Bludomain hacked

As a follow-up to this post – My wife’s Bludomain site – Heather Swanner.com is being hacked EVERY DAY. I fix it, and the next day it is down again. I contacted them and let them know what’s going on and aside from a canned response I haven’t gotten much – pretty disappointing.

In the meantime I simply used htaccess to redirect index.php to home.php since this exploit apparently only affects files named index.php or login.php

If you’re having trouble with your blu site being hacked on a regular basis and only displaying something like:

“Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING, expecting ‘,’ or ‘;’”

as a result, please leave a comment. More importantly if you’ve discovered a reasonable solution I’d love to hear it as well. Thanks.

Website hack – microsotf.cn – WordPress

So I emerged from a fantastic vacation weekend to find all of my php sites not working. Each displaying the same simple error message:

“Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING, expecting ‘,’ or ‘;’”

After my initial 30 second panic attack subsided I did a little googling and came up with this site: http://www.geeked.info/web-site-hack-loading-microsotfcn/

I’m assuming this is a bot that crawls from site to site. I had websites hacked across three different servers.

Once hacked, the site should produce a tiny iFrame that redirects to microsotf.cn. Don’t visit the page. It will most certainly ruin your day – spyware, malware, whatever. The beauty is – wordpress sites don’t display the iFrame. They just wind up broken. Other sites however won’t appear very different at all and it will be nearly impossible to tell whether the site was hacked or not.

If you’re having this problem simply open the source of the page in question and look a block of code similar to this (either immediately following the body tag or at the very bottom of the source code.):

Delete the offending code – upload (backup the original first, just in case) and you’re back in business.

Thanks to Ed over at http://www.geeked.info/ for having the ONLY blog post I could find on the whole internet about the hack.

EDIT: 7/9/09 – It has happened again to one of my sites. Different block of code, different malware site being loaded – same basic poison/remedy. For those interested in learning how to block an ip address (or range of ip addresses) – click here.

The Skinny on Keywords – Part 1

Anyone who has ever broached the subject of web design or search engine marketing is familiar with the term ‘keyword’. If you do any pay-per-click advertising then you should be spending a fair amount of time researching and tailoring your keywords to maximize your advertising budget.What I’ve found though, as time goes by, is that most people have truly only scratched the surface in terms of their knowledge of keywords and keyword phrases.

So What is a Keyword
A keyword – or more accurately – a ‘keyword phrase’ or ‘keyphrase’ is a word or phrase that people will use to search for a person, place or thing on the internet. Simply put, if I want to look into GPS tracking, I would go to my favorite search engine (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, etc.) and search for, you guessed it – “GPS tracking”

Yeah…So?
So if I’m in the business of selling GPS tracking devices, I need to make sure that my website will be one of the first sites displayed when my prospect searches Google for such a product – PERIOD. If your site is not showing up in the search engines, it’s a waste of time and money.

Research has shown that most internet searches find what they need in the first 10 results. Choosing the correct keyphrases is the first step in effective search engine marketing.

Choosing Keywords – A Primer
So where does one begin? The best place to start is with the obvious. If I own a website that sells amplified phones, then the cornerstone of my keyphrase analysis is going to be ‘amplified phone’.

But not everyone is going to search for the phrase amplified phone. Some prospects will search for ‘amplified telephone’. Some will search for ‘phone amplifier’ and some will more than likely search phrases like ‘telephone for the hard of hearing’.

Google has a great keyword tool that’s free to use. It not only gives you keyword ideas, but shows you their individual ‘search volume’ – how often the phrases are searched. When I plug in amplified phone, I learn that the most commonly searched variation is actually ‘amplifier phone’. This is news to me. I have some work to do!

OK… Now What?
I’m glad you asked. Now you gather a list of what you believe will be your top 15 or so keywords. The more keywords you use, the less ‘relevant’ the search engines will deem them, so less truly is more.

In my next keyword post I’ll discuss long vs. short-tail keywords, targeting prospects who are ready to purchase, and proper implementation of HTML Meta tags.