Doug Scott, probably soon to be my ex boss after reading this, trotted off to the Travoloution awards last week for some free food and drinks. To everyone’s surprise www.carrentals.co.uk won best car hire website. Surprised because the other sites up for the award are probably much more widely recognised brands, and as i like to tell our web developers CarRentals.co.uk looks frigging ugly :). Fortunately for CarRentals (and doug) its not looks that count but having the most comprehnsive, fastest, and easiest to use comparator that matter (that now ends the advertisement for carrentals)

See what doug had to say

Do they get results? Yes!

Do they offer value for money? Debatable!

Is their SEO any better than average? No!

Do they only use white hat SEO? No chance!

 
So what do these BIG agencies do for their money?

• Article submissions
• Directory submissions
• Paid links in footers
•  Paid links in sidebars.
• Paid hidden links
• Networks

Sound familiar? it’s exactly the same basic stuff anyone can learn from a quick read of a few forums. It’s also the stuff that would get your average site banned by Google, but when you do SEO for big brand firms it actually gets easier to get away with higher risk techniques.

Google don’t care, people expect to see these big brands in the results. So just because it works for brandx don’t think you can do it on your site. Your average site owner has to play by different rules, you’ll need to get smarter and more resourceful to compete with the big boys or start advertising on TV so your brand is well known and you too can spam.

What’s so good about these themes? Well for one they look very professional, secondly wordpress is not just for blogs, its uses as a cms are endless, unfortunately most templates out there are made for blogging - not great if you want to develop a news portal - which is why i like the gazzet edition  so much.

I’ve yet to try these themes out, but from the feedback and screenshots they look awesome

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages

Have played about with an early release of 2.5 and so far so good, only a couple of old plugin didnt work.

Would make sure you backup your database and wordpress installation before upgrading.

Chances are unless you are a PHP programmer you won’t have given this a second thought.

So what is it you are installing?
Wordpress  plugins and some templates contain code that performs a particular task.  Some of my favourite plugins are listed here

So what’s the security issue?
Those plugins and templates could be malicious!

Most of us take precautions when downloading programs and files on to our desktops, but happily install plungins and templates on servers without giving it a second thought.  So now you have your nice new shiny template installed, but what else is it doing? Possibilities are endless, you could be opening your server up for sending out spam,  or leaving your company server open to attack.

In the last few week alone I’ve seen..

• templates email that send out emails when installed
• plugins inserting hidden links in all your posts
• mystery encoded php in templates
• plugins that install extra php files from remote servers

So what can you do?
Until there is a online system where plugins and templates are checked for security holes, and we’re able to download them from a verified source, all we can do is be very careful.. Before installing look through those template and plugin files, and check for suspicious code.

The previous roadshow is the best seo event i’ve been too. It’s basically an invitation only, informal weekend meet up at a hotel. Lots of dirnking, lots of eating, and some very knowledegable people… Spammers, CEO’s, blackhats, whithats(not many of them to be honest), entrapenours, bedroom seo’s to head’s of search of multinationals.

This years event looks like it will be held in September/October, possibly Ireland. To get an invite you need to find someone who has already been invited.

See you there

Can’t see me posting here much  for the foreseeable future, but just thought i would mention that DougS has started his own blog.

Dougs blog should be  regular read for anyone who likes to hear someone rant about search, affiliate marketing, making money, etc.

To be honest i was hoping my poor excuse of a blog would be more like http://www.slightlyshadyseo.com/ but i can barley write - think i just lost my only 2 readers by sending them somewhere else 

Be nice to see this project succeed but i think google will win the battle for both search and online encyclopedia 

Anyone, all you nasty spammers have a new site to influence from the 7th of jan- at least let it get off the ground before you kill it!

Apart from being ridiculously expensive, their admin interface sucks ass. I had a few domains up for renewal, but had to let them expire since it was impossible to pay for the damn things. Credit card after credit card failed to go through with dumb uninformative errors messages being the only sign anything actually happened.

Finally decide to transfer the few remaining domains to another registrar, what a friggin ball ache. Once you go through their shit interface and answer their question as to why you want to transfer, your domains are unlocked for 10 days. Great, so now start the transfer process with new registrar and await email asking for confirmation. And wait, and wait. Hmm this has always worked before, contact moniker for assistance, wait, 5 days for reply saying check your email host, not actually answering my question. So they can keep the fucking domains.