So Google crafted new changes in their algorithms specifically, and intentionally, to bring about negative SEO en masse. Predictably, the industry responds with, “Please, please give us a disavow links tool”. When the negative SEO hysteria hits an all-time high, Google finally responds and gives us a tool that will turn SEO’s and SEM’s all over the world into free outsourced labour to manually do Google’s job for it.

If you’ve paid any attention at all to the disparity between what Matt Cutts says and what Google does, you will already have expected the disavow links tool would be anti-SEO in nature. It is like handing people shovels to dig 6 foot holes in the dirt with the promise of gold, and then burying them in it. It’s a user-powered tattle-tale machine and it will serve no good for anyone but Google.

It’s a classic example of the Hegelian Dialectic in use, this time not by a government, but by Google. Don’t be fooled.

Matthew Woodward has written a detailed article about it that is well worth reading at Why Google Disavow Is Bad News For SEO – Matthew Woodward

Matt Cutts and Google’s Disavow Links Tool is a Trojan Horse for SEO & SEM is a post from:

Panda was first released in February 2011, and went global in April 2011. The Panda algorithm represents the single biggest change to how Google indexes websites since Google began in 1998. For Search Engine Marketers (SEM), and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts, Panda has turned their world on its head.

In addition to user experience metrics, Panda factors in aggregate spam indicators on websites that, when combined, can trigger site-wide penalties, automatic SERP oblivion, and sometimes even a manual review by Google staff. Google’s Panda tends to become increasingly aggressive with each iteration.

How to Protect Your Site from Google’s Panda Algorithm?

To protect your site from Google’s Panda you need to make sure your sites are high quality and that they deliver an enjoyable user experience.

With Panda on the prowl you really need to focus on bounce rate, time on site, and pages viewed metrics as much as possible. Especially if you’re working aggressively on your back-linking campaigns, because aggressive back-linking will attract considerable attention from Google’s Page Rank algorithm and you do not want to join the hordes of website owners and promoters crying:

“Ow noes, I been eated by the Panda… What now?”

and,

“Halp halp… I’ve been pandalized! What should I do?”

Search Engine Marketers (SEM), and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialists: A Word of Caution

You need to be keenly aware of how Panda handles site usage metrics. If a site has somehow attracted more back-links and traffic than Google’s usage metrics suggest the site is worthy of, Panda will come sniffing and may not like what he finds. In other words, Panda takes website usage metrics and intelligently verifies them against Page Rank data to ensure the Page Rank algorithm has not been “gamed”.

When Panda determines the Page Rank algorithm has been gamed it will respond with a site-wide penalty, and possibly even automatic removal from the Google index. Depending on the severity of what Panda finds, it may defer the final decision to a real person and schedule your site for a manual review. However, where Panda determines blackhat SEO methods or other intentional Page Rank gaming has occurred, it may automatically remove your site from Google’s index altogether.

Google Panda? What the Hell is “Panda”? is a post from:

When you look for help with tableless CSS on Stack Overflow and other amateur coding forums, you can expect to be trolled by some pimply face kid, “dude, what are you doing… don’t be so puritanical” and, “that’s not possible in CSS, just use tables” and other ill informed ideas that assume tables should still be used for structural code elements.

Regardless the CSS haters it is not 1998 anymore and the use of tables for non-tabular data should have been abandoned with the introduction of ie6 nearly a decade ago. But for now let’s hold to the topic of this article and go into the reasons why tables are a bad idea in another post.

Perils of The (Not Quite) Perfect Tableless CSS Image Gallery

If you’ve started down the path of producing semantic valid XHTML and CSS code, and have produced a tableless CSS image gallery using an unordered list, you’ve either run into the following layout quirks, or you’re about to. So let’s take a look at what tends to happen in this not quite perfect tableless CSS image gallery before we tackle giving it bulletproof support for all browsers. Yes, even for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 too.

When CSS layout implosions like this happen, there’s often temptation to revert to tables since they require very little thought to implement and tend to offer some cross-browser robustness, especially for buggy browsers that are difficult to code for. Enter ie6 and ie7.

In a tableless CSS image gallery that uses an unordered list and has all its rows full with no empty space in a remaining “cell” you won’t immediately notice your floats are collapsed because the following content has no void in which to be sucked up into. But there will be no way for you to create space between the CSS image gallery’s unordered list and the following header element until you clear the floats.

Any bottom margin or padding on your unordered list will be ignored by the browser until the floats are cleared. Top margins and padding on the following header element will also be ignored by the browser.

Fix Your Tableless CSS Image Gallery So It Can’t Be Broke, in Any Browser, Ever!

Our tableless CSS image gallery needs to produce the same robustness we came to expect when using HTML tables. It will have full support for all browsers right back to ie6 without using any nasty browser hacks, tables, or non-semantic code. This tableless CSS image gallery really is going to be absolutely bulletproof.

First let’s take care of the vast majority of browsers by clearing the internal floats in our unordered list. Chris Coyier discusses several techniques for clearing floats towards the end of his article All About Floats. And you can get other great info on clearing floats at Quirks Mode. In this example I’ll just show you the way I like to clear them.

Clearing Floats

My preferred method of clearing floats uses the :after pseudo-class selector. You can simply drop it into your stylesheet along with a comma-separated chain, including each Div ID and Class you commonly need to clear. After that you can pretty much forget about clearing floats altogether.

This method works with all modern browsers like Firefox, SeaMonkey, Safari, Opera, Chrome and even ie8. Unfortunately ie6 and ie7 didn’t get the memo about the :after pseudo-class selector. But that’s okay, we’ll fix them after.

.image_gallery:after, #content:after{
content: ".";
display: block;
height: 0;
clear: both;
visibility: hidden;
}

HasLayout Fix for Internet Explorer Bugs

Adding ie6 and ie7 support to your tableless CSS image gallery is just a matter of triggering HasLayout so that ie6 and ie7 treat the unordered list’s internal floats as cleared. To do this you just need to add width to the unordered list in our CSS file.

ul.image_gallery{
margin: 8px 0px 22px 0px;
width:100%;
}

Now that you have cleared the floats and triggered HasLayout your Tableless CSS Image Gallery with Bulletproof Browser Support for all browsers will look something like this:

You can remove the text descriptions from your tableless CSS image gallery but remember to adjust the height attribute for the list item in your CSS file so the border sits where it should. Download zipped example files to see the full code.

A Tableless CSS Image Gallery with Bulletproof Browser Support For ALL Browsers, Even IE6 is a post from:

Within just moments of logging on to Facebook, people are instantly sucked in to a self perpetuating social media rumour mill that has never done any good, and frequently does a lot of harm. The moment they see “ATTENTION” and “URGENT FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO ALL YOUR CONTACTS RIGHT NOW” they’ve already clicked the send button without a moment’s thought.

I’ve received hundreds of false messages on Facebook over the years, usually masked as an appeal for help to save the polar bears, feed starving children in Cambodia, or to beware of some hacker, or even help find a paedophile. And many other seemingly innocuous requests that we’d all want to help with if we could.

It is easy to be sucked in without further investigation because nobody wants to see famine, we all love polar bears, and of course we don’t like hackers or pedos… So why not just forward these messages to our contact lists then?

The answer is simple. Unless you have taken time to properly investigate the cause you’re vouching for, you can’t possibly be sure what it is really about. People who donate to causes found via contact list spam on Facebook usually have no idea if they’re actually feeding a child in Cambodia or funding a car bomb for Al-Qaeda. Forwarding these messages without due diligence is even worse.

In our 9 to 5 jobs and careers if we conducted ourselves with similar neglect we’d get fired or worse, sued. But somehow when it comes to our use of online Social Media we feel no such accountability. Yet.

Today I received this false contact list spam on Facebook:

“ATTENTION!!! *** Do not accept a friend request from a CHRISTOPHER BUTTERFIELD and JENNIFER CHRISTINA SMITH they are hackers. Tell every 1 on your list because if somebody on your list adds him, he’ll be on your list too. He’ll figure out your computer’s ID and address”

As usual the friend who sent me this message thought they were doing the right thing. But a quick Google search of some of the text in that message showed people have been spreading that false rumour message for at least a year. Although a more complete version of it ended with:

“so copy & paste this message to everyone even if u don’t care for them cause if he hacks them, he hacks you!”

Editor’s note: Unfortunately the moderator of the Net Mums forum hasn’t been responsible enough to remove that post, or to even add a disclaimer to it.

The closing line above gives some insight into the purpose of this false message as mentioned in point two below. They want their rumour to go viral and they want YOU and all your contacts to help them spread it.

Why would someone send false rumour messages on Facebook?

1. They don’t know the message is false and didn’t bother to check
2. Just to see how far the meme spreads if it goes viral
3. Revenge and cyber bullying
4. Facebook rumours are the new prank phone call

I’ve seen similar false messages circulate Facebook claiming people are paedophiles. And without any first hand knowledge (let alone evidence) people forward the false message to their entire contact list, encouraging others to do the same, with a picture attached saying, “Help find this paedophile” and so on.

Imagine the harm a scorned ex could cause a perfectly innocent man who did nothing other than phone late for dinner. Or some kid who is miffed at his parents for gating him when they caught him skipping class. Or perhaps the disgruntled employee who just got fired who decides to get revenge.

But the most serious security concern on Facebook and other social media networks is identity theft. If someone gathers enough information about you they can take a bank loan in your name and destroy your credit rating. It can take you a very long time to clear your name and undo the damage to your credit history. The best way to protect against identity theft is to sufficiently obfuscate your personal info. Use false or at least incomplete names and do not use your real birth date on your social media profiles.

You should never friend anyone you don’t know and remember even your trusted friends may have poor password practices. When a Friend account gets hacked, any information you have available for them will be available to the hacker.

The first step to stop false rumour messages and cyber bullying on Facebook, is to bring your critical mind with you when you log on to social media networks. Take care to investigate anything you’re thinking about forwarding to your contacts. Remember, when you press that send button you’re endorsing the cause or the claim that you forward. Your friends trust you and will expect you did some due diligence before forwarding it to them.

You can help us end this cycle by linking to this article. Next time someone sends you a false rumour message on Facebook or a link to support a cause that turns out to be something other than what it appears, send them here to this page.

How to Stop False Rumour Messages & Reduce Cyber Bullying on Facebook is a post from:

Because comment spam is mostly done by automated bots and requires almost zero effort, reducing the effectiveness of comment spam will never actually make it too much work to bother doing. Yet on the other hand meaningful hand-written comments do require effort, so allowing WordPress to add rel=nofollow to them seems counter intuitive at best.

WordPress plugins like Akismet, Bad Behavior and many others, combined with the option to moderate user comments before including them, mean that comment spam really isn’t a problem at all.

If you want your blog to catch on fire you’re going to need your peers to contribute with informative relevant comments on your posts. Allowing WordPress to automatically remove incentive to comment on your posts by disabling any Google link-juice back to the user’s site is like flame retardant for your blog.

Fortunately I’m not alone in my view and there is now an movement established called You comment, I follow. If you want to remove rel=nofollow from links on user comments in your WordPress blog you can use the DoFollow plugin or any of a number of similar WordPress plugins.

If you’d like to fly one of these cool banners on your own WordPress blog, you can get them Randa Clay’s site by following the ‘You comment I Follow’ link above.

Is NoFollow Flame Retardant for WordPress Blogs? is a post from:

Rantings of A Seasoned Web Coder is a post from: