# Forbes.com - Home to The Best Press Releases in the World! Forbes AdVoice, a new Forbes editorial strategy that does away with the traditional barriers between advertising and editorial content: > The pitch is this: We'll sell you a blog, and your content will live alongside that of Forbes' journalists and bloggers. This isn't the "sponsored post" of yore; rather, it is giving advocacy groups or corporations such as Ford or Pfizer the same voice and same distribution tools as Forbes staffers, not to mention the Forbes brand. > "In this case the marketer or advertiser is part of the Forbes environment, the news environment," Mr. DVorkin said. If that stuff has legs & spreads across most the major media sites then Google's "authority first" relevancy algorithm strategy is dead. Google has always considered paid links bad ([as Forbes certainly knows](http://www.forbes.com/2007/10/24/google-web-traffic-tech-cx_ag_1024google2.html)) but as paid content spreads how will Google fight it? And if that content contains links then is it still a paid link? Will Google once more end up [purging the payola](http://www.forbes.com/2007/10/02/internet-paid-search-tech-cx_ag_1003google.html)? The other question is ... when media has tons of press releases alongside the articles, what value add is there for consumers to pay attention to the media? And if the media teaches advertisers to create their own media, won't many of those advertisers do so on their own websites & cut the mainstream media out of the loop? # It is Time to Regulate Ignorant Anonymous Guest Posts on TechCrunch TechCrunch published an anonymous attack piece on search engines...both the organic and paid side. Lets deconstruct some of it, shall we? **"It’s now conventional wisdom that search engine optimization, representing the organic result sets on any search query, is more voodoo than science."** And it was conventional wisdom that you needed to own tech stocks because "this time it is different". And it was conventional wisdom that housing goes up forever. We didn't care when fraud was looting trillions of dollars, but now you need to be compensated for your own intellectual sloth & laziness? Please. Most of the market is willfully ignorant and mislead. Just like in most big money markets. Nothing new there. What about public relations and branding and other forms of marketing? Most people are ignorant of the influence, so should we just ban marketing? Without marketing do consumers get more or less choice in the marketplace? If strong search rankings are an unfair advantage then are good domain names and memorable 800 phone numbers also worth regulating out of the marketplace? To most people rocket science and evolutionary biology and even basic economic literacy are more voodoo than science...does that mean we should shut them down? **"In addition, consumer behavior dictates the top three results on any search page are all that matter. "** They may be most important, but you can still build a real business by ranking a bit lower on the search results. Also, people search for billions of unique search queries each month, so it's not hard to rank in the top 3 for something. Keep a lean business if you want to use search as your primary distribution channel. Invest in slow sustainable growth as opportunities present themselves. The line "all of your eggs in 1 basket" also comes to mind. If search bounces around then try to offset that risk by building other distribution channels including offline, word of mouth marketing, repeat customer sales, affiliate marketing, building a strong brand, etc. **"And at any one time, the controller of these borders (that is, the search engine itself) can change and manipulate those rules – and that can substantially decrease or destroy all organic traffic coming to your website, without notice and without your knowledge."** Use analytics to track your search traffic. If your site has its rankings destroyed and you do not notice then you either didn't have much of a business, or are not investing properly in knowing your market. Either way you would deserve failure if you were reliant on a traffic stream and were not actively measuring it. **"Because the rules of organic and paid search change frequently – and remain undefined — agencies and other traffic brokers can win big; through their experience, they’re capable of reverse-engineering these rules. This means that, as this market matures, individual businesses have a diminishing chance to actually compete and gain search market share. That, in turn, puts them in a position of not only needing to hire an agency in order to find any traffic, but also making it more expensive overall to build businesses on the web."** The same analogy could be stated for businesses buying up key real estate locations and building efficiencies into their supply chain model - like a Wal Mart or a McDonalds. The same analogy can be made for huge online networks that cross promote new sites. The same can be said for banks that are too big to fail while smaller ones are slaughtered off and sold to the big ones. If business owners are too lazy or cheap or ignorant to invest in one of the highest ROI business functions of the last 100 years then how can anyone have sympathy for them? There are millions of dollars worth of tips on this site shared freely. And people can get direct help with their site [for as low as $100](/content/join/index.html). If they can't afford that, then they should not be on the COMMERCIAL web. **"The only real solution is disclosure. Transparency. Those traffic generators that use rule-based algorithms to determine result sets must publicly disclose their methodologies. That is the means by which all businesses can compete freely in the organic and paid search marketplaces."** Except this is not true. For numerous reasons. - as the algorithms grow more complex, the transparency of them would still only benefit a few key players while setting a high barrier to entry for small businesses. all this would actually do is drive small businesses out of the marketplace faster. - if algorithms were transparent automation and testing would be abused by larger established trusted websites. some news companies already [use robots to write content](http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/commentary/imomus/2006/08/71654). give them a high PageRank, offline distribution, algorithmic immunity, and the source code to the algorithm and I can't imagine how I would be able to compete against them. - media and marketing are rarely if ever transparent. and when they are it often backfires because people feel they were influenced and/or used. manipulation in the traditional media world goes on all the time. I suppose it is time to write another post about media transparency. # Bloggers as Influencers Since blogging about [a toy flower I bought my wife](/content/youtube-monetization-2-years-now/index.html) I got multiple emails from guys who said they bought them for their wives. And one member went so far as [paying Mahalo answers $10](http://www.mahalo.com/answers/shopping/where-can-i-buy-this-exact-style-of-singing-sunflower-see-details-for-link) to find the exact flower in the video. Think of how irrelevant a toy flower is for the audience on this site, and yet that casual mentioned likely caused over $100 of commerce to happen. What more if the offer was relevant to this site's audience? If people want media free then I think it makes a lot of sense for publishers to use affiliate links to get a cut of the action. I [reviewed SEM Rush](/content/sem-rush-search-marketing-research-review-semrush-com/index.html) before they had an affiliate program, and that likely added thousands of dollars in business for them. They have since added an affiliate program, and I have since went back to that old post and added affiliate links. Their affiliate payout is 40%, but I still have not earned that much because their price point is too low for what their tool does. They could increase their price 400% and it would still be a good value. A lot of high payout affiliate marketing is sleazy (diet scams, hyped network marketing, reverse billing fraud, cookie pushing, etc.) but if you have a real site with decent reach you can profit significantly from giving people discounts and recommending high value offers that you are proud to endorse. I shared [some affiliate program integration tips in the forums](http://community.seobook.com/affiliate-programs/5274-affiliate-program-integration-examples.html), highlighting a couple of our blog posts that made 4 figures and 5 figures each. # New Wordpress Hacking Strategy Using Cloaking to Target Google IP Addresses ### Stay Protected An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you want to prevent any of your Wordpress blogs from getting hacked make sure you keep your software up to date, and follow other basic [Wordpress protection strategies](http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/three-tips-to-protect-your-wordpress-installation/), like - securing your admin folder, removing the Wordpress version number from your theme's header.php file, creating an index.html file in your plug-ins directory, and removing other common Wordpress oriented footprints like a "powered by Wordpress" signature in the page footer. #### Get an Early Warning Another thing you can do to protect yourself is to get an early warning if/when your blog does get hacked. You can subscribe to a [Google Alert](http://www.google.com/alerts) for [site:yoursite.com viagra OR cialis OR levitra](http://www.google.com/search?q=viagra+OR+cialis+OR+levitra+OR+Phentermine+OR+Xanax+site:blogstorm.co.uk), and so on...as [Patrick explains on Blogstorm](http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/how-to-use-google-alerts-to-find-out-if-your-site-gets-hacked/687/). If one of your blogs gets hacked fix the others before it is too late. Some plug ins make it [easy to update/re-install Wordpress](http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2008/06/18/easywp-wordpress-installer-cause-there-aint-no-such-thing-as-too-easy/). #### Stopping Comment Spam Not quite as bad as full hacking, but comment spam is still annoying. There are a couple good plug ins to help prevent comment spam as well, including [Akismet](http://akismet.com/) and [Spam Karma](http://code.google.com/p/spam-karma/). Other easy suggestions on this front are to require a captcha and force first time comments to be moderated before appearing on the site. ### Google IP Address Targeted Hacking + Cloaked Spam One of my blogs was recently targeted by a blog hacker that inserted links into the site that could *only be viewed by GoogleBot*. You typically would not notice such a hack unless you subscribed to a Google Alert for your site, saw yourself ranking for some of the spam terms, and/or when your Google Search Traffic started to fall. The issue with such a hack is that it is hard to know if you wiped it out, even if you update everything. When you use [Firefox's User Agent Switcher](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59) you still will not see the links because you are not surfing from one of GoogleBot's IP addresses. In fact, for this particular hack you can't even see the links on Google's cached version of a page unless you view the text cache version of the page. Once you click the text only cache link tons of pharmacy links appear in the page footer. This screenshot was taken from a Texas Instruments blog post on security and safety. Google currently [has indexed over 20,000 pages with this particular hack](http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Serevent+Serophene+Seroquel%22&num=100&filter=0). #### How This Type of Hack Influences Google Traffic Earlier this week one of my writers who loves blogging complained that search traffic was dropping slightly, and then after a few days of minor decay the search traffic was cut in half. Keep in mind this site gets much of its traffic from organic links. Our Google traffic started to fall off slowly, and as more of the pages with spam in them got indexed the fall off became sharper. After a week or so traffic may be a small % of what it was...or if they just spam a couple pages the change in traffic may be so minor that you never notice it. The traffic decay rate depends on... - the crawl priority of your site (how frequently it gets crawled) - the number of pages you have on your site - how bad your site gets spammed (number of spammy links and pages, etc. You can see what portion of your site got hit by searching Google for "spammy footprint" site:example.com and comparing that count to the total number of pages Google shows indexed for site:example.com. ### How to Clean Up Your Wordpress Blog Regular updates are a plus to make it easy to revert to a prior version if needed. And if you find yourself upgrading software after a hack make sure your server is clean (save old files elsewhere) and install fresh. You probably want to change your database and Wordpress passwords after upgrading, and if you are not sure where the hack was you may also want to change your theme. There are a lot of different ways people can hack into a Wordpress blog. Some spam hunting ideas include... [Using SSH to look for recently modified files](http://www.labnol.org/internet/blogging/find-if-wordpress-blog-website-hacked-code-injected-files-changed/2870/) and/or weird new files that were added to your site. Some hackers may also add files to the root of your site, or above it hidden somewhere on your web server. Some hacks may be via a Wordpress plug-in. If you have inessential plug-ins installed see if others have complained about them getting hacked, and see if you can remove them. I think some hackers that get into Wordpress go so far as adding plug-ins that position spam throughout the blog. If your database contains spam in it then you can run the following MySQL query (from [Michael VanDeMar](http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2008/06/24/how-to-completely-clean-your-hacked-wordpress-installation/)) to find many of the most common types of Wordpress link hacks. If you can't find any spam in your Wordpress database, then... - look for files that have been added or modified - back up your files and database - disable plug ins - delete all files (except for maybe your config file and .htaccess file - and verify those have not been edited as well) - update your blog to the newest version of Wordpress - change your MySQL password and your Wordpress password - install a new theme - download necessary plug-ins from their original sources if you want to keep using them - make sure you performed all the steps at the top of this article to try to keep your blog safe. - if your problem was a shoddy host that got compromised then its a good idea to shift to a better [Wordpress hosting](http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-hosting/) solution. #### If The Hacker Was Using IP Cloaking... If the hacker was using IP cloaking you can't be 100% certain that the spam is gone until Google tries to index new pages on your site and/or re-indexes old pages that were hacked. You can find files that have been indexed in the last day or last week by [using Google's date based filters](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=site%3Aebay.com&as_qdr=w). If you updated your blog a few hours ago you can also do a regular site:www.example.com search on Google and set the results to 100 per page to find any pages that have been re-indexed in the last few hours. Once the search results come up you can search the search results page for _hours ago_. One note of caution is to check the actual page's cache date at the top of the page. Sometimes when a cache is really new clicking on the link will show you the new page, but sometimes it will show you a cached page from a few days back. When you see a new cached page without the spam links hopefully your spam problems are almost over and your site is on the road to recovery, with rankings improving as Google caches more pages from your site. Remember to set up a Google Alert for your site so you can track if any spam links magically re-appear. ### Your Turn I have only had a couple blogs hacked in my many years of blogging. Did I miss any obvious tips and/or wisdom you can add to the above post? # Blogging - No Longer a Unique Business Strategy I was surfing around quite a bit today and came across many great blog posts that seem like they were meant to be more than blog posts. But there is too much content and not enough attention, so nobody cared. A marketer who has studied online marketing for nearly a decade got 0 comments and 0 inbound links for writing an 8 page blog post of quality content. Worse yet, the blog is about using content to build links, and the post shared link building tips. If you are one off linkbaiting or publish nothing but hyped up linkbait garbage then blog posts are a good format for promotion because blogs make it easy to show social proof of value (via trackbacks and comments). But if your site is real and you aim to create a real brand your best content needs a permanent home, and should be set apart from your average blog post.