The BBC tech show Click bought a botnet to show how at risk we are for cyber crimes. The botnet consists of 22,000 hijacked PCs around the world and was purchased over the net through a chat room.

The Click team will show how effective spamming can be done with a botnet already of that small size. 

After 2 hours of running their experiment the test email addresses used started filling up with thousands of junk emails.

Click also went on to test out a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on a backup site owned by security company Prevx.

Click then ordered its slave PCs to bombard its target site with requests for access to make it inaccessible. Click managed to overload the site with just 60 PCs

Click reported that Computers from the US and the UK go for about $350 to $400 (£254-£290) for 1,000 because they’ve got much more financial details, like online banking passwords and credit cards details.

What would be interesting is how popular this is or could become in the SEO world. We have already seen the term Anti or Negative SEO thrown about, and some say it is becoming increasingly popular as normal SEO becomes increasingly harder.

Being able to buy 1,000 computers for less than £300 that can carry out a DDoS attack sounds like a reasonably affordable investment for the unscrupulous people out there.

Obviously it would look a little suspicious if you targeted  multiple websites that you compete with but it quite possibly would be cheaper and just as effective as trying to link spam a competitor.

Obviously you would like to think people would not sink this low but this is unfortunately not the case with some “Craphat SEOs” even hacking into  school websites to inject porn links.

Over the last few months I have been noticing quite a lot of websites that make some fundamental errors. One of the ones that keep cropping up is failing to make a website resolve on the non www.  version.

I just went to blackpool.gov.uk to try and pay our rates bill and was greeted with an opendns error.

I don’t know about most people but I never type in a URL starting with www. and I am assuming this would be cause for significant confusion for the average person that does not know about these things.

Granted a lot of sites that suffer these issues are for companies/organisations that are not relying on the search engines for success but it is still a basic error that will probably be causing confusion.

I just checked the other sites blackpool.gov.uk links out to and quite a few of them suffer from the same issues including:

• blackpoolunlimited.com
• reblackpool.com
• visitblackpool.com

Please sort it out!

After my investigation into what websites used valid markup I thought it would be interesting to check how accessible some of the sites are based on the W3C WAI Guidelines. In the UK it is, in theory, against the law to not have an accessible website as it discriminates against the Disabled.

Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) does not refer explicitly to website accessibility, but makes it illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities. The DDA applies to anyone providing a service; public, private and voluntary sectors. The Code of Practice: Rights of Access – Goods, Facilities, Services and Premises document published by the government’s Disability Rights Commission to accompany the Act does refer explicitly to websites as one of the “services to the public” which should be considered covered by the Act.

Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accessibility

While I do not think any Webmasters have been prosecuted for this I do think it is important that certain websites conform to the W3C WAI Guidelines. These would include websites for Universities and the Government.

As a quick, and not very scientific, investigation I have decided to check the Top 20 Universities to see if they conform to the W3C WAI Guidelines. As I am not an Accessibility specialist I am keeping it quite simple, I will be checking the home page of each University and running the automated checks from Watchfire WebXact. Just for reference I will also include the results from the W3C Markup validation from my previous tests.

1. Oxford: Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict : Meets Priority 1 and 3. Contains 1 error with 8 instances in Priority 2
2. Cambridge: Valid XHTML1.0 Strict: Meets Priority 1. Fails Priority 2 and 3.
3. Imperial College: XHTML1.0 Transitional 590 errors. Fails Priority 1,2 and 3
4. London School of Economics: HTML 4.01 Transitional with 79 errors: Meets Priority 1. Fails Priority 2 and 3
5. St Andrews: Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional: Meets Priority 1. Fails Priority 2 and 3.
6. University College London: XHTML 1.0 Transitional with 53 errors: Meets Priority 1. Fails Priority 2 and 3.
7. Warwick: HTML 4.01 Transitional with 4 errors: Meets Priority 2. Fails 1 and 3. There was only 1 Alternative Text Error in Priority 1 though, and 2 in Priority 3.
8. Bristol: Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional: Meets Priority 1. Fails Priority 2 and 3
9. Durham: HTML 4.01 Strict with 4 errors. Fails Priority 1, 2 and 3. There was only 1 Alternative Text error in Priority 1, and 1 Link Phrase for Priority 2.
10. King’s College London: XHTML 1.0 Transitional with 1 error. Meets priority 1. Fails Priority 2 and 3.
11. Bath: Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Meets Priority 1. Fails Priority 2 and 3.
12. Loughborough: Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional. Meets Priority 1. Fails Priority 2 and 3.
13. Edinburgh: HTML 4.01 Transitional with 17 errors. Fails Priority 1, 2 and 3. There was one Alternative Text error in Priority 1.
14. Southampton: Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. Passes Priority 1 and 2. Fails Priority 3. 1 error in Priority 3 requiring more whitespace between adjacent links.
15. Aston: HTML 4.01 Transitional with 8 errors. Passes Priority 1. Fails Priority 2 and 3.
16. York: XHTML 1.0 Transitional with 1 error. Passes Priority 1. Fails Priority 2 and 3.
17. Exeter: Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Passes Priority 1. Fails Priority 2 and 3.
18. School of Oriental and African Studies: XHTML 1.0 Transitional with 91 errors. Passes Priority 1. Fails Priority 2 and 3.
19. Nottingham: XHTML 1.0 Transitional failed validation as the document could not be checked. Passes Priority 1. Fails Priority 2 and 3.
20. East Anglia. XHTML 1.0 Transitional with 1 error. Passes Priority 1. Fails Priority 2 and 3.

Well I won’t lie, I carried out these tests to try and prove that the majority of the top Universities failed the basic requirements for web accessibility. While 12 of the top 20 Universities fail to use valid HTML/XHTML markup only 4 of the top 20 Universities fail to meet the 1st priority defined in the W3C WAI Guidelines.

While the results were not as damning as I may of hoped it is still very poor that 20% of the top 20 Universities fail to meet the basic requirements*. It is also poor that 18(90%) of the Universities fail to go beyond the minimum requirement for web accessibility. After all these are supposed to be the cream of the crop, Universities should be leaders when it comes down to the standards we expect/hope people will conform too.

Out of all the Universities it would appear that the University of Southampton is the only one to excel at their accessibility and quality of markup. As a quick further investigation I quickly validated another 5 random pages on the Southampton University Website. Only one page I checked had a small markup error (The International Undergrad Scholarship page), and this page page also created a “Create link phrase” error for Priority 2. The Hartley News Alumni page actually passed all 3 of the priorities.

*While Warwick did actually meet Priority 2, W3C say Priority 1 is the basic requirement and Web content must satisfy this checkpoint.

*Ok so either Live Writer is useless or I am a moron and can’t do posts with tables very well. I have quickly done screen shots of the info and posted that, if I get some time later I will redo it all*

So my last post was a bit of a rant about my Blog not validating and that I have decided to check some other sites around the Internet to see how popular developing websites with valid markup actually is.

My first lot of checks were Blogs from around the Internet, most of them are listed in Technorti’s Popular Blogs list however I have added several other ones that either I read frequently or I perceive to be quite big.

Every singe Blog that I checked that was in the Popular Technorati list failed the Validation test. I suppose blogs can argue that at least they are viewable properly through the RSS feeds.

The next list are websites mainly from the Alexa Top 500 Sites, however I have thrown a few in of my own.

And againt he majority of sites fail the validation. 2 sites that did pass that were interesting were www.msn.com and www.mininova.org. I can not believe Microsoft uses better markup than Google, and glad to see mininova one of the biggest bit torrent sites is leading the way in terms of valid markup.

Next are sites that promote accessibility and usability.

Interestingly Browsealoud advertise they conform to the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines priority 1, 2, and 3 and say their pages have Valid HTML. Unless some glitch happened when I checked this claim is incorrect at the time of writing.

Next I checked some popular Newspapers and News sites.

Not a single site I checked passed the validation, with the BBC.co.uk having a staggering 1272 errors on the home page! It is also written in HTML 4.01 Transitional which is not very Web 2.0 of the BBC is it?

Next up I checked the Top 20 Universities based on the list at the Times Good University Guide

12 of the top 20 Universities have errors in their markup, quite shocking really considering our Universities are so big on accessibility etc. If we take a look at the worst offender Imperial College London with 590 errors They use Javascript Menues to navigate the site, though they do use NnScript to provide text links if you do not have Javascript. According the accessibility page the website conforms with WAI priority 1 and 2 checkpoints however I ran a check using WebXACT and the website fails all 3 Checkpoints with 2 errors in Priority 1, 3 in Priority 2 and 2 in Priority 3, with a further 44 warnings.

Finally I checked some Government and Organization sites.

Again majority of the sites failed. I am glad the Job Centre failed as from what I recall it is the worst and most non user friendly website ever. This also failed all 3 WAI priorities based on the check at WebXACT, I also could not see any accessibility information on the main page.

So in conclusion it would seem not many companies/organizations are too bothered about the W3C standards. I am not entirely sure how accessible all the above sites are, I do realise that there is a lot more to it than just validating your markup, however it was interesting to see how rare valid websites were.

Ok so I think I said I followed comments in the past but a couple of people have commented recently and I noticed they were nofollow. I have installed Lucia’s Linky Love so links will actually be nofollow if you have never posted before. I have set the limit to 3 so it wont take much to switch to dofollow, and I will manually remove the nofollow from links under the 3 link count presuming it is not spammy. Some of the features of Linky Love are:

1. 1. Encourages good comments: Dofollows are added to the author “name” and links in comment text after a commenter leaves some minimum number of comments. The blogger can set this minimum number to anything between 3 and 10. This encourages regular visitors to comment, but discourages spammers by forcing them to visit your blog many times before they get “dofollows”.
   2. Encourages links. Dofollows are added to trackbacks and pingbacks only after the blog author has left some minimum number of comments, trackbacks or pingbacks. This discourages scrapper sites from sending you spammy trackbacks but rewards real bloggers for linking you.
   3. Gives peace of mind. Dofollows will not be added to comments left more than 14 days after you published your most recent post. This is a safety feature that prevents your blog from becoming a link farm should you ever be unexpectedly absent from your blog due to illness or any other major life event.
   4. Thwarts overly aggressive SEO types. The blogger may refuse “dofollows” to “names” that contain too many characters. This can be used to avoid giving “dofollows” to commenter’s who claim their name is “cashmere dog sweater”.
   5. Gives you more control over dofollow / nofollow options. As is always the case, the blogger can also delete the comment, report the comment to Akismet or delete the name or url. That’s good for truly spammy comments. But with Lucia’s Linky Love, you get another, less drastic, option. You manually prevent “dofollow” but still show the comment url and name by deleting the user email address when editing the comment. This lets you permit borderline visitors continue to comment, but deprive them of “dofollows” until they behave the way you like visitors to behave.

Yes believe it or not Kylie Minogue is entering into the Social Network World possibly aiming to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Tom Anderson. Called Kylie Connect and developed by New Visions Mobile in collaboration with Kylie’s record label Parlophone the site will be the first of its kind to be launched by a celebrity.

New Visions Mobile have tried to add a bit of originality to the idea by making it a more flexible model than rivals such as Facebook and MySpace allowing fans to register for the site on their mobile phones, blog, communicate with others, and upload images and videos.

Kylie will also be adding her own profile to the site, which will include news, and links to hew tracks.

“The whole thing is set up so that Kylie can update her blog and have a closer connection with fans,” said Julia McNally, business development director at New Visions Mobile.

The site has been launched to coincide with the release of Kylie’s new single 2 Hearts with her new album “X” coming out on Nov. 26.

Personally I cant wait till Jade Jade Goody jumps on the bandwagon and starts her how Social Networking Web Site, most likely breaking the bandwagon and popping the Web 2.0 bubble.

Well for the past 2-3 months I have put up with a variety of mediocre solutions for blogging. It was not uncommon for me to use MS Word for writing a post, as my spelling is awful, Dreamweaver for laying the post out and then finally copying and pasting it into WordPress. Not very fun.

After a Blog post from Karthik I decided to try out BlogDesk and also Windows Live Writer. I first tried out BlogDesk and while it is excellent and seems like quite a lightweight application I got the feeling it was a little slim on features. So I finally took the plunge and I am now testing Windows Live Writer. It has defiantly been a little harder to set up than BlogDesk, at first Live Writer did not recognise this blog, after upgrading it seems to be working so far, but I have read of problems with the publishing of the blog. So if this publishes without any hitch then Live Writer will defiantly be my choice for blogging for now. Some of the feature I like are:

1. The spell checking works the same as Word so I can correct my mistakes as I go.
2. Insert Hyperlink, yes it is easy no matter what you are using but I link to a lot of things so the easier the better.
3. Insert Table, again it’s easy no matter, but it’s a hassle I can’t be bothered spending extra time on.
4. Insert Video, for some reason I always had problems when adding embedded video through the WordPress interface. I have not tried it yet so it may not be as handy as it looks.
5. Plugins – There aren’t loads yet but there are defiantly a few handy ones, I downloaded the Insert Adsense, and Insert Amazon Link plugins which will definitely be handy for my other blogs.
6. Tagging you can add Tags from several different providers.
7. Update Theme, Live Writer actually downloads the theme of the site so you get a rough idea of the look of the post before you publish it.
8. Reminders to set categories. I am a tad forgetful and always forget to set categories, so this comes in handy.

Overall I am very impressed with it so far, we shall see how long it lasts though!

As I am sure you are aware a large number of websites have seen a significant drop in PageRank including some big players such as:

• WashingtonPost.com
• Forbes.com
• Blog Herald
• ProBlogger.net
• CopyBlogger
• Engadget
• StatCounter
• SearchengineJournal

This drop also appears to of hit all the SEO companies on the NSM Top SEO Company League with every SEO company on the league either maintaining their current PR or suffering a drop. This has led some people to accuse Google of penalising SEO companies. In response Matt Cutts emailed Search Engine Journal to let them know that the “partial Google Toolbar PageRank” was a result of Google’s campaign against paid linking and advertisement links which influence PageRank.

The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

However many webmasters/bloggers have protested this penalty because they do not sell paid links. Some lucky Blogggers have managed to successfully request a reinstatement of PageRank from Google. Problogger was knocked from a PR6 to a PR4 and has now managed to have the PR5 reinstated.

If you have had a major hit in PR and you are 100% sure that your have not broken then Google Guidelines. Then it should be possible to log into Google Webmaster Tools, and to select “Request reconsideration” from the Dashboard on the right hand side.

However it is worth noting that by requesting a reconsideration you are telling Google you have violated their Guidelines in the past and to your best knowledge, are no longer violating them. Therefore if you go down this route you need to make sure you definately do not break the Guidelines anymore or you may end up worse off than you started.

Personally, while I am a little annoyed our PR did not go up, I am not that bothered. We have changed our site a lot since the last update along with promote it quite heavily. While we have not paid for any links I guess I can see how the Google algorithm may of penalised or blocked our site from any PR gain. The important thing to realise is that PR has no effect on rankings and we have maintained excellent rankings over the past few months.

A follow on from yesterdays post it has been confirmed that Microsoft has invested $240 million investment in Facebook Inc. Microsoft said that it will be buying a 1.6% stake in Facebook Inc valuing it at $15 billion. Facebook is only 3 years old and the investment is based on potential rather than proven profits however the investment has secured Microsoft as the advertiser on the site until 2010 for both US and Abroad, and Facebook is expected to generate a revenue this year of $150 Million.

Last month Wall Street Journal reporting that Microsoft was apparantly trying to buy 5% of Facebook for $300 – $500 million. Today the NY Post is reporting that Google is trying beat Microsoft to the punch trying to bid for 5 – 10% of Facebook Inc. It is expected that the deal will be announced within the next 48 hours and Facebook’s investors are looking for a pre-money valuation of $10 billion-$15 billion in any deal. On the high side, that means Microsoft or Google would have to come up with $1.5 billion for a 10 percent stake or $750 million for a 5 percent piece.

The main reason for both Google and Microsoft wanting a stake in Facebook is to ensure they secure the advertising deal for the site. While I think it is great that the Social Boom is making so many people rich my main concern is the fact that everything relies on Advertising to make a profit. Now this advertising maybe more targetted than the likes of TV etc but more and more people are using browsers such as Firefox (Sept 06 Firefox useage was 27.3%  Sept 07 was  35.4%) with many of these users chosing to install extentions such as Adblock Plus (300,000 new users a month ). Using Firefox with Adblock Plus almost completely eliminates advertising, infact the only adverts I ever see are the Sponsored Links in Google. As the popularity of Firefox/Adblock increases then surely advertising revenue is going to be severly reduced? Even worse if these become mainstream will there be a Dot Com style crash?