Well if it can happen to me, it can happen to anybody. The website for my vacation rental was compromised. Here’s how it all went down. Yesterday I was talking to a renter and she said, I didn’t dare click on your website listing in Google because underneath the listing it said “This Site May Harm Your Computer”.

I immediately thought the renter had some sort of malware installed on their machine. I had never heard of Google policing the Internet, although I had heard that Google would put up a warning screen before visitors visited sites like warez, cracks, etc.. which are know to harbor malware. However, I decided to check it out and sure enough, here’s what I saw:

I was flabbergasted. This is my website for the vacation rentals I own…how could it be flagged as being harmful? Thankfully Google does offer some information on what may be causing the issue and why it was flagged. I downloaded Xenu Link Sleuth and checked all the site links, which was actually a pretty good exercise as I discovered some links that had expired from blog posts and a few mistakes in the site structure. One of the items that can trigger a warning like that on the Google serps is linking to sites that are know to harbor spyware / malware. I didn’t see any of those, just the regular run of the mill links to local activities, etc..

The next option was to explore was that my site was hacked. I forwarded the issue to my developer and what he found really startled me. Turns out that script, like Wordpress, which powers my blog (and this blog) have known vulnerabilities. That’s why it’s so important to keep the blog script updated. Well I didn’t and some zealous little hacker exploited one of the security holes and uploaded some obfuscated code to my site. What it did or how it harmed people, I have no idea. My developer removed the code and I then filed a re-inclusion request through Google.

Turns out my site was flagged on March 20th, about the same time my inquiries from the site dried up. I was worried that Google , with all their red tape, would not review the site for weeks, leaving me high and dry. But to their credit, the re-inclusion request seemed to trigger a respider within 24 hours and this morning the flag was removed from the SERPs.

I am a little pissed that Google kept my adwords account going strong, even though they had no problem outing the site to the world. It’s great to protect the consumers, but I think Google, if they wish to be the police of the Internet, should invest more resources and try to contact the site owner rather than publicly flogging them. But like I said, it did force me to get it fixed fast and Google was fast in getting the flag removed.

So all of you vacation rental website owners, make sure to keep your scripts up to date, and watch your Google serps. If your inquiries one day just dry up, it could be because your site has been flagged by Google and contains some junk which could harm the computers of others!

This is the first in long series of posts that feature various regions of the world and some truly exceptional vacation rentals in those areas. The primary reason I built these new vacation rental widgets is because I needed an easy way to showcase properties from the site.

My wife and I first visited Cabo San Lucas two years ago, we visited in April and the weather was amazing. The Caribbean is nice, but the weather can be quite variable, unlike Cabo San Lucas where it just seems to be sunny and dry all the time. Cabos itself is more of a town for those that like to party, that’s why my wife and I really like San Jose Del Cabos. The restaurants are far less expensive, and the food more authentic. It’s much less busy.

There is a ton of great golf (expensive), and great snorkeling. We always stay at the Hilton Los Cabos. But in all honesty we stay in the timeshare side which is called Cabo Real. The last two times we used redweek.com to rent a timeshare at a fraction of the cost of the hotel. Super nice place. You can get a timeshare for $1200-$1500 per week, whereas a room at the hotel with the tax, etc. will run you $300 - $500 per night. Plus you get a 10% off discount card, which saves you a ton of cash at their in house restaurants.

If we were with friends, I’d like to try a Cabos San Lucas or San Jose del Cabo Vacation Rental. If you could get one with a chef and a small staff, that would be the bomb. It would be even better if it was on the beach with access to snorkeling. I just love to snorkel, but taking one of those booze cruises sort of takes the fun out of it for me. I like to to do it on my own time…

Here is the first Cabos San Lucas rental I am showcasing, it’s not on the beach and it’s $1000+ a night for a 6 bedroom luxury unit, but if you got 6 couples together and each pitched in $1000, you’d have an amazing time!!!!!

Villa del Toro Rojo Mexico » Baja California » Cabo San Lucas   View This Listing at VacationRentalDirect.com   6 BR 6 BA Luxury Ocean View Villa in Pedregal   Property Details Listing: 4105 Type: Villa Sleeps : 10-12 Bed(s): 6 Bed(s): 6 Pets: Yes Children: Yes Pool :Yes Smoking: Yes Amenities Air Condition Phone Radio Washers & Dryer DVD Player Fishing near by

Contact: Brian        Phone: (619) 497-3471

For the longest time I’ve used Postlets and vFlyers.com to create ads for craigslist, etc.. Then, about 12 months ago, I saw a small listing site had created a little embeddable widget for myspace…I thought that was neat. So a couple months ago, I thought I’d make it easy for the property owners at VacationRentalDirect.com to create widgets for myspace, their blogs, other social media sites and also Craigslist. It’s been a pain in the ass, but tomorrow we are launching the widgets. They are pretty cool, but they’ll be getting better. Look for them in your tools menu for now…we’ll do a better job of highlighting them later this month after we launch some other features. Here is what one of the widgets will look like:

Rosewood Pointe Retreat House & Cottages United States » Michigan » Holland View This Listing at VacationRentalDirect.com Rosewood Pointe is located on the north side of beautiful Lake Macatawa in Holland, Michigan. Minutes from Lake Michigan, the resort is nestled among stately oaks and fragrant pines. Check out our May 2008 Spoecials! Property Details Type :Resort Pets :No Children :Yes Sleeps :18+ Pool :No Bed(s) :8+ Bath(s) :8+ Amenities Air Condition Washers & Dryer TV Cable DVD Player Fishing near by Stove

Contact: Brent Kleinheksel Phone: 612-501-2548 email: rentals@rosewoodpointe.com

I had to laugh tonight. I stumbled across a recent press release by ResortQuest dated March 5th titled , “ResortQuest Partners with Other Industry Leaders to Heighten Online Exposure of Vacation Rentals”. I wonder who the brainchild is of this attempt at search engine manipulation. It’s one thing to praise a new and innovative link bait product or a great viral marketing / social media campaign, it’s quite another to take a page out of the 2002 link building book and attempt to apply it in 2008.

Let me explain. For years, real estate agents would seek each other out to provide links to each other’s website. They’d publish them under the guise of being “referral networks”. The reality is that there is no reason to promote a competitor, if you are searching for a home in Myrtle Beach, why would you need to be referred to a Realtor in Phoenix? The answer is you don’t. The idea was to get links from other themed sites (e.g. other Realtor’s websites) in an attempt to boost your search engine rankings. For many years it worked, and in some instances it still does. But to all groups participating in ResortQuest’s little scheme, let me tell you, you are playing with fire.

All you need to do is visit any major real estate SEO forum and search back a few months and you’ll see that Google sent a warning shot across a lot of real estate websites and dropped them from the index for a period of months or longer, forcing those site owners to clean and remove those spam directories and file reinclusion requests with Google.

Whoever is running ResortQuest’s SEO operations is seriously a day late and a dollar short and is putting all of their “referral partners” at risk by promoting such a dated search engine manipulation scheme. You can email me until you are blue in the face, I’ll just refer you to other forums and you can read it yourself. It’s a boneheaded move. But one that personally makes me happy, because it won’t be long till I have a bunch of my competitors fall out of the Google Index.

I’m sure I’ll get the usual suspects complaining about my SEO, my link bait, my articles, my links, my widgets, my vast network of sites, that’s fine, unless you really know what you are talking about, and can back it up with higher SERPs than mine, don’t bother because I’ll delete your comments.

Here’s what ResortQuest is doing…they have created a website called resortquestpartners dot com (hell no I’m not linking to that garbage) and there you can find, of course, links to all their partners, as well as the Resortquest regional sites. The partner sites all have links from their index page or other close to root pages, titled “resortquest partnership” (or something similar) which then leads to page with oodles of links to all the other partners!! Starting to see what I am seeing? It’s just the same Realtor referral network, that the Big G slammed the door on in 2007, but resortQuest never got that memo! Worse yet, they aren’t even trying to stay under the radar, they are promoting it under the guise of a legitimate program - a dragging all of their “partners” down with them.

Ummm and ResortQuest is bragging about them showcasing their SEO efforts at the upcoming VRMA (Vacation Rental Managers Association) conference in Myrtle Beach next month. I am going to be there, just to see if they are as dumb as this program makes them appear to be?

For those of you thinking I am jealous, please check the serps for more major keywords for this site versus ResortQuest, it’s definitely not a post borne our of jealousy. It just angers me when ill informed groups put out this junk and then drag down a bunch of hard working chumps who erroneously think “if ResortQuest says it’ll work, it’ll work.” WRONG.

Better start prepping that Google reinclusion request my friends.

Today I got a call from a call center, which was obviously located in India. It was from AlwaysOnVacation.com. The caller could barely speak English and was offering me a free listing. I bothered him for awhile and then told him I wasn’t interested. I think it does a disservice to a vacation rental listing company to solicit new business using a foreign call center. How did they get my phone number? It doesn’t matter. I think it smells of desperation. They could barely speak English, barely.

Funny thing is, they just called me again, my phone number must have been on the list twice. This time I went ahead and pretended I wanted to add a property for free. The details were that I would get 5 free queries and 10 pictures for my listing. They gave me a url to go and list my property. I should publish the URL, but I don’t want to further publicize this crap. It’s obviously a way to track the effectiveness of the call center.

Once I went the URL, the Indian guy told me he ad to transfer me to his superior. I told him that was great and then I hung up…I was at the URL and had no need to talk to anyone else. Once I entered my info in the form, the listing wasn’t even real-time!! They said they would contact me in 24-48 hours. Boy, this firm doesn’t get it.

Turns out AlwaysOnVacation.com is owned by a company called VacationRenters, LLC. They own several vacation rental properties and appear to own some property management software and an online booking engine. I went to all of the websites and determined from first glance that it’s some sort of failed shell entity. I sent off an email to one of their contacts with some questions on how to add their booking engine properties to my site, but I doubt I’ll ever hear back. The websites have little or no information and appear to be incomplete. Just another vacation rental company that doesn’t get it.

There are so many vacation rental listing companies that have too much overhead. They’ve got people for sales, marketing and development and most of them are overpaid, because a typical US based employee is grossly overpaid for the productivity level they bring to the table. Here at VacationRentalDirect.com we are going to remain mean and lean, utilizing every marketing tool, every outsourced resource we can to keep our overhead low and our prices lower.

It’s the only way to keep developing a great site in a industry that requires many years and lots of work to deliver substantial results to vacation rental owners.