Pharma Sites Busted by DEA

Big changes to come at the pharm after 18 people arrested for allegedly selling pharmaceutical drugs illegally over the Internet. Those arrested include the "ringleaders" of more than 4,600 "rogue" Online pharmacy websites.   Read the DEA press release while trying not to gag.

Whether or not affiliate sites are in danger of facing legal action, they do bear some risk. At the very least, there is the very real risk not receiving commission payments when the DEA puts pharm affiliate companies out of business.

It would be prudent for webmasters to opt out of the online pharmacy industry.

Personally, I think it's a total crock of shit. Although I personally do not have any pharm affiliate sites, this news pisses me off. The vast majority of people purchasing medicine over the internet are trying to get their prescribed medications at a more affordable price - through Canadian pharmacies. The government should solve this problem by making prescription drugs affordable in the united states and not by creating more cyber "criminals".

Is the Yahoo! Honeymoon Over?

Is the Yahoo! Honeymoon Over?
Yes, I think it is. Over the last year and a half Yahoo! have well and truly won the hearts and minds of the blogging and tech community - no small feat, and very, very important. Yet much of that achievment, perhaps all of it, can be directly attributed to the Y! Search team - they get it, 100% However, there's a large disconnect between Y!Search and the rest of Y! ...

The Million Dollar Home Page
Check this guy out, he's bought his domain name (www.milliondollarhomepage.com) and he want a million dollars for college. He's selling ad space on the site, nothing new there. However, he's selling it off in 10x10 pixel blocks. There's a million pixels and he's selling each one for a dollar. At the moment ...

Getting Spidered: Static vs Dynamic

Search Engine Spiders prefer Static URLs

The structure of your site is very important for search engine spiders, and search engines seem to favour static urls over dynamic urls (urls that have a ? in them). Dynamic URL's are created by server side scripts, and the portion of the url after the ? is not static.

Yaho recommends avoiding dynamically generated urls for pages that you desire to be spidered and indexed. Google can handle dynamic URLs, but they warn webmasters about using dynamic urls:

Reasons your site may not be included: Your pages are dynamically generated. We are able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, we limit the amount of dynamic pages we index
-- from Google Webmasters

If your site depends on dynamically generated URLs and your search engine ranking isn't quite what you feel it sould be, then you might want to consider rewritting dynamic urls into static. There are plenty of resources online that illustrate how to use Mod Rewrite to accomplish this.

Fishin for MSN UK Serps?

Previously, MSN UK did not allow .coms to feature in the MSN UK search, whether or not they were UK hosted. That policy seems to have changed, since .coms, .nets, ecetera hosted in the UK, are featured in MSN SERPS.

However, instead of simply giving preference to sites hosted in the UK, MSN does not allow sites into the searches unless your site is either hosted in the UK, or is a .co.uk site (hosted in the UK).

What does this mean for webmasters? Well, if you want to have good search positions in UK based searches, you must host your site in the UK, and having a .co.uk domain hosted in the UK is even better.

MSN Paid Search

MSN Paid Search Details Emerge
Something missed in the week, but fortunately picked up by slashdot was this ZDNet Asia report on MSN Paid Search that details the launch in Singapore, with France to follow an...

Google Stuff

Google Showing Ads In Regular SERPS
I didn't see anything on TW or elsewhere about this, but it's really amazing to see how many more ODP descriptions and META descriptions are taking the place of snippets in Google's SERPs. If this keeps up, SEOs will be begging DMOZ to remove their sites from the directory, so they can get their META descriptions (aka ad copy) displayed. Google "...

Is Google PageRank Dead?
There have been several Blog and forum appearances that the PageRank in the toolbar is for entertainment purposes only - are they accurate?

Preventing AdSense Clicks by Home Network Users
"Some weeks ago, my wife nearly clicked on my ads, as she was searching for vacation destinations and found a page from me."

Google Employees Running Adwords Accounts - Conflict?
DougS pointed out this thread at Webmasterworld where on the second page, an anonymous Google employee confirms that many Googlers run Adwords accounts. As you can imagine, this has fueled much debate over the ethics of such an arrangement, particularly in light of the original posters situation...

Online Casino SEO Scam

A new scam is in the works. BeTheDealer Casino, who spearheaded the "fortuno Winnero Google Contest, offered a cash prize pool of $7000.00. Basically, to participate, webmasters were asked to put this on sites (I've made changes made to syntax show the code, not run it):


I'm participating in the challenging [a href='http://www.btdino.com']search engine optimization competition[/a][br]organized by BeTheDealer [a href='http://www.bethedealer.com/index.html']online casino gambling[/a].



Does it surprise you that an online gambling company would try to fool idiot webmasters into optimizing their casino for a popular gambling key phrase - Online Casino Gambling?

It's a very low form of search engine manipulation. Yeah, it might work, but it's shady. For more details, type www.btdino.com into your browser -- Heck, you didn't think I wanted to give these fools a link, did ya?

SEO Ranks . com

SEO Ranks is simply a fledgling site about Search Engine Optimization. It in no way pretends to be a professional SEO site, it's simply a site owned by a very interested webmaster. Complete amateur Optimizer. Optimizing for the search engines is always a moving target. What's true one day may not be true the next - at least it sure feels that way. But the basic principles for SEO always remain the rule.

Original Content, and lots of it help a site to make a splash in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). Incoming links from authority sites of the same genre are also important. Two things - content and incoming links. That much is true.

Bloggers Legally Liable?

Are Bloggers Legally Liable For Readers'Comments?
sued Aaron Wall, who maintains a blog on search engine optimization - tactics companies use to get themselves to appear

New SEM Tools

New SEM Tools From Search Engine Strategies San Jose
Internet Search Engine Database - Aug 29, 2005 Links are a huge topic of discussion in search engine optimization. Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer is a tool that lists the backlinks to your website.

Alt text and SEO

How Important Is ALT Text In Search Engine Optimization
WebProNews, KY - Aug 15, 2005
2. Use your keyword phrase in one or two instances of ALT text on the page - no more. Use moderation in everything you do in search engine optimization.

Web Design Templates And Search Engine Optimization
WebProNews, KY - Aug 23, 2005
I am worried that code bloat and other template issues might interfere with our search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Are...

Can You SuperSize that Web Page Please?
"Ever put up a super giganto web page? How'd it work out?"