Irishwonder’s Black Hat SEO Blog A blog about blackhat, general SEO issues and other things related to the life on the web

LinkedIn is gay.

Let me repeat this - LinkedIn is gay (and I’m not the only one thinking so).
Not an accurate representation of me my ass!

Of course there’s nothing as good for a blackhat as a nice deal on bulk domain names - what can be better is a chance to grab a few domains for free (remember .be?) But if you own tons of domain names there comes a time when you can discover a huuuge invoice in your email box - when those free domains turn 1 year old and the registrar expects you to renew them. What’s even worse is if your credit card gets charged and only then do you discover this has happened!

For those of you who have benefitted from free .biz domains at 1&1 last year, here is a quick reminder: this is that time of the year, don’t forget to cancel all those used and banned or maybe even unused and forgotten about .biz domain names

They say SEOs have no personal life whatsoever, and also rumors have it that SEOs are quite wealthy guys. Is it any surprise then that some mail order brides/cam girls decided to target this audience as directly as possible?

Got an email notification from SEOMoz today about a PM sent to me by someone in there. I don’t visit SEOMoz often these days so it was kinda surprising that somebody chose to contact me through its PM system. I went to check what it was all about and here’s what I’ve seen:

Nice marketing move, I’d say! Luckily for Rand, his PM system has a “Report spam” button.

(Warning: rant below)

I happened to check my old site that I had set up a long time ago and pretty much forgot about it and found something really unpleasant. The site included multiple affiliate offer ads from all kinds of sources, including a few minor affiliate networks. For the record: these networks still exist.

When I saw my site it had no ads in some cases and ads replaced by other, often unrelated ads in the best case or even redirects to some stupid parked domains in the worst case.  It really pissed me off and reminded me once more that if you want to keep control of your ads/images/whatever, better host them on your own server instead of hotlinking them from elsewhere. This is seriously an issue for affiliate programs and networks since very often they just give their affiliates a bit of code to insert into their sites which contains the link with their aff code and the image of the ad itself. Sometimes when I was lazy I was just pasting that code into my pages as well. Not any  more!

But it’s not even this that pisses me off most of all. It’s the affiliate networks that list offers, provide ads images for them hosted on their server, have people put the code on their pages then at some point, even without discontinuing the offer, rehost the images or just remove them - WTF??? It’s one thing when I as affiliate put up sites, spam them till they’re banned, then replace them with new sites. I am a blackhat - I am kinda supposed to operate based on the short term tactics. But what kind of a fucked up tactic is this for an affiliate network? You get people advertising your offers - and you disrupt their efforts with your own hands? And what does it look like to the merchants counting on you for affiliate traffic? Not only do you fail to make money yourself as an affiliate network (unless you charge upfront and it’s non-refundable), you also do not let anyone in this scheme make money.

Unless you do it on purpose. You know, bait and switch kind of thing. Still, starting and promoting a whole affiliate network is kinda too expensive of an endeavor just for bait and switch - can be done much faster and cheaper and without the cost of losing all the merchants and affiliates. So, I guess, in this case it’s plain lame. Makes one want to stop working with you immediately.

Let me go change those lame ads to something more reliable now.

Something really really evil and powerful that will change the face of the Internet is going to be out soon - it’s called SEO Link Pro and it’s a tool that is going to be released by Syndk8.

This tool will change the way people build links. From what I hear from Earl Grey, the efforts put into the development of this tool are larger than probably any blackhat tool released before.

If you haven’t seen the ad video for it yet here it is.  SEO Link Pro

Once it is released I will be doing a full review and sharing my impressions so watch this spot.

Overall, I have nothing against GoDaddy. It’s a convenient registrar with handy domain search finctions, bulk registration and almost everything else a black hat could dream of. Sure its site’s a bit bloated and takes forever to load - but other than that, generally I’ve been pretty happy with them.

If not for one thing - auto-renewals. Sure thing, if you have a ton of domains you intend to keep it’s nice not to have to worry about renewing them - but what if you want to drop some of your domains? Seems like by default, they now add auto-renewal to all the domains you buy with them. I wasn’t really aware of this until recently I decided not to renew a bunch of domains. I renewed the ones I wanted, just left without attention all the rest and left it at that. All of a sudden, on the expiration date I receive a message from GoDaddy that my card has been charged the cost of all those domains renewed for a year! If it was one or two domains I probably wouldn’t have cared much and just said ok, but there was a bunch of them and quite a lump sum of money - so I contacted their support and told them I didn’t want those domains and asked for a refund.

I must say that despite the fact that GoDaddy has no live chat with their support, they are pretty fast answering any email inquiries they get. They replied explaining what I should do and how to remove the auto- renewal option off my domains if I do not want them auto-renewed in the future. Since the procedure is slightly less than obvious here are the instructions for those of you who have domains at GoDaddy:

- Log into your account and click the “My Renewals and Upgrades” item in the side menu

- Select “Payments and Renewing Items” in the submenu

- You will see a list of all your domains with indications whether the auto-renewal for each of them is “On” or “Off” in the “Auto” column of the list

- Select the checkboxes for the domains you want to cancel the auto-renewal for and click the “Auto Renew” button at the top of the list (what sucks, tho, is that if you have more than 20 domains you will have to do it for as many times as there are pages of the list of your domains, with 20 domains per page only)

- You will see a form on the right of your page offering different options for renewals - select what you need, click Save and you’re done.

If anybody finds a way to do it in bulk please let me know - I haven’t found any options for bulk domain management.

I’ve had a lot of fun recently reading this post by Michael Gray a.k.a. Graywolf - to be honest I always enjoy his rants, whatever they are about. Whatever it is he’s writing about, you know he really means it and some stuff he comes up with is totally hilarious.

Anyways back to Digg. If you’ve been living under a rock, I’ll have you know that it has killed off all external links recently and when you click the link from the submitted post to a site you get taken to a framed page that has the infamous Digg toolbar on top and the target site’s content below it. In the code of the page it looks like this:

<iframe id="diggiFrame" name="diggiFrame" noresize="noresize"
 src="http://www.your-target-site.com" frameborder="0"></iframe>

Well so, that’s your XSS done backwards - pretty much. Not you hacking into an authority site but the authority site hijacking your content. Michael goes on to suggest it can be still used as parasite hosting - but TBH, I’ve yet to see a single one of those Digg short url pages indexed or better yet ranking in Google. The submission pages at Digg do get indexed as well as ever before - but the short URLs are kinda hmm… I have checked the submission page code to see what causes it and found this:

<a href="http://www.your-target-site.com" class="offsite
ct-lifestyle" rel="dc:source,[your short URL]" property="dc:title" 
target="_blank" onclick="gotoLink('12021587');">Your Submission
Title</a>

The link to the actual submitted site page is cloaked - only hoomins get there but not the Googlebot. Of course this effectively prevents Google from indexing the short URL - without Digg being too explicit about it, like stating it in its (terribly formatted) robots file or inserting stupid nofollows nobody really cares about etc.

But Graywolf, being Graywolf, as skilled as he is in all the darker-than-white arts and exploits, couldn’t have failed to notice this bit. I see people accusing him of shite in that post’s comments - but I believe he has a reason to post what he has posted. I do honestly thing Michael has a plot to get Digg banned - and here’s the bit that proves it, his list of steps to follow to “abuse” it:

• Set yourself up with a nice spammy lander page and submit it to digg, like this (http://digg.com/d1kRNK)
• It doesn’t matter if it get voted, up, down, sideways, or even gets buried
• Go get yourself some links, beg, borrow, steal, do whatever it takes
• Buy links, lots of links, quality is irrelevant, you want massive quantities (you do know that paid crappy links work differently when pointed at trusted sites right?).
• Sit back and wait for rankings to come, and collect your affiliate checks

(The italicising is mine to draw your attention to these points.)

A site linking to spammy pages / bad neighborhood? A site with purchased links, especially such that look like they have a “stab me I’m a paid link” sign on their back? All of the above done en masse? If this does not look like a recipe to get Digg banned by Google then I don’t know what does. (Sorry Michael if you intended to keep this secret plot secret, it was just too hilarious for me not to post about it).

But we also know that Graywolf is known for critisizing Google, right? I don’t know any questionable innovation from Google that he has not posted about and exposed its evil nature. So, I also believe that he is feeding Google its own poison: you like authority sites? you don’t like paid links? Eat your own sh#t then!

Hilarious beyond measure.

OK not explaining here in detail why you would want to do it - those smart enough will know themselves and the rest prolly don’t even need it.

There is a way to share the posts / updates of feeds you are subscribed to in Google reader without actually aving to click “Share” on each item you wnat to share. By default, your Shared items in Google reader are public - either open to everyone or just your friends, depeding on how you set it up. But to place an item into your shared items feed, you need to mrk it as shared manually. Now, what if you want a whole certain feed public by default?

First, you need to create a folder for the feeds you want shared. Then, go to your Google Reader settings, select the “Folders and Tags” tab, select you special folder and in the “Change sharing” dropdown select “Public”. That’s it, you’re done!

Now, use it wisely - don’t kill it for everyone.

Wikipedia results in otherwise commercial SERPs have become so commonplace that they cannot surprise anybody anymore. Infact the exchanges like, “Where does your site rank?” - “At #2 but the first one is Wikipedia so not much luck getting any higher” - have become quite typical as well. But somehow, I sense this is not the worst…

Google has been playing with YouTube. First they let you add transcripts to your videos and translate them - and now this. So, is the next step Google indexing these bits and pieces linked *technically* to distinctively different URLs and rank them for all kinds of queries? Hmm hmm hmm…

Folks, I must confess of something. I, too, have gone that way and released an ebook. Now my name can be slandered along with the names of all the ebook writing gurus. My only excuse is my ebook does not contain any bullshit like most gurus’.

I know many of my readers have whitehat projects so this ebook will be handy for promoting them nicely. (Time for my favorite 3-year-old SugarRae quote about blackhats whitehatting their ass off!) No need to think linkbuilding through directory submissions is the thing of the past - you just need to know a few tricks and it still works, even better than ever. The ebook comes with a nice list of bonuses, including a 4,000-strong directory list which actually contains live directories and the pagerank of those directories is current, for a change.  Moreover, I will keep updating it at least after every pagerank update. Another bonus those getting the ebook will be receiving very soon is a desktop tool for automating some of the keyword competitiveness research tasks that I am building right now - all for free.

Now head over to the Directory Marketing Reborn ebook site and see for yourself what it’s all about. Fantomaster has already recommended it.