Trulia Blatantly Ignores Googles TOS – Cloaks Sites

Eric Bramlett, a local seo expert, discoverd that Trulia, a popular real estate search site, has been cloaking their partner pages.  This is clearly against Google’s TOS and there is a good chance they will get penalized by Google.  Well after eading his post, I did a little more snooping my self and found they were cloaking the of the following pages as well:

  • http://www.americantowns.com/ct/fairfield-real-estate
  • http://www.kiplinger.com/money/realestate/
  • http://www.silvar.org/

Update: Trulia has taken down their cloaks.  It’s amazing what a little peer pressure will do.

Armando Montelongo, So-called Real Estate Guru Has A Local Radio Ad – Be Wary!

Many of you may have heard a commercial on the radio recently by a guy named Armando Montelongo.  He is selling his instructional real estate materials.  He mentions that he appears on the A&E television show Flip This House. Well you should know that he is not all he is cracked up to be.  As they say, Buyer Beware!  He has been indicted right here in Travis County for Fraud and has had his own share of foreclosure troubles.

Here are a few mentions of him around the web:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_This_House_(TV_series)#Season_Three_2

Flip This Lawsuit is a site containing a lot of information regarding the Montelongos and their relationship with the show and its former cast.  This post in particular is very interesting.

Here is an article from the SA Express reagarding his indictment.

Awesome new PDF Plugin for Firefox

I used to use the PDF Browser Plugin from http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf/ but it does not work on Intel Macs.  And since I have been on Intel Macs for a couple of years now, I have been very frustratetd with this situation.  Safari now has buil-in PDF viewing capabililty but Firefox has been lacking.  It is extremely annoying to view PDFs in Firefox.  You click on the llink to the PDF and then you have to save it.  Then you have to find the file and open it only to realize it is not what you needed.  So then you have to go and delete the file so your computer doesn’t get littered with stray PDFs.  Well, finally, there is an answer. Someone has released a new PDF plugin for Firefox that is completely open-source.  It allows you to quickly and easily view a PDF right in your browser window.

Passenger, Memory and mod_rewrite

Well, as I stated in my previous post, I enabled Passenger for my Austin Real Estate site.  Well, everything seemed fine for the first few days.  But then I noticed that my memory usage was steadily creeping up.  I killed my ruby processes and that helped but then it just started creeping up again.  After working with Dreamhost, they discovered there was a bug in that version of Passenger and they upgraded it for me and now my memory usage is much lower and holding steady.  However, I have another problem.  Apparently Passenger disables mod_rewrite.  This is fine since Passenger doeesn’t need it to run your Rails app.  However, I also had a wordpress instance on my domain.  I used a mod_rewrite to redirect users to the blog instead of Rails trying to interpret the url.  This no longer works and now my blog is dead.  I have several options to fix this.  After much deliberating, I have decided to move my Rails app to a subdomain, search.braxtonbeyer.com.  I will keep the blog on the main domain as it has most of the content. So, all in all, I am still satisfied with Passenger, but it does pay to do a little research before making major changes to your site.