January 23, 2009 by
ryan
I will be giving a talk on the ASP.NET MVC Framework at the
Findlay .NET User Group on Tuesday, January 27th (5:30pm - 7:30pm). If you're in NW Ohio and want to learn more about the MVC framework and how to get up and running with it you might be interested. The talk is taking place at the Marathon building downtown -- 539 S. Main St., Findlay, OH - Room 106M. More information is available at the
User Group site. Hope to see you there!
December 12, 2008 by
ryan
"nice post!!thanks for the info..that's great and cool"
-Random Spammer
As
a web developer / someone who has a blog, I understand dealing with
spam is one of the necessary evils of having a comments enabled on my
site. For the most part, my site has remained far enough under the
radar that most spammers do not waste their time. More recently,
however, there has been a gradual influx of comment spam with a title
something along the lines of "[Company Name] SEO Test." There is worse
spam for sure but it was definitely annoying.
A quick Google
search pointed me to a Web Development and Search Engine Optimization
company hosting an SEO competition. I checked the rules and sure enough,
there was a rule stating that only Ethical SEO Techniques would be
permitted. Quickly, I emailed the organization one of the comments
(with url, ip, email, etc) exepecting the offending parties would be
removed from the competition, eliminating additional garbage comments.
I was shocked to receive their reply.
Unfortunately
this is not against the rules of the competition – I would encourage
you to remove the spamming links for your website to discourage this
behaviour but as I said I can’t actually penalise this person
for making posts on other peoples websites.
Sorry about the spam.
Gaming the System
In
my opinion, Search Engine Optimization should be about perfecting a
website and the website's content; not tricking google into thinking
more people find your content useful than actuality.
Optimizing tags
and titles is one thing but gaming the system to garner search ranking is wrong
and is detrimental to the web as a whole. Just because commenting is
legal and allowable does not make it ethical. Unfortunately, this
practice will continue to exist as long as it gets results and
organizations act as enablers to those who would use these tactics for
financial gain (not to mention increased search engine ranking for the
enabling organizations).
Link Spam is Digital Graffiti
Imagine
for a second if companies condoned this practice outside of the Web --
what if McDonalds or Nike paid for their logos to be spray painted on
other's property? To make matters worse what if after receiving
numerous complaints they held a press conference and said "soap and
water removes the paint" or "just hire some guards and the problem will
go away."? I think it's safe to assume that practice would not be
received so kindly (h/t
Matt Braun on the graffiti analogy)!
Fortunately a link is not as hard to remove as paint but the concept is
similar.
Solutions anyone?
Social networks such as
Digg,
DotNetKicks and
DZone have always been plagued by those who would
try to circumvent the rules for personal gain. Where honeypots and
captcha systems would traditionally help against
bots, an increasing number of spammers seem to be actual people. The
administrators of these social networks are constantly coming up with
more sophisticated ways to combat spam but what should small blogs and
websites do?
Currently,
there are a number of methodologies for preventing blog spam that work
with varying degrees of effectiveness but none are ideal. Obviously,
you can moderate comments -- this works okay but is painful if you are
getting a lot of spam or a lot of comments. Also, make sure your
comment links have a rel="nofollow" attribute (h/t
Simone Chiaretta). Google
does not take nofollow links into account when calculating page rank.
Although this does not reward the spammer, it does not prevent spam.
What I would like to see is a centralized comment system like Disqus or
IntenseDebate that lets a user login with OpenID, Google Friend
Connect, Microsoft LiveID, Facebook Connect (whichever the user wants).
There would be a standard vote up / down vote for every comment a user
makes where the overall votes across all sites would determine the
users rating. Casting a down vote would remove a minimal amount of
points from the voter to prevent someone from going on a down vote
rampage (exactly how
StackOverflow works). Site owners could set
restrictions that would prevent users with a rating less than a
specified number from posting on their site. This may be idealistic and
introduce a new realm of privacy concerns but if done properly, I think it
would help eliminate a great deal of spam.
Wrapping things up
Although there are many less-than ethical tactics to increasing a
site's ranking, site structure and site content are the best methods of
SEO. I would love to hear your thoughts, ideas and any suggestions you
have in eliminating link spam.
If you liked this post...
April 14, 2008 by
ryan
If you have not seen one of the other 5 million postings on this, there is now a
security patch available for
BlogEngine.NET. This weekend an issue was reported where an attacker could obtain the username and password of the site. Thanks
BlogEngine.NET team for the quick fix on this!
March 19, 2008 by
ryan
If you have ever had your site running on BlogEngine.NET end up looking like this screenshot -- try disabling the 'Trim Stylesheets' checkbox under the 'Advanced Settings'. From what it looks like, this may be related running BlogEngine.NET in a shared environment or medium trust (here for more info).
February 12, 2008 by
ryan
After starting this website as a real blog just a couple of weeks ago,
any number of visitors has been extremely welcome. I was very happy to
have about 30 unique hits a day with hope that, over time, others will
find this site useful. Recently, however, I posted a link to a color
theme for visual studio on dotnetkicks. That post made it to the front page and eventually generated way more traffic than I ever imagined that it would...
I realize for some people 1000 hits in a couple of days is nothing but I was shocked to
see that kind of traffic from
dotnetkicks, especially for a
Visual Studio 2008 Theme.
Break down of page views.
Graph of my average of 30 or so hits a day up to a peak of about 700 back down to 70s-80s.
Needless to say,
DotNetKicks has a lot more visitors than I thought it did. I wonder what kind of traffic volume people receive for a more
globally useful posting...
January 27, 2008 by
ryan
For the past couple of years, I have been using a blog engine that I wrote from scratch (login system and everything). I knew there were a million of these already out there but it was something I was going to use as a learning experience (it was something I was using as a way to learn C#). It worked great and let me do everything I needed to, however, I have not updated the code in forever. My style of coding has obviously changed a lot since then. Instead of updating the code base to be more efficient and test-driven, I decided it was a good time to stop re-inventing the wheel. I'm now using Blog Engine.NET.
Over the next couple days, I'm going to be migrating some of the content over (some of it is just not worth it) and maybe make my own theme.