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

Last night I have been researching something and came across some weird stuff in Google. A lot has been said already about Google updating the SERPs more often for the more competitive markets (e.g. “buy viagra” and such) but I saw the proof of the opposite: the less popular a query is (=the less competitive a market is) the less Google will care about spending their resources on keeping its SERPs up to date.

I was searching for something quite obscure which I am not going to mention here directly but suffice to say it only returned about 500 results. The query contained a bit of text in quotes, inurl: , -site: and such shit. Not something you would normally compete to rank for consciously. Well approximately the first 25 results were ok but then the interesting bit started coming up. Almost every result I would click would take me to a parked page with nothing but your regular parked ads on it and no hint why it could be even coming up for that search query. It was late and I was tired and it just pissed me off so I said feck it and went to sleep but didn’t forget it. I decided to research it deeper today as my perverse blackhat mind suspected things like cloaking and the like.

Well, armed with my tools I checked that query again today and in Google cache of the SERPs in question there was the bit getting them to rank for the query. But Google cache was anywhere from a week to a month old for each one of those sites. Each one of these sites was not expired but parked - and by checking the domains in Domaintools I found out that these domains had their nameservers changed and got parked in the last couple days - i.e., after Google has last cached them.

As a result, a site may not be relevant to a query for a while but still ranking for it. The reverse Viagra law of Google!

You know why I used to love Quantcast, among other reasons? Quantcast.com is a PR 6 authority domain, not very old (registered in 2005) but it gained popularity fast and has 1,480,000 pages indexed in Google. Until recently, you could query any domain and it would create a page for it - and guess what, that page would rank in Google and give you a direct link from this nice PR 6 authority domain. Heck you could even write a script that would query a bunch of your spam domains and create you those pages and consequently, links on autopilot! Parasite hosting web 2.0 style, so to say.

Not any more! Quantcast has not only disabled creation of pages like http://www.quantcast.com/profile/yourspamsite.com, seems like it has also removed all pages that were already created that way. Moreover, Quantcast has added these little lines in its robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /traffic-compare

- and that’s where links from places like Statsaholic used to point at.

What’s left of this authority monster that’s still usable? Well, Quantcast is pushing its users to register, it tries to make the most of its traffic to build up its user base. Smart step, as for me, and they achieve two goals: they recruit their users who register accounts AND eliminate the spam issue. Hence, if you own a whitehat site, go ahead and register an account, Quantify your site and get a nice fat link. If not, forget about Quantcast - it’s not a blackhat haven any more.

Last week, everybody was discussing Google’s leaked AdWords score values. I guess enough guesses were voiced already about what those values might mean so I wouldn’t bother posting about it if not for one thing. I believe one more question that needs to be asked is WHY these values leaked.

Here are the two scenarios and it’s up to you to decide which one is more likely, if any:

1. Google is tweaking something - why else would their programmers touch this bit of code and leave these parameters slip into the open? As in, forgetting to comment it out or something.

2. Google is playing some PR game - as in, public relations, not PageRank. Google lets the scores leak to show something to all the SEOs out there, threaten them, keep them busy discussing it, or something.

Sure thing Google employees are human like all of us and Google is not immune to leaking these scores accidentally - but do you believe this was accidental or is there an agenda behind it?