Jianjun’s Blog

Gladder is a free FireFox plugin that works as a proxy server pool picker. (To learn more about it, read this article.) However, recently I found each time I use Gladder to visit my friend’s blog, the browser is redirected to www.sheetr.com (see below):

As this persists, it has led me to think about Gladder’s security strength and the possibility of its being hacked by such web sites.

Besides, as Gladder proxies are unencrypted, data transmitted through these servers are transparent. In other words, your data can still be filtered by the Firewall and you are denied access to many web sites. Furthermore, Gladder can’t deal with scripts, flash and a number of other multimedia features, meaning you can’t watch Youtube movies, Google movies and so on.

If it has so many limitations and annoying redirections, I don’t see any reason to continue using it. Anonymouse provides all Gladder functionalities without installing anything onto your disk.

Most SEO experts tell us that identical (duplicate) content will negatively affect our website’s search engine ranking and may even result in our websites being penalized. Well, to some extent, this may be true, as we do hear people say their websites are being banned or even dropped from search index. But according to my recent observation, those are probably just some very rare cases.

Some of the most notorious copycat websites almost don’t have any original content. They simply search on the Internet and found those keyword-rich articles and heap them together to make a gigantic website. They do things that Google ‘threatens’ to punish but they do get very good SEO results!

Their tactic is very simple. The site owner sets up a large number of blogs on free platforms with the same duplicate content linking to one another with most links back to the main site, while the main site doesn’t link back to these satellites. At the same time, they submit all those blogs to search engines and services such as Technorati to get better exposure and higher authority.

Let’s look at a live example: ‘translation183.bloglipi.com‘. The blog not only uses duplicate contents from other websites, but also has unknown number of embedded keyword-rich links to its main site - sytra.cn.

On Technorati, there are 19 blog reactions to it (see http://www.technorati.com/search/translation183.bloglipi.com) and one of those reacted back has an authority of 58 (see http://www.technorati.com/blogs/jonramos.com/wpmu/translation182). Needless to say, all those ‘reactions’ are created by the same guy and those blog names mostly have a ‘translaiton183′, ‘translation182′ or something similar.

I guess no SEO experts will actually recommend such a strategy to generate traffic, but it works. In just a few months time, Sytra.cn generated a very good traffic of more than 6,000 unique visits per month and a Google pagerank of 3.

Please don’t take me wrong. I’m with you in condemning such copycats + spammers and I believe what they are building right now will in the end be their tombs (something a Semantic Web will do well).

The purpose of this article is to show you search engine algorithms of today are far from perfect in dealing with such abusive acts and, at the same time, some unintentional duplicate content or a little too many links probably won’t do us much harm in regard to SEO.

The Grand Canal of China（大運河; pinyin: Dà Yùnhé）, also known as the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal（京杭大運河; pinyin: Jīng Háng Dà Yùnhé）is the longest ancient canal or artificial river in the world. (Wikipedia)

The Grand Canal also runs through Tianjin, the city where I live. This afternoon I took some pictures along the river bank.

Twitter faces serious Spamming problems recently. Spammers use bots to mass follow normal users. Although Twitter seems to have a mechanism to prevent these guys being noticed by users they follow, from their profiles we see they DO get followers. If they follow 10,000 people, usually they have a few hundred following back.

Today I found a new trick used by these followers. This guy created two profiles, one is used to mass follow other users, the other is used to ‘reap’ followers. See the following screen shots:

Spammer Profile 1 (If you are on Twitter, block this profile immediately)

Spammer Profile 2 (If you are on Twitter, block this profile immediately)

The first profile claims to be a service of Twitter called “Twitter Private Messaging Service.” When you click on the URL on this profile page, which is: twitter.com/friendships/create/InTouch, you will automatically follow the second profile. That’s why you see the second profile has 1,024 followers!

I think Twitter’s /friendshps/create/username function is actually a security loophole. I can’t really figure out why this function is there.

If you are on Twitter, watch out for this kind of trick. Spammers get enough followers to send spam or even do eviler things. Impersonation is a violation of Twitter TOS, but we see it’s prevalent on Twitterland. Failure to enforce the TOS gives green light to spammers. Twitter has to do something now before things become out of control and lose its user base!

Twitter is a popular social communication or microblogging platform where people update their current status using less than 140 characters.

Most users use a Twitter client such as Twhirl or Twitter web interface to send and receive ‘tweets’. But Twitter also offers an SMS service, which works just as your usual mobile SMS. You won’t be charged a dime unless you send them out. You may choose to receive a particular person’s updates or only Direct Messages (DM). You can also set it to ‘Sleep’ during certain hours. Local Twitter SMS numbers:

USA 40404
Canada 21212
India 5566511

International users may enable their mobile device via Twitter’s UK number: +447624801423.

Visit http://twitter.com/devices (after you logged in) to enable your phone to receive/send SMS messages from/to Twitter.

To receive a particular person’s tweets, go to that person’s profile page and choose so.

Happy tweeting!

*Update*

Twitter has stopped sending SMS messages to my mobile in China since a few days ago.

*Update-1*

Twitter recently experienced quite some technical glitches. But the good news is SMS service is back. Now you should be able to enjoy it for free again.