How to opt out of the Google, Yahoo and Microsoft ad networks

Search Engines No Comments
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Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all serve cookies that help (them) to serve you ads that match your search behaviour. This might be OK for some, but it gets annoying when you see irrelevant ads because someone else used your PC. For instance, I often buy stuff from Amazon for others and their website assumes I only buy for myself. So I get prompts about knitted toys, strange music and Harry Potter. You can opt out of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo advertising to some extent.

Opting Out of Google

Google’s home page (the Simple search, not Advanced) has a “Privacy” link at the bottom. Click it. You will be taken to the Privacy Policies page, where you will see a list of Google services. Click Advertising, which will lead you to a page explaining how you can opt out of the Google Content Network. You can also click the image above, as it is linked to the opt-out button. You cannot avoid seeing Google AdWords on Google Search unless you use a third-party ad blocking tool.

Opting Out of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) Member Ad Networks

The Google page helpfully links to this organisation, which has a convenient link to the NAI Opt Out Tool, which lets you out of seeing targeted ads. Remember, you will see ads, but not ones the ad servers thinks are relevant to you. I am not sure whether it is better to see random ads or targeted ones. You can choose to opt out of any or all of the following ad networks:

The single-click method doesn’t work for all the above, so be sure to check on the next page which ones you need to opt out of individually.

Strangely, BlueLithium told me I had opted out in large blue text, but it did not find a cookie, and that I had not opted out.

Opting Out of Live/Microsoft and Partner Advertising

You will find the opt-out form on the Personalised Advertising page.

How Opt Out Works

The opt-out process places an “opt-out” cookie on your computer. This opt-out cookie tells the ad network not to collect your non-personally identifiable information in order to tailor their campaigns for your. If you delete, block or otherwise restrict cookies, or if you use a different computer or web browser, or you format your hard drive, you will need to renew your opt-out choices from that PC or browser. The NAI tool serves third-party cookies to achieve its objective and a browser set to High or Medium privacy setting won’t cooperate with the tool.

Google has a sitemap.xml file!

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Google has a sitemap.xml file.
Google has a sitemap.xml file.

We should not be surprised by this factoid, but check out hxxp://www.google.com/sitemap.xml (replace xx with tt). It is 4 MB in size. If you thought that it would be a sitemap index file consisting of thousands of sitemaps, you’d be mistaken.

The file is 142,111 lines long, which means there are 35,527 URL entries in it. What are the interesting pages?

  • http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/overview.html looks interesting, but try loading it in your browser and you are taken to http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/index.html
  • http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain doesn’t load, but you end up at http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new. Weird.
  • http://www.google.com/a/interest leads to http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/interest, which happens to be a 404. Will Google get penalised? Will it lose PR? [I am just parodying forum newbies, relax.]
  • There are plenty of pages relating to ads – AdWords and AdSense, which is to be expected. The usual corporate pages, April Fool gags, zeitgeist, etc.
  • Numerous foreign-language versions of its content for its overseas markets.
  • Numerous university searches, such as http://www.google.com/univ/calpoly – where is Gopher these days?
  • Only the home page has a priority of 1.0; the rest are all 0.5.

Google also has a robots.txt file, but it doesn’t reference this sitemap.

Yes, a pretty small site, if you took out the non-English content. All fits in a single sitemap.xml file. :lol:

Peering into spam

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Reading Time: 3 minutes

More on the theme of stupid or lazy spammers – I often wonder about the spam that is not geo-targeted. I get dire “warnings” allegedly from banks I have never heard of, such as Abbey Bank. Is it run by some monks? I have never sold anything on eBay, but I am often the recipient of “complaints” against me.

Usually the reason for such spam is phishing, where silly little me is supposed to panic and log into what looks like eBay or my bank. I imagine that after supplying my password or PIN, I would get to an error page and I would give up wondering what that was all about. Then some criminal collects all these passwords and drains their owners’ accounts.

Some of these emails carry an attachment that you are supposed to open, thereby infecting your PC with a virus or Trojan. Here is what one contained:

From: Merrill Cormier US Airways [weh@brascabos.com.br]
Attachment: eTicket#1721.zip (133B)
#######################################################################
Panda Antivirus 2007 warning:

The file eTicket#1721.zip [eTicket#1721.exe] was infected by the W32/Nuwar.XR.worm virus and has been disinfected.
#######################################################################

Good day,
Thank you for using our new service “Buy airplane ticket Online” on our website.
Your account has been created:

Your login: blah@<my domain>
Your password: passLI6W

Your credit card has been charged for $459.30.
We would like to remind you that whenever you order tickets on our website you get a discount of 10%!
Attached to this message is the purchase Invoice and the airplane ticket.
To use your ticket, simply print it on a color printed, and you are set to take off for the journey!

Kind regards,
Merrill Cormier
US Airways

I know that I don’t fly US Airways and wouldn’t even open the email, but I was in the mood to check the current crop. I suspect that the spammer has never bought an airline ticket online and has no clue what a real confirmation email looks like. Perhaps he is a hapless soul in South Ossetia or Beijing.

The next suspicious item was the attachment – no meaningful document can be 133 bytes, even when zipped. Real world attachments of this kind tend to be PDFs, which don’t shrink much when zipped, so they are sent uncompressed. Had I been a novice user, Panda Antivirus 2007 would have saved me, as the text above confirms.

The attached infection W32/Nuwar@MM is an email spam worm – McAfee has a long and interesting description of its purpose and behaviour at http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_140835.htm. The zip file contains an executable file – this assumes the user will double-click it after opening the zip file. This file installs a tiny mail SMTP server on the infected PC. It finds email addresses on this PC and then sends spam to all of them, (which makes it a worm).

Novice users who know other novice users unwittingly help to propagate this nasty worm, as they recognise the apparent sender’s name.

I use Microsoft Outlook 2007 and I viewed the email’s “Options”, which contain the following lines:

Return-path: <abc@brascabos.com.br>
Envelope-to: <my email address>
Delivery-date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:04:15 +0000
Received: from [83.218.133.218] (helo=83-218-133-218.spitfireuk.net)
by .com with esmtp (Exim 4.69)
(envelope-from <abc@brascabos.com.br>)
id 1KODCR-0000nZ-QL
for <my email address>; Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:04:15 +0000
Received: from [83.218.133.218] by mx.brascabos.com.br; Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:02:36 +0000
From: “Merrill Cormier” US Airways
To: <my email address>
Subject: E-ticket #4919898619
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:02:36 +0000
Message-ID: <01c8f255$4d1dce00$da85da53@abc>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary=”—-=_NextPart_000_000E_01C8F255.4D1DCE00″
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0)
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.3790.2663
Importance: Normal
X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.1
X-Spam-Score: 11
X-Spam-Bar: +
X-Spam-Flag: NO

The email contents don’t contain the spammy words you see in the “Nigerian” spam emails, so the anti-spam checker at my server was fooled into giving it a low spam score and it got into my Inbox instead of the Outlook Junk E-mail folder.

The Brazilian email address (anonymised here) is probably harvested from a customer of Spitfire ADSL, a UK ISP, which has been allocated the IP address block 83.218.130.0 – 83.218.133.255. Only the ISP would know which of its customers was using that IP address at that time and sent me that email. Even so, we won’t know if the ISP’s customer was the one who passed on the worm or their PC was infected into being a proxy server for yet another infected PC.

I also received a similar disinfected spam email made to look from JetBlue Airways, wherever they might be. Same contents, same worm.

Nothing new here – just a deeper look at the day’s spam.

Lamest spam email

SEO 1 Comment
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We all get spam. I get over 200 a day after some more emails are filtered out by spam removal tools at the servers. I rarely open them unless something about its size or subject wording catches my eye. This one did:

This is an enquiry e-mail via http://<one of my sites> from:
Michelle <michelle@keywordspy.com>

I found this great adwords tool KeywordSpy.com . I’m using it and it has really improved my profits. It offers Free trials. – http://www.keywordspy.com/

“Michelle” or whatever his name is (spammers are always male) must be incredibly lazy or incredibly clever. Why on earth would anyone use Keyword Spy when Axandra IBP does a far better job among a host of other great features? I intend to review it soon and have used it since version 8.

Let’s spread some link love to other recipients of the same or similar email:

Adventures in Black Hat Land

SEO 1 Comment
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Blackhat forum
Blackhat forum

Blackhat World is a fascinating forum full of discussions supposedly about the black hat side of SEO. It turns out to be more about sharing cracked versions of scripts and programs, backdoors to ebooks without paying for them, links to spam tools, and so on.

You can post links to ebooks, as long as you don’t post the links of products authored by BHW members. I became aware of tools that help spamming, such as GYC Automator, which lets you create “as many Craigslist accounts and also create and manage corresponding Gmail and Yahoo! email accounts.” The marketing literature gushes, “Key to good business is good marketing and for good marketing you have to utilize Craigslist at its maximum. To do so you must post as many as 500 or more ads per day and use at least 500 active email accounts to be able to make this happen. It is difficult and time taking process to create and manage such number of accounts manually, it will keep you busy in creating email accounts and hardly you will get time to post ads.” Poor Craigslist sysadmins – they must have their work cut out for them.

Another hot topic is cookie stuffing, a way to drop, say, your Amazon affiliate cookie on your visitors, so that if they visit Amazon and buy, you get your commission. You may have seen companies that sell you “traffic” to any website of your choice. These are not real human visitors but browsers that open a tiny window on people’s PCs but they never realise they “visited” your site. You can get software to generate such visits – pretty pointless for making money, but they can help to inflate your visitor count for sites such as YouTube or Alexa rankings. If you stuff cookies, you will need this kind of junk traffic, otherwise your affiliate clicks will equal the number of buyers and you’ll be kicked out by the affiliate network.

I also learnt that Alexa’s search crawler does not look at robots.txt, so it knows all pages of a website, including the “thank you” pages that have a link to a purchased file. There is an entire thread full of Google, Yahoo and Alexa search terms that could lead to “free” downloads.

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