WooRank evaluates Web sites based on 50 criteria in an automated fashion, free of charge, and provides helpful SEO and other tips. [...] I gave the tool a spin and generated a report for techcrunch.com – turns out we’re worthy of a WooRank of 82.4. [...] Frankly, that’s a lot of valuable information available free of charge.

I gave it a spin on my homepage, and it gave up some valuable suggestions (as well as a score of 68.2, which isn’t too bad):

Among its suggestions are the following:

• Add meta-description and meta-keywords to every page
• Put alt-tags on all images
• Make sure the site validates
• Use a 301-redirect on WWW
• Get listed in the DMOZ/Yahoo directories

While the information it offers up is useful, it’s almost exactly the same as WebsiteGrader, and less detailed on load-time, etc, than . But, the way to go, of course, is to plugin your blog URLs into as many of these cookie-cutter analysis sites as you can, do some thinking on your own, and make a few tweaks. Everyone has their favorite tools, so let me know of other free “SEO Analysis” sites in the comments. If I like them, I’ll update this post.

haCkeD By r00t-x ~ r00tx0@gmail.com ~

Some script kiddie ran a sploit; apparently things are being fixed now:

We have completed the work necessary to secure our GRID infrastructure from this exploit.

We have also repaired the majority of affected sites using our automated tools. We will continue to run these tools throughout the night. Please let us know if you see anything out of place and we will dig deeper.

Subject: YOUR DOMAIN NAME (elliottback)’S CURRENT SITUATION

Dear ELLIOTT C.Back

We are the domain name registration organization in Hong Kong, ,which mainly deal with the domain names’ conflicts of the company in China and Asia regions.We have received an formal application online from one company named “TianHaiYuanTong (China) Investment Co.Ltd” who is trying to apply for the domain names(www. elliottback.cn www. elliottback.hk etc.) and the Internet keyword(elliottback) as their domain name and internet brand on Oct 6,2008.After our initial examination, we found that the keywords and domain names being applied are the same as your company’s name and trademark. These days we are dealing with it. If you don’t know this company, we doubt that they buy these domain names with other aims. We have not started the registration for TianHaiYuanTong company until now. In order to deal with this issue better, please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Best Regards,
Boyce Meng

Tel: +852-31757931 (ext8048)
Fax: +852- 31757932
Email: boyce.meng@hk-nsc.org.cn

Hong Kong Network Service Company Limited
website: www.hknsc.hk

However, as far as I can tell, there is no such “Tian Hai Yuan Tong” company, and I am not replying. I advise you to do the same, and post any more samples of this spam in the comments!

The second is a Flickr badge across the top of my page, with a custom-made Flickr logo to take you to my Flick page:

But this is Web 2.0, and I use the Thickbox script in other places on my site, so why not here too?

It’s fun tinkering around with your main page. I need to add a cookie-rotator to the image on the front page, rather than make it time based. Then people can see different versions of me everytime they come back, rather than the current “new elliott at 1 AM” business.

Your doing it to drive up your Google Rank is pitiful, though I’ve informed Google of your attempts to game their system. Further evidence of scraping will be dealt with through the legal system. Perhaps a note to [your employer] will be of use as well.

I sent back my reply, which indicates that no I am not a spammer, thank you very much:

I’m terribly sorry you are experiencing web scrapers, but honest-to-god it’s not me. I wrote a plugin a long time ago for Wordpress called “WP Autoblog” that can take an RSS feed and import them as a series of posts. The posts get branded with attribution like “Post by XYZ and software by me” which you’re probably mistaking for something I’m actively a part of. I wrote the plugin to aggregate some of my family blogs (ericback.com, elliottback.com) together into a single feed, but it quickly became abused by spammers so I pulled it. You can read more here.

All this in spite of people making photo-aggregators, sitewide tagging, and making Planet sites. I can’t believe how much grief a hacky Wordpress plugin has given me over the years. Hopefully as it gets more and more out of date, this query count will start to drop from 400k (not that much) to a few hundred. Then I will smile.