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

Gray Wolf did an excellent post on Black Hat SEO terminology and what it translates to when the intent is to make it look more legitimate - a must read for those considering whiter kinds of activity. After all, so many once spammy, shady and marginal techniques are making their way onto the mainstream scene, soon it will be impossible to imagine any decent SEO’s portfolio without them

So as some of you might have noticed, comments on this blog have been broken for a while now. I think Earl messed them up when messing with something on the server. Anyway, no matter what we tried to fix them didn’t work so far. If anmy of you knows how to fix broken WP comments please email me to irishwonder at irishwonder dot com. Thanks.

Jim Boykin caught red handed!  And they call me a spammer….
With all the massive recent talk of linkbait a.k.a. link bait, one of the most successful ideas mentioned that helped us all in the SEO community kill some time playing with it instead of SEOing something, was SEO Generations - an online game where you have to vote for different SEOs to decide who wins an SEO battle. Initially, there was a set of pictures uploaded by the author of the game, but everybody could add their own pictures resulting in more heroes getting involved in the game.

Very soon, people understood the publicity that comes from being in that game. Some seem to have understood it better than others, though! Some of this second category - gasp - appear to be the top people in the SEO community! What I mean is some people appear in the list of the game protagonists more than once - which of course creates double exposure for them. Among those lesser known guys who do we see but Jim Boykin! And they’ve been calling me a spammer….

Well guys, now I have a perfectly legitimate excuse for uploading another copy of my own picture - I’ve just got a new logo custom made for me so why not use it

P.S. I hope Jim has a good sense of humour

For those who might not know: refferrer spamming is a black hat SEO technique used originally for obtaining links from the server logs of high PR sites whose owners were dumb enough to leave the access to their stats (normally generated with a program like AWStats or similar) open to the public and the bots. It used to work and some time ago it resulted in tons of backlinks shown by the search engines for the spammer sites. As the site owners grew smarter and search engines began devaluing referrer spam links from stats, some kept using the technique just to get some extra attention to their sites from other sites’ owners checking their stats wondering where people come from to their site (the site owners followed the links to the “referrer” URLs and ended up on the spammers’ sites only to find out it was a fake one and the link to their site never existed on the spammers’ site). If used smartly, this can still provide soem benefit. But alas (or maybe luckily), not all those claiming to be black hat SEOs are smart and/or creative enough.
The easiest way to tell you’ve been referrer spammed is, of course, to go and check manually - or if you have a tool checking for links to your site that can be used as well. Sometimes it’s simply enough to load the URL in the referrer line into your browser - in some cases you’ll get the 404 page meaning the URL spammers used never even existed and was just a lame attempt to disguise the fact that there is no link to you on their site.

Recently, however, I came across a particularly dumb attempt of referrer spamming in my logs. The line looked soemthing like this:

Referer: http://www.the-spammers-site.com/blog/blah-blah-blah
Agent: YahooFeedSeeker Testing/2.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide)

Not only it was pointing at a page their site didn’t have - they were using a Yahoo bot as their user agent! Total eejits - next time you get to messing with server logs take a look at some of them and use some brain - as if bots ever show a referrer URL!

My favourite Statcounter just came up with an update that saves me a few dozen clicks a day. You see, I have a ton of sites in my Statcounter projects list, and checking how many visitors ech one of them had each day used to be a real pain. Well, not anymore, as they now display the number of pageloads today and yesterday on the projects page right next to the total number of pageloads. That sure still doesn’t tell you much about the unique visitors - but at least you get the general idea at a glance. Thanks, Aodhán!

There’s been a lot of talk recently about black hat SEO techniques making their way into white hat SEO practices - or at least commonly recognized white hat SEO going slightly gray - that it makes sense to take a closer look at one of these popular techniques.

Keyword stuffing, taken as is, is certainly a black hat technique of the worst kind - very 1998-ish, infact. But what does it take to make things look whiter, legitimize them, so to say? There are ways, certainly.

If you have a blog here are just a few ideas how to make it rank for keywords that matter to you by simple legitimized keyword stuffing:

• post a report on who ranks where for certain keywords, or something of the sort;
• or do a research on the best paying keywords;
• or post a list of keywords relevant to your industry, maybe even with some analytical (maybe also keyword-rich) blah blah alongside;
• or… well the ideas are really unlimited, use your imagination and you will surely come up with something

Watching my logs is something I spend quite soem time doing. Seriously, if you want to

1. get an idea what to write about, or
2. see who linked to you, or
3. get an idea how to increase your traffic, or
4. get an idea how to get your stuff indexed and/or increase the number of backlinks pointing to your site, etc., etc. -

you should check your stats.

I’m not the only one saying this. Check out this post by GrayWolf, especially the comment that goes with it…

I don’t even mention that checking your stats can remind you to fix the problems like non-existent 404 page or robots.txt. Server logs can even reveal search engine secrets before they announce things officially - pay attention to user agents and they can tell you a lot. For example, alongside with the usual

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)

you may sometimes notice something like

Yahoo-Blogs/v3.9 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/crawling/crawling-02.html )

or

YahooFeedSeeker/2.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide; users 1; views 3)

(a very informative one - this one even tells you the number of people subscribed to your blog’s feed) or even

YahooFeedSeeker Testing/2.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide)

- this last one, in particular, letting you know of Yahoo testing some new feed crawler…

I have decided to start an SEO consulting services site. As you can see, there’s not much there for now but there is a blog already set up and running which I will use from now on for all my “whiter” posts - while here I will be continuing with black hat SEO stuff.

… and egoSurf actually does have a way of displaying a vanity logo on your own blog - here we go:

Also, somehow the second time I ran that check it showed a higher result… Talk about tools’ credibility

Randfish mentioned egosurf, a tool that calculates how much you are associated with your own blog/site/whatever. Well I just ran it for myself out of curiosity, and this is what it told me:

ego points
irishwonder
4810
www.google.com

On Yahoo it’s even better:

ego points
irishwonder
5809
www.yahoo.com

The way they do it is pretty interesting and I’d love to have a tool for deep link analysis based on the same principle (on the second thought, there it is, right? *). One more interesting thought inspired by this toy is that this could be a criterion for choosing the right SEO - where do they rank for their own name/company name? I mean, come on, if you can’t rank #1 for your own name what can you do for other people?

They also have a link for suggesting more features for the tool - I didn’t suggest it there directly but will say here what I thought would be neat - they should make something people could place on their sites/blogs to display their points - with a link back to egosurf - So here we go, a free linkbait idea for you guys - no need to thank me but I’m not placing a direct link to you until you implement this feature

——————-
* - Oops I probably shouldn’t have posted it, now everyone and their fleas will use it for that until the lads implement captchas or something….. oh well….