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

Has your Blogger blog ever been wiped out by Blogger? Was it hosted on Blogger server or on your own one? How often was it updated? How much traffic was it getting?

The reason why I am asking these questions is because I’m trying to collect some factual information on Blogger behavior as cancelling blogs has often been the case with Blogger recently. This is the main reason why I started my anti-Blogger campaign in the first place. Blogger thinks it owns our blogs and can do whatever it wants with them, but in the long run our blogs are OUR intellectual property, we put many hours of work into them, and of course we don’t want them cancelled, especially the way Blogger does, without any notification or explanation why. Is Blogger out of server space/bandwidth so badly it cannot afford hosting the most active and popular blogs? If that’s the case that should be their problem, not ours. Let us know in writing you can’t host more than a certain amount and we count on you but host our blogs elsewhere instead.

On the other hand, I am also interested in the information on whether Blogger ever wipes out the old/infrequently updated blogs, and if that’s the case, I’d like to find out how it defines whether a blog is still of importance to its owner or not.

Is it the fate of all blogs to get less updated after a while? I am not talking about B&P blogs, those are just temporary tools, even though very helpful ones. I am talking about blogs that are actually handwritten and maintained more or less regularly. The ones we can even fall in love with (heard this complaint on more than one occasion ) First we post ten times a day, then twice a day, then once a day, then once every two days, then once a week and so on until the poor thing remains completely forgotten about.

However, for those who wonder, I have not given up this blog, I have just been busy lately but going to be posting in my normal mode again in about a week.

I am going to write an article about blog and ping as there are always many questions from newbies on the Syndk6 forums, and this is one for key topics for Black Hat. There exist some misconcepts about it though. I wouldn’t call B&P stricktly BH as it very much depends on the specifics of how it’s done in each particular case. A “whiter” form of manual B&P (or at least I believe it deserves to be looked at as B&P as well) is widely used for promoting 100% WH sites. This is when you post about things related to your mian site that you seek to promote, write articles, provide some sort of analysis, etc., and of course while you’re at it, you drop a link or two to your main site where appropriate.

The “ping” part of blog&ping has nothing “black” about it at all. It is completely legitimate to ping all the blog/RSS related services that are interested to know when your blog is updated. So what’s the differencebetween BH B&P and WH B&P? Some think the key is in automation - which is wrong. Though time consuming and not as productive, BH B&P can also be manual. More about this and other B&P concepts in the upcoming article.

OK this is a bit of plagiarism as I first saw a similar post in this blog. But it’s a thing everybody who ever tracked their traffic can attest to. Weekends traffic sucks… (though exactly on July 4 it was somehow better than other weekends for me… you never know!)

I have noticed my posts regularly show in Technorati’s search results for SEO - a nice little box on top of all search results called “Most Recent 3 Posts tagged seo“. I have already had several visitors come from those search results - that’s how I actually found out about them. Never underestimate the power of categorising!

There has recently been a PageRank update, and I didn’t even know it because of using Firefox most of the time… Read about it on Syndk8 and went to check my sites… My WH sites are doing pretty well, all the (relatively) new pages obtained some decent PR, but the blogs are definitely beyond compare! My oldest blogs (3-4 months old) that had no PR at all before this update suddenyl got a full 5! Including my black hat blogs Sweet sweet, thank you Google

If you ping different blog directories/search engines/RSS directories/search engines when posting in your blog, it’s not necessary to register first with some of them. They’ll just add you into their list when they get your first ping. With others, you do have to register, or else they won’t recognize your ping. Some time I will try to get to making a list of those that do not require registration. (Or does a list like that already exist? If anybody knows of one let me know…)

Statcounter, my tool of choice for tracking site visitors, has been having problems today. Nothing went missing from the stats, no harm to users whatsoever, thank God, which does show it is a very reliable tool, but from time to time I’m having problems with logging in to check my stats… However, I’m not as aggravated as I could be by this incident because when I cannot log in a message from the webmaster, Aodhán Cullen, is displayed, saying he’s sorry for the inconvenience. Of course all it takes is set up a custom error page - but this is still very nice to the visitors. Talk about user experience. Hope the problem is fixed soon, and thank you Aodhán for the great tool I wouldn’t imagine my life without.

Many people just don’t get the full grip of the B&P concept. I decided to make parallels between B&P blogs and other things that may be more familiar to most, especially with WH background.

A B&P blog used for only posting from one site can be compared to the new Google sitemaps only it’s more effective. Besides, there have been reports of BH sites getting banned after using Google sitemaps.

A B&P blog with posts from several sites, in my opinion, can be even better. It can probably be viewed as a version of a linkfarm - only much more naturally looking as most blogs link to many sites.

The article about free Black Hat hosting is now available at Syndk8. What’s funny about it is how it was written. the power went off in the house and I was writing it in a notebook (the paper one!) with a pen by the candlelight! Just think of it. It’s 2005, and it’s about Internet related stuff, and I can hardly remember how to write by hand - and yet it was written like it would have been 100 years ago if only they had Internet back then!