Posts filed under 'Humor'
 |
POSTED ON September 14th, 2007 BY cygnus |
Disclaimer: This is for educational purposes only; attempts at facial hair hijacking can result in unintended consequences, such as pizza face or handlebar mustache syndrome, which can only be resolved by selling said ill-gotten facial hair on ebay.
I know what you’re thinking, how could I hijack a beard of someone so well-respected and well-liked in the community as Rand from SEOmoz? I was young, and I needed the money… and I was sort of bored… and possibly intoxicated.
History aside, this article should serve as a tutorial on how to protect you from possible beard hijacks, proxy-based mustache attacks, and soul-crushing soul-patch theft. The best way to instruct you on how not to get your hair yanked is to take you inside the mind of a beardjacker…
Step 1. Identify your target. A quick image search on any engine can provide a lengthy list of possible victims, or you could just go here and try to take down a heavy hitter. In this particular case, we’ve settled on our buddy Rand.
Step 2. Probe for vulnerabilities. Not unlike hanging out at a sorority’s initiation party, or a wedding of career-driven single 30 somethings, probing for vulnerabilities is an easy way to determine if you have what it takes to take down the limping gazelle. In this particular case, it doesn’t look like Rand is properly protecting his mug. How do we know? We aren’t being redirected to “beard.randfishkin” when heading straight for “emptyface.randfishkin”. Furthermore, a slight error on his facial sub_domain setup is creating a mirror of emptyface no matter what we type in, whether it be “beardofzeus.randfishkin” or “beardedclam.randfishkin”. To keep this from happening to you, always make sure to choose the facial setup you want to be associated with and 301 redirect everything else via IIS or .htaccess. A few lines of code and some aftershave would have prevented me from going any further.
Click thumbnails for a slideshow.
Step 3. Attack. I don’t want to explain exactly how the 302 attack is going to take place, but let’s just say it involves a healthy amount of a link concoction known as propecia affiliate spam, hair clippers, chloroform and some time.
Step 4. Look at the results. Aren’t they beautiful? Here’s just before we started our 302 beard hijack. Here is shortly after Google mistakenly gave me Rand’s beard.
Click thumbnails for a slideshow.
Step 5. Check on your hijack victim.
Click thumbnails for a slideshow.
As you can see, the beard is much fuller and thicker on me than it was on Rand, due to what I can only attribute to superior facial authority. One by one his whiskers were whisked away, leaving a face only a mother and MysteryGuest could love.
Since this was meant to only be educational, I have since taken down the 302 beard hijack and I’m happy to report that Rand’s condition is much improved:
Cygnus
|
POSTED ON September 5th, 2007 BY cygnus |
Firstly, thank you for all the kind words. Did we expect people to want the images on actual posters, t-shirts, mouse pads, rub on tattoos, coffee mugs, and personally signed edible underwear? It crossed our minds. Then it crossed our minds that diet Dr. Pepper really does taste more like regular Dr. Pepper. With that revelation we took a short break from actual work to goof off and give you something else to chuckle at.
What is blogging?
Mainstream marketing bloggers have about as many original thoughts as a beauty queen from South Carolina, but write as though they invented the wheel, microwave, and pet rock over the course of a weekend.
What is spam?
Is that site ranking above you really spam? If it is relevant to the end user, then it’s simply a site ranking above you. Either learn and adapt or pick a different vocation. Every well placed magazine ad, television commercial, radio spot, and sky-written message would otherwise also have to be classified as spam, and they aren’t even as targeted!
What are forums?
When every other thread has some dude named Parkeet typing in all bold letters about how a search engine banned him despite placing a dictionary’s worth of words into his meta keywords, how much do you really expect to get out of the experience? Take off another point when the same guy then claims to have intimate knowledge surrounding the solution to your thematic collision issue.
What is a guru?
Come, sit at my feet to worship, and bring money. Seriously, if you really believe that the secrets to success are even secrets at all, then you don’t understand how adaptive and personalized success can be. Find a mentor, find some peers, but stay the hell away from gurus trying to sell a newsletter with access to “secret tools that the search engines don’t want you to know about.”
What is SEO?
This three letter word somehow became dirtier than most four letter words, and lacks the positive connotation of being related to bodily functions. All this despite being essential for just about any site wanting some sort of search related presence. Thankfully, 3 out of 5 rocket scientists prefer FrontPage.
Cygnus
|
POSTED ON July 12th, 2007 BY cygnus |
Welcome to Digital Heretix, the brainchild blog brought to you by a group of irreverent online marketers and the letter C… which is also for cookie. To kick things off, we wanted to look at a couple of terms from the online marketer’s lexicon of uselessness and show in poster format what those terms really mean. This post in particular with deal with the first five of these terms:
What is white hat?
A white hat will tell you that everything must be done by the book, that rules were meant to be followed, that content is king…and as you may have guessed, they areeither poor liars or simply poor.
* If you’re a search engine employee reading this blog, we’re so white hat that um…we tell people not to link to us and if they have to link to us to nofollow tags it because it might mess up the pretty SERPs. We’re so white that we glow in the dark; it’s either that or we haven’t seen the sun in a decade.
What is black hat?
For a good time, chat up a black hat. These guys know how to get rankings, albeit for only about 10 minutes. Technically, black hat means operating outside of the prevailing business logic by gently exploiting logical flaws, but for some reason it has taken on the meaning over the years of mass-produced junk content that is banned nearly as fast as it is created, all whilst wearing dark colored clothing and talking about taking on the man.
What is social media?
Enjoy puppet shows? Visit a social media site. The most entertaining aspect of supposed democracies is the lack of equal representation. Oh, and the encryption key is {censored}
What is link-building?
Enjoy being an attention whore? Like telling people the virtues of linking to your 90 character multi-hyphenated domain name, which is relevant to everyone from stamp collectors to forex and pharma?
What is affiliate marketing?
Speaking of whores…psst, wanna buy a watch? Have I got a deal for you!
Cygnus
