Smugglers Bay

Bing beats out Yahoo to become No.2 Search Provider

Excerpt from article by Steven Mostyn - Sep 15 2010 Read Entire Article

October 2, 2010.

"Google’s dominance in the search arena may appear all-but unassailable, but Microsoft’s Bing platform is certainly not prepared to give up the ghost when it comes to pursuing the market leader.

More pointedly, the latest monthly search figures released by research specialist Nielsen Co. reveal that Bing surpassed Yahoo during August to become the No. 2 search provider across the United States.

Ending the month second only to Google for the very first time since launch, Microsoft amassed some 13.9 percent of the search market via a combination of Bing, MSN and Windows Live – slipping past Yahoo’s 13.1 percent in the process.

Of course, it’s worth noting that Bing’s growth is likely connected to the ad-revenue partnership forged by Microsoft and Yahoo in 2009, which saw Yahoo agreeing to adopt Bing in order to help power its own flagging search engine technology.

While Bing is clearly showing forward momentum, its numbers fall well short of Google’s mammoth 65 percent share."

Black Hat SEO Attacks and Prevention
Excerpt from article by Steve Ragan - Nov 15 2010 Read Entire Article

"... Black Hat SEO (BHSEO) attacks need a domain to work. Once the domain is captured by the criminals, then the content generation scripts are uploaded and managed from there. Each compromised domain had some interesting shared traits; all of them used an open source Content Management System (CMS) or website template system, they were often running outdated software...

OS Commerce was the most popular script hijacked. Investigation showed that the compromise came from misconfiguration or script vulnerability in the case of older installations. There are several published exploit examples that target the shopping cart script, including SQL Injection, XSS, Remote File Inclusion, and file upload and execution. While most of the vulnerabilities have been patched by the development team that produces OS Commerce, the updates were missing in each of the compromised sites we observed.

After OS Commerce, Joomla installations, followed by WordPress, were the second and third most common traits on the compromised domains. It is worth noting that many of the compromised sites were using “one-click” installations, meaning their web host offered them a control panel with the option to install the CMS with little work on the webmaster’s part."