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

The kids with the comment spamming scripts can’t stop surprising me. Barely had Facebook introduced its “Like” button, they already make references to it. Here is a comment I got in my moderation queue:

I got to this page through Facebook (a friend of mine posted it). After reading it, I of course clicked “Like” then shared it.

Except, this on a site WITHOUT any “Like” button

Maile Ohye of Google has posted on her personal blog about the infamous hidden text tricks, saying that

If possible, it’s still best to avoid techniques such as “text-indent:-9999px” or “margin:-4000px” or “left:-2000em”

Well of course Google doesn’t like it, but I keep seeing quite a lot of these like it’s still 2001. I bet you all have seen them too or maybe even use them still (do you? shame on you, grow up and be more creative!). This is not big news really, what follows in her post is interesting tho. She talks about ways to alternately hide whatever needs to stay off the visible page for legitimate reasons, and the suggestions she lists are @media speech { } vs @media screen { } and the HTML 5 hidden=”" attribute. Not really sure about the hidden attribute, but I believe I have seen already the “media” trick used for a bit less than legitimate reasons - how long till Google starts hunting for those as signs of spam instead of recommending them?

What are Viagra SERPs?

Viagra SERPs are the most compeititive search engine results frequently changing with many websites fiercely competing for the top spots. The most advanced and aggressive techniques are used by website owners to rank in the top 10 search results in Google for queries like “Viagra”, “Buy Viagra” and the like. Viagra SERPs are the ones to watch closely for everyone who wants to learn about what works currently or will work in SEO

For the sake of academic value to fellow SEOs (blackhat and those just interested in learning more about SEO that works) I created a Google Square about Viagra SERPs.

I thought I’d check how Google’s new interface affects the buy viagra serps and did a post to cover them on my other blog. Have a look as there are a few interesting opportunities there for those who can see them.

Something really really evil and powerful that will change the face of the Internet is going to be out soon - it’s called SEO Link Pro and it’s a tool that is going to be released by Syndk8.

This tool will change the way people build links. From what I hear from Earl Grey, the efforts put into the development of this tool are larger than probably any blackhat tool released before.

If you haven’t seen the ad video for it yet here it is.  SEO Link Pro

Once it is released I will be doing a full review and sharing my impressions so watch this spot.

Overall, I have nothing against GoDaddy. It’s a convenient registrar with handy domain search finctions, bulk registration and almost everything else a black hat could dream of. Sure its site’s a bit bloated and takes forever to load - but other than that, generally I’ve been pretty happy with them.

If not for one thing - auto-renewals. Sure thing, if you have a ton of domains you intend to keep it’s nice not to have to worry about renewing them - but what if you want to drop some of your domains? Seems like by default, they now add auto-renewal to all the domains you buy with them. I wasn’t really aware of this until recently I decided not to renew a bunch of domains. I renewed the ones I wanted, just left without attention all the rest and left it at that. All of a sudden, on the expiration date I receive a message from GoDaddy that my card has been charged the cost of all those domains renewed for a year! If it was one or two domains I probably wouldn’t have cared much and just said ok, but there was a bunch of them and quite a lump sum of money - so I contacted their support and told them I didn’t want those domains and asked for a refund.

I must say that despite the fact that GoDaddy has no live chat with their support, they are pretty fast answering any email inquiries they get. They replied explaining what I should do and how to remove the auto- renewal option off my domains if I do not want them auto-renewed in the future. Since the procedure is slightly less than obvious here are the instructions for those of you who have domains at GoDaddy:

- Log into your account and click the “My Renewals and Upgrades” item in the side menu

- Select “Payments and Renewing Items” in the submenu

- You will see a list of all your domains with indications whether the auto-renewal for each of them is “On” or “Off” in the “Auto” column of the list

- Select the checkboxes for the domains you want to cancel the auto-renewal for and click the “Auto Renew” button at the top of the list (what sucks, tho, is that if you have more than 20 domains you will have to do it for as many times as there are pages of the list of your domains, with 20 domains per page only)

- You will see a form on the right of your page offering different options for renewals - select what you need, click Save and you’re done.

If anybody finds a way to do it in bulk please let me know - I haven’t found any options for bulk domain management.

Folks, I must confess of something. I, too, have gone that way and released an ebook. Now my name can be slandered along with the names of all the ebook writing gurus. My only excuse is my ebook does not contain any bullshit like most gurus’.

I know many of my readers have whitehat projects so this ebook will be handy for promoting them nicely. (Time for my favorite 3-year-old SugarRae quote about blackhats whitehatting their ass off!) No need to think linkbuilding through directory submissions is the thing of the past - you just need to know a few tricks and it still works, even better than ever. The ebook comes with a nice list of bonuses, including a 4,000-strong directory list which actually contains live directories and the pagerank of those directories is current, for a change.  Moreover, I will keep updating it at least after every pagerank update. Another bonus those getting the ebook will be receiving very soon is a desktop tool for automating some of the keyword competitiveness research tasks that I am building right now - all for free.

Now head over to the Directory Marketing Reborn ebook site and see for yourself what it’s all about. Fantomaster has already recommended it.

Those who have been waiting for purely blackhat posts from me, brace yourselves cause this is as blackhat as it gets.

I was checking the “buy viagra” SERPs in Google today and came across something that entertained me a lot. Who did I see ranking at #1 for “buy Viagra” but… Michael Martinez!

Why would a well respected member of the SEO community, known to be as whitehat as they get want to spam his forum profile to the top of buy viagra SERPs? Something smelt fishy here and I decided to dig deeper. Heres’ what I’ve seen when I clicked through to see the actual page:

Upon further examination, it became clear that the well respected member of the SEO community has nothing to do with this profile and some spammer just used his name randomly (or not so randomly?). But what totally amazed me is how fast this profile reached the goal of its creation:

As you see, it’s been created only9 days ago - and already succeeded in making it to the top of such competitive SERPs!

Little wonder here, really. OpenX is a free, open source ad server that manages the selling and delivery of online advertising inventory. It is also a 2001 authority domain with over 6 million links as reported by Yahoo. The profile page itself has 485 links that Yahoo already knows of. Using the power of an authority domain at it best!

While the spammer made a great choice of his parasite hosting resource, he has, however, made one mistake. If not for such a renown name he chose to use, his trick would have probably gone unnoticed.

Those of you following me on FriendFeed already know that I’ve been rehosting this blog - which has now been completed successfully, with much less hassle than the irishwonder.com one. While at it, I had Earl Grey email me some of the old files from the previous server and when I opened the email in Gmail here’s what I have noticed:

There wasn’t a single word in the email referring to blackhat SEO or anything of the sort - there was, as you can see, only the mention of Syndk8 and me - and yet it was enough for Google to target this ad at me. I obscured the actual site URL not to provide any free advertising to yet another clueless newb wanting to cash in on an ever-so-popular (up to the point of becoming painfully mainstream) concept of Black Hat SEO.

What proves my point even more is the fact that it’s not the first or one of a few sites trying to cash in on blackhat I’ve seen lately. The other day, I came across a newly started forum of another clueless newb - again, claiming to be a useful source of information about blackhat seo - yea well, maybe in a few years, dude, so far the forum was pretty empty. That one, though, had quite a creative way of promoting himself - he was distributing torrents of popular BH software with its title modified to include his site’s URL - if only the software owner doesn’t catch him at some point and kick his arse he might even be able to create himself a small following of equally clueless newbs - blackhat wannabes.

As I watch it all I am not worried about “competition” or disappointed or anything - first of all this is no competition to seasoned blackhats who do more than they talk. Gaming Google has become so much more difficult that it actually requires skills, experience and a good deal of creativity these days - not just stealing somebody else’s tools and running off with them. These wannabes give blackhat SEOs a bad name - well guess what, our reputation has never been really fluffy so who cares. I am only slightly nostalgic about the days when Syndk8 was the only blackhat SEO forum, we were the only blackhats, all mainstream forums used to kick us out so we had to start our own place to talk about BH and share our ideas - since we had a lot to share. Do these mainstream wannabes have anything worthy to share? Somehow, I doubt…

But those of you just starting and not knowing any better - watch out, they are in it for your money. Well, I guess everybody does what they can to make their dollar or two - but use your best judgement and check around what everybody is saying about them before getting out your credit card.

(Disclaimer: there’s nothing really blackhat in these techniques and I used this title more for attention driving purposes - but read on, you may find some useful bits and pieces below)

Have you ever wished you knew just how much traffic a competitor’s site is getting? Lots of SEOs, affiliate marketers and site owners face this question every now and then. Yet, there is no reliable way to get this kind of data unless you have access to a site’s logs… or is there?

OK, all I’m going to describe below probably does not exactly match the server logs in terms of reliability of the information you obtain, but it gets you pretty close. Do not, however, rely on just one trick and try to verify your information using several methods at once.

To start with, especially if you’re trying to compare the traffic of two or more sites, go to Alexa. Yea I know, enough has been said about how unreliable their data are, some sites may even be blocking the Alexa toolbar altogether, but hey, this is just the starting point.

Compete and Quantcast are the two services that collect traffic data for sites - check them as your next step. These tools are especially useful for higher traffic sites. For sites that do not get much traffic, you may not get any data at all - but at least you’ve tried.

Next and most interesting step involves Google - and you bet a monster like Google does know a thing or two about a site’s traffic. What you should do is get a few keywords that you know the site in question ranks for high enough to get the benefit of those rankings, go to Google Trends, enter the keyword the site ranks for and some other keyword that one of your sites ranks for that you know the kind of traffic it gets - and compare the two. (In case you don’t know what keywords a site ranks for, SpyFu should be your tool of choice to get these keywords - just enter the site’s URL and look what comes up as its organic rankings)

Another option you could use in Google Trends is enter the URL of the site in question and a URL of some site you own and know the traffic it gets and compare the two.

While not a single one of the listed methods can guarantee 100% correct information, at least the data you get is good for estimation purposes.

Oh and BTW, to facilitate using the tools I have mentioned here, I have created a bunch of custom Ubiquity commands which you can subscribe to and use all you want - and if you don’t know yet what Ubiquity is make sure you read this post on my other blog.