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

Recently, I got approached by SEOQuake developers (of SEODigger fame) who let me know about their new tool called AdsSpy. AdsSpy is a tool that does the opposite of SpyFu - if SpyFu lets you see “inside” AdWords and who bids on what keywords, AdsSpy lets you see what sites belong to the same owner based on their AdSense pub id, Yahoo partner id and so on.

Besides AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network, AdsSpy also handles smaller advertising networks such as Chitika, AdBrite, Kontera, Amazon and IntelliTXT. The source of information for AdsSpy is the SeoDigger database of sites. As of today, that is 338 835 unique advertiser IDs. Not much compared to the overall number of sites using different ways of monetisation through displaying ads, but it’s growing, just as fast as the user base of SEODigger (for those unfamiliar with it, it’s a tool that lets you see what keywords a site ranks for, based on the keywords appearing on the site itself).

What are the possible uses of this tool? Well, when I had my first look at it, I thanked God it’s not 2005 any more when most people’s main source of income was AdSense. Back in the days when blackhat MFA networks consisted of thousands of sites, this tool could have been a threat to a lot of them. However, nowadays that a lot of people have switched to affiliate networks and learned to mask their affiliate IDs, this is not that scary any more.

AdsSpy basically fills the niche that was empty so far, with people wondering how to search for bits of JavaScript code (which is how advertisers’ IDs are mostly implemented in the pages displaying ads) - something that traditional Google search is not capable of, despite Google’s long proven ability to index JavaScript. I see how this tool can benefit AdWords publishers using Google’s publisher network first of all. The developers suggest also such uses as researching ad placement and identifying site owners.

While playing with the tool, I tried looking up the O’Reilly network and found out that they use AdSense on at least 12 domains and 2 subdomains and Yahoo ads on at least 5 domains that AdsSpy knows about (the tool displays the complete list of all sites). Too bad the tool doesn’t show you the size of income the site owner gets from these ads - would have been interesting to see how AdSense treats its premium publishers these days (O’Reilly is one, isn’t it?)

You may remember a post I did about tramadol for dogs and spam associated with it a while ago. Well so, recently I noticed in my stats that I am getting referrals from Google searches for related terms, e.g. this one. I checked and well, it appears that out of over 23,000 results in Google.co.uk I rank #5… Do you think I should start selling tramadol in special packages for dogs exclusively on here yet?

As for other stuff people are trying to sell in these SERPs, one has striken me as particularly funny:

Click here to GET tramadol dogs side effects. Save your $$$. FREE delivery: tramadol dogs side effects.

Ah, the clueless newbie scraper builders! I am still of the opinion that no matter how large my keyword lists are, I need to have at least a quick look at them before I run them through the site generating software (that is, if I don’t have a nice intelligent filter to do that ) - or else, this is what you get.

On the second thought, Google could build a list of such meaningless keywords and hammer down scrapers using these patterns - that is, if they are not doing it yet.

Talking of keywords, watch this space (which is my other, whitehat blog if you are not familiar with it yet) for a nice long keyword research article that I am going to post there soon.

The news has reached me that Bompa, a.k.a. the newbie babysitter of Syndk8, has started a Blackhat SEO Bootcamp - basically, a standalone version of his newbie babysitting at Syndk8.

Who is it good for? Clearly, newbies. Those same newbies who come to syndk8 without knowing the first thing about SEO in general, let alone blackhat, and start by pissing people off and getting themselves under attacks for asking newbie questions. Bompa solves this problem by giving them an option to get their answers elsewhere without being ridiculed. Moreover, he gives them some basic tools good enough to get them started and get the feel of making money online as blackhats - basically, empowers them to make a step from a blackhat wannabe to a real fully-functional blackhat.

Do I recommend it? Absolutely. Knowing Bompa for all this time, I know he doesn’t promice anything he cannot deliver, and I know how experienced and, even more importantly for this case, patient he is. However, he only lets in 25 people at this time so don’t blame me if all seats are taken by the time you get there.

Last night I have been researching something and came across some weird stuff in Google. A lot has been said already about Google updating the SERPs more often for the more competitive markets (e.g. “buy viagra” and such) but I saw the proof of the opposite: the less popular a query is (=the less competitive a market is) the less Google will care about spending their resources on keeping its SERPs up to date.

I was searching for something quite obscure which I am not going to mention here directly but suffice to say it only returned about 500 results. The query contained a bit of text in quotes, inurl: , -site: and such shit. Not something you would normally compete to rank for consciously. Well approximately the first 25 results were ok but then the interesting bit started coming up. Almost every result I would click would take me to a parked page with nothing but your regular parked ads on it and no hint why it could be even coming up for that search query. It was late and I was tired and it just pissed me off so I said feck it and went to sleep but didn’t forget it. I decided to research it deeper today as my perverse blackhat mind suspected things like cloaking and the like.

Well, armed with my tools I checked that query again today and in Google cache of the SERPs in question there was the bit getting them to rank for the query. But Google cache was anywhere from a week to a month old for each one of those sites. Each one of these sites was not expired but parked - and by checking the domains in Domaintools I found out that these domains had their nameservers changed and got parked in the last couple days - i.e., after Google has last cached them.

As a result, a site may not be relevant to a query for a while but still ranking for it. The reverse Viagra law of Google!

You know why I used to love Quantcast, among other reasons? Quantcast.com is a PR 6 authority domain, not very old (registered in 2005) but it gained popularity fast and has 1,480,000 pages indexed in Google. Until recently, you could query any domain and it would create a page for it - and guess what, that page would rank in Google and give you a direct link from this nice PR 6 authority domain. Heck you could even write a script that would query a bunch of your spam domains and create you those pages and consequently, links on autopilot! Parasite hosting web 2.0 style, so to say.

Not any more! Quantcast has not only disabled creation of pages like http://www.quantcast.com/profile/yourspamsite.com, seems like it has also removed all pages that were already created that way. Moreover, Quantcast has added these little lines in its robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /traffic-compare

- and that’s where links from places like Statsaholic used to point at.

What’s left of this authority monster that’s still usable? Well, Quantcast is pushing its users to register, it tries to make the most of its traffic to build up its user base. Smart step, as for me, and they achieve two goals: they recruit their users who register accounts AND eliminate the spam issue. Hence, if you own a whitehat site, go ahead and register an account, Quantify your site and get a nice fat link. If not, forget about Quantcast - it’s not a blackhat haven any more.

Last week, everybody was discussing Google’s leaked AdWords score values. I guess enough guesses were voiced already about what those values might mean so I wouldn’t bother posting about it if not for one thing. I believe one more question that needs to be asked is WHY these values leaked.

Here are the two scenarios and it’s up to you to decide which one is more likely, if any:

1. Google is tweaking something - why else would their programmers touch this bit of code and leave these parameters slip into the open? As in, forgetting to comment it out or something.

2. Google is playing some PR game - as in, public relations, not PageRank. Google lets the scores leak to show something to all the SEOs out there, threaten them, keep them busy discussing it, or something.

Sure thing Google employees are human like all of us and Google is not immune to leaking these scores accidentally - but do you believe this was accidental or is there an agenda behind it?

… but I’ve been seeing discrepancies between different tools and toolbar PR on multiple sites - could it be an update?

You think I’m mad? Lately I have seen so many weird things in google.co.uk that are way too different from google.com that it would lead one to believe these are two separate search engines!

1. Why else would google.co.uk show ads for searches for something like http://www.somedomain.com/somepage.html? Especially since they are ads for the same somedomain.com? Sure UK googlers are greedier than their google.com counterparts and they are trying to squeeze every penny out of the poor advertiser!

2. Why else would a search on google.co.uk for a bit of page content in quotes (=exact match) result in two results: “Nothing found for your search in quotes but here is a result for your search but without quotes”?

Anybody else seen any more inconsistencies between these two different Googles?

Clearly not linking to this mess but for the sake of a live example:

www.musicstaff.com/links.asp

On the surface, it’s a legitimate decently looking 1997 site with a legitimate business model. But if you look at their links page… sketchy is not even descriptive enough of a word. There’s everything there from discounted adjustable beds to ringtones to car rentals to levitra and viagra… A total of 2025 outgoing external links of mostly this kind off that page. What does it all have to do with music? Moreover, how many of those sites are banned already or will be banned in the next few weeks? Repeat after me: want to ban your site - link to banned sites and bad neighbourhoods. Kindergarten SEO.

Now, don’t get me wrong as I don’t mean to discriminate against anyone, we live in the times of global economy, but let’s face it: overwhelming majority of Indian, Chinese, Philipino and Pakistani link builders that invade the freelance sites these days are horribly unskilled. Outsource your link building to them, and you don’t even need to worry about unscrupulous competitors doing negative SEO - you will get your site banned with your own hands - or to be exact, with the hands of those “linkbuilders”. Sure, in case of the above mentioned site it won’t happen very fast - at least the top 1,000 backlinks out of the 3,000 + of musicstaff.com are really high quality - whoever was handling their linkbuilding prior to this outsourcing hell did a good job, with a bunch of authority sites in the mix. But over the last few years since outsourcing link building has become widespread we’ve heard of many others, big and small, who have run into all sorts of troubles, from site bans to reputation issues - all due to poorly done outsourced link building. Sure, not every company can afford an online marketing budget that would allow hiring some of the industry’s best specialists - but if your business depends on your site’s rankings you better think twice before deciding to outsource it to a third world link builder (this is not to say that all US and UK based SEOs are equally good - but you get the idea).

Hence, here are a few tips for those considering SEO outsourcing. Before you decide to go for it, ask the candidates you plan on hiring as outsourced workforce at least the following questions:

• what are the examples of your previous link building work?
• how did it affect the positions and reputation of the sites it was done for? (e.g. what positions did the site have before the campaign started and how did they change as a result of it)?
• what are the principles you use for building links?
• who exactly will do the actual link bulding and what experience and skills do they possess?
• who will overview the quality of built links and am I paying for the sheer volume or for the quality of built links?

There is no guarantee of course that you will get honest answers to your questions but at least they will know it might not be a good idea to mess with you, and depending on the answers they do give you you will also know if they are any good or if they are simply bullshitting you and scamming you out of your money, however lesser the costs are.

If you have been looking for blackhat tools now is a good time to shop for some of the best tools available in this industry. I have negotiated a special discount for my blog readers with nobody other than the great Fantomaster, the maker of the best cloaking tools out there. Generally speaking, for those who might not be aware of it he has a lot of tools but he is most famous for his cloaking technolodies.

Cloaking, strictly speaking, is not a 100% blackhat technology. There are many totally legitimate reasons why people cloak their sites. Add IP delivery into the mix and you get a great technology allowing you to target your site visitors better, depending, for example, on their location. But cloaking or IP delivery done incorrectly can do a lot of harm.

The key to successful use of cloaking technologies is the correct information. Fantomaster surely has it - their spiderSpy™ botBase is updated every 6 hours - can you imagine the resources and server capacities it would take YOU to match their base?

So here’s the deal: surely Fantomaster’s tools are expensive, but all you have to do is enter this exclusive promo code:

2008IW102903

- in the “promo code” field on the purchase form and you will get a 10% discount on any tools on their site.

Go get it while the offer lasts and see how it will save you a lot of headache.