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

I have been looking at a client’s site that had some position losses after June 16 Panda rollout (v4 if I am not mistaken). They only lost positions for one tight group of keywords that one specific page was targeting while everything else remained stable. While checking different guesses, I looked at what I normally check in such cases, among other things - duplicate content suspects. For an exact match of a phrase off that page, I saw 8 results (1 omitted), out of which:

- #1 was a password protected page - so not indexable at the moment, even if it used to be indexable at some point;

- #2-5 were different tag pages off a scraper blog that has stolen the text off the original site  - mind you, the site’s hosting account has since been suspended and so the pages have long been removed from that site -  so no actual content there any more;

- #6 was a social bookmarking site that belongs to the breed of sites that save a copy of each bookmarked site rather than just the title, description and tags (a big pet peeve of mine - if your site’s platform does it why not at least make such saved copies non-indexable to save the site owners the dupe content pain?) - however, Google itself has identified this site as malware and displays a warning when you try to visit this page from their SERPs - one would think that should drop a site’s authority and trust, let alone ability to outrank the original source of the content;

- #7 was yet another social bookmarking site where some genius of a linkbuilder has built a link to a different site but stole the description off my client’s site  - the page was still up and the content on it was alive (this was the omitted result);

-#8 was the actual original page off my client’s site.

So we get Caffeine back in 2009 that is supposed to make indexing of the new and updated content much faster, then we get all the hype about a site’s loading speed and how important it is for rankings, then we get 4 incarnations of Panda that is supposed to better handle content attribution in cases of duplicate content, and then we get this shit in the SERPs? A page loses rankings because of 5 instances of duplicate content that even no longer exist and a malware site not even directly accessible from the SERPs, but - what a brilliant job on Google’s part! - the only actual instance of currently existing duplicate content gets correctly omitted, which still doesn’t help the original page get back its rankings. So much for all Google’s PR (as in, public relations, not pagerank)!

First of all, a disclaimer: I cannot be 100% sure all of the described below is not a coincidence and there wasn’t something else that I didn’t know about that factored in.

Yesterday, Matt Cutts reposted this post by Andrew Bunner, a software engineer from Google:

If you see a person with an obviously fake name, go to their profile and find the “Report Profile” link in the bottom of the left column. Report it as a “Fake Profile”. We want Google+ to be place for real people to connect with other real people.

This was no surprise, given (1) Google’s stance on such profiles and (2) Google’s previous attempts at encouraging users to report what it doesn’t like, be it paid links or anything else. So I commented saying:

So as usual, no algorithmic way to discover what Google doesn’t like but it just encourages users to file spam reports - now in the form of abuse reports on G+

Then I reposted the original post saying:

Google at its best - powered by abuse reports

Next thing I know, I get kicked out of my Google account (including email), get forced to verify it using mobile (never happened before), get back into my email but in Google+ I get a screen saying my account has been suspended for “suspicious activity” and violating their TOS. It gives me a link to submit my account for reconsideration (sounds rather ominous, given the analogy with submitting penalized sites for reconsideration that hardly ever results in anything positive until the 90 days of penalty run out). I click the link, it then tells me my account is being reviewed and in the meantime has “limited functionality” (which means me still getting spammed by all their notifications while not being able to post anything myself).

By this time I get slightly pissed off and post on Twitter:

Man is Google sensitive to criticism! I commented in G+ that they rely on abuse reports rather than algorithm and my account got suspended

Google acts like a 5-year-old
which part of this http://t.co/H9EE1kL do I violate by criticizing Google?

Next morning, my account is back to normal.

So what happened? Has someone at Google got offended by my comments? Have fellow G+ users decided to test the reporting functionality on me? (me using something slightly different than my legal name actually does make me a target, what would have happened if they decided to test it on Matt Cutts instead? would his account get suspended as well?) Has something else happened that I wasn’t aware of, like somebody trying to access my account from somewhere else?

Talking of the review: is this their normal time span for a review of a suspended account? Did my less-than-happy posts on Twitter helped speed it up as Google didn’t want any bad publicity?

I guess we can only get the correct answers to all of the above questions if somebody from Google decides to comment on this post. However, this whole story does make one important point stand out in the discussion about how Google+ is different from any other social networks, namely:

ALL OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKS USE YOUR EMAIL FOR SIGNUP AND NOTIFICATIONS, WHILE GOOGLE+ IS YOUR EMAIL!

If you get your G+ account suspended, you actually get your whole Google account suspended, including access to your email. If your Gmail account is your main email account, and you have years’ worth of data in it, that surely hurts. Oh, but there’s the Data Liberation thing Google now offers, you say, and you can get it all back via backup there - but being suspended you cannot even do that, that’s the whole issue. So Google locks you in, and there’s no way out. So much for Google trying to get us to use our real identity, main mail account and being an authentic persona in its services!

*Off to continue creating a bunch of zombie Buy Viagra G+ accounts*

Much has been written about Facebook’s privacy issues but infact it’s even more exploitable than one may think. Who needs Aweber and double opt-in email lists when you can spam people via Facebook. Here is the simplest scenario that can be modified depending on your own creativity and the end goal pursued:

1. Create an open group on Facebook
2. Invite a bunch of people, desirably such that are your potential customers/have interest in your topic
3. Start posting in that group - all your posts will automatically get delivered in your victims’ email boxes

Why? Because by default, Facebook settings are on for sending you mail whenever anybody:

• Changes the name of one of your groups
• Makes you group admin
• Asks to join a group you admin
• Adds you to a group
• Approves your request to join a group
• Changes the privacy setting of one of your groups

Plus, of course, whenever somebody posts in a group you are part of. Plenty of exposure, if you ask me.

Since the rise of Wordpress as one of the leading platforms building links through free themes has become quite fashionable at some point. The author of the free theme would just place a link to his desired web property in the footer, people would use the theme on their Wordpress sites and along with the theme place the link too. Of course, as with anything free, the author just has to expect that the link remains intact and people do not remove it. Some theme authors went as far as encoding the footer file so as to make removing links from the footer more difficult - but even all the pain of encoding is gamed in three easy steps:
- install the theme with the footer intact
- view the page source (in Firefox it’s even easier - select the bit of footer you need to modify and click “view selection source code”) and copy the bit of code in plain HTML
- go to the theme editor inside the admin area of your Wordpress installation, find the file named footer.php and replace it’s contents with the bit you just copied, then edit it to remove the link.

As you see, the whole process doesn’t even require any advanced coding skills. Hence, anyone can remove a link from the theme footer should they wish to do so. (Same thing happens, by the way, with the typical Wordpess footer footprint identifying Wordpress blogs as such - if the site owner does not want his site found via that footprint, he removes or modifies it.) Whenever - out of gratitude to the theme author or for whatever other reason - the site owner chooses to leave the link in the footer, it can as well be regarded as an editorially approved one.

Found out today that Geoffrey Faivre-Malloy better known in the SEO community as G-Man has passed away Here is the obituary.

G-Man was one of the most advanced people in the industry, capable of digging deep into the technicalities, finding hidden blackhat treasures like not many people are capable of today. He was always experimenting - Google (and maybe not only Google but the whole Internet) was his lab.

He was an active member of SEOChat in the old days when it wasn’t yet as lame as it is now and all the old-schoolers were hanging out there. He was on Threadwatch back before AWall bought it and then killed it. Later on, he posted a series of posts on different blackhat techniques on SEOMoz. He was one of the first moderators of Syndk8. He ran a blog of his own which he didn’t post on very often (at the time he started it he was already fighting the disease that ended up killing him) but every post was much waited for by those who knew of this blog and often contained rare insights - rarely posted in plain English not to out all the secrets but for those in the know they were invaluable. In 2006 he was nominated as Best SEO Black Hat Blogger by Search Engine Journal.

Unfortunately G-Man’s blog is down but here is the web archive of it. Here are some other links to commemorate Geoffrey:

• G-Man’s posts at SEOChat
• G-Man’s profile in Threadwatch
• G-Man’s posts in SEOMoz
• G-Man’s posts in Syndk8
• G-Man’s Twitter

I believe there is also a special place in the hearts of many of us who met him, online and offline, where he will stay always and will be remembered.

RIP G-Man!

I have been doing a few tool reviews on this blog previously. This post can be seen as a sort of a tool review as well - although the main point is in reviewing approaches to marketing the tools rather than the tools themselves. After all, a tool is only worth as much as your creative approach to using it.

Recently, some people have been pitching a certain piece of software called G Sneak. Sure somebody is pitching something every day - but because I was interested in what’s going on in the tools market I thought I’d check it out. Now, their sales page is all hype and gives you no info whatsoever of what it is, or what it does, or what principle it uses. Just the hype. OK I thought, since they mention a moneyback guarantee what do I have to lose - and bought it.

I regretted it immediately. All their system is, is a control panel for a bunch of blogs should you wish to create them, where you enter all your details manually each time you make a blog, plus a few small additions such as a utility for sending the posts over to the blogs and the like. Before you buy they try 50 times to push down your throat bigger plans, or additional software from other vendors, etc. Their member area is loaded with very very basic newbie guides (such as how to buy a domain) and tons of ads of other tools/ebooks/make money online systems. Very lame. I could probably post a trick letting you buy their stuff for $29 instead of $37 but I do not advise buying it at all as it does virtually nothing you wouldn’t be able to do without it. Good thing they sell via Clickbank which facilitates the process of getting a refund.

On the other hand, there is SENuke. Same kind of a long long sales page - but you got everything you would want to see: screenshots, functionality description, videos showing the tool in action… Yet, the page is simple enough for a newbie to understand, too. Does it sell? - you bet it does. Does it deliver? - totally! You know what you will find inside, you know why you want this tool, and you know what to expect from it. Moreover, you even get to download a free trial version. (BTW I can’t wait to see the new version come out)

Again, the effectiveness of any tool depends on how you use it (don’t be a dumb spammer, in other words). But generally, a tool claiming to cover all the ins and outs of your online money making process should (1) have a sales page explaining how it is going to do that and (2) probably cost a bit more than $20-30 one-time fee.

Disclaimer: this post has no affiliate links although it probably should.

It feels like walking a domain cemetery these days…

Remember Pownce?

It was acquired in December 2008 and everybody using it was advised to switch to Vox - a free blogging service and community owned by Six Apart as well. Fast forward some 20 months, and we hear the news of Vox closing down:

How many of you rely on Vox for links? It wasn’t a very bad source… If you were relying on it too heavily expect heavy drops once it dies and all the links on it die as well. Now, I wonder, if I could only purchase these domains… But I doubt Six Apart will let the domains go very fast:

Registrant:
Six Apart Ltd.
548 4th St
San Francisco, CA 94107
US

+1.4153440056

Domain Name: POWNCE.COM

Domain Name Servers:
NS2.SIXAPART.COM
NS1.SIXAPART.COM
NS3.SIXAPART.COM

Transfer-Lock Status: ENABLED

Created:     June 16, 2007
Modified:     January 21, 2009
Expires:     June 15, 2011

(Date to note: June 15, 2011)

Registrant:
Six Apart Ltd.
548 4th St
San Francisco, CA 94107
US

+1.4153440056

Domain Name: VOX.COM

Domain Name Servers:
NS2.SIXAPART.COM
NS1.SIXAPART.COM
NS3.SIXAPART.COM

Transfer-Lock Status: ENABLED

Created:     September 30, 1994
Modified:     September 19, 2007
Expires:     September 28, 2011

(Date to note - September 28, 2011. Again 2011! OK I guess we’ll see soon…)

Pretty neat way to monetize user created content - although I won’t get into how risky this can be for the AdSense ID owner, or how this is against the AdSense TOS (of which I am not even quite sure - been a while since I last seen it):

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.