life in search dot com

Today was supposed to be a such a productive day, but it looks like I have a bit of a mess to clean up. I took the day off from my day job to work on some personal projects, and it was my intent to get down to serious business today. I made a pact with myself not long ago; to complete at minimum one actionable item, each and every day, that will help me reach my business goals by this time next year. Today’s actionable item was to get two new instances of wordpress installed before noon. Mission accomplished

After the installations were complete, I started poking around a few sites that I have neglected for a while. I was shocked, but not particularly surprised, to discover that one of my blogs had been hacked. It was long overdue for a wordpress update, so I do accept some (but not all) responsibility for the hack. Anyway, the sneaky bastard inserted a hidden div full of spammy links behind the header image. I wouldn’t have noticed (because they’re hidden…duh), except that I was checking the site out on my Blackberry and the BB browser happened to display the links for me. Otherwise, I may never have noticed.

For competitive reasons, I am not going to reveal the site. Instead, here’s a code sample.

As you can see, some fookin c*nt injected a whack of spammy links to various pharmaceutical products. No big surprise right? This is what spammers do. What caught my attention, however, was the root domain. The pharma links were pointing to Third Screen Media, which is a division of Advertising.com, which is a division of AOL, which is a division of Time/Warner. Whew! I hope that didn’t make you as dizzy as it made me…

Hold up…time for a drink with @sugarrae.

Okay, I’m back. I started digging around a little bit, and it would appear that the Third Screen Media site has been hacked! Check this out …and then this…and then this. What do you think? It looks pretty dodgy to me. Google has indexed loads of these pages, too. With a stable of clients including Nieman Marcus and Southwest Airlines, one might assume that Advertising.com would know a thing or two about internet security. Apparently not. I have to wonder what their clients will think? If a hacker can compromise their corporate site in such a way, one has to wonder how secure their ad platform is. I know that I wouldn’t be too impressed at having my brand associated with such shadiness. Or is it possible that Advertising.com is doing blackhat SEO as part of their SEM services? If so, you’ve been outed suckas!

Fortunately, my site doesn’t appear to be penalized with the search engines. It’s still ranking where it was last week for most terms, which leads me to believe that I discovered the hack shortly after it happened. Hopefully, I caught it before Google did It will be interesting to see how long it takes for Advertising.com to respond. Maybe Om Malik could put a few new questions to them? As is the case with most “big brands”, it’s highly unlikely that ThirdScreenMedia.com will be penalized by Google in any meaningful way. I just wish I could get away with the same spammy tactics and/or infractions that the “big brands” get away with. Ciao for now, folks!

Have you been following the recent news regarding Bell Canada and their dodgy internet traffic throttling practices? According to some, Bell has been engaging in some deceptive marketing practices. A class action lawsuit was launched out of Quebec last week, and it is rumoured that another suit will be launched out of Ontario in the coming days. I wonder if browser hijacking is on the list of complaints?

Now if I’m not mistaken, Firefox defaults to Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” search when searches are performed in the address bar. Last night however, something rather strange happened when I typed my search into the address bar. Honestly, I thought my browser had been highjacked! In actuality, I was being served with a special message from our friends at Bell Canada:

Google is conspicuously absent from the list of search providers that Bell has partnered with for this new “service”. Hmmm…very interesting. Bell has seemingly teamed up with the *other* search engines to take on GOOG. If Bell can position themselves between the browser (Firefox) and the search engine (Google), they may be able to capture some of the traffic and lucrative advertising dollars that generally go to Google.It’s a risky endeavor (alienating your users and undermining the public trust in your brand), but I have to credit Bell for their tenaciousness. It’s not easy to maintain relevance in Google’s brave new world.In the United States, the issue of “Net Neutrality” has been one of major political sensitivity for quite some time. Here in Canada however, it has just recently appeared on the political radar. I urge each of you to learn more about the issues at hand. It’s your internet, after all.