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.