Google Proxy Hacking - How Your Page Rank Can Be Stolen & Pages Removed from SERP

April 15th, 2008 While looking for VOIP information I found an article which looked eerily familiar to another article I had recently read. A simple google search (remember that Google lists a small subset of total matches) with a big identifying phrase from the article yielded 2110 articles.

January 21st, 2008 Google had a well known proxy facility. You could use an url like http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=http://blog.taragana.com to access http://blog.taragana.com using Google as proxy.

March 12th, 2008 Would you approve a (blog) comment where the commenter's name is "Best Way To Loose Weight"? Any sane blogger would never approve such comments even if it is relevant to context. Do you know why? As comment author is linked with author URL, such comments are obviously intended to highlight the keywords he wants to increase search engine positioning and ranking.

April 13th, 2005 Nowadays I have noticed that Google apparently confers pagerank only to the front page of the blog. All other pages appear to have a rank of zero! I have noticed it across a wide spectrum of blogs, even blogs with very high pageranks.

August 25th, 2006 Wget is a super-useful utility to download pages and automate all types of web related tasks. It works for HTTP as well as FTP URL's.

February 24th, 2006 Google seems to have developed a habit of introducing new services and then withdrawing them due to high demand and reintroducing them selectively later. Google Web Accelerator, Google Analytics and now Google Pages, all follow this overused pattern.

January 9th, 2008 Google dutifully provides a forum for each product / API they launch. They also graciously decided to display 3 recent articles from their forum on their highly ranked product page.

August 21st, 2005 When FireFox is used through AnalogX Proxy (a popular free proxy server) a strange error persistently happens if you have too many browser windows open. All of your requests get strangely redirected to the last opened site.

July 13th, 2006 As I informed earlier we made a major move to a new server in the last few days. All the websites have moved over.

August 17th, 2006 Finally a clean-room implementation of Google's Page Rank Algorithm in Java, reverse-engineered from their numerous commentary on Page Rank (or is it Pigeon Rank?). public static int getPageRank(url) { // start off with a random low PR int pageRank = rand.getInt(0, 3); if ( isHostedOn('google.com', url) ) { pageRank++; } else if ( isHostedOn('microsoft.com', url) ) { pageRank--; } // Support valid pages if (isValidPage(url) ) { pageRank += 1; } tag_value['b'] = 1; tag_value['h2'] = 2; tag_value['h1'] = 3; tag_value['strong'] = -1; // W3C sux! pageRank = calculateTagsPR(tag_value, pagerank); // Sergey said good news sites have // lots of nested tables tablesOnPage = getTagCount('table'); if (tablesOnPage >= 50) { pageRank += 2; } if (pageRank >= 5) { pageRank = 4; // helps selling AdWords } if (linksFrom('mattcutts.com', url) >= 4) { // I link to "clean" sites only // ? Matt, Feb 2006 pagerank += 2; } pagerank += countBacklinks(url) / 10000; blacklist1 = getList('c:\chinese-government-censored.txt'); blacklist2 = getList('c:\larry-page-hatelist.txt'); if ( inArray(blacklist1, url) || inArray(blacklist2, url) ) { pageRank = 0; } d = dashesInUrl(url); pageRank = (d >= 3) ? pageRank -1 : pageRank + 1; if (inString(url, "how to build a bomb")) { // added on request.

November 4th, 2005 I realized that all my feeds in artima have been, without my knowledge, replaced with a sedo site, a domain squatter, with my domain name as a query in their script. Either they have hacked into my Artima account or they found some loophole in Artima site which they exploited to increase their page rank and effectively disabling all my feeds.

April 19th, 2006 Google AdSense competitive ad filter is an excellent way to provide better advertisements and deter MFA's. One of the grievances for big publishers was the small number of filters you could set per account, merely 200.

July 5th, 2005 Angsuman's Permanent Redirector Plugin Overview This plugin allows you to redirect (permanent redirect using HTTP status 301) any of your posts or pages to a different URL. This enables you to transfer Google rank of your post or page (static page of WordPress) to a new page.

February 10th, 2007 CVS is commonly used by open source project to provide access to their source code. Here is a simple way how you can connect to CVS server from behind a proxy server.

September 26th, 2006 Ever since I had written a post on how Samy hacked MySpace, I have been inundated with comments asking me how to hack MySpace. It is obvious that the people asking didn't realize that the actual purpose of the article was not to help hacking MySpace, but to discuss about an intelligent exploit after it was patched.