*ahem* Bing SERP today showed that my post was at the top 4 or so…

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Bing, Firefox, Winning, Internet

Not yet pushed out the public, but now available if you know where to look, Firefox 8.0…

Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Firefox 8.0, User Agent

Well, this visitor caught my eye earlier as the originating IP address is from the technology company Oracle but with a Googlebot user agent. Another clue that this is a spoofed user agent is that they came in off of a Google Search Engine referrer, as Googlebot doesn’t usually do that. Also, their browser had requested images off of my server (as browsers usually do) and Googlebot usually does not.

Why would someone spoof Googlebot? Aside from the amusing (and covert) aspects, some Web sites may serve different content to Googlebot — for example, cloaking or doorway pages which are a big Google Webmaster no no (i.e. a Flash or Video based Web site serving text for indexing or a specifically optimized entry page).

Host: 137.254.4.8

/2010/12/19/droid-user-agent/

Http Code: 200 Date: Sep 19 07:58:51 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 10962

Referer: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=droid+user+agent&oq=droid+user+

Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Technorati Tags: Google, Googlebot, User Agent, Spoofing

IP Address: 96.227.#.#

Operating System : Microsoft WinNT

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; Trident/6.0)

Monitor :
Resolution : 1920 x 1080
Color Depth : 24 bits

It’s always sweet when a friend visits you to show off his new user agent (apparently this is why I’ve garnered Internet fame). Microsoft Internet Explorer 10 preview (MSIE 10) on Windows 8 (Windows NT 6.2) it looks like.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Internet Explorer, IE 10, Windows 8

I had no idea the user agent was…Safari based. Unless this is a BB user with a Safari browser? Can you use multiple browsers on a BB?

Host: 74.82.68.#

Operating System: Macintosh Unknown

Agent: Safari 1.3
Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9800; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.526 Mobile Safari/534.8

Monitor:
Resolution : 360 x 480
Color Depth : 24 bits

Technorati Tags: User Agent, BlackBerry, RIM, Safari, Internet, Mobile

RockMelt, the new browser which takes advantage of your social networks, has a user agent.

*

/2011/01/01/easy-seo-update-your-copyright-notice/

Http Code: 200 Date: Jan 01 11:02:13 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 10150

Referer: -

Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) RockMelt/0.8.36.128 Chrome/7.0.517.44 Safari/534.7

Technorati Tags: RockMelt, Social Media, Social Networks, User Agent

Here’s a quick and easy SEO trick for you.

We all know that Google indexes freshly updated content on your Web site. Since it’s the New Year, take a moment and check if your Web site copyright notices are updated. Not only do you get that piece of mind from an updated copyright notice, but you’ve just updated each page of your Web site since each page should have the footer.

For those of you using PHP, here’s the code to insert into your footer, if it isn’t already there.

&copy; Copyright < ?php echo date("Y") ?>


Easy, huh?

Technorati Tags: SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Content

I noticed that some (unhip) person with a Motorola built Droid based phone on Verizon visited cleverhack the other day. I’m too lazy to pull my official logs, so here’s the sitemeter report. I am surprised to notice that the Droid runs a version of mobile Safari according to the User Agent string.

Operating System: Linux Unknown

Browser: Safari 1.3

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2.1; en-us; DROIDX Build/VZW) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1 854X480 motorola DROIDX

Javascript: version 1.5

Monitor
Resolution: 800 x 414

Color Depth: 32 bits

Technorati Tags: Droid, Linux, Safari, unhip, MOT

What’s more amusing…

The visitor from Yahoo corporate on Mac OS X/Safari searching for a particular phrase on Google.com or the visitor from Google (Europe) corporate on Windows XP/IE 6 searching for “Yahoo Fantasy Football” on Google.com?

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Google, Eat Your Dogfood

Yes, it seems as if the hot iPad social content app has a user agent that crawls the Web. Interestingly enough, the service is run on Amazon AWS according to the reverse IP lookup.

Host: 174.129.125.105
/2010/08/15/modern-email-marketing-two-odious-practices/
Http Code: 200 Date: Aug 15 12:27:35 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: -
Referer: -
Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 (+http://flipboard.com/crawler)

Technorati Tags: Flipboard, iPad, Content, Social, Magazine, User Agent, Amazon AWS, iTunes

Being a Marketer who is focused on all things Internet related, I read a lot of email on a daily basis. I receive a lot of email, too. I can tell you quite honestly that I probably get more email than you in a day. I don’t really want more email that will take attention away from my primary concern, work. And having sent a lot of email (they don’t call it Email Deliverability for nothing) in a previous life, I’m pretty inured to Email Marketing practices - both good and meant with good intentions.

But I don’t know if it’s just me being the proverbial old grump with a full email inbox or what, but some Email Marketing practices of late have gotten pretty obnoxious.

Practice #1: Sending email to a catch all or general email address. We’ve heard the mantra from the opt-in evangelists about how you should not send email to a catch all address (i.e. sales@yourdomain.com or info@yourdomain.com or webmaster@yourdomain.com) because it weakens your deliverability - in terms of potential email bounces.

It isn’t just that though, as a marketer it shows you don’t know *jack* about the organization you’re marketing to. You’re basically proclaiming you’re too lazy to find out to find out who the decision makers really are in the organization. And that makes you a poor marketer.

Practice #2: Including a mailto: link to the recipients email address in the body of the email (mostly seen in the footer, near the unsubscribe link).

Whoa, wait, what? The first time I noticed this, I thought it was a newbie error on behalf of the sender. Now, I’m seeing the behavior from well known senders using well known Email Marketing services. So, I’m suspicious - because the thinking goes, if you add the recipient’s domain to the email, the email has less of a chance of being rejected by spam filtering software. Because of course you (the recipient) would not want to be using spam filtering software that would reject email with a link to your domain in it. Below is an example of the text:

This email was sent to: blog@cleverhack.com

You’ve received this message because you’ve registered to receive email or you’ve made a purchase from us.

If you no longer wish to receive email offers from us, unsubscribe here.

Sneaky, huh?

Technorati Tags: Email, Email Deliverability, Email Marketing, Email Addresses, Domains, Footer, Unsubscribe, Spam, Spam Filtering, B2B, B2C

Well, I guess when you have enough Twitter followers, you start seeing the phishing scams.

It looks pretty close - design wise - to an official Twitter email. However, the thing was a) sent to an address that isn’t used for Twitter and b) sent from a hotmail address, which means these guys were just hoping for a few clicks before getting shut down. The hover over shows the address of the phishing site.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, phishing, phish, Hotmail