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

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!