Posted by: admin on January 14th, 2009
By Pinaki Ghosh
In this section I am producing some of the legendary Phishing mails, exactly as they came, to make you aware of the nature of Phishing mails and as such, alter you. Here is a phishing mail in the unchanged form, claiming to be from PayPal.
Pay Pal Scam 1: Updating Records
Dear Valued PayPal Member,
During our timely schedule account maintenance and verification unfortunately we have detected a slight error in your billing information on one of the files with PayPal.
Such things might occur due to the following problems:
- Any recent changes in your personal information like the change of address
- Our inability to verify the option of payment that you have selected which may be because of an internal error within our processors.
Therefore your account has been temporarily suspended. We need you to confirm your identity so that you can regain full privileges of your account.
However, the failure to update your records will result in account suspension.
In case it is not completed by July 20, 2007, we would reserve the right to terminate all privileges of your account indefinitely, as it may have been used for fraudulent purposes.
We thank you for your cooperation in this manner.To confirm your identity please follow the link below:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run
Thank you for your patience in this matter.
PayPal - Customer Service
Please do not reply to this e-mail as this is only a notification. Mail sent to this address cannot be answered.
Posted by: admin on December 12th, 2008
By Pinaki Ghosh
The Blackhat SEOs are the search engine optimizers who repel the illegal means and practices in order to encourage and boost the website rankings in the search engines. It involves methods that break the TOS of all reputed search engines. Cloaking, spamming, keyword & link stuffing, using doorway pages and site hijacking are some of the methods used by black hat SEOs.
The term black hat SEO is exactly the opposite of the White hat SEOs, who then use legal, ethical means for the search optimization. These terms have evolved from the classic western movies, where the cowboy hero is seen wearing a white hat, and the villains, wear on the black hat. Most take the witches from the tales wearing a tall, wide brimmed black hat. Thus, the black hat symbolizes the evil.
To save money employs the Blackhat SEO’s which are also economical. Most take their help to pull them out from some sort of trouble they have stepped into. Blackhat SEOs are known to solve some of the toughest problems with ease. But still, the Blackhat SEOs are never employed by any famous organizations. Blackhat SEOs do not believe in ethics and follow no ethical guidelines. They will give a high rank to a site by methods that are fair or foul. It is however debated that many SEOs who pose to be white hats, are really black hats in disguise. This theory differentiates that the black hats and the white hats live in the same body. Some white hat SEOs who copy paste content of one site into another, and thus create 50 or 100sites, are really Blackhat SEOs; lacking in ethics. A true writer white hat will never create a second site with content of another site.
The sufferers are the search engines, who are deceived and made to list bogus sites above good sites. Next to suffer are the surfers, who have to make up to choose the better sites from the list containing the bad, ugly and the spammer sites.
Posted by: admin on December 11th, 2008
Pinaki Ghosh
When one adds the website to any of the search engine, it automatically uses a scanning software called ‘spider’ to go through the content of web pages. The so called spider then adds the links to the other pages to read all information on the different pages and join them in a larger database of the search engine. If then there is any need of the information on certain keywords from the search engine, it would help in searching its database and look out for sites offering information on the keywords that are needed. Most search engine have there own crawlers which vary in code from each other, but at the same time, have a similar set of rules which one can then apply to look on the web.
The simplest forms that are used by these crawlers are the HTML codes that are used by the sites and come free from errors. Why make a face if one does not find his site cached by the search engines; the mistake lies in the poor coding of that particular site. It also can mean that the menu system design restricts the technological spiders to follow it. In such a case your site will not be indexed by the search engines.
You can correct by following the ways given below:
(a) Change the menu system to CSS type, text based menu system.
(b) Add a text menu below the web page (as a second menu system).
(c) Update the latest code to a search engine friendly version.
You can also optimize your web page by keeping the following advices in mind:
(i) When it comes to understanding pictures the search engines are useless. They really understand nothing much but only the text names of the pictures. Thus, using the ‘alt tags’ which are text equivalent of the pictures on the site helps.
(ii) Try and make up a site map away connecting from the main page, to let the search engines find out the other pages of your site.
(iii) Never use the same kind of color of the text and background. Also, making the text appear transparent can get you penalized by any of the search engines for using irrelevant ways.
(iv) Try not to use the ‘hidden text’ in your CSS files.
Make use of the traditional techniques like the title, description, metatags, and at the same time some good content in your site; and then be convinced that your page will be cached.
Posted by: admin on December 10th, 2008
Pinaki Ghosh
Google allots a value to almost all the web-pages in the Google index which is based on a complex formula. The search that Google performs has the results based on algorithm, which includes the Page Rank value. The higher is the Google Page Rank of your site, the more are your chances of getting a top listing, when someone performs a search Larry Page) and Sergey Brin using keywords from your site.
Larry Page bought in and developed the Page Ranks System (The name Page rank comes from his surname) and Sergey Brin at Stanford University, while researching on a new search engine project. Together, Page and Brin gave birth to Google Inc.
You can easily download and install the Google toolbar (which is pretty simple). Then by choosing the ‘advanced’ option and you can view the Page Rank of any site on the toolbar.
The way Page rank works is best understood by the mathematicians as it’s complicated and involves a lot of calculations. For you to understand, let me put it in a simpler form:
PRA = 1-d + dPRt1/Ct1 + … + PRtn/Ctn
To understand the above Google PageRank formula, here’s the English meaning: The more links that point to your site, the higher is your rank. The higher is the Google PageRank of the sites, pointing (linking) to your site, the higher will be your Google PageRank.
Supposing, a site with PageRank 10, and 5 other sites link to your site it will give you more value, than any site with PageRank 20, and 100 other sites linking to your site. Besides, your PageRank goes on increasing if other sites with content similar to your site point to your site. Thus you see the formula has a lot of variables, and complications.
Your Google PageRank can be increased by:
(a) Getting the higher number of incoming links i.e. links to your site. The PageRank for your site falls by the increasing number of outgoing links.
(b) By getting the incoming links to your site from good sites with high PageRank, will increase your Google PageRank!
(c) To increase your PageRank you can increase the number of pages of your site.
(d) Your PageRank also increases if other sites with similar web content point to your site.
Every month your Google PageRank changes once, as Google updates the rankings once a month.