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

There’s a post on Inside Google about Google not responding to spam reports by users, and folks there are wondering why Google doesn’t take any action if it doesn’t even require his efforts to find that spam, only react to users’ reports. Surprising indeed, from a white hat point of view, especially considering Matt Cutts’ recent post-update requests to report spam users see. But, on the other hand, I wonder if any of the white hat folks have thought of: 1) how many of these reports Google actually gets; 2) how many of these reports can be fake - just to keep Google busy in order for it never to get to actual spam and finally 3) how effective this way can be in paralysing Google?

Went to do some search on google and what do I see but this message:

We’re sorry…

… but we can’t process your request right now. A computer virus or spyware application is sending us automated requests, and it appears that your computer or network has been infected.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your computer is free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.
To continue searching, please type the characters you see below:

- and there goes a CAPTCHA….

Last time I’ve seen something similar to this was during a July update this year - but there was no captcha there, just the message that they can’t help me. Wonder what it all means this time?

I still see people coming here from Netvibes. Like I said, Netvibes feature Google search and Yahoo search and Icerocket search on their home page - but when you do the actual search it takes you to the search results page of the engine you’ve used - hence if people came through searches I’d see Google or Yahoo or Icerocket as referrals. Instead, I see Netvibes home page.

Netvibes is built the way that no matter on what page inside the site you are it still shows netvibes.com in the address bar. My blog hasn’t been added by the owners to the featured blogs on their home page. This can only mean one thing. People using it have added my blog to their home pages! Which is of course a good sign…

Every good little white hat/do-gooder is now obscessed with catching bad sploggers. There is a number of sites set up to report/collect data about spam blogs. Especially funny are those providing “lists” of recently caught/reported splogs. Here’s one at http://www.splogspot.com - I took a look at their “recently updated splogs” list and couldn’t help laughing. Either they are suffering from a very bad case of paranoia or they have fallen victim to automated reporting in order to undermine their “heroic” efforts - but what’s wrong, for example, with this innocent girl’s blog that it appeared on their list? And this is just a randomly clicked link… I believe there are many more like that one.

Guys, if you can’t handle splogs coming out in bulk at the speed of sound don’t pretend to be so smart and powerful - just recognize your wrong and look for a better way… meanwhile we the blackhats will look for more ways to make the puzzle more difficult for you

A few days ago, I did a post about Netvibes suggesting that submitting RSS feeds for your sites to it is only good for personal use but doesn’t do you any good in terms of SEO/promoting your site. My logs seem to prove the opposite though.

I created me a homepage on their site and added this blog’s feed - but there was no other way to add any of my links there and as it’s not a blog there’s no trackback ping - now I see people coming to this blog with Netvibes as a referral! hmm…

Does that mean the data I enter into my customized home page can still affect the rest of the site visitors? Or was it just the owner checking on who’s adding what? (How does that relate to my privacy then? hmm…)

As reported by almost everyone out there writing about Google or/and SEO, Google has dropped MSN’s PR to 2. That’s exactly what you will see in your Googlebar when you type in “www.msn.com”. As Matt Cutts explained in this comment on Threadwatch,

We’re showing the main PR on msn.com, not www.msn.com. If you check http://msn.com, it’s PR8

There are different speculations across the SEO forums as to why this is happening. most tend to suspect Google’s dislike for 301/302 redirects, which might be the case with www.msn.com/msn.com.

I came across Netvibes and got curious to look at what it is and what it can be used for. First of all, it should be noted that this thing has a PR of 7, with 7,060 baclinks reported by Google. This alone makes it a desirable place to drop your links/rss feeds at - but judging by the number of pages indexed by Google, clearly the personalized pages cannot be indexed - which makes sense of course, otherwise I’d be concerned about ym privacy. As for the features Netvibes personalized page provides, they include RSS feeds (you can add your own ones), web search in Google, Yahoo, Icerocket and Wikipedia, weather casts, an option to check your Gmail inbox (or even several Gmail boxes if need be), Bookmarks and some other stuff. I haven’t noticed anything suggesting any information exchange between the users of this system, or any other public means of use of the information submitted by each individual user through his personalized page - which makes it a nice and convenient (and probably pretty secure and private) way to handle your personal stuff - but renders it totally useless for any SEO/black hat purposes…

As of now, Syndk8 has preserved its noble PR of 6, this blog reached 4, so is Earl’s blog. As a sidenote - Matt Cutts’ blog that has been my “indicator” of a sort as to whether the PR update is happening yet has achieved an incredible 7!

at the time of this writing, Google Page Rank update seems to be happening. It is too nerve wrecking to watch PRs of your sites now as they jump up and down on that toolbar every now and then - but in a while I guess we’ll see the new pageranks!