A Reddit user, Reckoner6777, set up a Google Account and an Apple ID with a fake birth date. According to the user, they only used this fake birthdate with Google and Apple. Now, however, that fake birth date is showing up on the user’s credit report. [Read more…]

After I speak at conferences and events, I usually upload a copy of my presentation to Slideshare here so people who were at the event and those who weren’t at the event can see my presentation. Well, someone asked me today for a copy of an SEO audit (a template), which I will NOT give out. So, knowing that I don’t give out SEO audit templates or examples, I usually send people to my Slideshare account that has my recent SEO audit presentations which DO include lots of good info on my SEO audits. But today that changed. It seems as if Slideshare as misconfigured their SSL certificate. Take a look at what happens when I try to go to Slideshare: [Read more…]

California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra has filed extortion and money laundering charges against the owners of MugShots.com, the website that gathers mugshots of people who have been arrested and posts them online. Mugshots.com charges the individuals whose mugshots are posted on their website a fee to remove the mugshot photos from their website. The defendants named in the complaint are Sahar Sarid, Kishore Vidya Bhavnanie, Thomas Keesee, and David Usdan. [Read more…]

We all know that SEOs and us digital marketers spend a lot of time sitting in our offices, in front of our laptop or monitors. Sure, we do occasionally answer the phone, but to make the day go by faster and make it more enjoyable we absolutely have to have our tunes going. Most of the time, especially when I’m writing or even reviewing a client’s backlinks, I’ve got some music on. [Read more…]

eBay is voluntarily removing about 500,000 pages from their web site, possibly giving up what some estimate to be one billion page views. According to a Seeking Alpha report, eBay has hundreds of thousands of buying guides that were created in order to bring free organic search traffic to their web site. [Read more…]

Recently I wrote about how there was a bug in Grammarly’s Google Chrome extension. The bug allowed virtually any website to essentially get ahold of your login credentials and gain access to the Grammarly documents in your user account. As I mentioned in my post, Grammarly did fix the bug. [Read more…]

SEMrush, one of my go-tools for Keyword Research and a whole lot of other SEO and SEM tools, has launched Keyword Kombat Winter Sports Edition [Read more…]

As someone who started doing SEO back in 1996 for my own business and my affiliate websites, well before there even was an industry called the “search industry” or “digital marketing”, I’ve never thought of myself as being one who was an innovator. Well, over the years I’ve come to the realization that I’ve innovated lots of things over the years.

Hint:My latest innovation? The first-ever SEO to be accepting Bitcoin for payment of SEO services.

[Read more…]

There is a class action settlement, OPPERMAN, ET AL. v. KONG TECHNOLOGIES, INC., ET AL, that has been between the plaintiffs and an app developer. Kong Technologies created apps for Foodspotting, Foursquare, Gowalla, Instagram, KIK, Twitter, and Yelp. Kong Technologies was formerly known as Path, Inc.. Essentially, certain apps obtained contact data from users’ devices (their iPhones), in violation of their privacy rights. If you used one of these apps in your iPhone between 2009 and 2012 and allowed those apps to access your contacts, you may be entitled to money. You can claim it through iosappsettlement dot com. [Read more…]

Beware of scam apps that are in the Apple App Store that have been submitted by rogue developers. There are developers that are scamming Apple users, and making money from apps that don’t work. Dishonest app developers are creating apps that don’t work as described—and are linked to other innocent websites. [Read more…]

Matt Cutts, former head of the web spam team at Google, has officially resigned from Google. His last official day at Google was December 31, 2016, he announced on his blog. [Read more…]

Update
May 16, 2016: 12:01pm Yelp is now back up and running, it appears that the site was down for several hours today, May 16, 2016. While it was down, they were displaying this message:

Previous blog post below, as I initially reported it:

It appears that the Yelp website is down. This is the first time in many years that I have seen this website go down, and it’s certainly newsworthy. So many people rely on reviews from Yelp, good or bad, and many businesses rely on having good reviews on Yelp. [Read more…]

I bet you didn’t know that there is a simple version of Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia. While we certainly are familiar with the more technical side of Wikipedia, if you replace the “en” in the Wikipedia URL of any entry with “simple”, you will get the “simple” version of that entry. It’s explained to you as if you are a five year old. [Read more…]

This week I am Beijing, China doing a keynote address about SEO and domain names. There is free internet access here at the China World Hotel in Beijing, but is it really free? Maybe I should say that it is “restricted”. [Read more…]

By now, I’m pretty used to getting spam on LinkedIn, as I get it at least several times each week. But now, it seems as though the sales spammers are now targeting Google Plus, and somehow sending unsolicited sales spam that show up as notifications on Google Plus. Here’s the latest one, that I received just today. I have scratched out the name of the person and their company and URL, but you get the idea. [Read more…]

A website by Microsoft is using facial recognition to tell you how old you are. And if you ask me, it’s actually pretty accurate. Well, in at least most cases that I tested. The website, called How Old Do I Look?, allows you to find an image by searching on Bing.com, or you can upload your own photo. Their facial recognition algorithm will analyze the photo and tell you how old the person in the photo is. Or, if there are several people in the photo, it will look at all the faces and determine how old they are. [Read more…]

In a hilarious post, BuzzFeed said that no one would ever use any of the stock images that they posted in their article. Well, I have to say that they’re wrong. I mean, really, I can see a perfectly good use for their first image in the post: [Read more…]

Now this is bizarre. But apparently GoDaddy is being accused of releasing personally identifiable information (a woman’s email address) to someone who she’s accusing of being a spammer. And GoDaddy apparently released her email address to the spammer after she filled out an abuse complaint. The spammer wanted to know who had complained about their website, so GoDaddy gave them her email address. Of course, without permission. [Read more…]

Microsoft filed a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) request with Google. But, this one was one that might just deserve a Darwin Award. Who was the copyright infringer in this case? Yep, you guessed it. Microsoft. [Read more…]