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

Recently, Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal anounced the launch of Umdum, a new human edited directory. The even offered free submissions to the readers for a limited time. Well, I missed the deadline for free submissions but thought I’d try anyway and submitted this blog and my other blog. To prove once again it pays to watch your logs, I’ve seen the guys from Umdum looking at this site today! The blog hasn’t been added so far but I’m ready to wait soem more until they make their final judgement. So guys, am I good enough?

The Guardian used to have wonderful blogs on their site. They were frequently updated, covered plenty of topics, received an enormous amount of traffic, had many active visitors commenting… The best part about those blogs was the absense of nofollow on signature links, thus making the blogs really good for comment spamming cost-effective, easy and fast link acquisition.

Well, they’re not that good any more. Recently, the blogs have been redesigned and it is no longer possible to add a URL to a signature. Sad isn’t it.
I wonder how it will affect the number of commenters?

A while ago, I posted about how Google’s manual review can be detected through your logs. Well, last week I could verify it’s still true - the URL of doom http://www.corp.google.com/~pong/spam/ has appeared in the logs of my other blog splog and it has ceased to exist. But before it happened, the blog has received over 5,500 clicks averaging 50 unique visitors a day and it took Google about 10 months (and a manual review) to catch up with it. So guess I could call Blogger’s bluff with this on their “The steps we’ve taken have both improved the quality of content on Blog*Spot and improved the Blogger service as a whole” bragging - it still takes Google’s manual review.
For those wondering - the blog name on Blogspot has already been taken - giving the new user a jumpstart PR 3 right away! The new content, albeit manually written (it seems), makes even less sense than the original splog - some cheap kiddie verses and stuff. Heck my splog at least was useful for AdSense LOL

Kinda nice to know: I am #2 in Google for black hat seo consultants and probably the only blackhat SEO in that whole set of SERPs The rest is all like “Black hat SEO are the techniques used to fool the search engines” and the like crap.

Hey Google, you still can’t figure what people look for when they look for Blackhat SEO consultants?

Dave Sifry of Technorati has posted a new State of the Blogosphere report. Besides other things, it talks about spam in the blogosphere. Here are a few interesting facts:

- A new weblog is created about every second.

…

- About 9% of new blogs are spam

- 60% of pings are from known spam sources

- Technorati blocks these spam pings before the even become splogs

Then Sifry gets carried away creating even more new Sp-words, and while he notes that “the high level of interesting, original content being created greatly outweighs the fake or duplicate content listed on splogs”, this still leaves the question open since the old State of the Blogosphere report: what’s their spam detection rate and can they even estimate it objectively?

You know those services offering you a subdomain/subfolder for free with a funny domain name like go.to/mysite or getit.at/mysite and the like? Well, getting those cool free names is becoming slightly difficult these days as search engine spammers cast their eye in that direction in masses. For example, this is a message you get when trying to register for a subdomain at moved.to:

We apologise for any inconvenience, however the moved.to sign up process is currently unavailable. Over recent days we have had some large scale spam attacks on the moved.to system that have been compromising the user experience.

As a temporary measure we have disabled the sign up process, until we have solved the problem of these large scale spam attacks, this has been done to give our users a better usage experience, and we will reactivate the sign up as soon as we can prevent the spam.

We are working hard on creating a spam free service for our member, please visit us again in a short while and get your desired moved.to address.

Please report SPAM abuse to us, moved.to does not support Spam and will delete such short URL’s reported to us, Please include full details including the URL name and what type of spam was done on on which site, Please help us keep this free service clean from spam. thank you!

I’ve discovered UKGimp’s blog yesterday by following a link from Threadwatch to his interview of Danny Sullivan and also read a few interviews back, and while I enjoyed them this made me think of one issue.

Aaron Wall whom we can easily consider the father of the SEO interview genre said not so long ago that

interviews are currently the hottest form of spam on the SEO circuit

You know you’re popular if people interview you in packs (heck even I was asked to do an interview a couple of times though nothing came out of it so far yet). however, not all of these interviews are equally good. I do enjoy reading interviews done by masters of interviewing peole such as Aaron Pratt… but there’s only so many things you can ask a person if everybody’s interviewing him currently, and only so many ways you can word your answers - when 100 people run off to interview Matt Cutts I doubt there’s a lot of value in all of those interviews. So what once was an effective linkbait tool becomes dull duplicate spam.

As all of us are located in different parts of the world and many haven’t even met each other, many of those interviews are not even done live - but that’s another issue. Unless you  really do your best to work on the interview and communicate with your interviewee, interviews not done live or even on an IM are so evident. When the answer begs for a follow-up question and there’s none it gives you away and you interviw is lacking so much… So it’s not just an easy way to get your linkbait out and get everybody to link to you - with the competition there is currently, only most creative interviews will make it.

I have noticed yesterday that whois.sc had a redirect to domaintools.com and the overall design looked very different even if I didn’t pay attention to the address bar. Well, today there is a confirmation posted by Gary Price. What’s notable about the new site is that they offer a number of new services, most of them for free, and some services have been expanded. For example, now you can list an unlimited number of domains hosted on an IP.

Shoemoney, known for all kinds of funny things like running a live webcam on his blog and offering a $25 prize to the first person who catches him eating on his web cam, has removed the cam off the blog it seems. I haven’t seen him say anywhere whether it is permanent or temporary. Well in any case, I guess we all need some privacy at some point…

UPDATE: as of April 13, his webcam is back on

Philip Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped has come across a way some people actually get Google related links to do something useful.