Handsome Logic

Check out this screenshot of Google’s festive little Christmas tree ornaments displayed next to sponsored links on Google.com. I have tried to reproduce this with several different product queries, but “playstation” is the only one I’ve been able to trigger this with. The ornaments are 4 to an image, and seem to replace the thin gray line that normally separates the sponsored links from the organic results.

Single-fold SERP screenshot below:

I wrote on Twitter earlier that I had triggered Googles automated query protection CAPTCHA an unusual amount today. I’d say that as of 4PM, I’ve probably seen this page no less than 10-15 times today:

The page reads:

We’re sorry…
… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

I’ve scanned my system twice and I’m clean as a whistle. The CAPTCHA code on this one made me laugh, though.

If you read it out loud, it’s exactly what I said out loud last time I got this page:

The situation often arises where you need web design work done, but can not justify paying a professional designer. Not having the necessary software or a background in design can make DIY web design a real pain. Fear not — here are 10 free web design tools for non-designers.

1. Synthasite

Synthasite is a free, 100% browser-based web application that makes web design and publishing a breeze. With a library of design templates, drag-and-drop widgets, and write-in HTML capabilities, full sites can be created in minutes.

Synthasite has come a long way since launching in June, and the $5 Million cash-infusion they recently secured from Columbus Venture Capital ensures a bright future.

2. Screenalicio.us

Screenalicio.us is a daily-updated showcase of website screenshots featuring excellent designs and artistry. They currently host over 9,500 searchable and browse-able screenshots of live sites that you can visit for further inspiration. RSS feeds of gallery updates are also available, as well as comments and a 5-star rating system

3. OSWD.org

Open Source Web Design hosts over 2,000 free web templates, many of which include separate designs for interior pages. You can search their database by keyword, designer, validation, contrast, color, image presence, CSS usage and number of columns. There are also almost 300 links to live sites that are currently using templates and designs downloaded from OSWD.org. Should you decide to use one of their designs, you can put a non-nofollow link to your own site on those link pages.

4. Open Design Community

The Open Design Community (TODC) at OpenDesigns.org is similar to OSWD, but with a more active community and better organization of updates and new designs. The search functionality is similar, but TODC has an active forum community and an RSS feed of new open source web designs available for download.

5. Adobe Kuler

If you’re like me (and by that I mean colorblind), you will benefit from the use of a color scheme tool such as Adobe Kuler.

Although Kuler desktop and API are designed for integration with Adobe AIR, their free web-based tool is still extremely helpful. User-created color schemes are shared and available for use, download, and editing using the web tool’s robust set of features. There is also an active user community and tag search functionality.

6. Typetester

Typetester was sent to me some time ago by a web design firm that I farmed out some work to. Type tester is a feature-rich web tool that allows you to apply every conceivable variation and style to the font of your choice and preview it with instant updates in your web browser. Very useful for anyone who has been thwarted in the past by the way Photoshop handles text and anti-aliasing.

Typefaces are sorted into Safe, Win Default, and Mac Default. You can enter your own sample text or use the greeking (aka “lorem ipsum”) that is provided. Once you have your sample text and typeface, you can adjust the size, leading, tracking, color, word spacing and more across three independent columns.

7. Stock.xchng

SXC is my favorite destination for free, hi-res, quality stock photos. The galleries are home to over 340,000 photos, with new ones being added daily. Now and then you may come across a photo that requires download credits, but in the time I’ve been using them, all I’ve ever needed was my free account. If you have quality photos of your own, you’re encouraged to share them with other SXC members or enter one of their many photo competitions.

8. Browsershots

It’s a terrible thing to spend lots of time fine-tuning the design of a site, only to realize that the entire thing falls apart in other web browsers.

Browsershots is a free tool that will test your site in 24 different browsers across Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. You can also test screen size, javascript support, flash, and other variables. Your submitted pages are entered in a queue with other free users, though the wait time is seldom more than a few minutes. You can bypass the queue and get priority processing, however, with a premium membership.

9. Favicon Generator

Now that you see your site in all those different browsers, what’s missing? A favicon.ico file, of course!

The favicon.ico file, hosted in your site’s main directory, is the icon that displays on your browser tab, shortcuts, or on your bookmarks. But generating icons isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially in “.ico” format. Favicon Generator lets you upload a 100 x 100px graphic from your computer and automatically generates the file for you. You can then download the file, put it on your site, and add the following code in the <head> section of your site:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>

The favicon will work without that code as well, as long as it’s uploaded properly.

10. Wordpress Theme Generator

Nobody is hurting for a source for free Wordpress themes, but this tool is too cool to ignore.

The Wordpress Theme Generator allows you to build, edit and live-preview themes for Wordpress with little to no need for HTML or CSS knowledge. Change colors, element sizes, sidebar locations, tag cloud displays, number of columns and more. Then simply download your valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional Wordpress theme.

Introduction: D-M-What?

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA (view pdf), is a US Copyright law that protects against and outlines the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet.

The DMCA provides you, as a webmaster or other content publisher, with a means to take action against anyone republishing your copyrighted content without permission or infringing upon your copyright(s) in any other way online. Protected content is not just limited to the text on your site. Multimedia content, if published under your copyright, is also protected.

I have personally served many DMCA notifications without ever involving a lawyer (either my own or a client’s). However, if you have a lawyer it never hurts to copy them on all DMCA-related correspondence just to show the recipient you mean business.

How Do I File a DMCA Complaint?

Whoa chief, not so fast. Understand that web hosts don’t like to be told that, under law, they have to disable access to their paying customers’ content. However, according to the DMCA…

Under the knowledge standard, a service provider is eligible for the limitation
on liability only if it does not have actual knowledge of the infringement, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent, or upon gaining such knowledge or awareness, responds expeditiously to take the material down or block access to it.

Translation: Once you notify the provider that they are hosting content that infringes on your copyright, they potentially become liable. I say “potentially” because, in this basic guide, we’re not going to get into things like counter-notifications.
Some legal departments will request contact information for the party you’re filing the complaint against. So, your first step should always be to contact the offending party yourself and ask that they fix the situation.

If no contact info is available or if the offender isn’t cooperative, lock and load!

Step 1: Identify Your Target

Gather the URLs of all copied material on the offending site, or as many of the URLs as you feasibly can. In past situations, 1-2 examples coupled with a statement that the offending webmaster was responsible for removing all further infringing content has been enough for me to get entire hosting accounts suspended.

To find text that has been copied, try using a tool like Copyscape.

Also make sure you have gathered as much information as possible about the offending site — most importantly, their webhost (via Whois Lookup). In the event that their webhost is hidden by a DNS provider (like DNS Made Easy), then that provider should be the first recipient of your DMCA.

Once you determine who is hosting the infringing content, visit their site and look for “Legal”, “Abuse” or “Contact” links. If there is no contact information published for the legal/abuse department(s), call and ask who you would direct such correspondence to. Get as much info as possible (Name, E-mail, Fax, Telephone number, etc.)

Step 2: Identify Yourself

Make note of where on your site your copyright policy is stated, because you’ll want/need to include that in your notification. All copyright infringement notifications require you to include certain statements, such as…

I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

and…

I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Step 3: Lock and Load

Now that you have gathered the required information, plug it into your DMCA Notification.

You can download a free sample DMCA template in MS Word (.doc) or Adobe PDF format and use that to speed the process along. Be sure to comb the language of the completed document and the DMCA itself before submitting, though. It helps to know the law in case a less-than-cooperative webhost tries to convince you it’s not their problem. Trust me, it happens.

Your document must be signed, either with your digital signature or by printing, signing, and then faxing or scanning the document.

Step 4: Fire When Ready!

Now that you have your completed, signed DMCA Notification, send it (perhaps along with a brief cover letter) to the target(s) identified in Step 1. Detail your previous attempts to resolve the situation, and explain that a collaborative effort between you and the offending webmaster will no longer be accepted as a viable solution.

Do not expect them to follow up with you, either. As mentioned earlier, hosts do not like being told that they are being legally forced to take action against their paying customers. Be aggressive and persistent, but not obnoxious. Do not listen to stories about how “the customer said they’d take it down when they get back from vacation”. Remember that it is your rights that have been violated and that it is their responsibility to fix it. If they drag their feet, mention to them that the language of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act specifically states that service providers must respond expeditiously to take the material down or block access to it.

The Aftermath

Hopefully within a few days of serving your DMCA Notification, you will have a satisfactory result. In some cases, legal action may be required, though I have never found it necessary.

The last DMCA I served was to the host of a site that had republished a number of a client’s photos without permission and then attempted to stonewall me when I contacted them about it. The result was a termination of their entire account with that host.

The best part was that all 18 of this multi-million dollar company’s sites were on the same account, and all came crashing down because of a few copied photos on one site.

Serving DMCA’s to Search Engines

If you want the pages on the offending site removed from the results pages of the search engines, you must contact each search engine individually. In addition to the information gathered above, be prepared to present the following information:

• The keywords or search terms that trigger the display of the offending page in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s)
• The URL(s) of the SERP(s) that display the offending content

How Do I Send a DMCA to a Search Engine?

Below are the contact details and some brief instructions for the big search engines. For smaller SE’s, look for complaint/abuse/legal/copyright pages on the engine’s homepage.

Google DMCA Info

Google has a page regarding their copyright infringement policies and procedures located here.

Your complaints can be sent by email to removals@google.com, or in writing via snail-mail to:

Google, Inc.
Attn: Google Legal Support, DMCA Complaints
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

…or, you can fax the documents to

(650) 963-3255

Attn: Google Legal Support, DMCA Complaints

Yahoo DMCA Info

Yahoo’s DMCA policies and procedures page can be found here.

Although submittal of a written request may still be necessary, you can contact them by phone at…

Yahoo Copyright Dept. Telephone Number: (408) 349-5080

Complaint and notification documents can be emailed to copyright@yahoo-inc.com, though it should be noted that this email box does not accept attachments.

If you would prefer to snail-mail your documents send them to:

Copyright Agent
c/o Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

…or fax them to

Yahoo Copyright Dept. Fax Number: (408) 349-7821

Ask.com DMCA Info

Ask.com has both a page detailing their copyright policies, and a web form for submitting complaints and notifications.

You can also mail your documents to Ask.com at…

IAC Search & Media
Attention: General Counsel
555 12th Street, Suite 500
Oakland, CA 94607

Microsoft (MSN, Live.com) DMCA Info

The Microsoft DMCA page provides information on their copyright infringement policies, but there is no web form given. Your DMCA documents must be sent to:

Microsoft Corporation/The Microsoft Network
Attn: J.K. Weston
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052

Telephone: (425) 703-5529
Fax: (425) 936-7329
Email: jkweston@microsoft.com

AOL DMCA Info

If you need to submit copyright infringement notification to AOL, you can first view their copyright infringement policy page, and then submit your info via web contact form.

If you would prefer to send your documents by mail, they should be addressed to…

Dawn Palmer
Senior IP Counsel
AOL LLC
22000 AOL Way
Dulles, VA 20166

You may also contact them by calling…

AOL DMCA Telephone Number: (703) 265-0094

And thus concludes the SEO Guide to DMCA Warfare. As mentioned earlier, issues of counter-notifications or liability exemptions are not covered… perhaps in another post. Or, leave any questions you may have in the comments below.

In SEO, PPC or any well-covered area of Internet Marketing, there comes a point where your “daily reading” ceases to stimulate you. I, for one, probably breeze past 95% of the posts in my feed reader every morning without a click. Now, because I’m subscribed to far too many feeds, I still end up spending 1-2 hours on average reading the 5% that captures my attention. Whether you’ve reached that point or not, much of the information being bounced back and forth between industry forums and blogs is little more than a “best practices” guide. Much like the stock market, by the time it’s news, the real opportunity is considerably diminished.

So if your white hat RSS subscriptions are no longer forcing you to think, here are 11 Blackhat Blogs you can’t afford to not be reading:

1. Blue Hat SEO

Eli at Blue Hat SEO posts some of the best advanced SEO techniques available for webmaster consumption. Although the blog is not frequently updated, the posts are long and detailed, and a day spent reading his archives would be time well spent. If post titles like…

…Link Saturation w/ Log Link Matching
…Desert Scraping
…Keyword Fluffing
…Link Laundering and
…Introduction to Black Hole SEO

make you salivate just a little, clear your schedule and start reading.

2. SEO Black Hat

If you’ve never heard the name Quadzilla, it’s a good thing you’re reading this post. SEOBlackHat.com not only maintains an active blog of the misadventures and tactics of black hat SEO, but also operates a paid-membership forum that boasts “The Most Cutting-Edge SEO Exploits No One is Publishing”. At $100/mo, forum membership might not be every webmaster’s cup of tea. But the blog is free, which is why you can’t afford not to read it.

3. busin3ss.name

business.name is a great resource on content generation and link building techniques, and the blogging home of the creator of YACG (Yet Another Content Generator). The three largest items in their tag cloud are “exploit”, “edu-spam” and “tools”. ‘Nuff said.

4. syndk8

Earl Grey’s syndk8.net is more of a forum than a blog, though a visit will show you why it made the list. Syndik8 is packed full of gray matter-stimulating user-submitted content from its over 10,000 members. Topics of discussion range from black hat PPC and content scraping to PHP cloaking scripts and more.

5. fantomNews

fantomNews is the blog of webmaster software company fantomas, makers of applications such as the “Shadow Domain Generator” and spiderSpy™ botBase. The blog features a weekly SEO cartoon (fantoOn), as well as posts like “The Spammers Guide to Wikipedia Hacking” and “Wordpress Mass Installer”. While the primary goal of the site is to sell their products, there is sill plenty of valuable and provocative information available free of charge.

6. Oooff.com

Smaxor is a familiar face on the WickedFire forums, as well as (recently) Earners Forum. His blog, oooff.com, is a great place to start if you’re an internet marketer in need of a crash course in PHP. Smaxor has written excellent guides and tutorials, such as “Basic Web Scraping Using PHP and cURL” and “Basic PHP Data Parsing”. Even if you never have a need for PHP (which is rather unlikely), the posts do a great job of illustrating the basic functionality and possibilities of dynamic website programming.

7. Rephraser

Rephraser hasn’t been updated since early October, but started as the chronicles of a webmaster building his own network of spam sites. The most recent post is a guide to understanding the basic forms of black hat link building. The blog started with promising potential and I hope it’s updated soon… but in the meantime, there is enough on the site to make it worth a read for any black hat greenhorn.

8. Seocracy

Seocracy is another WF regular and a great source for quality databases. While his blog doesn’t expressly promote or advocate blackhat techniques, his understanding of them is apparent and his posts are informative and entertaining. Posts about “Google Hacking” give search queries that anyone can use to find proxies, database dumps and more. And his block sucks. Oh wait, is the “Diss My Blog” contest over? If you missed Seocracy’s “Diss My Blog” contest, then you missed out on some of the more humorous linkbait seen in the industry blogosphere. Results and winning contributions are still available on his blog.

9. Linkdump

Linkdump.f0wl.org is choc full of real code and implementation examples that range from content generation to keyword extraction and scraping. The site is the former home of a software application of the same name, which it seems is no longer available.

10. DinkStyle.com

Unlike the common stereotype of a black hat webmaster (AdSense-happy), DinkStyle.com is a blog geared more towards affiliate marketing. What the site may lack in code examples, it more than makes up for in useful tool suggestions and accounts of dink’s real experiences as a blackhat webmaster. Dink doesn’t care for the term “blackhat”, but spends more time ranking than arguing over semantics.

11. Roguespammer

Roguespammer is a relatively new blog, started up in early October. Posts so far have been scattered over a wide range of topics, but watch for upcoming posts about blackhat link building, traffic monetization and Craigslist spamming. The intended focus of the site is methods for acquiring and monetizing traffic from user-generated content sites like classified sites, social networks and wiki’s.