SeoPedia: The Internet Marketing & SEO Blog

Just a few days ago, ANRCTI (the National Regulatory Authority for Communications and Information Technology) imposed the FIRST fine for SPAM in Romania, to a lawyer company called Urban & Asociaţii.

The fine was 1000 RON, roughly 330 Euro:

ANRCTI enforced the first fine for sending unrequested commercial messages, following an inquiry which revealed that the subject had not obtained the addressees’ consent for sending such a communication (spam). The inquiry was initiated upon receiving a complaint, at the end of 2007, the first one submitted to ANRCTI after the take over of relevant attributions.

The complaint showed that, starting from September 2007, the plaintiff had been receiving a number of unrequested commercial messages that promoted a newsletter and a company. Following the inquiry conducted by the ANRCTI control personnel, the sender of these unrequested commercial messages (without the plaintiff’s prior consent) was found to be the company Urban & Asociaţii. This company was imposed a contravention fine amounting to RON 1000.

Yesterday I confronted myself with a very weird situation. Dudes broke my car’s windows.

I had a lot of cars and I’ve been driving for a long time, but is the first time I’ve had this happen to me. I live in a select neighborhood and stuff, in downtown Bucharest.

The funny thing out of all this is that this thief must have been one of those dental freaks. He must care a lot about his teeth and didn’t had any money to buy some gums because all he stole were my Orbit chewing gums.

That’s right. He broke my windows, scratched my upholstery, damaged the car, and stole only my Orbits. He could’ve taken at least my GPS window holder. How funny is that ?

Moreover, the police came, told me to go with them at the station to take fingerprints. What’s weird about this is that at the station, the investigators (two 20 years old chicks), took fingerprints without any protection gloves on. That’s right, bear handed.

I’m a fan of CSI. Even I know that you can not contaminate a scene that way. After they took fingerprints (they did NOT took my fingerprints, so they could exclude them), they told me that all taken fingerprints were partial.

Now, there were about 10 different surfaces down there, including high gloss papers (you could not want a better surface for fingerprinting), so how the heck couldn’t they extract at least a full thumb fingerprint from over 15 objects which were tempered with in the car. This was not a professional job anyway, so I doubt that the guy had gloves.

After this happened (I saw it at 9 AM), I spent the whole day looking for replacement windows and other parts, because Toyota told me that the minimum time required to bring the parts was 2 weeks. I fixed my car until the evening. Screw insurance, screw the thief, life goes on.

PS: My first personal post on my blog, ever, because I’m pretty pissed.

I have been testing these Sitelinks for quite some time now on several websites, from new to very old, from few to zounds of visitors.

What are Sitelinks ? They are a collection of links, automatically chosen by Google’s algorithm, to appear below the result of website, linking to main pages of your website. They are randomly chosen, although you can block any link from appearing. We will discuss more about Sitelinks in the Google Sitelinks FAQ section below.

Recently, some of my websites got Sitelinks whilst I tried different ways of reaching this milestone.

Continue reading Google Sitelinks: The Ultimate FAQ

Ciprian has just uploaded all the recent tools he and his team have developed, and has bundled them all in one single SEO & webmaster tools package.

I have been using the previous home for some of these tools for some time now, mainly because almost all the tools had tens of datacenters on which you could’ve searched for information, including indexed pages, backlinks and cache times.

Since most of the multiple datacenters tools are restricted to Pagerank and (very few) to indexed pages, Ciprian’s tools were a Godsend.

There a lot of basic tools in the collection. Nevertheless the ones that really help me are the SEO strength (a complete package of the basic stats like backlinks, indexed pages and PR), indexed pages, inbound links, Google keyword ranking and the Google cache.

I think Ciprian should work on the keyword research tool a little bit more. It gives me some wierd results.

Leaving that aside, Ciprian, I think you should also put a link to the Google SERPs, on all the datacenters in the results pages of the SEO tools, so that users can check that result in real time too.

Like most other similar services on the web, Ciprian’s tools have their share of downtime, slow response times and timeouts, but the team is working hard to improve these problems every day.

None of the tools require any user account and they are all free for unlimited use. Have fun.

Cristian invited me to speak at NetCamp, about Web 2.0.

My presentation will revolve around reputation management for companies and individuals as well as how companies can communicate internally and externally, efficiently, Web 2.0 style.

Will upload my presentation in this post, after the event is finished.

More information about this event can be found in the official website. Registrations can be made online.

This event will be starting tomorrow.

Update: This was my presentation (PPT).

Just received an e-mail from BlogRush letting me know that I collaborated and worked to increase my account, for two months now, for nothing, and that Seopedia is not good enough for this crap network.

The mail souns like :

We regret to inform you that your BlogRush Account Is Currently INACTIVE.

Your blog(s) did not pass our Quality Review criteria. You will find instructions below for making your account active again.

You will notice that the widget no longer loads on your pages — please remove the BlogRush code from your blog for now.

We recently reviewed your blog(s) located at:
http://www.seopedia.org

We determined that your blog did not meet our strict quality guidelines. Please do not take this personally, but realize that we must abide by a very strict set of quality guidelines. (They are listed below.)

If you feel you have made the necessary changes to your blog(s) to meet our guidelines, you can resubmit your blog(s) for review after this date:
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Continue reading Blogrush is a scam

I just found a nifty HTML generator to hide affiliate links.

The only drawback is that on rightclick, the affiliate URL still appears.

I just followed a link from a comment in Aaron’s blog, and ended up in Igor Mordkovich’s Bizmord.com blog.

Igor blogs mostly about PPC, because that’s what his expertise is.

From the index, I was just a click away from 17 Most Common PPC Mistakes Web Marketers Make. I read the article top to bottom. It clearly shows that Igor paid a lot of attention when he wrote the article. Almost all the advices he written, are practical ones, although not all are for advanced PPC account managers.

Apart from the fact that if you do not involve yourself in the industry and start commenting on blogs, websites and communities that are related to your field, you won’t get much coverage for your content website (may it be a blog or a news website), from this single, quality, passionate and helpful article Ivan wrote and I read, I’m positive that Igor deserves a link from my blogroll. And I’ll be reading more in the future.

That’s how well written content brings you natural links from quality and related websites.

I receive an email today in my inbox.

I laughed my ass of. Who sends these kind of e-mails ?

Mr. Christian, you the guru, the fish, the snake of SEM, you the greatest bear of them all.

Could you, Oh COULD you great Zen master of SEM, give me a link from your blog ?

Listen to an interview with William Quigley taken by the USF Entrepreneurship Club. William Quigley is one of the Managing Partners at Clearstone, a VC who invests hundreds of millions in startups.

Whilst previously representing the interests of the Walt Disney Company, William has moved to the financial and investing market, where the big bucks are.

Amongst Clearstone’s assets there are: PayPal, Overture, Mp3.com and others.

So if you are new to entrepreneurship and want to get your mind ready for some action, or might want to find out how to even get referred to a VC, listen to this short interview (22 minutes).

Hit Play below:

This is already old news, beeing first reported in Seopedia, two days ago. PayPal is now fully accepting Romania, with sending and receiving capabilities, merchant account included.

That means every Romanian citizen can now accept website payments (through PayPal funds, or through Credit Card payments) and can withdraw the money to a Romanian debit or credit card (not a bank account).

Read more in SeoPedia (the largest Romanian SEM community), again, the first source in Romania who unrevealed this braking news.

Western Union Quick Cash payments will be available for pick-up the day after the payment date. The countries where Quick Cash is possible are :

China (Mainland)
Malaysia
Pakistan
Romania
Philippines
Argentina
Chile
Peru
Colombia

The comissions for the Quick Cash service are NOT the same as for the normal Western Union money transfer (hundreds of USD).

In Romania, at least, the commisions are this way (these comissions are NOT present or stated anywhere within the Google Website, nor the Western Union website):

$15 for any sum up to $3000 USD
$25 for any sum exceeding $3000 USD

The maximum payment through this service is $5000. If your payment exceeds $5000, the payment method will automatically convert to the standard check.

You can search valid Western Union agents in your city, that allow QuickCash payments, through Payment Solutions.

When will you receive a payment ? Next day :)

Read more about it in SeoPedia forum (romanian).

Ever wanted to see how one of the many available (PMBlaster, Zunker, Xrumer etc.) forum spamming software looks and runs like ?

See Xrumer in action.

What’s interesting to see in the video above, from the point of view, is how the program works. The procedures, the checklists, the options, so you can build your own anti-spam blockade.

Some of you guys, will be amazed to see how captchas and/or math spam questions are like so … 1945.

Important: Please be aware that I do NOT endorse, NOR do I recommend the use of such spamming software, except for your own, personal and private use, to see how the program functions. As one user says in this WP article about Xrumer, you have to know the enemy and the weapons used by the enemy before you can defend against them.

These days, I am testing BlogRush, an ad network built by John Reese of Income.com. I want to state from the beginning, that BlogRush is not breaking news. Everybody has wrote about it. Below I will write my own input and that’s it. Moreover, I will try to get a few hundred referrals with the help of the Internet God. :)

BlogRush is your average pyramidal (meaning you can have sub-affiliates and sub-sub-affiliate and … you get the idea) banner / link exchange network, just that it’s presented in a Web 2.0 form: a widget, which you can put in your blog’s sidebar, or in your website’s utility spot.

Continue reading BlogRush - A new MyBlogLog ?

I am beeing overrun with tens of comments from this very sick guy (real human, not robot), so I was forced to put all the comments to moderate status, as well as banning the entire .rima-tde.net hostname. Banning individual IP’s didn’t worked. The guy kept coming back.

Any ideas for my problem guys ?

Update: The guy keep on doing it (now using Romanian IPs, USA IPs etc):

I guess it’s the price to pay when you have “admirers”.