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

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.

Today I went to Technorati to search for something and noticed a new interface tweak - apart from the recently introduced authority filter, Technorati now offers you to search in either all blogs or your favourite blogs. To use this feature, you have to create an account with Technorati and add some blogs to your favourites. Reminds of an online newsreader, doesn’t it? Not exactly, though. It has its god points as well as drawbacks, and the range of opinions across the Blogosphere about this new feature goes from enthusiastic approval to sharp criticism. Thatedeguy posts a more detailed review of Technorati’s favourites complaining about the limits Technorati sets on people’s favourites. The number of blogs you can save is limited to 50. Meanwhile, TDavid at MakeYouGoHmm says:

Too bad it is only blogs though and doesn’t include RSS feeds.

Scoble has already a button for adding his blog to people’s Technorati favourites in place. And as we have an option to see other people’s lists of favourite blogs, David Sifry’s list being featured most prominently in the sidebar, Stowe Boyd talks about the future social dimension.

So looks like what we get is a mixture of a blog search engine, a newsreader and a social bookmarking service. Pretty wide area to cover, let’s see how it works out for Technorati and what the future of all these functional innovations will be.

A few days ago, I did a post about Netvibes suggesting that submitting RSS feeds for your sites to it is only good for personal use but doesn’t do you any good in terms of SEO/promoting your site. My logs seem to prove the opposite though.

I created me a homepage on their site and added this blog’s feed - but there was no other way to add any of my links there and as it’s not a blog there’s no trackback ping - now I see people coming to this blog with Netvibes as a referral! hmm…

Does that mean the data I enter into my customized home page can still affect the rest of the site visitors? Or was it just the owner checking on who’s adding what? (How does that relate to my privacy then? hmm…)

I came across Netvibes and got curious to look at what it is and what it can be used for. First of all, it should be noted that this thing has a PR of 7, with 7,060 baclinks reported by Google. This alone makes it a desirable place to drop your links/rss feeds at - but judging by the number of pages indexed by Google, clearly the personalized pages cannot be indexed - which makes sense of course, otherwise I’d be concerned about ym privacy. As for the features Netvibes personalized page provides, they include RSS feeds (you can add your own ones), web search in Google, Yahoo, Icerocket and Wikipedia, weather casts, an option to check your Gmail inbox (or even several Gmail boxes if need be), Bookmarks and some other stuff. I haven’t noticed anything suggesting any information exchange between the users of this system, or any other public means of use of the information submitted by each individual user through his personalized page - which makes it a nice and convenient (and probably pretty secure and private) way to handle your personal stuff - but renders it totally useless for any SEO/black hat purposes…

I have attended Yahoo’s booth on eComXpo today. Among other things, they present their Publisher Network - but here’s a scandalous part about it. Quoting their presentation,

Take advantage of Yahoo! Publisher tools, services and programs. Integrate other Yahoo! services into your web site, including Add to My Yahoo! (RSS), Y!Q and much more to come…

Problem is, when you click the link to see Add to My Yahoo! (RSS) in action, it still isn’t functioning properly! I double checked in two browsers - and all I could see is the same thing I have reported earlier today… You’d think they would at least show functioning stuff at an event like that…

As I reported some time ago, if you are trying to add your own content to your My Yahoo page, recently it’s been a not-so-easily accomplished task. Well, I discovered today that it just got even worse. Now, when you hit “Add Content” on My Yahoo page, it asks you for your password. Once you type in your password it asks you for it again, and it goes on endlessly, never letting you get to the page where you actually add your feeds/content. Is it Yahoo’s preparation for its expected launch of blog search?

I have noticed recently that adding our RSS feeds to My Yahoo is not that easy any more. It will find the feed you enter the URL for, even display its contents, but when you click “Add to My Yahoo” it will only refresh the page you’re on and nothing else will happen, the feed won’t be added. I have tested this with different sites’ feeds, with different Yahoo accounts, from different computers with different IPs, and at different time of day and night - same thing happens. Sometimes I seem to catch it off guard and then it would add my feed, but most of the time iit seems like the server responsible for it is down - or do they turn it off on purpose, to lower the number of feeds submitted to their database through My Yahoo pages??? I can imagine now that most SEOs know and use this trick, Yahoo should be getting plenty of these submissions, so maybe they decided to if not close this backdoor completely then at least limit its accessibility to a couple hours a day only?

If that’s the case, this is not a good decision on Yahoo’s part. With Google’s launch of their new feed and blog indexing service Blog Search, Yahoo needs to stay competitive in this area as well. While of course My Yahoo Add Content service generates a lot of spam in their database - this is a source for Yahoo to get to know about completely legitimate sites publishing RSS feeds as well - not to mention the fact that officially, this service exists not even for Yahoo itself but for people to be able to use their My Yahoo page as an online aggregator for reading different feeds. Not very nice, Yahoo…

I have come across this tip that shows how to make the best out of your RSS feed and the new Google blog Search.

If you have a popular blog that generates income through advertising, chances are you offer an RSS feed that contains only an exceprt of each entry. This is a good way to encourage readers to visit the blog to continue reading. In the similar interest of drawing traffic to the site, you should also want to make the best use of Google’s new Blog Search function (info). Unfortunately, Google currently uses only RSS feeds (rather than readable pages) to index weblogs, meaning in many cases only a portion of each entry is searchable.

It offers this tip specifically for Movable Type blogs - but with some modifications, this could be applied to about any blog out there (except for Blogger blogs hosted on Blogger - but those have an option to have a feed with complete posts in it easily selected in the blog settings).

Checked this blog’s stats today and was surprised to notice some visitors actually came to my blog from the new Google Blog Search. The new service seems pretty fast and efficient so far. People complain that it only indexes and searches the RSS feeds published by the blogs as opposed to the complete posts (meaning that RSS feeds can sometimes include only a partial description of the actual blog posts). But it is always possible to set up the feed in a way that includes the whole post. I am going to post a trick advised by one of the sites I came across later on.

Looks like with the introduction of Google blog search, Blogger will lose its value as an aid for faster Google indexing. Google blog search FAQ says:

Your results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger

and even

The goal of Blog Search is to include every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom). It is not restricted to Blogger blogs, or blogs from any other service.

What Google also plans on is providing a submission form for people to submit blogs not yet indexed by their blog search service:

How do I get my blog listed?

If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it. Also, we will soon be providing a form that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven’t picked it up automatically. Stay tuned for more information on this.

It is still not clear whether it will go as far as providing an option to ping Google’s server when a blog is updated, and from the previous experience we’ve had with Google Sitemap, it is not quite clear if this service will be safe for blackhat blogs/sites.

As for the RSS feed Google provides for the search results in Blog Search, there is no explicit permission to use it for “commercial” purposes, but at the same time there is no explicit statement saying commercial use of the feed is prohibited. The FAQ only mentions using it with an aggregator:

Can I subscribe to search results?

Yes. At the bottom of each page of search results you can find several links, offering the top 10 or 100 results as either Atom or RSS feeds. Just grab the links from here and subscribe to them in the news aggregator of your choice and you will get updates whenever new posts are made that match your query.

Is it going to be a new backdoor for getting indexed by Google? Time will tell how effective the new service will turn for speeding up the indexing, but it definitely is an interesting new subject for further research and experimenting for the SEOs, white hat and black hat alike.