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

As we all know, this can be tricky. Only Google knows which one of your backlinks have been indexed by Google - but luckily there are ways to trick it into showing you a bit more than it would like to.

The traditional link: search reveals the least information. Infact, it reveals so little that many consider it almost useless and use Yahoo linkdomain: search in order to see who links to a site. The good thing about the link: search in Google is that it gives you an idea as to what links Google considers important enough for a site to display them. Note that it doesn’t necessarily mean Google thinks they are all good valuable links - a lot of those can be links from scaper sites and the like.

Many people stop at that thinking this is all the information they can get out of Google until it decides to release some more backlinks it knows about. But wait, there is a way to find it out sooner. I guess you’ve heard about Google Alerts. You might even know that Google Alerts are every SEO’s best friends. Use them smartly and you will get bits and pieces that you’d miss other wise. Set an alert with your site’s URL, set it up to be sent to you in HTML format and as it happens and you get every mention of your URL Google finds right into your mailbox as soon as it finds it. However, keep in mind that not all of these alerts will be for live links pointing at your site - due to the nature of Google Alerts, it’s impossible to set them up to distinguish between live links and your URL simply mentioned as plain text so it still takes a manual check to know for sure. Moreover, sometimes you will see a page that has changed since Google last indexed it and there will be no more link to your site on it anymore - and sometimes Google even goes so far as to sending you alerts when it finds a paid ad on a page in case you’re using PPC programs (e.g. Overture) - looks like it hasn’t been trained to distinguish between regular content and ads if those ads are not AdSense. But despite all the drawbacks of this technique, you’ll be amazed at how much additional information it will show you that Google did not really intend to let you know

If the above technique can work for any site you want to analyse, what I’m going to describe next will only work if you really know a lot about the site in question. If you know the exact pages where the links to the site should be, you can search Google for those particular pages to see if they have been indexed.

This is all of course very time consuming but there are ways to automate this process (should anybody come up with any kind of a solution for this I’d be happy to review it ).

I have been asking myself whether a page indexed by Google that contans a link to another page means that link has been indexed as well, right away when the page has been indexed, or if those links are only links that Google can potentially become aware of in some time and honestly, I can’t answer this. If anybody has any theories regarding indexing links by Google that they’d like to share I welcome your comments.

I haven’t been to SEOChat since the mass exodus happened after the owners places “nofollow” on all the signature links. (For those unaware, this whole story is not so much about rel=”nofollow” on the links that are hard enough to earn anyway - you need to be registered for at least 3 months and make at least 100 posts to be able to have a sig - as it is about the owners turning into dictators - see it all covered in detail on Randfish’s blog). Well, today while checking my stats I noticed someone coming to my blog from there - I am still a registered member and haven’t removed my signature or done anything else destructive there. Out of curiosity I followed the backlink and lo and behold - the darbed rel=”nofollow” is taken off the links in the signatures… Something tells me though it wouldn’t make people return in masses…

AN UPDATE: As far as I know (and this has been proved once again just this very minute), despite the previous attempt of the forum owners to stop the forum from falling apart by un-banning the banned users, people are still getting banned at every whim of the admin, and changes are still made without any discussion with the community. Oh well…

There has been a lot of talk on Threadwatch whether Google Analytics is to be considered evil and most people said it should be - here is some factual proof it is!

If you have dug into Analytics beyond just adding the short snippet of code to your Web pages, you may know that you can use the urchinTracker() javascript function to create “virtual pages” that don’t actually exist. This is handy when you are tracking multiple “steps” of a process with the same URI.

As an example, if your shopping cart requires 4 steps — from sign up to payment — and this entire process is all done on the same physical page using a series of posts (ie. cart.php), you can dynamically output “urchinTracker(’step1.html’)” to “urchinTracker(’step4.html’)” rather than simply “urchinTracker()”. Most log file analyzers will see 4 requests to cart.php, whereas Analytics will record hits for step1.html through step4.html.

This by itself doesn’t prove anything, but when you consider that my awstats sees GoogleBot added a few extra pages to their crawl list, it becomes clear. GoogleBot is now crawling step1.html, step2.html, step3.html and step4.html even though they do not exist! The only way Google could know about these pages is if they use data gathered from my urchinTracker(”step#.html”) code!

Lovely… I wasn’t very eager to use it in the first place, now I know I won’t use it for sure as long as I’m in my right mind. For smallish sites with moderate traffic, Statcounter is more than enough. Meanwhile, people are coming out with ways to block Google Analytics cookies.

Comment spam automation tools definitely need more logic to run more effectively (or some brains in the heads of those using them). Firing them off to just post anywhere that seems to be supporting posting just doesn’t cut it. For example, trying to comment spam this blog will only be a waste of your time and consequently a waste of my time when I delete your comment spam. You won’t get any mercy here just because you are a fellow blackhat, especially if your intellectual abilities are so much below average thast you are trying to comment spam me. Every eejit can understand that if I am familiar with different black hat techniques I will also make efforts not to fall victim to those using them against me (makes sense doesn’t it?) Your comment spam just won’t make it through and will only remain a wasted effort on your part.

Attention comment spam scripts authors, from now on make it an industry standard to filter my blog out of your list of collected URLs if ti appears there by any chance. Heck, it can be even used as a marketing bonus if you sell your script to other people. Here’s even your free weekend marketing tip: on your site where you sell the script, put a banner saying “Our script does not attempt to comment spam IrishWonder’s blog! Spamming a Syndk8 mod is useless!”

Good luck, get coding now! the best script out there might end up getting reviewed by me here

Just checked my stats and noticed people coming over from searches for Google Base. Now, considering the recent news about the porn content there, I wonder what is the real reason people are looking for Google Base?

Brings a whole new dimension to Internet search/SEO, eh?

I have been reading a good deal of other people’s blogs recently, and there are some blogs I tend to read regularly. Not all of them are necessarily Blackhat, many are just general SEO. In the meantime, I’ve been watching what those other people do with their blogs. I guess it’s time for me to make up a little collection of links to those blogs somewhere, not only as a recognition of my appreciation and interest but even for my own convenience - sometimes when using a computer other than my own and not having my bookmarks within reach it is quite a task to remember all the places to go to. Now, I’ve been wondering how I should go about it. Obviously, all the blogs that I read do it either by making a Blogroll of links in the sidebar or by having a page of links/resourses/whatever they call them linked to from the sidebar. Since having sitewide links is not cool any more, I guess I will opt for a separate page, but I’m still considering it.

A I mentioned yesterday, I decided to play around with Google Base to see what it’s all about. Well, in theory, it has a good potential in my opinion and since the stuff you post there is, according to Google, displayed in multiple places including Froogle, and even regular Google search, chances are you can get a good exposure. But on the other hand, it seems to be used only by a limited number of people for now - though the next few days will tell….

As a sidenote, it appears that in order to be most effective and provide a maximum exposure, a post should be sorta “optimized” in an SEO sense of the word…

Just to see what’s gonna happen. There’s been so much talk about Google Base recently since the moment it went live (or not-so-live, as some reported) that I just thought I have to try it out. So far, I have my ad sitting there waiting to be published and got this message from Google Base:

Your item is currently processing. Items submitted through the Google Base user interface take 15-60 minutes to be published. Items submitted using a bulk upload will be published within 24 hours.

I will report on progress as it happens….

UPDATE#1: 15 minutes later, the ad is already published. Pretty fast! Now I only wonder how many people use Google Base so far and what the exposure would be. More to follow….

Google has just added some changes to its Sitemaps. Some things there are interesting to note:

1. When you log in, in case you’ve been logged into any other Google services you use before, it asks you whether you want to use a separate account for Sitemaps - and warns that you can only be logged into one account at a time - nice enough of G to tell us

2. Now you don’t even need to create an xml sitemap to use the service - all you do is upload to your server a file named with a unique code Google gives you - this way they verify you are the true owner of the domain. OK, this is all fine and pretty secure - but this is how bad they want to know who owns what!

The new information provided for the domains submitted to Google Sitemaps includes problems crawling pages, and otehr Googlebot stats. that’s not so new really, as all these stats are obtained through the old queries, only now they are listed like this:

Query Type Link
Indexed pages in your site site:orange-revolution.netfirms.com/
Pages that refer to your site’s URL allinurl:orange-revolution.netfirms.com/
Pages that link to your site link:orange-revolution.netfirms.com/
The current cache of your site cache:orange-revolution.netfirms.com/
Information we have about your site info:orange-revolution.netfirms.com/
Pages that are similar to your site related:orange-revolution.netfirms.com/

Considering the bad reputation the site: query has had lately… Hmm…

Another question that pops up in my head is whether adding the Google-coded file to the server will be as lethal for black hat sites as using Google Sitemaps proved to be. In other words, I’m not in a hurry to try it out until I hear people’s reports on this.

Seems like everybody’s busy creating terrible sounding new words - the one I just ran into is Shoposphere, mentioned by SEW’s Chris Sherman in this post about Yahoo expanding its shopping search. I am not sure if this is the first mention of the word, and feel reluctant to really research this. Anyway, this is one more word along with splogs and splogosphere that I don’t like at all - it just sounds too unnatural.

An update: it appears that Yahoo itself came up with the word! - Ugh….