Last week we covered a story about Malware & SEO hacking hits UK government, schools & universities which ended up on the front page of Digg.

Ritchie the author of the post has emailed me the following image (they use some kind of heat map package) showing that visitors from Digg seem to click like mad anywhere on the page even when no links are present.

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PageRank sculpting was quite a straightforward topic until recently – you just needed to add the nofollow tag to links pointing at “useless” pages such as shopping baskets and login forms and your rankings for long tail keywords magically jumped up.

I’ve heard people talking about 70% traffic increases across large websites purely using this method.

Matt Cutts has tried (and failed, in my opinion) to clarify the issue with a new PageRank sculpting post. The comments are excellent, a mixture of people who don’t understand SEO blindly saying “great post” and the usual knowledgeable people actually questioning things.

Here are some quotes that have me confused.
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Last week Twitter passed what’s probably the most important milestone yet in terms of viral marketing – a single link received over 10,000 re-tweets.

The link was the iPhone twitition on our very own Twitition.com site and actually received 12,809 signatures as well as a lot of additional re-tweets.

The excellent Tweetmeme website is currently reporting 11,571 re-tweets for the AT&T twitition with 5,111 re-tweets for the O2 version.

Only around 10% of visitors to Twitition actually signed the petition which gives you an indication of the sort of traffic Twitter can drive.

Microsoft is to ship Windows 7 without a web browser to appease the EU.

Microsoft has announced that it will ship a special version of Vista’s successor in Europe, titled Windows 7 E, without Internet Explorer 8. The browser-less version, a reaction to an antitrust investigation by the EU into whether Microsoft is abusing its dominant position with Windows and Internet Explorer, will be distributed in all member nations of the European Economic Area as well as Croatia and Switzerland.

This might be good to promote healthy competition and decrease the market share of IE but the EU doesn’t seem to have thought how it will affect search. Google has a 90% market share in the UK and will be more than happy to pay retailers to install Chrome and Firefox with Google as the default search engine on every Windows PC.

How much money have you made from Twitter? With most companies yet to even figure out how to get more than 100 followers Dell has made over $2 million from a number of Twitter accounts.

The main account is DellOutlet with 625,378 followers but they have a number of other accounts too. For a global company like Dell that’s a good idea – most people should just stick with one account.

We got 100,000 visitors from Twitter this week

This week has been a fun week for one of our internal project Twitition with over 100,000 unique visitors from Twitter in a couple of days and links from pretty much every major newspaper.

A lot of people think that because Twitter is still quite small a campaign won’t generate as much buzz as doing something on Facebook. What they forget is that the media loves Twitter and any Twitter campaign stands a much higher chance of getting a write up than a Facebook app.

This added PR opportunity is what makes campaigns doubly successful.

Hacking websites to insert malware and links to other websites isn’t a new practice but thanks to the negligent actions of many schools, universities and government departments it’s becoming more widespread.

Websites using outdated software are full of gaping holes which, once found, can be exploited across dozens of different sites. The latest study finds that hundreds of school, government and university sites have been affected with schools blindly linking to viagra sites from their homepages.

How to see the hacked pages

You can see some of the hundreds of sites by performing the following search queries similar to the ones below on Google.

• inurl:.ac.uk buy cialis
• inurl:.gov.uk buy viagra
• inurl:.sch.uk lesbian porn

The hackers quite often make the text invisible on the page so you may need to click on the “Cached” link offered in the Google results and then the “Text-only version” of the cached page. An example is here.

Thanks Ritchie from Online Backup Technology for the tip.

iPhone 3G owners in the UK are fuming this morning after it was revealed O2 would not be offering an easy upgrade to people in mid-contract.

If you want to upgrade to the iPhone 3GS and you are not at the end of your contract then O2 will be asking for £35 for each month left on your contract and then £274.23 to buy the handset. So if you have 6 months left its going to cost almost £500 to upgrade.

The most insulting thing about the new iPhone pricing is that O2 are offering internet tethering (allowing you to use the iPhone as a modem for your laptop) but charging £14.68 a month for the privilege. The iPhone has an unlimited data package so how can they charge again for the same data? And who is really going to use 3GB a month?

Why can’t O2 just offer 50MB of tethered data for free as part of my contract?

You can watch the O2 Twitter feed to see them squirming and check out peoples feelings on Twitter.

A Dutch website has lost a lawsuit over the words appearing in the snippet of text appearing in Googles search results, despite the fact that Google generated the snippet.

Apparently the snippet gave the incorrect impression that a local car dealer (Zwartepoorte) had gone backrupt despite the fact that the snippet only appeared when you searched for “zwartepoorte failliet” (failliet means bankrupt in Dutch). The offending page has now been taken down.
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Reading what people are saying about Bing is fascinating because every criticism of the results I’ve seen is based on something other than the actual algorithm.

Some bloggers are saying that Bing doesn’t have the right sponsored links showing up which is interesting because that isn’t the core feature of a search engine. Google has set the bar very high with AdWords because the adverts are so relevant and high quality that people actually find them useful. The fact Google spends a lot of time promoting and refining the system to entice as many advertisers as possible gives AdWords a huge inventory advantage over anybody else.
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