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

I’ve been looking through my server logs and this has caught my attention. The site in question just had AdSense placed onto it but no links have been pointed at it. (The site is not new, it existed for some time, then AdSense ads have been placed onto it)

What I saw in the logs is Mediapartners-Google crawling the site some time after the ads were placed (about an hour or so) - and then right after it, 14 minutes later, Googlebot coming over. Googlebot just asked for the home page - but that’s till interesting. Another thing worth noting is they both came from the same IP - 66.249.67.104.

Looks like this is all AdCents is good for nowadays, however. As a side note, I’ve had a quick look at referral products at AdSense (I DEFINITELY have no intention promoting these - I’d rather find an affiliate program in the niche that interests me) - and the funniest part of it was Google taking its geotargeting way too far. Namely, it assumes you will be targeting only the local users with your websites and you need a few extra clicks to change it. Dohh! Hello Google, ever heard of websites being just slightly different from traditional offline brick-and-mortar shops or whatever? I get visitors to my sites from places I have never even been to - moreover, sometimes I even build sites SPECIFICALLY to target the audience in such places! How much dumber can AdSense get?

Targeting Asian markets? Nothing is better than the right domain for it. And there’s no such thing as too many domains for a blackhat of course

.Asia domains are not exactly the traditional target for domain mass-buying blackhats (the cost is 90 euro for a two-year registration) - but for your greyhat or whitehat effort, this should be perfect. The .ASIA name space was approved by ICANN on December 6, 2006 but at first the registrations were limited to companies and trademark owners only. Not Any more! The Land Rush phase has the only requirement to apply for a .ASIA domain name - provide a contact address within the recognized Asia Region. But even if you don’t have such address these guys will act as your contact so it can still be done. (These same guys btw provide registrations for all other possible ccTLDs)

Until March 26, 2008 multiple applications for the same domain names will be handled through an auction. After that date, free registration will open. But of course if you have in mind something really competitive you will want to apply for it as soon as possible.

Happy domain hunting!

Seems like Wikipedia folks really got nothing else to do with their life than catch wiki spammers - or whoever they consider such.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:A._B./To_do_list (no link love for you!)
This is a to-do list of some Wikipedia editor where I am listed along with Threadwatch, Graywolf, Searchguild (recently bought by SEONews) and Syndk8.

I, as well as other sources mentioned on that list, did write a post about getting links off Wikipedia - this was a while ago, they finally got to reading that stuff and acting on what they read It has only been two years by now

I used to have a user profile on Wikipedia - they now moved my page to Wictionary (en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:IrishWonder) and removed my logo that used to be on my user page. Well if they refuse me the right to be their user - so be it, I will take the pride in being treated the same way as Danny Sullivan who was refused a (totally valid) mention in Wikipedia a while ago. Now that’s a worthy company!

Been searching for something that is not indexed by Google and came across something I don’t think I’ve seen before:

So now, instead of just offering to check if your search terms are entered correctly and additional options like go to the URL directly, Google fetches whatever it thinks is close… Not the most logical step is it?

I just noticed Bompa of Syndk8 mentioned me in a post about people paying attention to buy Viagra SERPs. He bitched about me having only two posts on the topic - so here goes another one!

Watching the folks who watches the BUY VIAGRA SERPs seems to be a new fad doesn’t it? Well so, I had a look at the Viagra SERPs in Google and to me the top 5 are a bit different cause of different geolocation - but pretty close still. Fantomaster really does a great job of his Viagra watch. Out of the people I know I also see Dink in there. There is one more very interesting thing I noticed, namely a parasite page off Brooklyn College of the City University of New York - targetting - guess what keyword??? Get ready for it…. BUY VIAGRA SERPS!

Holy shit, some keywords they are scraping! I even know whom they are scraping - sure enough, Viagra study at Syndk8. There is a bunch of results like I mentioned in the top 10 in Google for viagra serps. One of them that I noticed even had the syndk8 URL in their scraped content. Well if this keeps on going like this, Google will end up considering “buy viagra serps” keyword long tail of “buy viagra” and next thing we know is I’ll be selling Viagra off this blog!

The importance of each one of different factors influencing the SERPs in Google seems to vary across different markets nowadays - e.g. I constantly see SERPs where PR6 pages go way lower than PR0 or PR 2 pages (old news of course, PR not being a major factor any more, at least in the form available to the general public), or I have seen SERPs where 100 links beat 10,000 links, and I have even seen SERPs (gasp! what would Jim Boykin say? ) where 2-year-old sites were beating 10-year-old sites to the top spots.

But here’s one example of SERPs where age factor is definitely overplaying to the point where it hurts the quality of these SERPs, as described in this post by Affiliate Money Maker:

I headed to Google and ran a quick search. Google returned almost 9 million results for “send a fax by email” - wow that’s impressive. What have we got here?

The first one was TPC Fax (tpc.int) - a site last updated in 2001. You see, in the old days of non-monetized Internet there was a community initiative to support sending faxes by email through privately operated printer servers. This was a free community service supported exclusively by good will of people participating in this project. Well that was a long time ago. I don’t know how reliable or widespread it was, but currently it is not working any more.

Digging through a bunch of FAQ’s and equally old sites that are of no use any longer,<...>

It is pretty clear that the search was meant to be for sites actually providing these services - and what comes up instead? A bunch of aged but practically useless results… Not a good job, Google.

Ever wondered what happens once you send that ping over, be it for a blog or otherwise?
Here’s what:

*

/2007
Http Code: 404 Date: Feb 07 22:57:56 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: -
Referer: -
Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Yea you guessed it, this wasn’t a blog. It certainly gives me a couple ideas…

Disclaimer: I do not even know if this is old news or new news and can’t be arsed to dig into it. I just noticed it and thought I’d post about it. If you have something to say go ahead and comment but this is just my opinion and you can take it or leave it.

I don’t spend anywhere nearly as much time dealing with Google AdCents (copyright someone in Syndk8, whoever first coined the term - so very true these days) as I used to when it was still worth it - but I had to tweak some of my really old stuff and had to log into the AdSense interface. Evidently they ahve implemented a ton of changes in there but what attracted my attention the most is the littlelink saying “Allowed Sites”. Their explanation of this feature in Help goes like this:

What is my Allowed Sites list?

Allowed sites are sites or URLs on which AdSense publishers allow or wish to have their Google ads displayed. If a URL displaying your AdSense ad code is not on your Allowed Sites list, ads will still be displayed, but impressions and clicks won’t be recorded, advertisers won’t be charged, and you won’t receive any earnings for that URL.

We’ve added the Allowed Sites feature because we’ve learned that some AdSense publishers are concerned about potentially malicious behavior from others on the web, such as stealing their ad code and placing it on an inappropriate site. By offering this feature, we allow AdSense publishers more control over which sites or URLs can have their AdSense code.

Hmm, with all the banning of people’s accounts left and right, I guess they did receive a lot of criticism, and indeed I am not going to talk about the nasty techniques of killing a person’s AdSense account here - but would this feature have been in place from the very start killing somebody else’s account would have definitely been much more difficult.

On the other hand, should some newbie forget to put a site into the allowed sites list, and here’s what happens:

Will my reports show statistics from all sites with my ad code or just my Allowed Sites?

Reports will only show statistics from sites and URLs in your Allowed Sites list. Impressions, clicks, and earnings will not be recorded for sites and URLs not in your Allowed Sites list.

Oh well, I guess Google would say something has to be sacrificed anyway for the sake of security… However, it’s way too late to try fixing stuff in AdSense - I can only approximately estimate how many publishers they have lost due to 1) banning accounts, 2) cutting down the CPC, 3) cutting down the CTR with their tweaks to the ad format. Almost everybody I know who used to do AdSense either has dropped it alltogether and switched to affiliate marketing exclusively or reduced the amount of efforts they spend on Adsense to a bare minimum. Another generation of publishers needs to grow now before Google has a chance to fix their publisher network - and there is no guarantee it will ever get to the volume it used to be.