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

As I was browsing around I saw a Google ad that looked interesting to me and decided to go and check the advertiser’s site - only to see the “Problem Loading Page” screen. This is not the first time I see this happen and of course this is common sense but I thought I’d still post about it.

The ad was for quite a competitive keyword on a site that gets plenty of traffic. High CPC times high clickthrough rate (due to extremely good targeting - the site is very relevant to the ad)… you get the picture, 0 ROI and a lot of money thrown away for nothing. That server being down could really cost a lot to the advertiser.

Of course, rule number one for any PPC advertiser would be to turn off the ads if the server goes down to stop losing money. But in real life, not too many site admins spend day and night watching for the server downtime - this resulting in PPC money getting wasted for some period of time until the problem is discovered.

This got me thinking: is there a tool anywhere that could ping the server every so often and in case of the server going down turn off the ads display in the advertiser’s AdWords (or Yahoo Search Marketing, to that matter) account? In theory, this shouldn’t be too difficult to build, and with the number of PPC advertisers using Google or Yahoo or both, the market is pretty large.

(Next possible steps for me: run a little research to find out what’s going on in this market, write an e-book, advertise it through PPC, see what ther esponse is, invest into building the tool, market and sell it. I’m not sure tho I am interested enough in this project that can turn pretty huge and time consuming. So instead, I decided I’d just blog about it and see if there’s any response in the form of comments.)

So what are your thoughts on this?

P.S. I know I have shifted a bit towards PPC in my recent posts, I promice we will return to our usual program soon

I’ve been using Google AdWords keyword tool quite a lot for a long time. It is a handy tool that has a lot of the information I need when doing my keyword research in one place - or rather, it is supposed to have it, as long as it works. They have been going through many changes lately, and it’s all fine if Google is trying to give me better user experience. I can even understand when the tool is temporarily down due to those changes taking place - but in the last few weeks, it’s been happening a bit too much.

Now for those who don’t deal with this tool as much as I do, there are two slightly different tools - the external AdWords keyword tool which can be used by anybody wihtout having to create an AdWords account and log into it and the tool available inside the AdWords account. In the past, the external variant of the tool used to be limited in its functions and the data it used to provide - but later on, it’s been sorted and now it’s hardly different from the account-based tool - except for things like negative keywords and other stuff that mostly makes sense when you’re setting up a PPC campaign. I’ve been happy with this innovation since I find it handy that I don’t have to log into my AdWords account every time I need to do a quick research - and having a healthy paranoia, I naturally appreciate it when Google cannot associate every keyword research I run with my advertiser account.

Recently, however, I’ve been doing some research and the external tool just spat a long page of code at me instead of the results I was expecting. I decided it was broken and was forced to log in - only to find out that this downtime was most likely caused by their update - they just had to tell me now that the search volume data I was seeing when looking at a keyword search volume was December data - thanks for the clarification, ok I can live with it. Soon after, the external tool was back up and running properly again and the same update was applied to it as well.

Today as I was doing another keyword research that I really needed to complete as quickly as possible i ran into an even worse problem though. The tool fails to display the cost per click data for keywords! Logging in and using the tol within the account yields the same result. The worst is that neither in Inside AdWords blog nor in the AdWords API blog there was no warning or even mention of this one - GRRRRR!!!!!!!!

Hello Google, please get your act together and let me use the tool you’ve probably made exactly for that - people using it! AdWords failing to provide the CPC data is even worse than Yahoo Search Marketing going AdWords-like - it’s like they’re giving themselves the right to charge the advertisers whatever they feel like based on nothing else but just their desires - which in my opinion is like digging a hole for themselves.

So you were asking for it - here goes. I am back into posting mode, don’t know how often I will be able to post but anyway there are certain things I feel I have to share.

Nothing makes me laugh more than seeing the process of learning in some whitehats and how slow it goes. However, whitehats still do learn new tricks and blackhats should not slow down their learning process either.

This is really old news for those who somehow happen not to know - it has been made public almost 1 1/2 years ago and even if somebody happens not to read Threadwatch (gasp!), Quadszilla has been talking about this trick ad nauseam afterwards so even the blind have seen it and even the deaf have heard it. So funny when whitehats are making big news out of it

What’s a bit troubling there is the ethical question of people getting outed - sure the spammer was not careful enough and got caught but there are precautions to be taken. I believe (and a lot of experienced people will agree with me) it’s really dumb to use brute force spam like that to link directly to your MFA sites - let’s just hope this poor dude had more than one AdSense account. Now then, don’t I just love it how affiliate networks like CJ let you encode your aff id!

Now then, I don’t believe blog comment/trackback spam  is anywhere as effective any more as it used to be - so was it worth the effort and all the exposure that followed? And blog spammers, quick, take note: that blog mentioned in the post is now to be filtered out of your spamming list! Dohh - haven’t I been talking for ages about filtering the blog lists to spam? Also, mass stuff only works when done with brains - I’ve been moderating trackback and comment spam on my own blog here where the same person hits several posts over a couple hours - if you don’t get through once do you think more attempts cut it? Sooo lame… Yawn.

Holy $h#t like, I’ve been taking a looooong vacation from posting - to put it straight I’ve been neglecting my blog - and I’m on the list! (Old news of course but I haven’t been reading much news lately, this one I discovered as a link to this blog showing in my WP dashboard when I came to post last night) Wow… prolly a hint to start posting again hehe… This wouldn’t be surprising like 2 years ago when there were only 5 or 6 BH blogs total - but these days every wannabe starts a BH blogs every 20 minutes (and no G-Man I’m not hinting at ya - you’re old school so you deserve every credit there could be - worthy read always - recommended ) Must be a quality indicator of sorts eh?
Then again: even older news - Matt Cutts reads this blog - I knew it all the way tho, just some factual proof

… or How to Make Identifying Connection Between Your Sites Nearly Impossible.

Quite a few things have already been said about connections between sites identifiable by Google becoming the reason for mass bans - this excellent post by Graywolf comes to mind, as well as one memorable practical lesson from Matt Cutts. But these are things that are kinda more or less on the surface and possibly can be identified algorithmically. Now, what happens if somebody is so curious about your network that they start digging into your details manually? You think it’s enough to just take care of the basics and you’re safe - well think again.

Recently, I have been looking at somebody’s network of sites (for research purposes mostly, competitive analysis and such, ya know) and found it incredible how many stupid things people can do with their domain information that leaves them wide open to anyone skilled enough to look deeper. I am not going to tip anyone as to all the evil uses of such information but I couldn’t help posting a few things many people seem to either ignore or be unaware of.

So, what in your WHOIS info can be potentially vulnerable?

1. Unless it’s a shared host hosting hundreds of sites that belong to different clients of this hosting provider, hosting your multiple sites on the same IP is a surefire giveaway - infact, this was the first thing that revealed the whole network in question to me.

2. Nameservers: these should either be separate for every domain you own or belong to the host whose shared hosting you’re using, along with hundreds of other sites hosted there.

3. Registrant info: this should either be privateor completely unique for each domain. Using email address like myotherdomain@yahoo.com as you contact email in registrant details is as stupid as can be.

4. Screw any of the above once and your domain is screwed for good as the WHOIS history and nameserver changes can all be tracked for as much as $149/year (the cost of silver membership at Domaintools).