HOEI

The MakeUseOf.com domain seems to have been hijacked over the weekend.   The guys over at MakeUseOf.com have set up shop temporarily on a Blogger platform at makeuseof-temporary.blogspot.com. The hosting company (GoDaddy.com) released the domain to someone who was impersonating the owner of the domain.  Here is what Mark from MakeUseOf.com had to say:

“Now it turns out that in order to transfer the domain, Ferank (or someone helping him) called up GoDaddy and impersonated Aibek. At that point he had already access to our account (or at least had enough information to recover the username/pass for the account) and basically said “hi, I’m the owner of MakeUseOf.com, please transfer the domain”. GoDaddy then complied. “

The Real Truth Behind The MakeUseOf.com Domain Crack

The plot has thickened because the hijacker (aka Ali Ferank) has requested a ransom of $2000 for the safe return of the MakeUseOf.com domain name.

What I would do if I woke up in Mark and Aibek’s shoes:

1) I recommend that the MakeUseOf.com team go over and take a swim in the ICANN registrar transfer policies to determine what pressure can be placed on GoDaddy.com to take some responsibility for what happened.

2) I would get Google involved since the  person currently holding the registration is using Goggle as the email host provider.

The following shows the current WhoIs for MakeuseOf.com:

Registrant Contact:
DomainsGame LLC
Ali Ferank

Alhana baghas nara St
Dubai, NA 85445
AE

Administrative Contact:
DomainsGame LLC
Ali Ferank ()
+1.5544415212
Fax: +1.5555555555
Alhana baghas nara St
Dubai, NA 85445
AE

A quick nslookup for the MX record for the email domain listed in the registration information shows that DomainsGame.org is using Goggle as a host for email services.

> domainsgame.org
Server:  vnsc-pri.sys.gtei.net
Address:  4.2.2.1

Non-authoritative answer:
domainsgame.org MX preference = 30, mail exchanger = aspmx3.googlemail.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 30, mail exchanger = aspmx4.googlemail.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 30, mail exchanger = aspmx5.googlemail.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = aspmx.l.google.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 20, mail exchanger = alt1.aspmx.l.google.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 20, mail exchanger = alt2.aspmx.l.google.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 30, mail exchanger = aspmx2.googlemail.com
>

3) I would give these guys at Moniker Privacy Services a call to see who registered DomainsGame.org.

A WhoIs on the DomainsGame.org domain shows it registered to:

Admin ID:MONIKER1571241
Admin Name:Moniker Privacy Services
Admin Organization:Moniker Privacy Services
Admin Street1:20 SW 27th Ave.
Admin Street2:Suite 201
Admin City:Pompano Beach
Admin State/Province:FL
Admin Postal Code:33069
Admin Country:US
Admin Phone:+1.9549848445
Admin FAX:+1.9549699155
Admin Email:

4) I would not assume this to be an international issue just because the person gave a Dubai snailmail address.

Conclusion

In the meantime GoDaddy has told the MakeUseOf team to realax in a bowl of legal stew.  GoDaddy is obviously trying to determine their liability in this matter before taking too much action.  Lets hope that GoDaddy is not one of the registrars described in the Wikipedia explanation of Domain Hijacking and Domain Theft.

“However, it is well documented that some registrars will admit no fault in accepting the forged credentials and will refuse to correct the record until forced by legal action. In many of these cases, justice is not done and the hijacker retains control of the domain. The victims of such theft often do not have the resources or willingness to invest the effort necessary to regain control of their domain, which may require a lawsuit or a lengthy and time-consuming arbitration process, especially if the hijacker and victim are in different countries.”

GoDaddy.com has a chance to avoid more of the “GoGaddy Sucks” articcles if they handle this correctly.

One of my other blogs (Grill’n Time) has been entered into the Blogging Idol 2 competition that is produced by Daniel Scocco over at Daily Blog Tips. The competition will run through the month of November 2008 and offers a great incentive for me to revive this blog.  There are over $4500 in cash and prizes up for grabs from the following sponsors:

• A lifetime subscription to Keyword Country (worth $2,000)
• An annual subscription to the Trackur corporate edition (worth $1,000)
• $300 courtesy of Sponsored Reviews
• $300 courtesy of BidVertiser
• $300 courtesy of TNX
• $100 from Daily Blog Tips
• $300 in text links from Text-Link-Ads
• A 3-month subscription to the SEO Book Training Program (worth $300)

You can help me win by subscribing to my Grill’n Time RSS feed by clicking HERE. There will be some design changes tot his blog along with some great new tasty treats from the Osborne Family Kitchen like:

• Southern Sweet Tea
• Homemade Popcorn that taste just like the movie theatre
• What to do with leftover homemade biscuits
• Some great new grilling ideas
• And much more

You can also help me win this competition by sending your friends over to check out Grill’n Time.

Rachel over at Christians in Good Company has a post titled Google Reader: Friend or Foe? and it made me consider how feeds may be adversely affecting blog traffic.  I am not talking about your blog’s feed hurting your traffic even though that could be true since you don’t get hits on those readers if you are providing full post content in your feed, but rather I am talking about the feeds we read via tools like my Google Readers on my iGoogle page.  Much like Rachel, I often skip the process of visiting and commenting on posts I view in my reader even though I traditionally would have left a comment on many of the posts I read.  In my opinion that can and has led to the decline in traffic on my blog(s) since I am not leaving those little link crumbs pointing back to my blogs since I am not commenting nearly as much as I used to.

It appears that the new Alexa ranking system has benefited a couple of sites that I manage.  The ranking for HOEI was in the 500K range and GrowingKids was in the 600K range with both climbing before the change.  GrowingKids was launched in July of 2007 and has finally pasted HOEI in Alexa rankings with a new ranking of 344,414.  Traffic on GrowingKids.org has doubled since the beginning of the year and the RSS subscribers have nearly tripled so the Alexa ranking is not at all a surprise.  There have been criticisms of Alexa about the rankings favoring sites with technical content.  It seems that the new ranking system is proving to change that technical bias at least from my perspective.

I have stepped out on a limb and upgraded one of my production blogs (Riley’s Page) to WordPress 2.5 RC1.  Well, it is sort of production in that it is still live.  I plan to shutdown Riley’s Page at some point and consolidate all of my family blogging into my personal blog.  Here a couple of additional notes about this upgrade so far:

• Riley’s Page was running on its own MYSQL database instance
• It was a direct upgrade from WP 2.1 to 2.5
• The blog uses the default WordPress theme (the theme folder was not upgraded at all)

Others are blogging about this today and recommending a little more cautious approach than what I am taking.

Daily Blog Tips

WordPress SEO and Blog Marketing 

Invitation: I am inviting all of my blogging buddies to take a look under the hood of WordPress 2.5.  If you know me well enough to have my personal email, then drop me a note and I will hook you up with an admin account on the back end of Riley’s Page.

Not so fast there cowboy!

I will step out on a limb here and say that there are very few people who build a publicly accessible blog or web site with the intent that no one will ever visit. While that was not my intent when I built Blog Community College (BCC) more than six months ago, the harsh reality is that less than fifty people total have visited the site since it was built. Well over half of the 42 unique visits to the site to date have come from me or my co-author Chad.

Site Meter stats more than six months after the first post.

There are a few lessons to be learned from this unplanned exercise in blog flop:

Publicity Required - Building a blog requires some very basic marketing if you want people to actually read the blog. We might start by:

1. Registering the site with search engines
2. Using BCC’s URL as my “Website” when commenting on other blogs
3. Notifying other bloggers of BCC’s existence
4. Emailing a  few friends

More Content -Only one video tutorial has been posted out of nearly a half dozen that are in various stages of editing.

Follow Through - Continue you what you start.  While I have not done very good on this so far I believe that this is a pretty good idea for a blog.  That said, there is no reason to sit on it.  It is never too late to follow though.

A flurry of comment spam has been going around in recent days with the following message:

“very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce”

There is no URL and the message is exactly the same on all the blogs where you find this comment.

What is this comment all about and who is Idetrorce?

In my humble opinion, this is a pre-attack campaign for a bigger spam campaign that will come in the next few weeks. The comment above would be okay on most blog posts since it is not trying to link people back to a product of service and it is just a polite disagreement. Once posted on a loosely moderated blog, the blogger might get a bad rap for deleting such a non threatening comment. Read the editors comments on the wormblog comment number 12.

“So I googled and found that it is indeed SPAM.

I am leaving it up though as I would never wish to be accused of deleting someone who simply disagreed with me.”

If a blogger does not block the email address and user name associated with this comment, then they could be opening themselves up to something much bigger coming down the pipe. That is just one man’s opinion. I am not afraid to delete and edit comments on my blog. I have even deleted some comments from people who agreed with me. When it’s my blog I will do what I think is in the best interest of my blog.

I do strict moderation on all comments on some of my blogs. There are very few terms I force moderate on here on this blog, but this user name and email address will be added to my list. I recommend you do the same with your blog. I just don’t have a good feeling about this Idetroce character.

In Wordpress

Go to your Dashboard and select Options/Discussion. Scroll down and enter the user name, email address and IPs from this commenter. By the way, the IPs this person is sourcing from are out of Amsterdam.

Don’t forget to change the time on your WordPress software if you live in one of those areas that plays the daylight savings time game.  I have not yet found a plugin that automatically adjusts the blog time the way many operating systems do.

Do you have a blog? No. If not and you have the slightest interest in owning a blog then continue reading.

I will take you from where you are right now to owning a blog and writing your first blog post in three (3) minutes.

It’s Fast and It’s Free!!!

All you need is a valid email address and three minutes of free time. That’s it. Let’s get started by watching the YouTube video posted below to learn how.

Having trouble viewing this? Download a copy.

This is the first in a series of what will hopefully be many lessons on blogging. This lesson is as basic as blogging lessons get. The filming and editing on this lesson was done by me personally and is very basic. I have partnered with Chad from Chadfusious Says to get a more professional look and feel for Blog Community College (BCC) lessons in the future. Future lessons will include:

• Registering a domain name
• Adding a counter to your blog
• Adding pictures and videos to your blog posts
• Building a blog with WordPress
• And much more

Some of the filming of future lessons has already been completed. While Blog Community College is currently running on Google’s Blogger server, it will soon be transferred to blogcommunitycollege.com. That will be a lesson in itself.  Stay tuned for more from Blog Community College.

The following are tips I give to people who ask me how to get listed in search engine results. Most are pretty straight forward, but some can be a little intimidating. Don’t worry about those that are hard to grasp. Focus on what is easy and start asking questions to other bloggers and web masters concerning the harder ones.

Disclaimer: Most of these will only apply if you own your own domain name.

#1 Priority is to submit your URL to search engines:

If you do nothing else you need to register your domain with the big three search engines. This tells them you have a site that needs indexing by their crawlers (automatic web site content scanning/indexing tools).

It is believed by most seasoned webmasters that registering with the three big search engines (for free) will give you about a 95% coverage of all Internet searches since a large number of the smaller engines pull results from these three. You can verify this yourself by trying to register your url with some of the smaller search engines. The smaller search engines will often link you to one of these three pages to register your URL with them.

Google
Yahoo!
MSN Live Search

Learn from Google:

Note: Some of the Google resources require a Google account to view and use do if you are an anti-Google type then you are missing out on some very good information, tools, and most of all…traffic. The last time I checked, I was getting significant amount of my traffic here on HOEI from The Long Tail searches on Google.

Webmaster Tools - Starting spot for webmasters needing to learn about Google and general webmaster tools like the robots.txt files
Google Sitemaps - Sitemaps can be tricky to get formated correctly, but they are helpful in building credibility with Google.

As mentioned above, the sitemaps and robots.txt files lend to letting Google (sitemaps) and other search engines (robots.txt) know how often and/or if they need to scan each of your pages and folders based on how often you update them. Letting them know to not waste their time and resources indexing pages and folders that have not and will not be updated for a while makes them happy.

Suggestions for your site to get better search engine love: (in no particular order)

1. Interlink within your site where practical. (i.e., a blog post on this blog that mentions desktop friendly snack food might link to a post on Grill’n Time)
2. Make the title of each page match the content and URL of the page as much as possible. Wordpress and blogger can do this for you. Check out http://www.hoei.com/2007/05/website-to-blog/ as an example. You will notice the title of the blog post matches what is in the very top bar of the browser at the top of your screen and the URL contains the post title text.
3. Do a keyword density search on your pages to get a better idea of what keywords will work best in your keyword META tag.

GoogleRankings Ultimate SEO Tool (My favorite)
SEO Book Keyword Density Analyzer Tool
SEO Tools - Keyword Density

Review what Domaintools.com has to say about your site:

From the whois search results on Domaintools.com, you want to try and get your Title Relevancy, Description Relevancy, and SEO Score as close to 100% as possible. Add alt tags to any images that do not already have them. A header image alt tag is a great place to plant keywords that might not show very well in your page text, but you want the search engines to find you with these words. There is also a text browser example in the sidebar of the Domaintools results page that shows you what your site’s home page looks like to a search engine at first glance. You have probably heard some folks talk about the text near the top and left of the page being the most prominent to search engines. This text browser will give you a glimpse of why you hear these tips.