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

There was a thread  in the syndk8 forums discussing the footprints some less eperienced black hat SEOs are likely to leave behind when producing their sites. The thread was much brader than this post as it went into discussing the details like online privacy, legal aspects and so on, but I decided to do a quick summary of a sort in the form of a not-to-do list.

So, if you’re in your right mind don’t do this:

1. Use the same old tired feckin template from site to site - heck I can almost put the name to the face already
2. Once you har of a new technique, get stuck on it and use nothing else and do not innovate anything
3. Do not invent anything to make your sites look more legitimate, or just invent something so stupid and unnatural that Matt Cutts’ cat can tell it’s scraped spam
4. Interlink all your sites into one giant spam network yelling Google ban us all
5. And of course, generally, don’t ever ever use your brain when creating your sites - just repeat what you have seen/heard of even if you didn’t really get to the point of an idea.

6. Use something unusual in your css classes names (thanks UKGimp for this one)

7. Use the same IP for all your sites and the same whois information (thanks again UKGimp)

If anybody has anything  useful to add to this list feel free to either post in the forum thread or add your comments here.

Well after reading for the umptieth time on an umptieth blog about Google Pages, I thought I’d go and make me one, just for the heck of it. And what do I see at their login page but this:

Due to heavy demand, we are unable to offer new accounts for today. If you’d like to be added to our waiting list, please enter your email address.

Now this is sorta funny - but is there anything new with Gogle’s stuff being down as soon as they launch it? Remember the Google Base launch?

Today I went to Technorati to search for something and noticed a new interface tweak - apart from the recently introduced authority filter, Technorati now offers you to search in either all blogs or your favourite blogs. To use this feature, you have to create an account with Technorati and add some blogs to your favourites. Reminds of an online newsreader, doesn’t it? Not exactly, though. It has its god points as well as drawbacks, and the range of opinions across the Blogosphere about this new feature goes from enthusiastic approval to sharp criticism. Thatedeguy posts a more detailed review of Technorati’s favourites complaining about the limits Technorati sets on people’s favourites. The number of blogs you can save is limited to 50. Meanwhile, TDavid at MakeYouGoHmm says:

Too bad it is only blogs though and doesn’t include RSS feeds.

Scoble has already a button for adding his blog to people’s Technorati favourites in place. And as we have an option to see other people’s lists of favourite blogs, David Sifry’s list being featured most prominently in the sidebar, Stowe Boyd talks about the future social dimension.

So looks like what we get is a mixture of a blog search engine, a newsreader and a social bookmarking service. Pretty wide area to cover, let’s see how it works out for Technorati and what the future of all these functional innovations will be.

I got a spam email today. Its title looked scary at first glance, all this stuff about PayPal and warning notifications, ya know… But I know better than that so I looked at the full headers and what do I see but:

From: PayPal Security Center
MIME-Version: 1.0
Message-ID:
Received:

* from [62.139.102.34] (helo=62.139.102.34) by *** with smtp (Exim 4.52) id 1FBXDI-00025a-Vc for irishwonder@***.com; Tue, 21 Feb 2006 08:05:57 -0500
* from 42.0.202.114 by ; Tue, 21 Feb 2006 11:05:38 -0200

Reply-To: PayPal
Return-path:
Subject: Warning Notification issued for your account
To: irishwonder@***.com
X-MSMail-Priority: High
X-Mailer: MIME-tools 5.503 (Entity 5.501)
Priority: High Priority 1

I remembered Greg Boser’s (a.k.a. Web Guerilla) post about comment spammers and thought I’d try and see  who the spammer  was and what I can find out using the full headers of this spam message. This is what I digged out in Whois:

The first IP mentioned in the headers:

62.139.102.34

Blacklist Status:	Listed (details)
Record Type:	IP Address
IP Location:	Egypt - Al Qahirah - Cairo - Egynet
Reverse IP:	Web server hosts 1 websites

The blacklist for this IP has two entries, dated today and 2006-02-18. The site hosted on that IP is :

Domain Name:LRCEGYPT.ORG
Created On:10-Dec-2003 13:03:37 UTC
Last Updated On:22-Nov-2005 17:23:33 UTC
Expiration Date:10-Dec-2007 13:03:37 UTC

Blacklist Status: Listed - Cached Today

****
Registrant City:Cairo
Registrant State/Province:Cairo
Registrant Postal Code:12411
Registrant Country:EG

Now, there is no way for me to tell whether it’s these Egyptians spamming me or somebody uses their server as a proxy - but if it was somebody else it still got the Egyptians effectively blacklisted for spam.

Oh yea, and the link in the phishing email (yes that’s what it was of course) was poining at a Korean server… What a collection!

I have been approached by a number of people asking me if I can “spread the word” about their tools if they offer them to me for free. This issue is especially itchy for those tool developers since spam advertising on syndk8 forums is strictly prohibited - the forums are maintained through paid advertising we offer those wishing to display their products in front of a large highly targeted audience that syndk8 members are. However, I thought about all this and decided to come up with this offer. I can review the black hat tools you want to introduce to our community and post my reviews on this blog that is part of the syndk8 web site and is read by many community members as well as other people that come from elsewhere. But bear in mind that I won’t endorse these tools unless I find something really unique and useful about them.

If you’re interested in this offer and wish to discuss the details contact me either through comments here or by emailing irishwonder at irishwonder dot com.

Just to let everybody interested know - my infamous comments have been finally fixed - so if you feel like interacting feel free to comment spam this blog leave your intelligent feedback

Had a look at Matt Cutts’ blog today and noticed something I haven’t seen there before: he changed the default WordPress text that goes before the comment form to this:

Leave a Comment (unless you are a spammer

I wonder how effective that might be in fighting spammers (do they run away Matt?) but at least it made me smile.

This post by Graywolf made me notice something interesting going on in Google. If it is a new feature it’s a very subtle way to implement it - nobody knows what’s going on if you just stumble into it one day doing your searches.

Graywolf suspects it to be a handjob by Google but I’d like to speculate there’s something more to it. There is a tendency I have noticed: if yu enter your search query in the for of a question (like humans normally talk and ask about things), you are likely to get results different from regular search queries. In Graywolf’s case, it was a link to a Wikipedia article. In my case, I asked Google “what is SEO” and this is what came up:

Looks interesting…. So is it something similar to definition search? To compare the results, I searched for SEO - just one plain word… the SERPs didn’t have any definition links this time, just regular SERPs.

Regular, are they now??? Not really!

That SEO Chat is #1 is nothing new or surprising. What’s surprising, however, is the set of links to SEO Chat’s internal pages Google’s displaying. What might that mean? No other site in the SERPs has that. no other query I tried shows anything like that for any other site. Search for web design or banking, what happens? - Just regular SERPs….

This is becoming really misleading, Google. If anything is displayed as AdWords ads it has the caption “Sponsored links”. If there are news for the word searched for it has the caption “News” and so on. SEO Chat has none of that - just an additional set of links that can’t be explained by anything I see on that page. Maybe Matt Cutts would care to comment?

UPDATE: Matt Cutts has commented on the issue, since my comments are broken here is his reply (yea Matt, I know I have to get to fixing them asap…)

Nadir reports on his blog of an article on ZDNet about Google headhunting for Stanford grads. When the Google home page is loaded from a Stanford IP Google serves up an ad offering people to work for them.

And you told me I was bad for picking my nose!

I did some Google hacking this morning. Gmail seemed to have some problems, it wasn’t really down but their server kinda slowed down. I went to check if anybody else has noticed that and came across a load of posts from a year ago with people reporting Gmail problems and blaming the beta for instability. Well, since regular google search doesn’t report anything recent (despite the huge number of blog posts in the results) I thought I’d check the blog search on Google. Results sorted by relevance didn’t appear to be recent, and results sorted by date had a lot of mentions of Gmail but nothing about it going down. However, what caught my eye is the abundance of gmail addresses posted out there for any email spammer to pick… when will they learn? Until they do, Gmail will be kept very busy filtering out all the spam and mass mailing stuff.

As for recent Yahoo news, I just noticed that My Yahoo  started displaying favicons for the RSS feeds you place on it. Not major news of course but we have seen a lot of buzz about other interface tweaks (2, 3, 4, 5)recently so why not post about this one. (In case you’re wondering why I call the big Technorati news about the authority filter an interface tweak - well, if you haven’t noticed they actually had that implemented in a slightly different form already - they only came up with a new interface element. Before, you could simply sort the results of your Technorati blog search by authority - sure it stil displayed them all and only changed the order - but that was actually the first step towards what’s big news today).