Burf.com

Burf.com Servers were infected with a worm / trojan which has caused some downtime. This has now been fixed and we hope this never happens again!

We would like to Recommend AVG virus software found here : http://www.grisoft.com/doc/1

Over the 2 days that we had the problem, many solutions where tried and the free version of this software did the best job out of all the other antivirus solutions we tried!!

Dear visitors,

Lately we have had some downtime, this has mainly been due to increased traffic which has stressed the servers. This should now be resolved.

Also a lot of work has been done on the quality of data stored. Basically the web is full of billions of web pages which can contained a lot of invalid html, symbols etc which can confuse our indexing process. Also certain websites seem to contain something that stops our robots from finishing, this in turn hangs that process

Safeguards have been added to improve the stability of the process and are currently being tested. We find the best way to test and improve the quality is by removing all data from the index and start again from a base set of urls.

Please be assured that all this work is to improve the site overall and give the visitors a better result

Thanks Simon
(22.06.05)

Burf.com has been down for 12 hours due to data center problems. We apologise for this and hope to have troubles future.

Posted by Gary McHugh on: 2005-06-14 00:33:41

One of the most frequent questions I get asked by my clients is “What is the best way to promote my site?” If a brand new webmaster asks me that question then I will take as much time as I can possibly muster to answer their request, before they learn about and put on the SEO and ranking blinkers so many webmasters wear with pride.

Allow me now to state the obvious, the success of any website is in direct proportion to the amount of visitors it receives. If success is about visitors then why on earth would any intelligent business person devote 95% of their promotion time and budget to a single method of advertising their site?

Imagine for a moment you are the advertising executive for a large automobile company. Your company has just released the most economical car ever and your job is to make sure everyone knows about it.

Which of the following would you do?

1. Place a full page ad in one or two car magazines, then spend the next year rehashing and tweaking the wording of that ad, because it wasn’t creating the sales you wanted.

OR

2. Advertise in every magazine and newspaper you can find, start national TV advertising campaigns, make sure you have slots on every commercial radio station in the country, advertise on billboards, in cinemas, sponsor sporting events and what ever else you could think of.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out the second idea is a much better plan. Now this may come as a shock to you, but the major search engines are not the only source of visitors to your website. Many SEO gurus are quick to point out to you that search engines are the only way to achieve substantial traffic. That is simply not true. One disturbing idea promoted heavily by the SEO world recently is that “Links are dead” My answer to that idea is, if links were dead then there would be no web.

Links are how people travel the web, whether they are text links, banners or email links to visit any site you need to click a link. Google itself is one enormous searchable link database.

Let’s states something even more obvious. Google is not the only site on the web that links to other sites. There are directories, there are banner exchanges, and the big one there are hundreds of millions of other websites. How many of those carry a link to your site?

For any keyword or phrase on the major search engines there are millions of sites vying for just 10 first page places. Are you really devoting all your promotion time to SEO with those kinds of odds?

There is also much talk of the value of links, and nearly all of it is based on the value of links in a search engines eyes, and how that will or will not improve your rankings. STOP!!! You need to get this!!! The value of a link is how many times it gets used, clicks and visits NOT rankings.

While many will object to this statement SEO is nothing more than educated guesswork, why do I say that? Simple because Google, Yahoo and MSN do NOT tell SEO experts how they order their results. Just the opposite they regularly change how their results are ordered to stay one step ahead of the SEO experts. Why do they do that? Because they do not want their results manipulating period! They want one thing, to deliver accurate search results.

Don’t take my word for this, go and get the words from the horses mouth here.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Notice the all the advice is geared towards building your site for visitors not for search engines.

If you really want to build steady long term traffic to your site, then advertise your site in every legal way you can. Yes it requires time and a consistent effort. As a wise man once said ” The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary”. In closing, how many of the following have you used to advertise your site? If you haven’t done them all maybe you need to.

Have you?:
Listed your site in a couple of hundred directories?
Exchanged quality visible links with at least 200 sites?
Exchanged banners with sites in your genre?
Started a small pay per click advertising campaign?
Written articles to do with the genre of your site and offered them to other sites for free inclusion in their newsletter or on their site?
Had your site reviewed by a review site?
Donated a product or free membership to a competition on another site?

These are only a few promotion methods that will bring visitors to your site. There are many many more if you use your imagination. This is also advertising that will not be undone in one minute by a Google algorithm change.

Am I saying don’t optimize your site? NO I am saying don’t rely totally on SEO for your traffic.

Are you putting all your promotional eggs in one basket? If so, isn’t it time you stopped and gave your site the best chance of success

About the Author

Gary McHugh is co author of HonestLinks.Net , a site dedicated to teaching webmasters to exchange links that bring traffic. He also runs his own web design and hosting company 2001web.com

MSN Toolbar 1.2 Releases With Tabbed Browsing
Nathan Weinberg | Contributing Writer

MSN released tonight version 1.2 of its search toolbar, which
brings tabbed browsing to all compatible versions of IE well ahead
of the release of Internet Explorer 7. While the tabbed browsing is
very rudimentary, it is also very excellent. running fast and
supporting most features you’d want.

You can click a button to open all links from a specific page
(say Bloglines) in a new background tab. You can have all open
windows be designated as “My Tabs”, and then open them whenever
with a single click (although it is not simple to edit them). If
you accidentally close your browser, you can re-open it and click
“Open Last Viewed Tabs” to get everything back, no harm no foul.

Special report “Spammers are thieves… They’re hijacking your system to deliver their unrequested, unwanted advertising,” says a new Microsoft web site paper by R’ykandar Korra’ti.

But Microsoft is on shaky ground when it comes to spam – in recent newsgroup posting the company’s own abuse manager Mike Lyman has effectively been conceding that Microsoft sends out unwelcome, unsolicited mail, and that company staff are unwilling and unable to do much about it.

Microsoft’s anti-spam stance is being undermined by a combination of faulty software systems, bureaucracy and incompetence.

Lyman means well, but getting Microsoft to deliver a service that comes close to Korra’ti’s objectives seems to be like trying to push water uphill. This isn’t helped by the greed factor operating on top of the other problems.

According to Korra’ti, “The allegedly legitimate’ spammers… don’t hide where their mail is coming from, and at least they pretend to offer a way off their lists.” As far as quite a few users are concerned, that makes Microsoft a “legitimate spammer”.

Several mailing lists and newsgroups are currently discussing complaints about Microsoft and spam, and there have been several clear instances where the company has been at fault, and where this has been conceded by Lyman. One of the problems, he admits, is a “tainted” database that isn’t being fixed, and is still being used.

He also concedes that at least one mailing wasn’t justified, that some Microsoft staff aren’t acting according to official company policy when it comes to unsolicited mail, and that the company is currently far more concerned with privacy, and is therefore putting too few resources into cleaning up its own act on spam.

The database problems often make it difficult for people to get off the mailing list, which they could well have been put onto without their agreement. This is by no means unusual in the industry, but Microsoft continues to add people to its list, to use databases that haven’t been properly cleaned up, and to transfer mailing lists to third parties without the knowledge or permission of the people listed.

The emailing that caused most ire was one about Microsoft’s plans for Y2K (two copies of this one just this morning – Ed), but other smaller volume efforts continue. Some people also claim that visitors to Microsoft sites may find themselves getting unrequested newsletters.

And last week Microsoft is said to have mailed MCSE training course attendees who had specifically checked the ‘no publicity’ box.

When Microsoft sold Sidewalk to Citysearch, it seems to have sold its database without deleting those who had asked to be removed but at the time were possibly only flagged for removal. To their annoyance, they were then started hearing from Sidewalk: “Since you previously registered with Sidewalk, we thought you would like to know…”

Unsolicited email from Microsoft may say that the email is being sent to “preferred members,” but recipients frequently deny that they have ever knowingly become a “member” of any Microsoft list.

It can however be very difficult not to wind up on one or more Microsoft lists, via registration of OS or applications, or through the (largely compulsory) registration procedure for the Windows Update or Office Update services.

Microsoft inevitably gets its hands on details of a very large proportion of PC users, and it therefore has a duty to be serious, consistent and responsible in the way it handles this data.

But on the contrary, from what Lyman concedes it would seem Microsoft is inconsistent, irresponsible, and cavalier. Lyman admits that all is not well with Microsoft databases. He said in a newsgroup posting that “the data base was tainted and the mailing wasn’t justified”. But he seems to have little power to influence change at Microsoft, where the current concern at the group where he reports is privacy rather than spamming. He is unable personally to get at the faulty database, and in effect blames Microsoft’s impenetrable bureaucracy.

When challenged about unplugging the offending servers, he wrote: “Physical ability does not equal authority”. There are many examples of users taking all possible steps to get removed, and finding it impossible. People were “working to fix their messes,” Lyman said, but even a threat to divert a $50,000 budget to non-Microsoft products was only likely “to impact the local [Microsoft] weenie more than the guys at corp HQ who did the spamming.”

He was also brutally frank about what happens when email is sent to addresses like abuse@microsoft.com: “you’re probably hitting some little peon in the organisation who has zero say in how things are run. … By the time the stuff gets to those who are the decision makers it’s probably been boiled down to numbers and stats with maybe a few samples of the complaints. 600,000 messages went out, 100 complaints came back, hmm, must be doing a pretty good job.’”

Lyman notes that most Microsoft marketing people don’t have Internet experience, and so fail to grasp the implications of what they’re doing. As far as they’re concerned what the recipients regard as unsolicited spam are “informative announcements”.

Lyman says: “The one thing that’s kept my frustration over the pace of things at Microsoft from completely boiling over is I deal with the same people for privacy issues as I do with spamming issues. They’ve been very focussed on piracy and frankly I’d rather have them focussed on privacy.”

One of the greatest fears for spammers (at least the “legitimate” spammers who can be tracked and pilloried) is being black-listed by the Mail Abuse Protection System (MAPS) founded by Paul Vixie in 1997. MAPS has developed a Real-Time Black Hole List (RBL) used by some 300 licensed subscribing ISPs (numbers have doubled each year, so far) to block spam.

Nick Nicholas, the front man for MAPS, said there were 12 complete nominations to list Microsoft, and many incomplete ones, when the issue of black-listing Microsoft was raised. Lyman thinks that MAPS is trying to become an “anti-spamming version of TRUSTe” but is doing it from outside the corporate world.

This is true, and for the moment at least, MAPS does not enjoy too much major league support. MAPS admits it has made mistakes in its blacklists in the past. There were rumblings that Microsoft might sue MAPS if Microsoft was placed on the RBL list (Lyman ominously mentioned that “deep pockets usually win”), but Microsoft recently concluded a deal with MAPS to use the product in Hotmail to cut down on spam, making any legal action much less likely. Ironically, Hotmail itself has taken legal action against what it regards as the abuse of Hotmail. Lyman claims that Microsoft has scheduled improving the database, but has no timing as to when this will happen.

He noted that he took a firm line with Microsoft and has overcome a view that persisted at Microsoft that people who complained had forgotten they had registered to receive spam.

In one message Lyman said of old requests to be removed “the database purge should clear them out”, but it would be impossible to find any culprits for previous abuses on the Microsoft staff. But “if the harvested stuff is recent [”last year or so”], there’s a major problem with policy violation and heads need to roll.” So anybody getting junk mail from Microsoft to an email address first used in the last year should take up Lyman’s offer to sort the matter out and contact him at usma87@hotmail.com.

He noted: “I hope other companies avoid the mistakes our folks made and go straight for the confirmed subscriptions up front. It’ll save them lots of pain.” Lyman appears to be a Microsoft person who is actually trying to sort out the spamming situation, but with little or no help. And there are those who say that the anti-spamming cure by the net cops is worse than the disease.

In Congress recently Rep Heather Wilson told a hearing that “banning all spam “may be unconstitutional because it would ban unsolicited mail that people do not mind receiving – or even want to receive…”

There is a way to block Microsoft spam for MS Exchange users who use Exchange to provide SMTP services, and it’s described at info.edu/Techdir/relaying-exchange.html. There are also spam filter packages such as SLMail, MailShield, N-Plex, the Isode Message Switch, VOPmail, and WorldSecureMail.

In view of what Lyman says, a column “written” by Bill Gates on the subject of spam last year has a certain piquancy: “My company is among many that offer regular emailings to customers and potential customers. But we only send email to people who have requested it, and we have easy ways for people to remove themselves from the mailing list.” This is clearly untrue. Gates then described spam:

“Sometimes spam includes a purported way for you to remove yourself from the mailing list, but it often doesn’t work. In fact, making the request may do nothing more than prove to the spammer that your e-mail address is valid – prompting more mailings.”

Ahem. Gastronomic note: Spam stands for spiced ham, and is a trademark of Hormel Foods’ tinned luncheon meat, first introduced in 1937. For this reason, spam is often referred to as unsolicited commercial email (UCE). There is also a spam fan club.

Burf.com has offically joined the ExactSeek.com search engine network. This will allow us to sale advertising which will appear not only on our engine, but 30 other search engines. For the list of search engines within this nextwork,
check here

We have just released a improved search method which now allows more than one page of results to be access for multi word searches.

“We’re undertaking an experiment called Google Sitemaps that will either fail miserably, or succeed beyond our wildest dreams, in making the web better for webmasters and users alike. It’s a beta ‘ecosystem’ that may help webmasters with two current challenges: keeping Google informed about all of your new web pages or updates, and increasing the coverage of your web pages in the Google index.”

Well most search engines would not tell you this information but we have decided to. As this project progresses this can change but here is how we basically rate your page. We use old style page ranking.

We index your title, url, and meta description / keywords. If a word is found in all 4 of these places (like news) then we will give your page a page rank of 4. We also have a program that looks at the whole page and then returns 10 keywords which will give you a top rating of 5 for any word

It is a very simple way to rate a page but seems to be giving good results. We will soon be adding a url length process to help give actural ratings.

06/05/06 Simon