Saturday, December 6, 2008

Link Relevance

by: David Andrew Smith

We are constantly being told by SEO experts and the Search Engines that the importance of a link is determined by its page rank and relevance to our own web sites. Consequently when developing a linking strategy we should only be concerned with relevant links. That is other web sites which have some connection to our own. For example I run a web site devoted to providing a variety of cleaning services to commercial clients throughout the UK, so a relevant site would be a cleaning machine supplier or a cleaning chemicals supplier. Not other cleaning companies for the obvious reason they are our direct competitors.

Now this sounds simple and straightforward and if we did this we would end up linking to about twenty sites. This number is not in any way sufficient for us to compete with our competitors who have many hundreds and in some cases thousands of links recognised by the search engines.

How does Google determine relevance? I would suggest that it is a completely random process. If I look at my own back links which Google are registering then many are relevant in terms of the definition above, but many are not. None of our suppliers who provide us with a back link and incidentally have high page ranks form part of this list and yet they are highly relevant? It may be that these form part of Google’s count but they choose for one reason or another not to divulge these. It remains a mystery.

How does a mathematical formula work out relevance? If I back link to my customers who are a very divers group to me they are relevant but apparently not to Google. We have many back links from construction and building companies because we carry out builders cleans for them. Yet these are seemingly not deemed to be relevant but a mortgage company is? Builders and construction firms are mentioned several times on the web site and so a relevant connection should be able to be made.

If I look at the back links of my major competitors then the situation becomes even more confusing. Very few would appear on the surface to be of any relevance at all but who am I to judge? I do not have inside knowledge of the workings of these companies and their possible connections.

To me the whole process seems completely arbitrary and I will continue developing links to sites that I consider relevant. If Google paid attention to its own advice in only developing links to relevant sites then presumably it would only link to other search engines?

It is an easy statement to make for Google and SEO experts, ‘only develop links to relevant sites’ but the reality is that they have no way of knowing what is truly relevant and what is not. Consequently my advice is to continue developing your links to websites that you consider of some relevance either to you or surfers who come across your site and continue to be astonished at what Google considers to be relevant!

How to Get a Good Deal on a Hard Drive

by: Mac McClellan

Computer equipment is one of the hardest things to buy if you are not at least somewhat competent in the market. Many people are willing to take advantage of someone who doesn’t have a clue what he or she need. Take the MarketPro Shows for example. Many different vendors frequent the shows in order to sell their wares, and on one occasion, this writer thought the Motherboard had gone on my computer, but I was also interested in upgrading my hard drive as well. One vendor quoted a price of approximately $350 to replace the Mother Board and include a hard drive of 2 Gb It seemed like a good deal at the time until shopping in various computer stores showed that a whole system with an 80 Gb hard drive could be purchased for not much more than that. Interesting thought, isn’t it? Why is a person going to pay $350 to get 2 Gb of hard drive memory when for approximately $599, one can get a tower with an 80 Gb hard drive, 512K of RAM, a keyboard, and sometimes even a printer depending on the sale that is being offered at the time.

How do you know where you’re getting a good deal on a hard drive? One of the things that you don’t want to do is take the first deal that interests you because you think it sounds “good.” Unless you are a computer whiz who knows the prices and specifications of every product in the local area, you need to check around. Find out exactly what it is that you want and get some prices. While you are doing this, do not let anyone think that you are interested in buying at that time because they will attempt to convince you that if you don’t buy your hard drive that day, you will pay much more money for it and not get the same quality. You want to do all of your research before you make your final decision and know that in the end you have made the most informed decision of all.

When it is suggested that you check around, that doesn’t mean just the stores in your area because often times, an Internet search will yield you a much better price, but this means you will have to know exactly what it is that you want right down to the size of the hard drive and speed of the processor. Even EBay is a good source of value-priced hard drives, but you must be able to read into the seller’s profile, meaning that you do not attempt to place a bid if the seller has a private profile. Again, you must read the description in detail because if you are looking for a new hard drive, you must look at the complete description. Even if your hard drive has taken a nosedive, give yourself an opportunity to look for a good deal instead of simply taking the first one that sounds like a good deal because you’re desperate. This has not yet been mentioned, but one of the most important things about a hard drive is know the potential that it can crash and being sure to have all of your important information backed up so that it’s just a matter of reloading it when you replace the hard drive. Lastly, be sure to keep your virus protection up to date because one of the biggest causes of hard drive crashes is a virus.

Of course most of the work has already been done for you at http://harddriveusa.com. At Hard Drive USA you can find great resources on hard drives and the best deals on hard drives.

Stealing Passwords And Other Juicy Googlebits

by: David Andrew

Disclaimer: Before we even start, I'd like to let my readers know that I am a full-time information security professional. I do not condone the theft of anyone's personal information including passwords, social security numbers, credit card numbers, etc. Moreover, I condemn such acts as morally and ethically wrong. The purpose and goal of this article is not to assist people with criminal or nefarious intentions, but rather to educate about the type of information that can be easily found with a web browser and a search engine, and by extension, the type of information that should and should not be submitted to web sites.

By now we all know of Google's dominance in the search industry. Although Yahoo and Microsoft remain competitors, neither one of their search engines are as mature as Google's. And beyond the "big three", you're hard pressed to find any search engine worth using anymore. GYM (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft) have all but eliminated the smaller players in search--including former giants like Altavista, Lycos, and Excite. But even amongst the big three, Google is far ahead of the pack. In fact, Google's indexing prowess and relevancy ratings have become so good that many information security professionals now use Google as a key part to their vulnerability assessment and penetration testing services. Security professionals know that the first step in performing a successful assessment is to gather intelligence about the target. This is known as the "footprinting" or "profiling" phase of the security engagement. And what better way to profile your target than to leverage the power of the world's greatest search engine? By simply using search queries (aka Just Google It, one can quickly locate sensitive and quasi-sensitive company information including domain names, subdomains, network address ranges, mail servers, FTP servers, whois contact information, even e-mail addresses. And the kicker is that all of the above can potentially be found about a target without sending even a single packet to the target's network. In an effort to better automate the footprinting phase using Google, some in the security industry have even written software that will go out and perform various search queries on the target inan effort to obtain an accurate profile. Of particular interest is Foundstone's SiteDigger and BiDiBLAH by Sensepost. SiteDigger will look for vulnerabilities, configuration problems, and other "interesting security nuggets" by searching Google's cache. Like SiteDigger, BiDiBLAH also uses a Google API license key to query the search engine for various keywords in an effort to determine a target's subdomains. Incidentally, BiDiBLAH is an all-around excellent free tool for professional penetration testers.

Now finding company web sites, domain names, and even e-mail addresses is one thing. But stealing people's eBay passwords? Credit card numbers? All by doing a few Google searches? Yes. And unfortunately not only is this possible, it's often simple to carry out. "But how can you search for someone's password if you don't know what it is"? Good question! The answer, of course, is you do not. Since the unique element is unknown, you need to search on a known, common element. Allow me to further explain.

By its very nature, software contains fingerprints--bits of information that uniquely identify and differentiate that software. For example, when you connect to a Microsoft IIS server, that web server will reply with its server string ("Microsoft-IIS/6.0", for example). Even tiny components of a software application will leave fingerprints. For example, McAfee VirusScan 8.0.0 has a small component called Access Protection which acts as a very simple firewall. But the log file for this component can be easily spotted because of a common, known element that is shared across all instances of that log. Now because this log file does not contain highly sensitive information such as passwords (it actually does contain disk path information though), the risk is not substantial if someone's log file found its away into the wrong hands. But what about other application log files that have common, known elements? How about configuration files? Spreadsheets? Accounting software? I think you get the point. Searching Google for these known application fingerprints will inevitably bring up "interesting" results. By the way, there are entire web sites devoted to sole purpose of sharing Google queries that will result in juicy googlebits such as passwords, social security numbersand yes, credit card numbers. And although I won't list any of those sites here, they are not hard to find (hint: use Google!).

Incidentally, one of the things that makes these queries possible is Google's support of advanced operators. Google supports a growing number of these operators which help narrow down the output and generally provide a more specific result set. Using Google's advanced operators, you can even limit a searches to a specific domain or even filetype. For example, the following query searches registry files looking specifically for a text string beginning with "Username" and the word "putty" (PuTTY is a free implementation of telnet and SSH for the Windows and Unix platforms):

ext:reg "username=*" putty

If successful, the query would result in a list of username to machine mappings for folks who use puTTY. Armed with this useful information, an attacker could then possibly launch a brute-force password guessing attack against the target (assuming the. target's firewall allowed for inbound SSH connectivity). As you can see, coming up with searches that reveal Googlebits is mostly an excercise of the imagination.

As stated on their corporate website, Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". So far, I'd say Google is doing an excellent job in fulfilling their mission statement. Are you upset that Google's database contains sensitive personal information such as credit card numbers? Me too. And though I won't give Google a complete pass, the primary parties at fault here are web site operators and web users (you and me). If you operate a Web site, please don't leave config files, log files, and other files that contain sensitive information sitting on your web server! And if you enjoy the many services the web has to offer, please understand that any information you send to a web site has the potential to show up in a Google search. I can't tell you how many forum posts I've stumbled on during a Google search that contained things like cell phone numbers, driver's license numbers, and even social security numbers.

You have been warned.

The Simple Truth About Optimized Web Content

by: Trish Andrews

To rank well in any search engine, the words you write should never be a second thought. They must be your absolute first thought. Give careful attention to the words on your web pages right from the very beginning of planning and designing your website.

Content development experts know the one thing that causes websites to win or lose in the search engines is Words. The words you use and how you use them to create your content is your best asset is to naturally market your website in the search engines.

Why is that?

Website content that is "optimized" for the search engines deliberately aims right at the very words and phrases people are typing as search terms as they hunt for information or products.

IT ALL MAKES SENSE

There is nothing mystical about it... it's as black-and-white and sensible as it gets! Readers of web pages need to be immediately assured that the page they land on is what they're after. The page needs to be clear and on point.

It's the same for the major search engines. Just like people, the search engines need to identify right away what a web page is about. They need definite pointers and clues to guide how and where they will list your web page in their reports.

This is done with the use of keywords. Targeting the best words and phrases is done through keyword research. Research digs up the niche words that people really do use; words that have a good demand and low supply! Your website development must begin here, to be a contender for high-ranking pages.

With well-designed, keyword-rich content pages that are linked together using keywords, search engines are more likely to index your web pages on Page One of their listing.

SEO IS A GUIDE, NOT A GIMMICK

Think of writing SEO content not as a ploy or a trick to get better rankings. Think of it as it really should be, and that is simply to help the search engines list your web pages in the best possible way.

Search engine technology is advancing rapidly too. Shallow repetition of keywords throughout the text will become a thing of the past. Search engines will be looking harder and smarter for relevance and meaning to be woven throughout a site's pages.

Why? So they can bring the most accurate and fulfilling web pages back to the searcher. Period. Because without this pinpoint accuracy, advertisers will not reap the benefits of paid advertising. This one trend will motivate webmasters to improve the relevance and resourcefulness of their web content.

PEOPLE DEMAND QUALITY

People will continue to demand refreshing, informative content - which is "who" the content is really and truly for. After all, we only write a web page according to the search engines' demands so people will find it.

It will be no coincidence when someone types a search phrase and your website is either absent from view or is indexed highly on the results page.

It will also be no coincidence that when someone lands on your web page, they either click away from your highly ranked page because the content is worthless, or they stay with you and engage because the content is important and meaningful to them.

Just remember: Don't get "number bound" when you do keyword research. Use common sense in keyword selection. Find the easier words to market, words with a smaller audience. Then let nature take its course to the bigger rankings.

It all happens because the content is built to tell a search engine exactly what it wants to know. What is this page about? All the rest is then for people!

Copyright 2006 Trish Andrews

Monday, December 1, 2008

Speed Up Your Slow PC

by: Dustin Ramsey

Background programs running:

This is the biggest reason and can be fixed quickly and for free... it's possible that your computer may have so many background programs running simultaneously that there is not enough resources to run normally.

The end result of this is that your computer begins to run more and more slowly over time as you add other programs.

There are two remedies, get Anti-Spyware and use the feature which allows you to view running programs and to disable any of those running programs. Or, if you like to get into your system with your bare hands, use the remedy below.

How to disable unneeded background programs:

All icons in your computer's system tray are background programs using memory. There are more, but you will get a hint from that system tray. To see and exit all running background programs:

Windows 95 - ME

a. Press the Ctrl + Alt + Delete keys at the same time.

b. Click any program or task except Explorer or Systray,

c. and then click End Task.

Repeat steps b and c to quit all programs except Explorer and Systray which are necessary components of Microsoft Windows.

You should now have a clean system. See if the computer runs like it used to... if it does, you will want to prevent those programs from restarting the next time you start the computer.

If you don't want any background programs starting when you restart the system, and you know what you are doing, you can run msconfig from the run menu and completely disable what you find in the 'Startup' tab. If you aren't that experienced and you want a safe way to disable all those unneeded background programs, get the remedy recommended for the spyware on this page. It has a feature allowing you to disable startup programs safely.

Windows XP through 2003 Server

a. Press the Ctrl + Alt + Delete keys at the same time.

b. Choose 'Task Manager' tab to view and end any running programs.

c. disabling these programs will require that you change their startup properties in the 'Administrative Tools' area of your system. The Windows Help menu will walk you though that process if you search 'disable programs' in your help section.

Spyware:

Many kinds of software add themselves to your system start menu without even asking your permission. Sometimes you will click on a link or visit a hacker website that installs spyware on your computer without you knowing. NOAWARE (http://www.noadware.net/?hop=greenberet) is the best fix that I have found. and its free to try.

Fragmented hard drive:

This results from programs being loaded and deleted. Run the Window's hard drive defragmenter (Defrag) once a month. It is under your System Tools menu. Your computer's help menu will tell you how to do it.

Other problems: (Possible, but unlikely to cause problems)

You could have old or conflicting Windows device drivers. An example would be you might actually have two entirely different video drivers on your system and Windows could actually be alternately using both of them.

To prevent this problem, First boot the computer in Safe Mode by pressing and holding the F8 key during startup, after the DOS memory check has completed.

While in Safe Mode select Start/Settings/Control Panel/System/Devices. Click on all the devices and see if the various drivers have any yellow or red exclamation marks (which indicates a driver conflict) and also determine if there are any duplicate drivers that can be eliminated.

You may have to delete and reload a driver to correct these problems. Duplicate drivers can and should be deleted.

As each new Windows program is installed and uninstalled, it leaves behind parts of itself that can slow down or crash your computer. These are mostly .dlls and other shared files.

It's also very possible when uninstalling a program that needed Windows system files can be deleted. When your computer asks if you want to uninstall shared files it's usually safest to say no -- even if your uninstall program claims the files are not being used.

Old Windows drivers can be found by booting into Safe Mode, then opening Control Panel/System/Devices and ridding your system of old drivers.

Otherwise, the only real answer to this problem is to pick up ERROR DOCTOR (http://www.errordoctor.com/index.php?hop=greenberet&ss=errordoctor&sp=0) or just reload Windows into a new directory which eliminates all old junk and leftover files. Reloading Windows is something to do last, as you will also have to reload all your Windows settings, drivers, and programs.

You could be lacking system memory - The only time this may be a problem is if you have an older system and upgraded your operating system without adding some more memory. You should probably upgrade to 256 or 512MB or more of system memory, while it isn't free, it isn't very expensive like it was at one time. To find great deals on memory upgrades try Tiger Direct. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/Category/category_tlc.asp?CatId=10&sourceid=qIqiQ-M8y2fdAnp89Pcb&siteid=0041581812&CMP=AFC-AFFIL

Is Your Data Encryption Really Secure

by: Darren Miller

How Do You Know Your Data Encryption is Really Secure

There are various types and methods of data encryption. Some of the most popular forms of data encryption include single file encryption, folder encryption, volume encryption, whole disk encryption, and of course email encryption.

The Windows XP operating system has the ability to perform file and folder encryption. There are 3rd party tools, like PGP Desktop, which can perform whole disk, logical disk, file, and e-mail encryption.

If you routinely deal with confidential or sensitive information, or if you are concerned about private information falling into someone else's hands, encryption may be the way you want to go. However, there are a few things you should be aware of so you don't have a false sense of security.

First, What Is Data Encryption

Throughout ancient and modern history people have come up with ways to mask, hide, and verify that information is secure or valid. For instance; the ancient Babylonians in 4000 B.C. used something call intaglio, a process in which images and writing were carved or etched into stone that identified certain Babylonian merchants when they were trading. Each trader, or merchant, had a specific intaglio to make his mark, this way his customers would know that what they were purchasing belonged to, or was produced by, a specific merchant. This is a bit different then encryption, more like today's digital signature, another process typically part of data encryption.

Encryption today is much more advanced and complex. It is used for everything from securing military secrets to keeping intellectual property confidential. There are various forms of encryption techniques, some stronger or more secure than others. In it's basic form, encryption can be thought of as the masking, or the scrambling of original human readable information. The person who is masking the information must provide the person he is sending the information to with some sort of key that allows them to unscramble the information so they can make sense of it. For instance; I use encrypted e-mail messages so I can correspond with my customers on a regular basis. I do this because during certain types of projects my customers and I discuss private information such as security holes discovered during security assessments. This type of information is obviously not something we would want to fall into someone else's hands.

Most Data Does Not Start Out Encrypted So Be Careful

The primary reason I am writing this article is to point out a couple specific issues with data encryption. During a recent discussion with a friend of mine he told me that he was using Windows XP folder encryption to secure some of his confidential information. He asked me if I thought this was a secure method of storing important documents. My response was yes and no. The data encryption used by Windows XP is relatively secure, but the issue is that the majority of the data that is now encrypted in the folder did not start out that way.

Let's take for example, a word document that contains your personal financial information. You may have written this document so you have a central location where account numbers, social security numbers, and other private and individual identification information is easily retrievable. After you are finished writing the document, you then transferred it to your secure encrypted folder. Since it is now in a secure folder, only you are able to access it because only you know the pass-phrase that was used to generate the encryption key. For the most part, this assumption is correct.

While you were writing that document, you probably hit the save button several times. Or if you are like me, many times. I've lost lengthy documents several times in the past and have trained myself to hit the save button pretty frequently. Every time you hit the save button, a new temporary version of the file is created. This is typically saved in the c:\documents and settings\"profile name"\local settings\temp directory. This is done for recovery and undue purposes. For instance, if you make a mistake while writing the document and need to undue your actions, one of these temp files may be used to undue the action. Also, if your system or application crashed while writing the document, you can recover it from the temp files stored in this directory. You may have had to go through this before and it works very well.

Now that you have finished your document and copied or moved it to the secure folder, your document is secure, right? Wrong. Chances are the temporary files in your temp directory are still there. Even if you were to delete them, there is a significant chance they can be recovered using open source or very inexpensive undelete or data recovery software. If someone where to get hold of your computer, hard drive, or gain remote access to your system somehow, there is a significant chance the unencrypted original version of your document can be located. So what can you do to make sure that your encrypted version of your file and data is the only version. There is not a clear or 100% secure answer to this question but I will share with you how I deal with the issue.

Changing The Location Of Unencrypted Temp Files

The primary way applications like Microsoft Word determine where to store temporary versions of your files is by looking at two user environment variables. One called "tmp" and one called "temp". They can be accessed by right clicking on "my computer", choose properties, then choose the "advanced" tab and click "environment variables". Here you can edit or change the default location for temporary files. One thing I have to point out is even though a large number of software packages use these locations for temporary storage, it will be hard to determine if they all do or if they save temp files in other locations. You will have to do a little investigating to determine where various applications store their temp files. On my system, I have changed these variables to point to an encrypted disk where I store my encrypted data and files. This way, I can be reasonably sure that temporary or working versions of the files are also encrypted.

Encrypted Files May Not Stay Encrypted When Copied or Moved

Another thing you should be aware of is what happens to encrypted files or folders when they are copied or moved to another location. If a file or folder that has previously been encrypted is copied or moved to another Windows NTFS partition or volume, the encryption is preserved (under most circumstances). However, if you move or copy the encrypted data to volume or partition that is not NTFS, the file is automatically decrypted. Also, just because a file is encrypted on your hard disk it does not mean that this file will be encrypted when you e-mail it to someone. E-mail encryption is a totally different procedure. Also, keep in mind that encrypted files are decrypted when they are transmitted over a network connection.

Make Sure Deleted Unencrypted Files Are Really Gone

Because data that is deleted from disk may be recoverable for quite some time, I use another procedure to limit or reduce the risk of this possibility. As I mentioned earlier, data that has been deleted can in many cases be easily recovered using off the shelf software. In order to be reasonably sure deleted data is not easily recoverable, you need to write over that portion of the disk where the file and it's fragments were located. Actually, you most likely need to do this multiple times just to be sure the data is unrecoverable. The PGP Desktop software I use to create encrypted file systems, send encrypted e-mail, and create encrypted zip files also has a tool called "Wipe Free Space". This tool will write random patterns of data to all space on a drive that is flagged as free. You can tell the software how many times to perform this procedure but the default it usually three passes. My primary system performs this task every night. This way I can be reasonably sure the!

unencrypted versions of my encrypted files are not just sitting around waiting to be recovered.

Conclusion

If you are concerned about keeping important data confidential, file, folder, or disk encryption is a good solution. If configured properly you can be reasonably sure that your private information will remain private. Just remember that most data does not start out encrypted and that remnants of the original information may still exist in an unencrypted state. There are many options with regard to data encryption; Windows XP native file and folder encryption, open source encryption solutions, or commercial encryption solutions such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). Do some research up front to determine which may be the best method for you.

Could the New Google Spider Be Causing Issues With Websites?

by: Rob Sullivan

Around the time Google announced “Big Daddy,” there was a new Googlebot roaming the web. Since then I’ve heard stories from clients of websites and servers going down and previously unindexed content getting indexed.

I started digging into this and you’d be surprised at what I found out.

First, lets look at the timeline of events:

In Late September some astute spider watchers over at Webmasterworld spotted unique Googlebot activity. In fact, it was in this thread that the bot was first reported on. It concerned some posters who thought that perhaps this could be regular users masquerading as the famous bot.

Early on it also appeared that the new bot wasn’t obeying the Robots.txt file. This is the protocol which allows or denies crawling to parts of a website.

Speculation grew on what the new crawler was until Matt Cutts mentioned a new Google test data center. For those that don’t know, Matt Cutts is a senior engineer with Google and one of the few Google employees talking to us “regular folk.” This mention happened in November.

There wasn’t much mention of Big Daddy until early January of this year when Matt again blogged about it asking for feedback.

Much feedback was given on the accuracy of the results. There were also those that asked if the Mozilla Googlebot (known as “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)” in your visitor logs) and Big Daddy were related, but no response was made.

Now I’m going to begin some of my own speculation:

I do in fact believe the two are related. In fact, I think this new crawler will eventually replace the old crawlers just as Big Daddy will replace the current data infrastructure.

Why is this important?

Based on my observations, this crawler may be able to do so much more than the old crawler.

For one, it emulates a newer browser. The old bot was based on the Lynx text based browser. While I’m sure Google added features as time went on, the basic Lynx browser is just that – basic.

Which explains why Google couldn’t deal with things like JavaScript, CSS and Flash.

However, with the new spider, built on the Mozilla engine, there are so many possibilities.

Just look at what your Mozilla or Firefox browser can do itself – render CSS, read and execute JavaScript and other scripting languages, even emulate other browsers.

But that’s not all.

I’ve talked to a few of my clients and their sites are getting hammered by this new spider. It has gotten so bad that some of their servers have gone down because of the volume of traffic from this one spider!

On the plus side, I have clients who went from a few hundred thousand indexed pages to over 10 million in just a few weeks! Literally since December, 2005 there’s been a 3500% increase in indexed pages over an 8 week period! Just so you know, this is also the client’s site that went down because of the huge volume of crawling happening.

But that’s still not all.

I have another client which uses IP recognition to serve content based on a person’s geographic location. If you live in the US you get American content and pricing; if you live in the UK you get UK content and pricing. As you may imagine, the UK, US, Canadian and Australian content is all very similar. In fact about the only thing noticeably different is the pricing aspect.

This is my concern – if the duplicate content gets indexed by Google what will they do? There’s a good chance that the site would be penalized or even banned for violation of the webmaster quality guidelines set forth by Google.

This is why we implemented IP recognition – so that Googlebot, which crawls from US IP addresses only sees one version of the site.

However, a review of the server logs shows that this new Googlebot has been visiting not only the US content but also the content of the other sections of the site. Naturally, I wanted to verify that the IP recognition was working. It is. This leads me to wonder then; can this browser spoof its location and/or use a proxy?

Imagine that – the browser is smart enough to do some of its own testing by viewing the site from multiple IP addresses. If that’s the case then those who cloak sites are going to have problems.

In any case, from the limited observations I’ve made, this new Google – both the data center and the spider – are going to change the way we do things.

If you have experienced anything similar in the past few months to do with Google, be sure to add it to our comments section below.