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

I do like a bit of conspiracy theories every now and then. Was doing a search in Google today for something related to .edu domains - and my attention got drawn to a bunch of Google ads that came up with the results opf my search. All those ads read along the lines of “get real .edu links to boost your site’s rankings” and such. That got me thinking: sure it’s not the first time Google is caught talking negatively of things and still displaying ads for them, but could this be part of their plan in this case? I mean, there are several things they can potentially be doing with these ads (besides ripping thie immediate financial benefits):

1. Obviously this is an easy way to locate link selling networks - and if I was running one I definitely wouldn’t have been advertising it in AdWords, no matter how much I want immadiate traffic an sales.

2. OK this one is a bit too far fetched - but what if…. We all know how much info Google is already collecting on its users - imagine that a person clicking an ad is signed into their Google account… First Google tracks if a click resulted in a conversion (i.e. signup) on the link selling site. Then, Google checks the user’s history to see what domain(s) interest him most, thus assuming some of them at least may belong to him. Next, check within some period of time (say a month) if any of these domains acquired any new links since the conversion on the link selling site. All of this happens in bulk of course. Next, add two and two - and you got a complete picture of the network where the link dealer is selling links. No need for footprints even. AdWords as a honeypot.

I am paranoid and it’s a fact but it doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

Conclusions:
- I know - and always did - to make sure I am not logged into any Google acct when searchign for anything important
- I know if I was buying links for my sites it’s best not to buy from networks advertised in AdWords - or at least avoid clicking the links to them directly from the ads
- I know what I would be doing if I was running a link selling network
- I know it’s best not to post it here or elsewhere publicly in case Google folks are still reading my blog
- I will now know if Matt Cutts is still reading my blog hehehe - hey Matt

You wanted the PR update - you got it, or at least something like it. Many folks, however, are not happy with it. What’s interesting tho is that everything I see (after a quick scan) mentioned everywhere about sites affected by the PR downgrade, as they refer to it, concerns blogs and blogs alone. Some speculate about selling links and doing paid reviews, others speculate about networks being the new ultimate evil. Whatever - I can’t be arsed to analyze this shit, too busy making sites that are making me money so I’ll just agree with what Scott said here and here. Traffic is indeed the only thing that matters. This blog has not been affected. Neither has been one of my otehr blogs that has managed to survive 2 pagerank updates already while remaining PR0 and successfully accomplishing the task it exists for - i.e. making me money. So fuck you Darren Rowse, and fuck you John Chow, for whining about losing your Page Rank. Shoemoney doesn’t seem to care about it, oh and Loren Baker got it right as well.

Back to spamming, need to spam enough to buy me a new car - oh, and prolly spamming blogs whose rank has dropped in order to get your spam indexed is not such a good idea any more

UPDATE: Evidently at the time of posting this the PR update has not been finished yet - neither it is now it seems as people keep reporting fluctuations. This blog has shifted from PR4 to PR3, and the other blog got from PR0 to PR3 - not that I care much but still. I’ve yet to hear a sound theory as to what’s happened tho.

There’s something weird going on with the PR which I noticed after this recent update. I have a new (whitehat) site that was created between the two updates and it has been linked to quite a lot before the update but after the update it still has PR0. I thought I’d investigate it a bit and checked the site’s backlinks in Yahoo with SEO for Firefox plugin on so that I could see the pagerank of the pages showing up in my backlinks right away. Yahoo reported 181 backlinks with a couple PR4’s and even one PR5 in the top 10 of the backlinks list. OK I thought, I wonder how many of these are counted as backlinks by Google as I know for a fact some had nofollow on them. So I went to check Google’s link: command and only saw 3 backlinks - but even out of those, there was one PR2 page. I got curious and even went as far as added the site in question to Google Webmater Tools panel (it wasn’t there till then) and went ahead and downloaded the backlinks report. Well, Google shows over 400 links - any kind of PR. What’s a bit amusing there is that many of nofollow links come up there as well. But still regardless of all the PR I should have been getting from all those links (the ones without the nofollow, of course) what I have infact is PR0. Makes you wonder!

This blog ranks #4 for keyword tool external here. In case somebody doesn’t know, Google’s external keyword tool is the tool that was initially provided for AdWords advertisers to use for selecting keywords to bid on in their AdWords ad campaigns. Here is the actual location of that tool. It ranks #1, luckily for Google. I never bother to remember the exact URL and normally just type “keyword tool external” into my browser’s address bar - which takes me there, due to the fact that many browsers’ address bar works as a searc box and they just take you to #1 result for whatever you type in there. I can imagine a ton of other people do exactly the same thing as me. Now, I do not think I could outrank Google for its own tool name, but just for the sake of a speculation: what if I did and it was this blog that people would have been taken to when typing “keyword tool external” in their browsers address bar? How could I possibly use it? I do have a couple uses in mind - even applicable for my current #4 spot - but I’d like to know what my readers could suggest? Go ahead submit your ideas in the comments here.

As of June 1, it’s become official. Google bought Feedburner which has been announced here, here and even here. Other than the talk of the expanding Google empire and all that, you may say: so what?

Yea, so just what does this mean to a blackhat spammer like you and me?

Several things.

First. I’d speculate that if you are using blogs tied to Feedburner whatever you post in your blogs might end up getting indexed by Google even faster. Whether or not it will affect the speed of spam detection in those blogs, I guess it’s too early to speculate.

Second. If you are a blackhat spammer who still uses feeds from other people’s blogs for, um, syndication into your own sites (remember Really-Simple-Spamming?) you will probably want to stay as far away from Feedburner-powered feeds for your dirty deeds as never before. Provided Google’s left hand knows what its right hand is doing.

Like I said, the above are only my speculations - but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Google has come up with something new I haven’t seen up to now. Recently, they have started displaying the last time you’ve visited a page showing in the SERPs and the total number of visits if you visited it more than once. Naturally, this only works if you’re logged into your Google account and only if you click through to the page directly from the SERPs page (click to view a larger image):

Now, with the user visits logging being so explicit, this just begs a question: if Google counts the users’ visits to a page in the SERPs, do these visits affect the page’s position in those SERPs yet?

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.

Checked G’s buy Viagra SERPs a couple hours ago and it said “Results 1 - 97 of about 147,000 for buy viagra“. The rest were in the omitted results, and #2, 3 and 4 were subdomains of the same domain. Checked them again just now and it’s a totally different picture:

Results 1 - 100 of about 41,100,000 for buy viagra

Out of the 3 subdomains in results 2-4, only one is left now. Hmm?

So we have all read Google’s AdSense TOS and remember the bit about not modifying their ads code:

Prohibited Uses. You shall not < ...>  (ii) edit, modify, filter or change the order of the information contained in any Ad, Link, Ad Unit, Search Result, or Referral Button, or remove, obscure or minimize any Ad, Link, Ad Unit, Search Result, or Referral Button in any way

Now, if you look at it, there are not so many people who do not violate this one, if any. I am not talking about something evil like trying to manipulate Google into showing better ads or anything else along these lines. Consider something as simple as making a PHP site and putting AdSense into includes so you can manage your site easily…

echo "

Once you have typed it, before every ” you need to put a \ or else your PHP just won’t parse! How many instances of ” is there in a standard bit of AdSense code?

I guess another revision of AdSense TOS is due…

Came across this today when doing a Google search for “seo company”:

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

That they take DMCA complaints seriously at G might be newsworthy per se - but posting this notice on a SERPs page is even more noteworthy.