The Time I Hacked Google's Manual Actions Database
In 2013 Google released their Manual Actions viewer tool; within 24 hours I had hacked it and could view the penalties applied to any website.
Read the articleBlog / Search
Notes on search.
Experiments and ideas about how search engines and websites work.
Search
Articles in Search
XSS attacks on Googlebot allow search index manipulation
Googlebot is based on Google Chrome version 41 (2015), and therefore it has no XSS Auditor, which later versions of Chrome use to protect the user from XSS attacks…
Read the articleGoogle exploit via XML Sitemaps to manipulate search results
Short version: For the $12 cost of a domain, I was able to rank in Google search results against Amazon, Walmart etc. for high value money terms in the US. The…
Read the articleGooglebot's Javascript random() function is deterministic
I was conducting some experiments on how Googlebot parses and renders Javascript, and I came across a couple of interesting things about the way it does so. The first…
Read the articleGooglebot now accepting Cookies
In the last couple of days Google announced that they were going to start executing javascript on most pages they visit and thus rendering pages far more akin to how…
Read the articleDetect if visitors are logged into Twitter, Facebook or Google+
Javascript code to determine whether a website visitor is currently logged into a social media site (Twitter, Facebook or Google+).
Read the articleSetting up Amazon Mechanical Turk with SERP Turkey
Read how to setup and use Amazon's Mechanical Turk with the SERP Turkey tool; a free split-testing CTR analytics tool for SERPs.
Read the articleGoogle's +1 vulnerable to clickjacking?
Facebook and Twitter have both succumbed to clickjacking, and now it seems that Google's new +1 button is just as vulnerable.
Read the article