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

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.

You may remember a post I did about tramadol for dogs and spam associated with it a while ago. Well so, recently I noticed in my stats that I am getting referrals from Google searches for related terms, e.g. this one. I checked and well, it appears that out of over 23,000 results in Google.co.uk I rank #5… Do you think I should start selling tramadol in special packages for dogs exclusively on here yet?

As for other stuff people are trying to sell in these SERPs, one has striken me as particularly funny:

Click here to GET tramadol dogs side effects. Save your $$$. FREE delivery: tramadol dogs side effects.

Ah, the clueless newbie scraper builders! I am still of the opinion that no matter how large my keyword lists are, I need to have at least a quick look at them before I run them through the site generating software (that is, if I don’t have a nice intelligent filter to do that ) - or else, this is what you get.

On the second thought, Google could build a list of such meaningless keywords and hammer down scrapers using these patterns - that is, if they are not doing it yet.

Talking of keywords, watch this space (which is my other, whitehat blog if you are not familiar with it yet) for a nice long keyword research article that I am going to post there soon.

The news has reached me that Bompa, a.k.a. the newbie babysitter of Syndk8, has started a Blackhat SEO Bootcamp - basically, a standalone version of his newbie babysitting at Syndk8.

Who is it good for? Clearly, newbies. Those same newbies who come to syndk8 without knowing the first thing about SEO in general, let alone blackhat, and start by pissing people off and getting themselves under attacks for asking newbie questions. Bompa solves this problem by giving them an option to get their answers elsewhere without being ridiculed. Moreover, he gives them some basic tools good enough to get them started and get the feel of making money online as blackhats - basically, empowers them to make a step from a blackhat wannabe to a real fully-functional blackhat.

Do I recommend it? Absolutely. Knowing Bompa for all this time, I know he doesn’t promice anything he cannot deliver, and I know how experienced and, even more importantly for this case, patient he is. However, he only lets in 25 people at this time so don’t blame me if all seats are taken by the time you get there.

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.

Clearly not linking to this mess but for the sake of a live example:

www.musicstaff.com/links.asp

On the surface, it’s a legitimate decently looking 1997 site with a legitimate business model. But if you look at their links page… sketchy is not even descriptive enough of a word. There’s everything there from discounted adjustable beds to ringtones to car rentals to levitra and viagra… A total of 2025 outgoing external links of mostly this kind off that page. What does it all have to do with music? Moreover, how many of those sites are banned already or will be banned in the next few weeks? Repeat after me: want to ban your site - link to banned sites and bad neighbourhoods. Kindergarten SEO.

Now, don’t get me wrong as I don’t mean to discriminate against anyone, we live in the times of global economy, but let’s face it: overwhelming majority of Indian, Chinese, Philipino and Pakistani link builders that invade the freelance sites these days are horribly unskilled. Outsource your link building to them, and you don’t even need to worry about unscrupulous competitors doing negative SEO - you will get your site banned with your own hands - or to be exact, with the hands of those “linkbuilders”. Sure, in case of the above mentioned site it won’t happen very fast - at least the top 1,000 backlinks out of the 3,000 + of musicstaff.com are really high quality - whoever was handling their linkbuilding prior to this outsourcing hell did a good job, with a bunch of authority sites in the mix. But over the last few years since outsourcing link building has become widespread we’ve heard of many others, big and small, who have run into all sorts of troubles, from site bans to reputation issues - all due to poorly done outsourced link building. Sure, not every company can afford an online marketing budget that would allow hiring some of the industry’s best specialists - but if your business depends on your site’s rankings you better think twice before deciding to outsource it to a third world link builder (this is not to say that all US and UK based SEOs are equally good - but you get the idea).

Hence, here are a few tips for those considering SEO outsourcing. Before you decide to go for it, ask the candidates you plan on hiring as outsourced workforce at least the following questions:

• what are the examples of your previous link building work?
• how did it affect the positions and reputation of the sites it was done for? (e.g. what positions did the site have before the campaign started and how did they change as a result of it)?
• what are the principles you use for building links?
• who exactly will do the actual link bulding and what experience and skills do they possess?
• who will overview the quality of built links and am I paying for the sheer volume or for the quality of built links?

There is no guarantee of course that you will get honest answers to your questions but at least they will know it might not be a good idea to mess with you, and depending on the answers they do give you you will also know if they are any good or if they are simply bullshitting you and scamming you out of your money, however lesser the costs are.