Do yourself a favor and [read this post](http://www.seofaststart.com/blog/google-proxy-hacking) by Dan Thies.
I don’t have much to say about it right now, but this is a “as it happens alert” for anyone worried about black hat competitors.
Filemaker Developers Conference
It’s day 2 of the filemaker devcon. The big news here is learning all about live connections between Filemaker and MySQL using ESS (***E***xternal ***S***QL ***S***ources). Plus, the Filemaker PHP API. :D
One of the most striking presentations was by [Michael Ward of CustoMike Solutions](http://www.customikesolutions.com/) who presented a Web 2.0 shopping cart that used Filemaker as the backend database! Thanks to his client [Mozi, an Australian homewares and stationery online store](http://www.mozi.com.au/), for letting him show off their site. :)
Expect some posts in the future on Filemaker and MySQL.
Actually, I can like that post without being signed in :P
Who wouldn’t enjoy Rand (or for that matter, any SEM professional) posting a [series of myspace-esque self portraits](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-emotions-that-make-us-link)?
Tiny problem though… I’d *love* to give feedback on the posts. There’s even a mechanism for doing so with the little “Do you like this post? Yes No” links in the feed. Unfortunately, clicking them turns up this result:
So is the feedback mechanism’s goal to get people to sign up? Or is it to get feedback on the posts? Perhaps you’d only want to publicly display the feedback from signed in visitors but I can’t imagine a reason not to still collect the feedback from other visitors.
A minor point to be sure, but a good opportunity to think about what purpose the different features of your web site are intended to serve. Are those features optimized for that purpose?
Spamming authority sites search boxes
DaveN [hints at the technique today](http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/why-is-google-so-easy-to-spam.html).
If you want to see exactly what sorts of spamming he’s talking about with other sites search pages, some simple Google searches will show you. (You’ll always need to show omitted results when manually typing in these searches.)
* [site:weather.com inurl:search/partner](http://www.google.com/search?q=site:weather.com+inurl:search/partner&filter=0)
* [site:search.orange.co.uk inurl:all?q=](http://www.google.com/search?q=site:search.orange.co.uk+inurl:all%3Fq%3D&filter=0)
Of course, I tend to trust what DaveN puts out… if he says this is working then I’m sure it’s having some effect. That said, it’s gotta be a hole that Google can plug pretty easily. Unless this is a case where search engine engineers are blind to detecting what a search engine result page looks like. ;)