How Google is reverse engineering page dates

Full format dates inside the main content of pages (month/day/year)

Dates in the comments, when no other date appears on a page

Decoding dates in URL’s (I have seen them decode 20091225 and 12252009 formats)

If you don’t want dates on your SERP snippets, use a permalink structure like %post_id%/%page_name% (or just /%page_name%, only if you don’t have a lot of posts, otherwise you will make it difficult for your CMS to rewrite your URLs). Remove all mentions of dates on your page, including the comments. Dates mentioned inside your content will probably be ok, especially if more than one is mentioned.

Elements of Twitter style

Learn how to tweet better.

Domain Appraisal Myths

Good article on domaining, parking and domain appraisal.

Tips on social media strategy from 10 experts

Some good tidbits on social media from Viperchill.

Five ways to keep it simple

So, to simplify: take a look back at whatever you’re trying to say. Focus on your key message and cut away the cruft that stops your customer from understanding it. Put that engineering mind to rest: stop trying to be factually complete and exhaustive.  Instead, make sure you’re not wasting anyone’s time.

Which Test Won

Weekly A/B tests and results.

List of crowdsourcing vendors

Big list of crowdsourcing and freelancing websites.

CSS Gallery submission

If you have a well designed website, perhaps you should take the time to submit it to a few CSS galleries. This is a semi-automated tool that can help you submit to 380+ CSS showcases/galleries.

One of the best SEO ebooks I’ve read, from the excellent seo-theory.com. A few years old but still makes a lot of sense.

Confessions of a black hat SEO

Hackers entering the game has led to some confusion. Some people think hacking for marketing is just a natural extension of Black Hat SEO. I very much disagree. Being an aggressive marketer or a Black Hat SEO is absolutely not the same as being a criminal. I may be “naughty”, I may not respect standards or stupid rules – but I respect the laws and I abide by them.

It Pays to be Popular on Facebook and Twitter

SubvertAndProfit launches a new ad campaign. They started out as a paid Digg service a few years ago but they’ve grown to include paid posting/voting/etc on a couple dozen social sites.

WideCircles Reloaded Beta launches

This is a service similar to SubverAndProfit, they have been around for a while. Haven’t heard much about them but I am curious to see if the new version gets any traction.

Is There Any Value in Getting Links From Directories

Yes but most people are doing it wrong.

Debt: the first five thousand years

A brief look on the history of debt. Worth a read.

Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors.

The Millionaires’ Magician

I like how this guy has branded himself.

AdCopy – In beta, you can request an invite.

AdCaptcher – Advertiser functionality coming soon.

AdAptcha – Also in closed beta, you can request an invite.

CaptchaAd – These guys are open for business. The counter on their site says they have served 23 million captcha ads so far.

The idea of captchavertising (see what I did there, I made a new word) has been popping up every now and then for the past few years.

http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2005/10/captcha-advertising.html

Probably the earliest mention of “captcha advertising”.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/12/commercializing.html

Next year Seth Godin comes up with it.

http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/01/captcha-advertising-part-ii.html
http://www.seobook.com/captcha-advertising

http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2010/03/captcha-advertising-closer-to-reality.html

http://www.techi.com/2010/04/captcha-advertising-coming-soon-to-a-website-near-you/

http://www.captchaadvertising.com/ – One of the above companies should grab this domain.

http://captchavertising.com – Parked.  Seems like I’m not the first one to think of “captchavertising”.

http://captchadvertising.com/ – Also parked.

Site speed is now officially a ranking factor at Google.

Captcha advertising coming soon to a website near you

Not really a new idea but is it a good one with all the automated captcha services that are in use these days?

The rough guide to Real Time Bidding in the European market

RTB (Real Time Bidding): What is it? (part ii) (part iii)

The Ad-Exchange model

Real Time Bidding is here to displace the conventional display systems, with lots of new inventory opening up. Mike On Ads has some good stuff on the subject.

Web Coupons Know Lots About You

Coupons are a great tool and you can use them to learn more about your conversions. A variety of examples are mentioned in the article, including a company that offers a coupon platform, RevTrax.

Does marketing make you cynical?

The internal Google documents leaked by Viacom are  interesting.

WebPageTest (example report)

Test your site’s speed for free and get some useful reports,  as well as suggestions on what to improve.

Fireclick Index

Last week’s Cart Abandonment rate: 69.20%

Someone needs to be doing something about that.

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Screen scraper tricks (focus on iMacros)

Abusing Firefox extensions

Attacking SMS

Social Zombies

Stealing profits from stock market spammers

Exploiting automated software updates

Cross Site Scripting Anonymous Browser 2.0

De-anonymizing you

Malicious proxies

Weaponizing the web

Wi-Fish

Real World Web: Performance & Scalability.

NGINX + PHP-FPM + APC.

Gearman is interesting.

Well, he finally lost the appeal. (via)

The socket API uses a 6 byte header containing protocol_version/command_code/data_size. Let’s call this the cc-header.

protocol_version is there for keeping old code functioning when the protocol changes. Currently, version is still 1.

command_code is used for actual commands as well as error codes.

data_size tells you the size of data in bytes following the cc-header. Size often is 0.

If you are sending a picture or receiving picture text there’s a second header following the cc-header. Let’s call this the pic-header.

The pic-header is 20 bytes long and contains pic_timeout/pic_type/data_size/major_id/minor_id.

pic_timeout is used to tell Decaptcher how much time it has to get the captcha back to you.

pic_type serves as an affiliate application id, as far as I know.

data_size is the size in bytes that will follow the pic-header.

major_id and minor_id are sent to you when you get picture text, they are used when reporting picture text as bad.

You append your image binary after the pic-header, when you are sending.

Picture text comes after the pic-header, when you are receiving.

Logging in:

1. Open socket to Decaptcher’s server.
2. Send cc-header, command_code=1, followed by your username.
3. Receive 32 byte salt, with command_code=3.
4. Using sha256, hash the salt,md5 of your password and username (in this order).
5. Send the hash along with a cc-header and command_code=4.
6. Receive cc-header with command_code=7.

Sending a picture:

1. Must be logined.
2. Send cc-header with command_code=12, then a pic-header and then the picture binary.
3. Wait on the socket until you get a cc-header with command_code=14. A pic-header and picture text will follow. You must store the major_id and minor_id you get in the pic-header preceding the picture text (in order to report bad picture text).
4. If command_code is not 14 then it’s an error code.

Notifying of bad picture text:

1. Must be logined.
2. Send a cc-header with command_code=13, then a pic-header containing the major_id and minor_id that came back with the picture text.

Getting your API credits balance:

1. Must be logined.
2. Send a cc-header with command_code=10.
3. Receive a cc-header with command_code=10 and the balance follows as text.

Logging out:

1. Must be logined.
2. Send a cc-header with command_code=2.
3. Close the socket.

The command codes:

‘cmdCC_UNUSED’, 0
‘cmdCC_LOGIN’, 1 // login
‘cmdCC_BYE’, 2 // end of session
‘cmdCC_RAND’, 3 // random data for making hash with login+password
‘cmdCC_HASH’, 4 // hash data
‘cmdCC_PICTURE’, 5 // picture data, deprecated
‘cmdCC_TEXT’, 6 // text data, deprecated
‘cmdCC_OK’, 7 // ok
‘cmdCC_FAILED’, 8 // failed
‘cmdCC_OVERLOAD’, 9 // server overloaded
‘cmdCC_BALANCE’, 10 // zero balance
‘cmdCC_TIMEOUT’, 11 // time out occured
‘cmdCC_PICTURE2′, 12 // picture data
‘cmdCC_PICTUREFL’, 13 // picture failure
‘cmdCC_TEXT2′, 14 // text data

Picture timeout codes:

‘ptoDEFAULT’, 0 // default timeout, server-specific
‘ptoLONG’, 1 // long timeout for picture, server-specfic
‘pto30SEC’, 2 // 30 seconds timeout for picture
‘pto60SEC’, 3 // 60 seconds timeout for picture
‘pto90SEC’, 4 // 90 seconds timeout for picture

The default picture type:

‘ptUNSPECIFIED’, 0 // picture type unspecified