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

The addition of Trending to the sidebar of Twitter didn’t happen yesterday and may have been a good idea - but it surely gives spammers an inspiration. In case you don’t know how different terms appear in those trends, they are whatever people tweet the most about. Some most popular trends will have as many as 200+ tweets per minute. The idea behind them is to let you see right away what are the hot topics.

Some will post their spam and add those keywords currently showing in the trends. Why do they do it? Not only will their tweets (potentially) appear in the Twitter search results for those trends (which is what you get when clicking one of the trending topics in the sidebar), but due to Google’s new interface and its love for frequently updated content (better yet, real time updates), these tweets will appear in Google as well, resulting in the below picture:

The problem with this implementation is that, if a trend is really popular, the post will get pushed down very fast. So the spammer is forced to keep posting, watching the new appearing rends and spamming them one after another. As a result, t gets noticed by many people as irrelevant spam affecting many trending topics and eventually quite a high number of people will report the spammer’s account for spam. Hence, the accounts are short-lived and once they are blocked for spam all previous posts will disappear.

Is there a way to do it better? Actually, yes. First of all, there is no point in chasing the trends. Secondly, if you want to benefit from Twitter and/or Google’s real-time SERPs, you need to imitate a real user as much as possible instead of brute forcing the SERPs.

The kids with the comment spamming scripts can’t stop surprising me. Barely had Facebook introduced its “Like” button, they already make references to it. Here is a comment I got in my moderation queue:

I got to this page through Facebook (a friend of mine posted it). After reading it, I of course clicked “Like” then shared it.

Except, this on a site WITHOUT any “Like” button

Maile Ohye of Google has posted on her personal blog about the infamous hidden text tricks, saying that

If possible, it’s still best to avoid techniques such as “text-indent:-9999px” or “margin:-4000px” or “left:-2000em”

Well of course Google doesn’t like it, but I keep seeing quite a lot of these like it’s still 2001. I bet you all have seen them too or maybe even use them still (do you? shame on you, grow up and be more creative!). This is not big news really, what follows in her post is interesting tho. She talks about ways to alternately hide whatever needs to stay off the visible page for legitimate reasons, and the suggestions she lists are @media speech { } vs @media screen { } and the HTML 5 hidden=”" attribute. Not really sure about the hidden attribute, but I believe I have seen already the “media” trick used for a bit less than legitimate reasons - how long till Google starts hunting for those as signs of spam instead of recommending them?

What are Viagra SERPs?

Viagra SERPs are the most compeititive search engine results frequently changing with many websites fiercely competing for the top spots. The most advanced and aggressive techniques are used by website owners to rank in the top 10 search results in Google for queries like “Viagra”, “Buy Viagra” and the like. Viagra SERPs are the ones to watch closely for everyone who wants to learn about what works currently or will work in SEO

For the sake of academic value to fellow SEOs (blackhat and those just interested in learning more about SEO that works) I created a Google Square about Viagra SERPs.

I thought I’d check how Google’s new interface affects the buy viagra serps and did a post to cover them on my other blog. Have a look as there are a few interesting opportunities there for those who can see them.

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.