Cookie Stuffing with .htaccess

I recently got the chance to speak on Whiteboard Friday over at SEOmoz, it was a quick session whereby a few SEO’s just give up a couple of tricks that the general population may not be aware of, i chose to talk about cookie stuffing.

Cookie stuffing is not new and has been blogged about a few times so i am not pretending to have actually come up with the method. I wanted to talk about it because i have been doing it slightly different using .htaccess and i have also been getting some really good results.

Basically, Cookie stuffing is a method in which you place cookies on users computers without them nessecerally knowing about it. It can be used on your affiliate sites to auto drop a cookie without the user actually clicking through your banner and converting on the retailers site. This allows you to get a much better conversion rate for visitors of your site because even if they hit your page, bounce, and then goto the retailers page at a later date (within the cookie length) you still get the sale.

It can also be used off site, whereby you would drop a cookie for a large affiliate site (such as ebay or amazon) by simply having a reference to your image. You can use this trick anywhere which allows you to use image code.

So here are the steps to do it…

1) Create a directory on your server with an inconspicuous name such as /stats
2) In that directory create a .htaccess file with the following code…
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule yourfakeimage.jpg http://www.cookiedroppingurl.com [R,L]
3) Place the /stats/yourfakeimage.jpg code in the footer of your site and then when the browser requests the image the .htaccess will return them the url which drops the cookie, this is all done in the background so unless someone is specifically looking out for it then you should get away with doing it

Obviously, you can use /stats/yourfakeimage.jpg in any other site that allows you to reference an image, aslong as the site doesnt cache the image locally on their server then you will be able to serve up as many cookies as you like.

There has been a lot of debate about whether using this method on external sites is classed as stealing and Esrun wrote a great article on cookie dropping.

I just want to add that you should be careful doing this, obviously if your affiliate see’s that you are generating a 100% clickthrough rate then they are going to start asking questions and can even ban you from the program.

Edit: Reader El Bueno has come up with a method for doing this on Windows IIS, you can see his solution in his comment

Google Bombing still works?

I was waiting for a while to see if this would happen and now it seems it has indeed. A few days ago Rebecca Kelly from SEOMoz wrote a blog post recapping the in’s and out’s of SMX Advanced 2008. In the second paragraph she mentions that i visted the SEOMoz office and also links to Ayima.com using the link text Dean Chew.

Now Ayima.com ranks 2nd for Dean Chew, even though there is no mention of my name on the site, the Ayima site doesn’t link to this blog, and i dont link to the Ayima site. The only relationship between Dean Chew and Ayima.com is from Rebecca’s post.

Wikipedia describes a Google Bomb as…

A Google bomb (also referred to as a ‘link bomb’) is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions.[1] Because of the way that Google’s algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text.

Now, i was under the impression that Google had really tried to stamp out the process of Google Bombing, and obviously whilst this particular case isn’t bombing (as Rebecca was simply linking to a site she knew i had a relationship with) it does indicate that with smaller volume terms such as Dean Chew the process may still work.

Here is a screen shot of the results

Google bombing

Now i wonder that since i have mentioned my own name in this post so many times, if i will now have the 2nd position indent for Dean Chew? Only time will tell.

I will ask Rebecca to change the link to point to this blog and keep note of how long it takes for the Ayima result to drop off so if you a reading this like a week after its posted, the results are probably not the same.

So my Adsense account was banned

Real quick post, but yesterday I got a lively email from Google telling me that my adsense account had been banned because of click fraud. The strange thing is that i have adsense code on only one site and that site has been down for at least two weeks.

I used the please-be-nice-and-let-me-back-on-adsense form and tried to explain that something must be amiss because I havent had any code up on the site for ages. However Google wouldn’t budge and reminded me of this…

My account was disabled and my appeal was denied. Is there any way I can rejoin the programme? Can I open a new account?

We understand your concern about the actions taken against your account. Please know that our actions are the result of careful investigation by our team of dedicated specialists, taking into account the interests of our advertisers, publishers and users. Though you may be disappointed with our decision, we are unable to reinstate your account.

Please also note that publishers disabled for invalid click activity are not allowed any further participation in AdSense. For this reason, these publishers may not open new accounts.

Lastly, please bear in mind that Google does reserve the right to disable an account for any reason, including invalid click activity from any source.

So just remember, even though Google is this really cool company that helps us find what we need on a daily basis, they are also a bunch of bastards who can close down your account without actually giving you any real reason why!

More Strangeness going on with the Digg algo

A couple of days ago some strange things were going on with the Digg algorithm which meant that stories managed to hit the front page with only one or two Diggs.

Now today whilst browsing i noticed that 3 stories had managed to hit the front page with 0 or 1 comments. Usually a story gets a good 10 or so comments with a decent amount of Diggs to hit the front page.

I did have a screenshot right here but wordpress fucked up and overwrote it

Since the last little mishap we have been told that Digg have been playing around with the algo, should we now expect that new stories will have a longer life to make it to the front page and a less amount of comments?

Speed dial for Firefox – a brilliant extension

I was chatting away with EvilGreenDonkey and he told me about a Firefox script that he found called speed dial, so i installed away and now i am loving it.

What is speed dial?
Speed dial allows you to open thumbnails of your favourite sites in one tab or window. You basically add the sites that you want to keep updated on and then whenever you open a new tab they are all their to be easily clicked.
There is more though, you can tell speed dial to keep checking these sites every x minutes, hours, or days. So you can check the update status of all your favourite sites from one window.

I find it really handy to keep up to date on whats happening on Digg, Reddit etc, you can also add your Gmail or Hotmail accounts in to the mix and you have a handy way of seeing when you get new mail etc.

Below is a screenshot of speed dial.

speeddial.png

Get it from Mozilla addons