Of course, this had to happen at some point. Some bonehead(s) decided that they are going to go after the mass appeal and market of Twitter.com and try to hack in by using a phishing scheme. Well, Twitter has been all over this, as have the majority of the members, so I don’t expect this one to cause any lasting damage.

For more information, here’s the link to the blog post direct from Twitter.com: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/01/gone-phishing.html

Just to reiterate what they say in their post, if you are unsure if you’ve been “attacked” or if you can’t log in to Twitter, either change your password by the regular means, or use the password recovery if you’ve been locked out of your Twitter account.

Kudos to the staff at Twitter for doing everything necessary to squelch this as fast as possible. That said, it is up to each of us to know what it is that we are clicking/signing up for/approving on-line BEFORE taking that action. Our safety and security is in our own hands, so be wise about what you are doing on-line and if in doubt, DON’T do it! Get it checked out first by a professional.

As an aside, it is always a good idea to change your passwords on a regular basis, especially if you do anything with money on-line. Also make sure your anti-virus, spam filter and firewall are updated daily and that they are more than adequate to the job at hand.

I had someone ask me why I had removed the Self Improvement and Health & Healing posts/products from the site, so I figured if one person is asking, there are probably more that are wondering, so here my answer. 

The main reason is that I want GamblerMan.com to be focused exclusively on Internet and Affiliate marketing. That was the number one idea when I created it in the first place.

Indeed, I have plenty to say and post regarding self improvement, health, healing, meditation, energy work, etc. etc., but I felt that trying to combine them all in one blog was just not going to do any of them justice. With that in mind, I pulled the non-marketing posts and will be creating a new blog page at my current psychic healing site: Tolemac.net

It just makes more sense to have them separated than to have it all jumbled together. Plus, I can then also separate the traffic I get for marketing from traffic for the self improvement, et al site.

Once I have the blog page set up over at Tolemac.net, I’ll post here with the link and let you all know it’s ready.

EDIT: ‘Tis ready. Come visit and leave a comment. http://tolemac.net/blog

First off, you gotta love Twitter! One of the people that I’ve been following is an excellent marketer named Jim Connolly. Earlier today, he sent a Tweet with a link to a new blog post where he asked if he should set up his blog as a do-follow, so that anyone who posts a comment would have the do-follow tag go to their link.

The main concern he has (as we all do) is dealing with spam comments. After reading that post, I decided that I would also set up my blog as a do-follow, as we can all use as much link-love as possible. So off I went in search of a good to great Wordpress plugin. That brought me to this post at Perishable Press. Jeff there has a review of 4 different do-follow/no-follow plugins and after reading his reviews and checking out each one, I settled on Michele’s NoFollow Free plug-in.

This is a dead easy plug-in with some very good options. The one that caught my attention and convinced me this was the one to use, is the ability to set up a “comment word blacklist”. Basically, I can put any word I want into the blacklist, and if anyone uses that word (think mega-spam words like Cialis, or Tramadol) it will immediately set that comment to no-follow, thereby reducing that links juice with the search engines.

It also gives you the option of setting up how many comments a person must make before they have the no-follow turned off and the do-follow turned on. Right now, I have it set at one posted comment for right now. I see this as another way of doing away with the “hit-and-run” commentors.

Using this plug-in along with Akismet, I can definitely see almost no spam being posted here.

If we can all utilize similar plug-ins/code for each of our sites to reduce or eliminate the spam, we could all be the recipients of alot more link juice, and have better rankings for our sites. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think about this and what you’re using on your site.