I have to admire Rand Fishkin – he seems to be doing everything right in SEO-land, no matter where I look. His latest link bait is a fairly difficult SEO quiz. It has something for everyone – quality, controversy, content. There are 75 questions, which I think few SEOs will get 100% right, even if they know their stuff. That’s what makes it controversial.

There are questions with borderline answers — there is one about Alexa, where the correct response would have been correct until Alexa announced last week that it is changing its data collection methodology. Many questions have been asked in the negative, so you need to slow down and read the question carefully.

I wish the test had been loaded with 500 questions, so that no two people could get the same set of questions. Then the responses would not enable them to raise their score by taking the test many times.

But Rand is a genius. I have seen him and his lovely mum at Pubcon but have never spoken to him or exchanged an email, so I can only go by the genius exemplified on his websites. Yes, Rand would want the link bait benefit and no more than two visits per person who took the quiz. Any more would be a waste of bandwidth. Give it a go.

Popularity: 18% [?]

SEO conversations won’t be the same again. Everyone who knows about Alexa’s ranking system has an opinion about it. Most are not complimentary, because Alexa relied on traffic measurement based on people who had installed its toolbar, or others like me, who use a third-party tool such as the SearchStatus extension for Firefox, which sends usage data to Alexa. Toolbars tend to be installed by advanced computer users and the Alexa toolbar has a large North American following, so it might not show reliable traffic trends for a site with an Australian focus.

Alexa has just announced that it will now use a new measurement technique rather than rely entirely on the toolbar. Without giving anything away, it said, “We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.”

Until Alexa is ready to share details of those multiple sources, we can only speculate that some of it will come from major ISPs, either directly or through other services that already have such an arrangement and are permitted to share it with Alexa.

For the time being, you can only see six months’ worth of historic data. Alexa says that soon the older data will be available, with better normalisation of non-USA data.

Popularity: 28% [?]

This isn’t new, but new to me. I got my first phishing email that purported to be from Google AdWords. It came to one of my accounts at a US non-profit I am involved with, so I didn’t even need to think if it was genuine.

Subject: Submit your payment information
———————————————————————————
Dear Google Adwords Customer,

Your ads have stopped running because we were unable to process your billing information. To activate your account and start running your ads, enter your billing information.

In order to activate your account and start running your ads, enter your billing information. Please sign into your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login, and update your billing information.

Once your account is reactivated and your billing information has been processed, any your ads and campaigns can begin running immediately on Google.

———————————————————————————-
This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.

———————————————————————————-

Google Adwords Team

The real URL beneath the one in the email points to www.adwords.google.com.3ppi3o.cn/select/Login – even when you hover on the link, your eyes will notice the left part of the URL (shown in green), but the domain name is further to the right (shown in red). It hosts a realistic copy of the AdWords login page, but Firefox knows it is a phishing site and blocks it. So does Internet Explorer 8.

The email was apparently sent via a Yahoo account from 189.59.233.22, which is allocated to Brazil. I didn’t bother to investigate if it was spoofed, sent via an open proxy or whatever. If you get one of these, don’t get caught out.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Bravo to Google for processing my friend’s reconsideration request in less than four days!

I blogged last week that a quality WordPress site had been hacked and stuffed with spammy links and it went out of the Google index a day or two later. My friend filed a reinclusion request and three days later it was back in the SERPs and showed PageRank.

Popularity: 27% [?]

I don’t know why this had to be a secret, but the RTM version of SpeedPPC3 adds support for a raft of other PPC ad networks. (For those of you in the advertising industry but who never actually use the damn technology, substitute “SEM” for “PPC” and it will make more sense).

Jay Stockwell’s SpeedPPC 3 now supports 11 known ad networks (I can’t call the additional eight “well-known”.):

• ABCSearch
• Affiliate Radar
• Ask
• Enhance
• GoClick
• Google AdWords
• LookSmart
• Miva
• MSN adCenter
• Yahoo! Search Marketing
• Search123
• ValidClick

Actually, SpeedPPC 3 now handles 12 or more ad networks – It will support any other service that can accept a file upload. Now there is a fourth tab marked “Custom”, which covers the minor 8 players plus any Custom ones you want to process.

For example, I created one for Sensis BidSmart and the settings were saved for future use. Such configuration details are appended at the end of the CustomOutputs.xml file. Get your copy of SpeedPPC here.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Latest gem from somewhere in South Asia:

Grab your own Permanent Pr4, Pr5, PR6 & PR7 Text Links!

I am going to offer you 20,000 High PR Links Resource Package in $18 only.

Geting your site in to the top 10 results on Google, Yahoo & MSN search engines
relies heavily on getting good quality high Pagerank (PR) links back to your site.

Your site will get top position in all search engines with in 2 months. Even If
your site is new. Only 20 spots available.

At his website you will learn that there are “only” six spots left. Take a close look at the bottom of the image if you can appreciate irony. I think he should save one spot for his own website. Stay away from such offers.

Popularity: 20% [?]