Author Archive
IE8 conditional comments strange behaviour
March 1st, 2011 | 
Author: I have come today on a strange behaviour of IE8 regarding the conditional comments. As anyone knows, conditional comments are a very convenient way to instruct IE to display some content when it cannot display it like all the other browsers.
In short, I wanted to link within a conditional comment a special stylesheet inside the head of a document. Usually, this is a very simple task. I made it a lot of times before, but I never noticed the strange requirement explained below.
My code was something like this:
<!--[if lte IE8]>
<link type="text/css" related="stylesheet" href="blabla.css">
<![endif}-->
To my surprise, IE did interpreted correctly the code from "blabla.css" but displayed the following line on the top of the page:
<!--[if lte IE8]><![endif}-->
which was a totally non-sense. It was a triple non-sense, because a) this expression is a comment, b) anyway, this comment was inserted in the head section, and c) the IE interpreted the css code.
If you don't believe it, just use the following code and see it for yourself:
<!DOCTYPE html> <head> <title>Test</title> <!--[if lte IE8]> <style> h1 {color: Red;} </style> <![endif]--> </head> <body> <h1>This should be red in IE8</h1> </body>
The example above will output a red H1 in IE8, preceded by… a strange line that displays the conditional comment’s expression.
<!–[if lte IE8]><![endif}-->
This should be red in IE8
After scratching my head and trying to find a solution to this uncomprehensible situation, I finaly managed to deal with it. The problem was the name of the browser. When writing the comment, one must carefuly obey the syntax recommended by Microsoft and write <!--[if IE 8]> instead of <!–[if IE8]> (with a space between “IE” and “8″). This is all! The following example will output a correct page and will stop triggering the abnormal behaviour, despite the fact that the only difference is given by a space between IE and 8.
<!DOCTYPE html> <head> <title>Test</title> <!--[if lte IE 8]> <style> h1 {color: Red;} </style> <![endif]--> </head> <body> <h1>This should be red in IE8</h1> </body>
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TrendMicro bot kills your server; how to ban it
We recently ran in a very, very big trouble. The server that hosts the only TRUE local marketplace for services was down almost every 48 hours, and we didn’t knew why. The server load data showed some tremendous values; there where some open processes that were eating a lot from the server’s 8Gb memory; and we simply didn’t understand why. The guys from the hosting company were equally unaware.
When we had to cope for the third time in a row with such an incident, I decided to study the log files and I was amazed to discover that in the hours preceding every single incident the server was “attacked” from 3 IPs, coming from the same C-class: 216.104.15.* There were a lot of automated tools that were requesting non-existant pages from our website, by running into an infinite loop that was requesting something like this:
www…/list-services/js/functions.js
www…/list-services/js/js/functions.js
www…/list-services/js/js/js/functions.js
It was obvious that these requests were coming from some sort of search bot too stupid to understand the <base> tag.
Digging more into this, I discovered that this C-class pertains to Trend Micro, a shitty anti-virus producer. Then, searching more on Google, I found out that this shitty anti-virus installs on users’ computers a bullshit tool that “verifies” if/whether a website spreads malware or not. Unfortunately, their tool seems to be quite stupid, since it cannot correctly parse the HTML code of a page.
That’s why I decided to ban with .htaccess all the requests coming for the said C-class. And digging even more, I discovered that they are using a second class, too: 150.70.64.* and that a lot of people are starting to complain about them.
How to get high authority backlinks – the easy and straightforward way
Getting high authority backlinks is not an easy task, but it’s better to start with paid links and industry hub pages because these are the most easy to get.
Everybody knows that high authority backlinks are the essential ingredient to obtain good positions on search engines. Unfortunately it’s very hard to obtain authority links, however there are some links that are easy to get.
I had to find recently some authority backlinks for Pinbud. We all know the theory: high authority links can be obtained only from:
- educational domains
- government-related domains (including foreign governmental websites)
- high PR websites
- established, old domains with content related to your website’s content
The theory is easy to learn – but the practice is a nightmare.
There are only 2 ways to get a backlink from an educational or a governmental website:
- the legitimate way: you get the backlink because you’ve done something and you deserve the backlink. This is very hard to attain, because 99.999% of websites have nothing in common with any educational resources;
- the “hacking” way: you can find a website that’s vulnerable to XSS (or better) so you can place a hidden backlink. While this is a feasible scenario, it requires tremenduos efforts. You must check websites one by one and do tests. In my opinion, it’s simply worthless.
Governmental links are very, very powerful. 2 months ago, intrigued by a post from WebmasterWorld, I’ve made some research and I discovered some highly positioned websites that had only 4-5 backlinks. But all these links were coming from some Chinese secondary governmental websites, and that’s why these websites were occupying really good positions. It was amazing!
High PR websites can be anything, from news to free classifieds, but the most common are the news-related websites. A news-related website will always feature at least PR 4-5, but the most important websites, even the websites of local, minor, newspapers, easily reach PR 8-9. Links can be paid or obtained for free.
After carefully reviewing a lot of possibilities, I finaly decided to pay some bucks, but to ensure some trusted backlinks. Remember, your time costs money: the timeframe required to obtain for free such backlinks can be so huge, that it’s simply worthless. So, I’ve decided to pay links from:
- Yahoo! Directory. Yahoo! Directory has PR 8. A link from Y!D is $300 / year. Choose carefully your category page. Choose a page related to the content of your website, preferably featuring some competitors, and with a good PR (at least 3-4).
- BOTW directory. Best Of The Web is another old, trustful directory. It has PR 7 and a backlink costs $299.95 (one time fee).
- Business.com is the third major directory, featuring PR 7. Price: $299 (one time fee).
- JoeAnt. JoeAnt directory has PR 7 and a backlink costs only $39.99. However be very careful, because JoeAnt doesn’t seem to be fully indexed by Googlebot. You should submit only to a category that’s indexed by Googlebot.
Thus, paying only $940, we’ve got 4 authority backlinks. But this is not all: Yahoo! listed PinBud not only on the main directory (http://dir.yahoo.com) but also on several subdomains. The same with Business.com. I submitted the website to a category and the editors placed our link on an additional (but relevant) category. In fact, the $940 price paid us not only 4, but 8 authority links.
Beside these we’ve got some backlinks from some minor directories that are probably getting information from Yahoo! So, the money were well spent.
Another precious backlinks that we’ve got in the last weeks are 2 links from Microsoft. As anyone knows, PinBud is powered by Microsoft Bing Maps technology. The coding itself is not Microsoft related (the platform is a classic LAMP – Linux/Apache/MySql/PHP) but the core function, companies listing and positiong, is build on top of Bing Maps integration. So we were entitled to submit our company description to Microsoft Bizspark and now we have a live profile on Bizspark and a link from Microsoft Platform Ready.
And finaly, another worth to mention authority link source is the DMOZ directory – but, unfortunately, it’s very hard to get there. Just submit your website and forget about it. Come again in 4-5 months and, if you don’t see your website, submit it again or try to find on Elance or another marketplace an editor that will agree to let you in for few bucks.
We have seen almost immediately the effects of these backlinks: the traffic on PinBud.ca went up like crazy. And there are enough signs telling us that PinBud.com will be soon out of the infamous “sandbox”. So, the conclusion is crystal-clear: start to build authority links with the most easy to get!