Times Are Tough All Over

I've never been one to sugarcoat reality, and that goes for online as well. Times are tough, the economy sucks and it takes REAL effort to earn money online, so if you're looking for the "lazy guide to riches", then I suggest you give up NOW!

There has been a series of events recently that hit me very hard. The first is the latest Google algorithm change, called "Panda", that has many established webmasters upset that they have lost their site rankings in favor of the search engine choosing long, spammy websites, including many blackhat sites created with content stolen from the previously high ranking sites.

It's a shitty system, to be quite frank, and one that makes the Google search results LESS relevant than ever before. Currently, it's mostly spam sites being rewarded with high spots in the SERP and good quality sites are being penalized. Luckily, searchers have noticed this, and Google recently lost a percentage of it's search engine dominance to people moving over to Bing and Yahoo for more relevant results. It's much easier to optimize good content for Yahoo, and it's more of a buyer's market there anyway, as I've mentioned many times before.

The next problem I encountered recently was with a scammer from Egypt who is selling one of my scripts illegally on his website 7turnkey.com (he doesn't deserve a backlink from me) and also selling scripts from other webmasters which he has no right to sell. I sent his host (mellowhost.com, the hosting for scammers) a DMCA takedown notice and they ignored it. Then the bastard had the balls to send ME a takedown notice! I filed a counterclaim and won and now I'm faced with the exhausting task of sending notices to all the forums where he has posted sales threads for my script.

I managed to get the scumbag banned from DP and V7N forums so far for trying to sell my script, but I'd like others to help me in the battle. If you see a forum thread offering an online TV script with a link to buy it on the 7turnkey site, then please report it to me with a link to the thread either by commenting below or via email. Thanks in advance for your help!

The final problem (for now) was the worst one. I was on Facebook and got hit with a terrible virus that wiped out my whole computer and rendered it dead and useless! While I do keep regular backups, as everyone should, on several external drives, it was still a huge pain in the ass to have to get another computer and piece everything together like I had it before.

The disturbing thing is that these new viruses seem to be served through seemingly normal ads on trusted websites. It's no longer a matter of worrying about opening up a shady looking attachment in an email message anymore. Now the viruses are loaded when the ad is loaded on the page without even clicking on it. There were several malicious ads served through the sidebar of Hotmail recently, plus networks like Clicksor and Trafficrevenue are notorious for serving up this crap, but this one was on Facebook and it was a killer.

I never even clicked anything! My antivirus tried to block it and I noticed it had a .in extension before everything died, but it was too fast for me to prevent it. Be careful!

Those are my tales of woe for now. Thank you for reading this and I hope others can learn from my mistakes.

UPDATE! The script issue has been resolved, as I simply bought the site. I am now the new owner of the 7turnkey revenue sharing scripts website (with link!), so feel free to pay a visit and say hello there anytime :)