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

It’s been a slow week with the holidays and all but I’m slowly geting back to posting. I have just posted some forum spamming tips at Syndk8.net - enjoy and hopefully soon I’ll get to posting something useful here as well.

These days it seems like everybody is busy intrviewing Matt Cutts so I thought I’d do soemthing different for a change - a case study. This one isn’t quite as popular as interviews, maybe because the previous attempt by Quadszilla wasn’t taken too well, but I made some preparatory steps before doing mine - I asked my study object if it’s ok with him and he didn’t mind. So, here we go.

Aaron Wall is known as an owner of numerous sites but first of all he is associated with SEOBook.com. He ranks in the top 10 in both Google and Yahoo for SEO. And his whole network of sites (or at least that part of it that I will be analysing here ) , besides covering the individual sites’ goals, serves the purpose of promoting the SEO Book site, and does it in many ways some of which are not only creative but even completely non-traditional. Notice how I haven’t mentioned the word “links” even once up to now? - Rightly so, as it’s not only about links or not as much about links as it is about community building and viral marketing - the two notions Aaron mentions a lot. So how do these two things work in his own network?

Let’s look at search-marketing.info to start with, the site that was the predecessor of SEOBook.com. It’s one of a few sites that are not blogs - Aaron seems to love blogs. It covers the same topic as the SEO Book site but serves as a sort of an archive of previously written articles about SEO - and naturally, links to SEOBook.com for more recent stuff. It is free of any kind of sales pitch and earns the readers’ trust, hence it is very likely that people who first arrive to sales-marketing.info will eventually end up at SEOBook.com. While a lot of information povided there seems pretty basic, Aaron’s main target audience is not SEO gurus and such but people starting to study SEO - those who are most likely to purchase a book on SEO. They get soem stuff for free, they like it, they get to trust the author and then they buy the book. Seems like a good scheme for converting.

But Aaron Wall goes further than this and offers even more for free: linkhounds.com - free SEO tools, directoryarchives.com - “a directory of most quality directories”, myriadsearch.com - a search engine to look for sites best loved by all the four big search engines at once, bloggoodies.com - practical advice for bloggers… Whatever it is SEO-related that you’re searching for, he’s out there with something to offer you. And then you see that it’s the same guy who wrote the SEO Book! Some people will be searching for black hat SEO for a change - and bingo, he has covered that as well with his blackhatseo.com. This is nothing more than a collection of how-not-tos dating back to probably 2000 when people stuffed their pages with keywords in invisible text and did otehr things no self-respecting search engine spammer would do nowadays - but the site catches that bit of traffic and points that to SEO Book as well as a counter example of how things should be done. When examining this network, besides “community” and “viral marketing”, the third notion that comes to mind is “niche marketing”.

And if all the mentioned sites were not enough, there is also a personal blog at aaronwall.com, talking of different things (some actually refer to him as “the peanut butter guy”) but of course referring to SEO related stuff every now and then - so even people who first got into Aaron Wall are bound to get into SEO Book eventually - love me, love my dog principle in action.

Though all these sites are totelly legitimate with the search engines, he works at truly black hat volumes - as a result his network covers every conceivable topic and through his personality as the centre of this network ties it all to SEO and consequently to the SEO Book.

Now, for those wondering if I’ve been living under a rock and unaware of aaron’s recent purchase of Threadwatch, I think this was a brilliant move. While everybody’s buying old domains, he takes it one step further and buys an aged domain with an already formed community- what an elegant idea indeed! Instead of building a community, he just got one with an established site. Sure, there are no direct links to SEO Book there, but look at his username - what better exposure can one wish for? Of course just buying a site like that doesn’t yet do the trick, if not taken proper care of even the best established site can eventually lose its community, so it is now a huge task for Aaron to maintain the quality of Threadwatch, and if done properly, it can bring great results. I have already noticed how the number of comments on SEOBook.com increased right after this purchase (to be honest, then it decreased slightly again as the initial interest wore off - but this only goes to prove once again that sites/communities of this scale require constant attention and hard work. I notice Aaron’s doubts every now and then as to whether it is the right route to go - spreading your effort on several sites instead of focusing on one - sure it’s more pain but the potential effect is greater as well.)

While the whole idea of such a network has a great potential, I’m not saying it’s perfect in this realization. There are always technical details that can be improved. Aaron told me he had sitewide (haven’t we all had them till not so long ago?) and same anchor text links on his sites that he recently removed due to Google’s penalty. No matter how great the network idea is, if you do anything more or less long term you still need to watch all the SE changes and stay flexible. But the lesson that both white hats and black hats can take away with them from from here is how combining the best of both worlds can work for your benefit.

Well, the reasons are evident and everybody writing about SEO/practicing SEO in their right mind understands this. Reveal too much and you get:
1. A shitload of competition doing the same and rendering your trick useless for you.
2. Excessive exposure of a technique makes it too recognizeable and it’s not below the radar any more.
3. The technique gets over-abused to the point where it starts bothering search engines and their employees and they eventually (and in most cases very soon) work out a fix for the abused algo hole.

Most high profile SEOs, equally BH and WH, will tell you nothing really important, extremely effective and innovative is posted in public forums. It’s rather reading between the lines. Everybody mentioned this on before. Nothing important ever gets posted publicly, period. High profile people are not the kind who want extra exposure - they get enough of it anyway - so posting valluable stuff for extra publicity is out of question.

If so, what made DaveN mention on a public forum this way of getting past the sandbox?

Tried to do some “inurl:” search on Google just now and got the “We’re sorry…” message from Google despite the fact that I haven’t run any mass automated requests from this IP for ages. Just to make sure, tried searching for something by just entering a search term into the searchbox - and it worked like a charm… Wonder what Google is up to? Seems like they don’t like people doing certain special searches…

Logged into my Gmail box today and noticed something new - a line on top of the message list showing syndicated news headlines. Google calls them “Web Clips” and they can be customized through your mail settings menu. There is a present collection of feeds Google uses but you can remove those feeds and add your own. Here we go, a combination of Google home page and Reader… I guess it’s kinda cool to be able to see the news you’re interested in when logging into your mailbox.

Recently, we had to ban a number of users from accessing the syndk8 forums. While this might seem as tough measure it had to be done for the following reasons.

There were at least two people who were just using syndk8 site and black hat seo forums to fill their blogs with content. They haven’t provided any useful information resulting from their own research on their blogs, nor have they produced anything unique. In the meantime, they were priviledged to be welcomed into the private syndk8 forums and abused it by reposting copyrighted content.

Anyone found abusing the forum policies and reposting copyrighted material in the future will be banned as well.

If only those spamming this blog ever read it. They could have been more effective (not necessarily here but in most other places).

Some time ago I came across this post in Aaron Wall’s SEO Bookblog pointing at this thread at SEW discussing content exchange as opposed to the oldschool link exchange. Since the last Google update(s) renderign reciprocal linking totally useless, webmasters and SEOs all over the web have been trying to find a better solution and this one indeed seems like one.

Content exchange on blogs has existed since the advent of blogs. It is called comments. You contribute a useful/insightful/witty comment and in return you get to display your signature link on the blog that you comment on. But try taking the easy route by posting irrelevant crap only designed to insert your links, and all you get is pissed off blog owners and your comment spam modded out.

When people started using blogs for marketing, it gave rise to comment spam increase. On one hand, there is manual comment spam that already constitutes quite a problem (check this Threadwatch thread for a discussion of one of such cases). On the other hand, there are automated ways of comment spamming which are much worse due to the volume. Take some button clicking script kiddie who thinks he’s a big bad black hat but totally lacks creativity and imagination and you have half the Blogosphere pissed off. This is totally ineffective of course. These spammy comments only stand a chance to remain intact on dead blogs, thus achieving nothing.

If you want your links to stay where you drop them use some imagination. First, do some topical research for posts on blogs that match the same topic as what you are going to comment spam for. By doing this search, you achieve two goals:

1. You get topically relevant posts;
2. You get live and most likely frequently spidered blogs.

Then, design your comment. Take the time to do it carefully. It should be more or less general but still relevant to the posts in the blogs you’ve found. The more URLs you want to cover in one run, the more difficult it is to achieve this…

This strategy is probably not really universal as there will always be people to lazy to work it out properly, or there are spammier industries out there where most blogs are automated spam blogs - but there there’s no need for tricks like this as those blogs are never moderated anyway and the comemnts there are eitehr published right away or not published at all. But for less spam-dependent topics this, if done properly, can definitely improve te overall picture

Just checked my AdSense account and noticed that I can now use Firefox ads as well. previously, they were only available with the Adsense accounts registered by Americans.

I might be getting slightly paranoid over it and maybe some will say this is not even worth worrying about. But doing black hat SEO you’re better off being paranoid where there’s no real danger than missing something and getting smoked on it.

Since Google has provided all the spammers with a great free tool called Gmail, Gmail invites have been flying over in masses, and I doubt there’s any serious black hat out there with less than a dozen Gmail accounts registered all for different (but equally shady) purposes. However, have you ever thought how large a footprint you’re leaving? I’ve been thinking about it for a while already…

Here’s a possible scenario to consider. Say you register a domain or 50 with one Gmail address, build those sites, then send yourself an invite and open another Gmail account, and go and register another 50 domains with that new address, build the sites, and link one of them from one of the first 50 sites registered with the first Gmail address (suppose that site has been out for a while by then, accumulated some backlinks and PR and stands well in SERPs so it does a good job for indexing the new one). Now, some evil bot goes to index the new site, checks its Whois info, checks the linking site’s Whois info, checks where the second Gmail account got its invite from, does its math and….. you get the picture. Not like it’s a totally unrealistic scenario either - Google watches already how many invites you send out, how many of them actually get used for registering new accounts and based on those data decided whether to refill your invites supply.

On the other hand, we have a nice example of different services not really communicating much or at least turning a blind eye on this kind of data - AdSense user ID, if taken into consideration by the indexing Google bots and Google’s algos for SERPs, could have been an even more serious footprint. (Well, there just might be a very good reason behind not using that info - but that’s a different story)

So, while there’s no direct proof the above described thing actually takes place or ever will take place - I’d still rather watch where those Gmail invites go…

Offline browsers have been my favourite toy recently. The possibilities you have with them are truly unlimited (well, limited by the peculiarities of the particular tool you use - and no I’m not gonna call any names here, after all I’m a black hat not a charity fund). Originally created for people who wished to surf sites while offline, they go way beyond that now. Many will let you use proxies, set up what exactly you want to get off the targeted site, and all the rest of those perks. The one I’ve been playing with even creates a database of keywords used on the original site, with their frequency data, and even some primitive tools to modify the downloaded site during the process… What a goldmine