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David Naylor
davidnaylor.co.uk · Personal blog · on HN since 2008
David Naylor, a UK SEO consultant, writes about search engines, web security flaws, cookies law and URL shorteners.
What HN saysHN links it for write-ups on a Google Webmaster Tools deindexing flaw, Twitter vulnerabilities, Twitter backlinks and the EU cookies directive. Commenters give no real opinion of it.
19HN people shared it
12linked it in comments
11stories submitted
220story points
8 years agolast shared
2008people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1EU “Cookies” Directive. Interactive guide to 25th May and what it means for you4 people · 2 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 2Massive Twitter Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability3 people · 83 points · first shared 2009 · 35 comments on HN
- 3Remove any URL from Google via Webmaster Tools2 people · 6 points · first shared 2011 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Twitter Exploit Still Works1 people · 63 points · first shared 2009 · 21 comments on HN
- 5Bit.ly/robots.txt and the Dangers of Custom Shortened URLs1 people · 49 points · first shared 2009 · 15 comments on HN
- 6Don’t Make The Same Mistakes As Bit.ly and Tr.im (running a URL shortener)1 people · 6 points · first shared 2009 · 2 comments on HN
- 7Does Authorship Affect Rankings? A Rand Fishkin Study1 people · 3 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 8New Google Layout1 people · 3 points · first shared 2011 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Large UK Solicitor Firm Suffer Google Whiplash1 people · 3 points · first shared 2014 · 3 comments on HN
- 10Google buys Beat That Quote… then bans them1 people · 1 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 11Google: It's Really About the Backlinks1 people · 1 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 12Stopping bad robots with honeytraps1 people · first shared 2009
- 13Is eval google back on track1 people · first shared 2008
- 14Tracked google users will result in 10 of keyword data lost1 people · first shared 2011
- 15What does not provided keywords really mean1 people · first shared 2011
What HN people wrote when they linked it
dredge · 2012-01-12
Once upon a time it was possible to get a clean (not rel=nofollow) link from one's Twitter profile: http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/twitter-backlink-tip.html
Presumably for anti-spam reasons, Matt Cutts (of Google, and regular Hacker News commenter) implied in a tweet that Twitter would want to fix this: https://twitter.com/mattcutts/statuses/865610396
I think this implies - in my opinion rightly - that Google want or wanted links on Twitter to have the nofollow attribute set.
superasn · 2018-10-03
I do remember about a flaw that let anyone remove/deindex any website from Google(1).
Not sure how big it would be compared to Facebook's issues though as no user data was comprised.
(1) https://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-webmasters-flaw-allows-you-to-rem…
mijnpc · 2011-11-04
gmac · 2011-08-16
I wonder how this will be treated under the EU's Directive on cookies...
Edit: sorry, not found an answer yet, but the top Google result for 'EU cookies' is rather fun: http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/eu-cookies-directive-interactive-guide-to…
sp332 · 2011-05-26
I hope UK websites don't start working like this: http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/eu-cookies-directive-interactive-guide-to… (Don't click the checkbox, read the texts and keep clicking OK)
lwhi · 2011-03-09
A tongue in cheek example of what users might face:
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/eu-cookies-directive-interactive-guide-to…
rahoulb · 2010-09-21
They were also told about this a while back:
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/massive-twitter-cross-site-scripting-vuln…
Not quite the same flaw but very similar - caused by unescaped URLs
Seldaek · 2010-06-24
This has been demo'd a long time ago already [1], and it seems they haven't done anything yet ? Wtf.
[1] http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/massive-twitter-cross-site-scripting-vuln…
randfish · 2010-04-17
I'm going to have to strongly disagree with at least the "useful" adjective in this statement. I would concur that if the click-through-rate and impression data were accurate or consistent with other data sources that claim to show the same thing (Google Analytics, log file analysis, Google AdWords campaigns) it would be phenomenally valuable.
However, as it stands, my digging suggests that not only are the numbers dramatically different between other sources and GWMT, they're not even consistently different (at times, the multiples of variance can range from 0.5X-3X).
A number of good posts have been written on this by the webmaster/SEO community already:
http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/new-google-webmaster-tools-keyphra…
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-webmaster-tools-2.html
tezza · 2009-09-24
..:: Loop Detection?? ::..
Are you supposed to implement your own cycle detection?
If not, how deep is the cycle detection that 80legs offers?
--
There are plenty of HoneyTrap[1] OSS projects which will quickly rack up lots of $$$ if the 80legs spider is backlisted.
For those who don't know, these projects create deeply linked pages, and sometimes create infinite cycles. They are trying to hinder spammers, but may hinder 80legs too.
--
[1] http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/stopping-bad-robots-with-honeytraps.html
davecardwell · 2009-08-16
I’ve been looking into this to see if it will have any positive/negative affects for my employer. Came across this useful tool for comparing results side-by-side: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766281
Additional analysis by some well-known SEO’s:
http://www.seobook.com/google-caffeine
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-caffeine-and-seo.html
http://www.vizioninteractive.com/google-caffeine-a-comprehensive-analy…
petercooper · 2008-07-09
This piece mentions "No manual intervention" and backs that up with some reasons why Google supposedly doesn't have any manual intervention in the ordering of search results.
If that's true, then does that mean the eval.google.com "secret" back-end application supposedly used by teams of moderators to manipulate search results was a fabrication or just not under the principle of "manual intervention"? Or, do activities two years ago not count in the principles shared today?
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/29726.htm
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/01/1532216&tid=217
http://www.searchbistro.com/index.php?/archives/19-Google-Secret-Lab,-…
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/is-eval-google-back-on-track.html
Marissa Meyer is also supposed (and a big stress on /supposed/) to have said that Google has 10,000 people checking search results for relevance:
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/06/26/GoogleScalabilityConferen…