims that hosting was interrupted after unlawful order of Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs that in turn originates after request from Russian State ("General") Office of Public Prosecutor.

All the issues seems to be resolved now - site is finally moved to US. I hope that US is kinda "Russian State Office of Public Prosecutor"-proof country.

P.S. My wife wrote a bright episode from offline Cannabis Legalize League life.

How do search engines' bots handle javascript?

2007-01-02T19:08:00.000Z

This is a freestyle translation of www.seoweblog.ru: Как индексаторы поисковых систем обрабатывают javascript?.

We've just completed experiment, targeted the real knowledge of how do indexers/bots of different search engines handle HTML code with javascript included within it and javascript redirects in particular.

In our experiment we used high traffic site positioned in google for some popular keywords. On the main page of this site we created links to the (experimental) pages with a different fragments of javascript within each of it. These fragments redirect clients' browsers to the other (destination) pages specially created for this experiment. To be safe destination pages were truly secret and weren't linked with the main site in any way. This way we were sure that bots had came for the destination pages only via experimental pages. All we need to do after that is just look at raw server's log at which destination pages were actually crawled by search engines bots.

At the end of experiment it was clear that Googlebot and other search engines' bots were able to correctly handle almost any variants of javascript redirects, i.e. bots had crawled destination pages and pages were appeared in the search engines' index. Below are concrete examples that were correctly interpreted by bots:

In the first example processed by indexer we see plain redirect code:

<script language=”JavaScript”> document.location.href = “http://www.site.com/directory/1.html”; </script>

Second one was redirect executed by encoded script:

<script language=’JavaScript’>var str = ‘wbs%21s%3Eepdvnfou%2Fsfgfssfs-u%3E%23%23-r%3C %0B%21%21%21%21%21%21%21%21%21%21%21%21%21%21 epdvnfou%2Fmpdbujpo%3E%23iuuq%3B00xxx%2Fbetpgu.efwfmpqnfou %2Fdpn0uftukt03fod%2Fiunm%23%3C’; str = unescape(str); res = ‘’; for (var i = 0; i < str.length; i++){ res += String.fromCharCode(str.charCodeAt(i)-1); } eval(res);</script>

In the third example indexers were required to process part of the script inlined in iframe (and they did it correctly):

<iframe xsrc=”http://www.site.com/directory/f.html” width=”100%” height=”100%” frameborder=0 hspace=0 vspace=0 marginwidth=0 marginheight=0 allowtransparency=true scrolling=no> </iframe>

But there were exceptions. Below is two javascript examples could be used for redirecting client browsers that search engines do not understand (i.e. seo safe).

On the first page redirect was done in a manner that allows to execute it only by client's browser or a bot with html code rendering capability. Example (slightly modified) code is:

<table width=”100%”> <tr> <td id=”first”>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> </tr> <tr> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> <td id=”second”>aassssssdddddffffgggghhhhjjjkklll</td> </tr> </table> </div> <script language=”JavaScript”> var D=document; function AbsPos(O, Parent){ var X=0, Y=0, Next, D=document; Next=O; if (Parent==null) Parent=D; while (Next!=null && Next!==Parent){ Y+=Next.offsetTop; X+=Next.offsetLeft; Next=Next.offsetParent; } return [X, Y]; } var first = AbsPos(D.getElementById(’first’)); var second = AbsPos(D.getElementById(’second’)); if (first[0] != second[0]) { document.location.href = “http:/’+'/www.site.com/directory/t.html”; } else { document.write(’whatever‘); } </script>

The experiment has shown us that search engines bots do not have rendering capability (and this is understandable). That fact could be used by anyone who wants to have redirect either executed by alive users and not accounted by (hided from) search engines' bots.

In the second example redirect is triggered by an "active window" event:

<script language=”JavaScript”> function f(){ document.location.href = “http://www.site.com/directory/x.html”; } window.onFocus = f(); </script>

Of course bot didn't follow (crawl, index in turn) this redirect because it don't have such capabilities (again).

In the next special example:

<script language=”JavaScript”> function rnb() { http://www.site.com/directory/abc.html } </script>

were URL was simply inlined in javascript (without any redirect) we have verified that bots didn't follow the URL. This means that search engines' bots (Google and others) do indeed correctly "execute" javascript and see the result of it's execution. But the subset of javascript they support is limited. E.g. they haven't have rendering capability yet.

Our conclusions

Bots of the main search engines (Google in particular) do support some subset of javascript. I.e. in general they are able to distinguish between normal javascript (that is part of dynamic html page) and sneaky redirects. But there is still a possibility to create sneaky redirect unnoticed by the search engines. E.g. you could exploit the difference between a real html browser and and se bot (last one haven't have rendering capability yet).

Only .6% of Matt Cutts' readers are from Russia.

2007-01-01T22:38:00.000Z

According to Matt Cutts' reply (hint: search for "Update:") to my question about geo location distribution of his blog readers the Russia's share of his readers is only about .6%. That surprised me only at the first glance. While I agree with the very popular anti-spammer's opinion that Russian speaking countries (and Russia is the biggest one) is among of the main sources of black hat techniques (one xenophobe even suggest to simply: "deny from .ru") the funny thing I notice every time I'm reading over Russian sites focused on seo is that Russian natives very rarely rely on rather well known to English speakers facts.

A good example is the comment where one mention google toolbar as possible reason for Googlebot crawling a page while Matt Cutts has already written comprehensive post shows that google toolbar "doesn’t lead to page being indexed". This is the main issue that distract me from the love of my own country - the average level of escapism and ignorance of the other world is too high currently.

On the other hand the fact that at this level of escapism Russia is still very visible as black hats' home is only mean that search engines haven't yet archived the desired level of spam resistance.

P.S. It seems that Matt Cutts' blog is experiencing MySQL problem currently:

WordPress database error: [Can't open file: 'wp_comments.MYI' (errno: 144)]
SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = '538' AND ( comment_approved = '1' OR ( comment_author = 'Sergey S. Kostyliov' AND comment_author_email = 'rathamahata@gmail.com' AND comment_approved = '0' ) ) ORDER BY comment_date

I.e.:

rathamahata@x ~ $ perror 144 MySQL error code 144: Table is crashed and last repair failed rathamahata@x ~ $

so link to "my question" temporally points to the entire post. I'll change link when mysql problem goes away.

Update: 20070102 18:03 (GMT)
MySQl problem at Matt Cutts' blog has been resolved. Link has just been changed to a correct one.

YahooFeedSeeker does use Google Blog Search Pinging Service?

2006-12-24T17:28:00.000Z

I am currently playing with Google Blog Search Pinging Service. While looking at the raw logs I've noticed the yahoo's YahooFeedSeeker came to my site right after the Googlebot:

66.249.72.67 - - [24/Dec/2006:19:35:46 +0300] "GET /sitemap.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 251 "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" qwerty.legaliz.info "-"
216.39.58.17 - - [24/Dec/2006:19:43:15 +0300] "GET /sitemap.xml HTTP/1.0" 200 251 "YahooFeedSeeker/2.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide)" qwerty.legaliz.info "-"

I haven't sent any other blog pings (i.e. I did _only_ manual ping). So I suspect that YahooFeedSeeker does use changes file exported by google in some way.

Internet censorship case (IP delivery is different from cloaking).

2006-12-21T11:42:00.000Z

Qwerty - one of the local Moscow internet provider have just firewalled Cannabis Legalize League (CLL) for it's customers (regular Russian citizens). This is the second case of repressions over CLL inspired by the Russian authorities. First one was mail with threats from Russian DEA analog sent to hosting provider where CLL site used to be hosted for a while - due to this incident CLL site was migrated to Ukraine.

To workaround current issue I've configured custom mirror/proxy of CLL site provides different views on specially created third-level domain for:

Qwety's customers.
Any from within internet censorship free world.

P.S. For googlers and antispam radicals. This is not a cloaking. This is an example of correct usage of an IP Delivery technique. In case any have better ideas on how to workaround internet censorship cases your comments are highly appreciated. Below is mod_rewrite excerpt from my httpd.conf:

  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^87\.240\.[01][12345].*
  RewriteRule (.*) http://legaliz.info/$1 [P,L]

News from the streets of Moscow.

2006-12-14T16:45:00.000Z

Prices of effective marijuana have raised up. Again. Now it is even more expensive than gold - $50 per 2 grams.
The most exciting sound you can hear at opposition political action this autumn/winter comes from alive Buddhists.

Moscow government prohibited "Killed Journalists Remembrance Marсh".

2006-12-12T15:07:00.000Z

A friend of mine Maria Smirnova aka Мария Смирнова (one of the members of the coordination committee) have just confirmed to me that Moscow government prohibited Killed Journalists Remembrance Marсh (link is in Russian). Marсh was scheduled at October 17 2006.

For those not familiar with the Russian law I have to add that Russian Constitution and Federal Law #54 in turn don't give any right for a local government to prohibit a public action.

P.S. The speed of backlinks growth for such a political projects is amazing. Clearly Russian politic is the weirdest case of the white hat seo I've ever known. There is no so much need to be a black hat when social spam is so effective.

The whole captcha concept is doomed.

2006-11-16T15:48:00.000Z

Someone left a comment about a workaround for one of the possible captcha killers:
Hey, Sergey, there is quite easy workaround for such captchas cheating. Captcha owner should just include his domain name into captcha. And he could do it the way you could not masquerade it (as watermark over characters or something similar). Of course when you are smart and unique, no one site owner would do that. But when it became usual spam practice, owners will defend.

Sure, domain name embedding will guard captcha up to the safe level in the ideal world. But the real world is different from the ideal one. It is almost the same situation as with "authentic microkernel vs real OSes". While microkernel OSes are more ideal from the methodology angle of view the largest part of the real OSes are not microkernel. It's because humans are not ideal at all.

In the real world domain name embedding:

Will made captcha encoding by humans more harder. The web is already full of complaints about current captcha implementations. Captcha surely will not benefit from adding additional complexity for humans.
Has a workaround for it. Spammers will be required to register mistyped domains for their targets. Sure, the convertation will be a bit lower but still practical, I suppose.

The _whole_ captcha concept is doomed! Captcha is just yet another variant of cybersquatting prevention method. Rather complicated to me to live quite long. It's complexity (either current or suggested) will not safe it.

Have just switched to blogger beta.

2006-11-09T16:00:00.000Z

And now I've got two problems as a bonus:

Sitemap's errors (Google Webmaster tools) of two types:
1. Your Sitemap or Sitemap index file doesn't properly declare the namespace.
2. This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location.
My blogger's profile doesn't work anymore. (Update 20061212: It seems that bug affected my profile was fixed. It works now.)

Livejournal is down, Russian March is dead.

2006-11-04T13:36:00.000Z

Slow Saturday... It intended to be very news rich in Moscow but it doesn't so. For haven't yet been detailed reasons livejournal.com (livejournal, LJ, живой журнал, ЖЖ) have experienced outage since Moscow morning.

Of course, time of outage correlates with US night well enough. Independently of the real details of the outauge this is very helpfull for russian security forces. It seems they've just finally secured so called Russian March.

Cross-linked second level domains network internet graph will lost.

2006-11-02T19:50:00.000Z

Jerzy mentioned one real problem that possible censorship politic change on "russian" livejournal part will trigger.

For non-authentic humans language it sounds like: Global internet graph will lost authentic humans created(peoples from seo are not authentic) cross-linked network of second level domains from one host. Internet will lost a bit of humanity. Bit belongs Six Apart/SUP.

If SUP are really thinking of more tight censorship they have just been commited commercial suicide. Killing of what they own can be non-ethical for readers - part that consumes humanity. Sad. But, if that affected readers part is big enough - time to build legal doorways by mirroring censored (but haven't yet migrated to any host) chunk of livejournal.com. Authentic humans will like it.

SUP, Go8 and anarcho-capitalism.

2006-10-27T23:36:00.000Z

I should probably write about current russian blogosphere - it becomes a hot topic.

As many know, Six Apart announced their partnersip with russian SUP company for their livejournal.com blog's hosting. Many, especialy residents of Russia, having in mind who really SUP are, afraid that it could be a first step, a base for a further compaign of political repressions over russian bloggers hosted on livejournal (largest part of russian blogosphepre in fact). But I think that there are several niches hided behind the political repressions of writers(bloggers) one. What may looks like a sign of possible repressions over russian bloggers is actualy only one part of problems that may arise in russian internet segment in future.

If fact current problem is not dangerous at all. Until there are still enough blog hostings around the world that are not under _any_ control the key factor of internet freedom in Russia is not an ability to write to some blog hosting (even lagest part of russian blogoshere) but the freedom to write.

To be short, in the most paranoic case: a hardest legal attack from russian government (crypto criminalised, total internet censhorship established) against all over internet business in Russia it will only hurt legal part of that business. Without other world support any local attack on crypto will not successed and censorhip system will not be total at all. An illegal market will in a jiffy accepts all the parts that a legal one has lost.

Until the first attempts of russians government to restrict network connects from Russia to the other world (or any other variants of mangling outer world view from inside russian internet segment) there are not enough reasons for many non-russian human rights or political organisations to look at things like SIX Apart and SUP partnership.

Any imaginable level of madness that could come from SUP is enough only for creating temporary problem. Even if all russian residents will loose ability to publish on livejournal.com some day, next day all of them will migrate to other blog hostings. There always will be enough blog hostings not affected by any doze of any control of The Bloody Russian Regime.

Non-russians, please, don't fight with temporary problems (like SUP), temporary problems are just attractive source of money and nothing more, they will never die - they will always ressurect untill you finally kill economy.

All that is needed to guarantee freedom to write on russian (the same logic is applicable to any other coutry too, btw) blogoshpere no matter of russian government activity and madness is just two things:

An ability for russians to cross russian internet border. I will write about a possible way below.
"The Bloody Russian Regime"-free blog (and any other) hostings outside the russian borders. Already done.

Speaking about crossing russian internet border. If access from russian internet segment to the outer world is not mangled or restricted (this is true currently, and as I've already said this is the only one internal russian subject that non-russian human rights or political organisations should look at) all other parts will not require any cooperation with the russian government. Below is just one example of possible working scheme.

Allow russian residents to take a part in global internet business, this will eliminate the influence of any possible economic sanctions from the russian government. Do not share information of russian residents internet activity (no matter business or not) outside the russian border, to eliminate the influence of any possible political sanctions. That will create an ability for russians to not depend on government in their ways to access and use of an internet. In the worst case free (as in freedom) access to the internet will become the part of illegal (in Russia) market, unless there are legal (outside of Russia) finance sources invisible for russian government this is not a problem.

There are plenty of such possible schemes. All of them including example above could be named as legal for outside of the country border angle of view, anarcho-capitalism like part of economy isolated frоm the country government. In fact schemes like that have been already working for ages. Е.g. SEO as any of small anarcho-capitalism style of doing business is something that actualy prevent Russia from collapse more than huge semi-fairly-legal businesses like oil and gas. They are just misses "legal for outside of the country border angle of view" part. This is not immanent problem of many of such a schemes/businesses. This is just drain bramage of paranoics constantly busy to legislate and partly criminalize everything new they hear and see. In case of "politican" variant of paranoics this could be fatal. So, please! Say "No!" to any colloborative initiatives on global internet economy from the Go8 and others.

Do not get fooled. SUP are not an enemy of freedom to write in Russia currently. No matter how weird or nice they are. To treat them as such they should be an IT monopolist company in a real mondialistic world (one Earth - one state). Until they aren't even near that position you could always choose another blog hosting - free enough for you, no one force you to choose livejournal.com. The real enemies are Legislation and Criminalization fun clubs with a hunting license (for a hunt on libertarian economy) in different countries, usually inside the governments and near.

Depoliticize internet economic all outside Russia and the freedom to write will never die for us: russian residents. It is all in our and yours interests.

AJAX proxy (semi-alive traffic convertation).

2006-10-20T14:01:00.000Z

When I used to be involved in smtp spam some colleagues of mine solved their problems with smtp relays in original way. Self written php smtp over http proxies was the solution. Php enabled hostings were cheap enough and their technical stuff was lazy enough. I don't think that possibility of that have changed a lot.

But I think there are much more interesting things on the horizon. It is all about old business - traffic convertation. There are far less profitable (if count "alive's" visits) traffic sources then for traffic comes from search engines:

CJs from adult web.
"Reject traffic" from any traffic acceptor.
Just unknown, very cheap, potentially alive (and potentially bots :) traffic you bought somewhere.

I should said that it all depends of your estimation of aliveness. I have a good example. This is one of the members of permanently ongoing activity I call: Fractal project. One practical example is decoding captchas using humans as decoders. In simple scheme any attribute that can be treated as non-profitable (e.g. China's traffic for something limited to US) triggers redirect to feed where user see anti-bot yahoo like message (claiming that user is possibly robot). To prove authentic humanity user should decode captcha (nothing new). But the captcha used in fact is fetched from blogger (AJAX is wonderful technology). After that we have yet another series of blog in blogger we could use for splog's creation, splogs also gives some constant backlink's (with medium period of live, because splogs are constant targets for baning) stream, good enough for some others splogs/doorways. At the time I had left these experiments speed of splogs creation was about 2k/day.

But the most exciting to me theoretical possibility is http proxy tunneled over AJAX capable clients (e.g. regular web surfer aka drone). All you need is just custom proxy server that accepts drones (nodes) ready to process regular http queries (in surfer's context, due to AJAX, not server one) and js code for drones. Custom proxy server should do two thins:

To acts as regular http proxy for you. Every incoming http proxy query should be inserted in the queue.
Second task is queue processing. Server simply offloads queries to AJAX capable alive drones when they arrives.

In drone context it just some code that executed by javascript engine of http client (say browser). While drone stays at the your http proxy feed it could process server queue several times.

All you need is just guaranteed bandwidth (~drones/s).

Btw, captchas decoding could be combined with AJAX proxy. All the time drone spend decoding capcthas (s)he could also acts as http proxy. There is possibility to constantly lie that dron decoding of a captcha is wrong and send him(er) another one, until drone will be tired.

Web 2.0 is coming and I enjoy it.

Guests.

2006-10-20T00:06:00.000Z

I had new visitors:

From Palo Alto (20061018).
Next day someone with referer: "http://reactor.corp.google.com/reader/view/".

Google escapism: openid ignorance.

2006-10-17T18:20:00.000Z

Google is amazingly open company. They share a lot of internal information. My favourite one source is seo library. But their openness is one direction mainly. They allow others to follow them (by sharing their docs, specs, standarts, scientific papers, etc) but not always influenced enough by things from the outer world. The most visible symptom is their ingnorance of openid for at least two of their services: Google Webmaster Tools (google sitemaps) and Blogger.

Google Webmaster Tools (google sitemaps) allows to verify that site is under user control by two possible methods:
1. By creating unique named file in the server root of your web host.
2. By inserting an unique meta tag in the HEAD of index page of your web host.
Both methods are light and flexible enough for any technical person but openid already does exactly the same: i.e. provides a method to verify that url(==hostname in this case) is under someone control. Furthemore, openid is more user friendly because many vendors and providers (e.g. blog engines and blog hostings) does already have built-in openid support.
Blogger - a very popular blog hosting simply lacks openid support that makes it less usefull for a user wishes to use its blogspot url as openid url for many vendors and hosting that support it and so lowers user ability to cross blogspot boundary by commenting on many others (not blogspot's) blogs.

If both Blogger and Google Webmaster Tools will support openid it will automatically gives Blogger users a way to verify their blogs for Google Webmaster Tools (without need to edit blog template by hands) as a bonus.

For whom the bell tolls.

2006-10-14T08:17:00.000Z

I firstly saw Anna Politkovskaya at September 03, 2006 around and in "Kitay-Gorod" Police department. I cover a bit of this story in my previous post. She wrote article about this (Russian) for "Novaya Gazeta" (one ot the last free ones russian newspapers). Unfortunately the fist time was the last one (besides funeral). Due to the four bullets in the elevator to her flat at October 07, 2006. About one hour after the murder we got an incoming call: Anna Politkovskaya was found dead.

This was kinda point of no return: no more logic reasons to stay inside the country but the revenge feelings. The sound was clear: "..never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.".

After the week it was clear - abnormal logic had damaged even full incoming information thread. It spreads even over the versions of the murder. The most attractive for me is a link to GRU. GRU is kinda old structure. Just one year younger than some countries like Finland. GRU is mostly invisible for the westerns currently. The only one visible part is the funniest one: "Восток" & "Запад" ("East" & "West") battalions of the GRU (mostly formed from chechen's collaborationists) are russian part of UN Forces in Lebanon.

Political activism in Russia (after the seo).

2006-09-16T23:57:00.000Z

Unfortunately I am unable to complete the promise I made in my last own comment. I left seo at the begining of april 2006. So I don't want to speak anymore about any material based on too personal experience.

There is not so much interesting about my current work, sorry. But there are a lot of things happen related to streets politic in Russia.

I will stop comment on any aspects of seo besides political in this blog. Furthermore, I plan to write about some political activity I take part in and so to change blog topic a bit.

Here is in order:

Here is some photos from the last action. Court is scheduled at 20060919 (from money penalty to 15 days in jail, most probable is money penalty). Sorry, the post I linked to is in russian.
It seems that russian became well known language for antispammer fascists world. Russian language is still new for this world. Here is wrong translation of Ann Elisabeth from russian:
"Реклама, распространяемая по сетям электросвязи и размещаемая на почтовых отправлениях".
In fact correct translation is not:
advertising distributed via electronic networks.

but:
advertising distributed via "сети электросвязи" and via regular postal system.

"сети электросвязи" is wrong to short to "electronic networks" as Ann did. There are concrete examples of what "сети электросвязи" means in this law. See below:
"Статья 18. Реклама, распространяемая по сетям электросвязи и размещаемая на почтовых отправлениях

1. Распространение рекламы по сетям электросвязи, в том числе посредством использования телефонной, факсимильной, подвижной радиотелефонной связи, допускается только при условии предварительного согласия абонента или адресата на получение рекламы...

So it is not "electronic networks" but "phone, fax, mobile phone". I.e. completely unrelated to mail/im/web/p2p spam.

Google's "No" to US government request for search engines logs

2006-01-19T22:06:00.000Z

Many of my words about SEO have strong libertarian smell. It is kinda hard to explain that my black hat nature is not a direct reason for that. In the past I tried to write about possible reasons for my libertarian view on SEO mostly from Russian citizen angle of view. It seems I wasn't successful. I think that US President Bush Administration have just helped me to highlight things I am afraid of. US is much obvious to many westerns than Russia and current issue is directly related to search engines. Kudos to google!

[Biased terminology] Spamvertzied keywords

2006-01-17T10:30:00.000Z

I've just found very good example of biased terminology in the
JoeChongq's comment on his own post (which is actually a reply to my previous post). I'm speaking about his term "spamvertzied keywords" (I think this means spam advertized keywords). There is no such thing per se. There are only profitable (more or less) keywords. The more particluar keyword profiltable the more it attractive to any seo guys and girls (including linkspammers). But this is just the consequence of keyword profitability and nothing more.

Warlordism.

2006-01-07T11:50:00.000Z

Update: 20060111 09:05 (GMT)
My opponent wrote about his own view on the problem. I suggest you to read him first. To me his unability to share any fact that cantradicts with my writing just proves my own words. Thank you, JoeChongq . I wish you peace.

First they Ignore you.
Then they they Laught at you.
Then they Attack you.
Then You Win.
-- Mahatma Gandhi

Besides white (one colour of gray if you want) hats and black (another colour of gray) hats there are thirds - seo warlords. This part benefits from any disagreement of the first two sides, being mostly unnoticed by the both.

Have you ever heard about warlords? In the real life the safest place to see an alive warlords is Transnistria from Europe.

Lets introduce examples of the seo warlords sites:

The doorway of the warlord matt.
Why I call it doorway? Because it clearly violated this:
* Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
part of google's webmaster guidelines. Look at this doorway's page
And the Joe's doorway.
The same violation as for the #1. Please look at the keywords links at the very bottom of it's rightbar

Note many irrelevant (for an ordinary users) backlinks on the both sites. Some of them are very hot se keywords.

The funniest is that their backlinks in most share the same beneficiary - *.chongqed.org domains and #1 have a direct backlink to #2, though #1 and #2 seem not to be affiliated on the persons level (according to personal email from #2). I should note that I know #2 for a long time and haven't even realized that it violates google's guildlines (from my angle of view) untill discovered #1.

Guys and girls, war on any thing don't give you any right to violate guidelines. Anchor text contains (suprisingly!) - words. There is no exception in guidlines for this type of inlined words for cases when you selling links, "hating" something, fighting against something, or just use any keyword as link anchor text and abstain from vote about any affilation of backlink<=>text pair at the same time, though in clinic psychology terms this is reflection of partucular association type which is (type) one of the most known symptom of schizophrenia (of course any one symptom is not enough to clarify diagnosis :). But in reality google does provide you with a primitive (rel="nofollow") at least for backlinks. You can inline any irrelevant text (for an ordinary user) in backlink and give search engine a hint about it's possible irrelevance. Even though this in only semi-solution. Warlords sites don't use rel="nofollow" primitive for a many clearly irrelevant backlinks.

These two self-elected warlords (this is usual for warlords) are worse than any of both black and white hats to an average user outside of SEO, because their clear target is serps pollution (again, from the average user's point of view) in the name of the antispam fight.

[RFC] Cloaking in a good and safe manner (Why rel="nofollow" is just a semi-solution).

2006-01-06T14:42:00.000Z

If you have ever read any SEO blogs or just any other regulary updatable sites about SEO you've probably already seen that many of them are polluted with many various keywords. Here is a good example of keywords pollution (note many gambling keywords all over the page).

According to google's webmaster guidelines I could be treated as a person violated this:
* Don't load pages with irrelevant words.

Did I really violate guidelines?

It depends on the angle of view. In my opinion it is just a missing part in google's code (and in turn guidelines). As always: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions", and google is not an exception. To me all keywords I inserted in mentioned page should be there - it is just very natural for a humans to use real examples speaking of any thing. In case of the SEO gambling keywords (and any others, btw) are relevant examples. But I do understand the intentions behind google "irrelevant words" cite. They don't want count such seo's example keywords for their strightforward meaning for an ordinary persons (i.e. as gambling keywords not as seo's keywords examples) and so positioning them for gambling keywords. And I fully appreciate it.

What is a problem? Googlers have already shown that they understood that real live is more sophisticated than their short abstract guidelines. I am speaking about Matt Cutts' interpretation of rel="nofollow" backlink's attribute. I like his short explanation of rel="nofollow" as a way to abstain from editorial vote. Without his explanation it is possible to misunderstood rel="nofollow" concept. For example it would be possible to interpret that google contradicts with another part of it's own guidelines:
* Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Because rel="nofollow" does exactly what cloaking means. I.e. delivers different views to a humans (these don't see rel="nofollow") and to search engines (those ones do). But with Matt's explanation it is clear that this is just a hint for a search engine in situation when peoples are not required to have such a hint. Peoples are smart and will understood what is going on anyway - from the surrounding context of backlink E.g. hints like strings:

comments
trackbacks
sponsored links
this evil person have just spammed my blog
etc...

are enough for any human.

But rel="nofollow" is just a semi-solution not a full one. The whole internet is just a graph of nodes - pages (mine and others) binded by backlinks. Any of us have been already granted by search engine whether to vote about other nodes or to abstain from a vote (i.e. to put rel="nofollow" attribute or not). Let peoples decide about their own nodes (any part of them) not only about nodes of others...

So what I suggest?

I think that support of e. g.
<div id="myid" rel="not4se">...</div>
syntax will be enough, but I don't care about actual implementation.

Of course all I wrote in this post apply to all search engines (IIRC yahoo and msn have already stated that they support rel="nofollow", not sure about ask...) not only to google. Google and googlers (hello Matt!) is just happen to be most open to a dialog with webmasters currently.

Btw, the whole problem is far wider than just seo keywords - it is all about a hints for a non-humans (i.e. search engines) about any word/phrace/text/content that is used outside of it's strightforward/dictionary connotation.

Any comments are highly appreciated. I know that some of my readers are rather sceptical about me due to my black hat nature (in their eyes). Please forget about black & white while your are reading this post...

Schoolboys on the air.

2006-01-03T17:38:00.000Z

I've just returned from my usual daily run across the SERPs and I've got a news for you: russian-speaking schoolboys massively entered many industries they had never tried on a regular basis before end of the summer 2005. I spent so many hours on summer investigating SERPs (that was beginning of my SEO career) so I'm sure that situation had changed... changed a lot.

Why I call them "russian-speaking schoolboys" and what are the industries they entered in? I'll give you an example. I don't like site-calling (for a various reasons) so I'll give you a hints. These hints will be not clear for a person not-familiar with professional SEO and this is intentional.

Example is a freebie redirect site from some Eastern Europe (but EU) country's domain zone that have just entered second google's SERP for very hot gambling keyword. I and google traffic estimator both think that it is the hottest non-poker gambling keyword. Google traffic estimator thinks that it costs aprox. $1k/day (actually a bit more ;). Google thinks that it knows aprox. 30.5M pages related to this keyword... Ok. Industry should be clear. But why do I think that he/she is a "russian-speaking schoolboy"? Because he/she sends traffic to a public (not advanced) umax ppc feed. Backlinks are guestbooks only. This means that:

He/she is a native russian-speaking at a high probability. Why on earth should others choose umax for a gambling traffic?
He/she hasn't yet earned his/her first $100 in SEO but is still trying ;)
He/she use not his/her own tools but some stupid programs so broadly known to "russian-speaking schoolboys".

To me this is exact portrait of russian-speaking schoolboy/girl making his/her first steps in black hat seo. And there are many of them visible in the winter SERPs. Looks like the concurrency for their traditional industries (weight loss, stop erectile dysfunction) had jumped so high so they have moved to other (not only gambling, btw) industries... Who will be next?