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If you've been following my columns both here and in other places you will know that for quite a while I was writing almost daily and I have to tell you that sometimes it's hard to come up with new topics when you're writing that frequently. If you've been following my columns both here and in other places you will know that for quite a while I was writing almost daily and I have to tell you that sometimes it's hard to come up with new topics when you're writing that frequently.

At times when it was hard to find something to write about I'd have a ‘This and That' column where I'd talk about odd things that I'd come across that might have been important and helpful to you, the reader. Usually these things were just snippets of information and way too small to fill an entire column.

Since I've reduced my writing workload I haven't struggled to find something to write about but that doesn't mean that I'm going to do away with the ‘This and That' columns because I'm still finding plenty of snippets of information that you will find interesting but talking about them won't take up a whole column. And today is going to be one of those columns of this and that.

A Scary Site
Most of us from time to time have wanted to take a serious look at websites that belong to our competitors. We'd love to be able to look beneath the bonnet at what's happening down there out of sight and there have been some sites around that have helped us do that. Alexa will give you some idea of traffic levels, whois.sc can give you some idea of the background of the site; IP domains on seologs.com can give you a list of sites that share the same IP and all that's very interesting but somehow I've always wanted more.

If I'm going to do some snooping then I want to find the juicy information and not just the crumbs. Well now I've found a site that does give me some of that juicy information that I like to know ... and frankly it's scary that there is a site out there that can reveal so much information.

You will find it at urivalet.com and when you first see it you'll think that it looks fairly innocent but once you enter a domain name and then hit the submit button all is revealed ... well maybe not all but certainly a whole lot more information than you might wish your competitors could see about your sites.

Once you have entered a URL you're then taken to a page that just keeps on giving you more and more information. Internal links, external links, download times, server header information, meta tags, number of pages on the site and much more.

Keeping the hackers out
It seems that these days there's no one that's safe from hackers who want to slip their own codes into your web pages and those of us who run blogs seem to be particularly susceptible to these guys. There's nothing quite like finding that some of your outbound links have been changed so that they point to Viagra and pharmacy sites and when Google finds your links have been changed they can kick you out of their listings very quickly.

Of course finding those hacked links can be a real problem but it is possible to let Google do the hard work of locating those links for you. I have to admit that this is not an original idea of mine, I read about it recently but unfortunately I can't remember where I read it otherwise I would give them some credit.

But regardless of where I read it this is something that I should share with you. All you have to do to find those links that some hacker has changed is to set up a Google Alert so that you're notified immediately any changed links are detected. The example in the piece I was reading was really very simple and it really is something that anyone can do.

This is the example that was given of the alert you need to set up if you want to keep the pharmacy spammers out of your site: 'viagra OR cialis OR levitra OR Phentermine OR Xanax site:yourdomainname.com'. With a little bit of thought you'll come up with terms that other spammers might use too.

Now if somebody hacks your site and adds there spammy links to it you'll get notification very quickly and that can save you losing those valuable spots that your sites are holding in the search engines.

Now it's time for me to head off and do some admin work. Today is the last day of the financial year here in Australia so it's time to see what our bottom line has been like for the last 12 months. It's definitely been growing and we'll be looking at areas where we can make it grow even more in the coming year ... now that's something that all of us should be looking at doing isn't it?