Phil Muncaster reported recently in V3.co.uk that hackers will be using Harry Potter to distribute malware. Harry Potter himself won’t be waving his magic wand anytime soon to harm anyone’s PC (He’s the good guy! Come on!) but what the hackers will be doing is simply distribute malware by attaching them to bogus sites advertised as pages where one can download the upcoming movie “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” even before it is released. Black hat SEO will be playing an important part in their scheme because they will be optimizing these sites in order to rank well so as to get the fans that just can’t wait for the movie to come out.

Right now though with the would be victims on the path to unauthorized sneek peaks I can’t imagine the Harry Potter guys trying to do anything about the it. After all word of the malware distribution might even help quell illegal early distribution of the movie.

Aside from the Harry Potter movie, Rik Ferguson, senior security adviser at security vendor Trend Micro, is reported to have said that he also expects black hat SEOs to use the Michael Jackson tragedy to do harm and profit.

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If you’ll be somewhere in the Washington area on August 24 and 25 make sure you sign up for SEOmoz’s PRO Training Series 2009 immediately. SEOmoz’s training seminars get sold out really quick so you’d better decide quickly. This is one of the seminars that will actually help you learn something useful about SEO providing value other than networking. Seminar’s limited to 220 participants only.
The good thing though is if you’re too far away or found out too late you can still get the knowledge they’ll be sharing on the seminar via the SEOmoz PRO Training Seminar 2009: Tips, Tricks & Tactics DVD, which is already available for pre-order.

Stuff you’ll learn in the seminar include:

* Content Creation
* Site Architecture
* Linkbuilding
* Keyword Research
* Social Media Marketing
* Conversion Rate Optimization
* Competitive Intelligence
* Vertical Search
* Search Engine Penalties & Guidelines

There will also be elective courses.

Those in Europe will have to wait till October for SEOmoz to go to London to hold another seminar there. Speakers will differ for the two seminars but Rand Fishkin will be present in both seminars.

Price will be $899 per person. SEOmoz PRO members of course can get in at a discounted rate of $599. The seminar DVD can be bought for $249.

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Pagerank sculpting, which as defined by Matt Cutts is simply trying to change how PageRank flows within your site using different methods such as the “nofollow” tag, is still plausible, however, in his post “PageRank Sculpting” he tells us why he doesn’t think you should bother doing it. Here’s an excerpt of his post on pagerank sculpting.

I wouldn’t recommend it [pagerank sculpting], because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.

So when is pagerank sculpting useful? According to Matt Cutts it is useful to use the “nofollow” tag for some pages such as links to a shopping cart or links to log-in pages but only “because those pages are different for every user and they aren’t that helpful to show up in search engines.” Other than that it would pay more if you spent your time optimizing your site in other ways.

Again make sure you make the best use of your time by giving attention to your site architecture and to your site’s actual content. Make sure that users find the info they need just a few clicks away from the main page and make sure that all pages you want indexed are crawlable.

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