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

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.

Thanks for sending me your comment spam with your site map - saved me an extra step looking for it and the keyword selection is really high quality, looks like you manually filtered it to exclude all the meaningless scraped keywords. Great job. I was just considering generating a MySpace related site or 100 as I have an affiliate program to monetize them properly.

However, there is one thing that makes me wonder - I don’t suppose $99.95 for the Basic membership at iDisk, even less so $179.95 for .Mac Family Pac - so it must have been the free 60-day trial. The part that worries me is “60-day”. You put all this effort in spamming your links only to lose your parasite hosted site in 60 days? Hmmm… All parasite hosting is surely a gamble, it may or may not last, but KNOWING exactly that you would lose it in 60 days? Did that PR9 tempt you so much?

Those who know me also know how much I like all the comment spam I am getting on this and other blogs of mine Really folks, could I wish for more than free research delivered straight into my moderation queue? You just gotta figure out how to use it, make a few steps to implement it - and you’re set. If something is being spammed there is money in it to be made.

Sometimes the spam I get is weird, sometimes it is funny. Sometimes I can’t help laughing at the broken tools the spammers are using (e.g. the one that splits their keyword list into single separate meaningless keywords and spams that - just one of the recent curiosities I came across). Sometimes, however, my comment spam really makes me wonder.

I’ve been getting “tramadol dog” spam for ages now - and it always made me wonder if that’s just uncanny scraped keywords that have never been filtered from complete nonsense or if it’s a legitimate keyword for those pharma guys. Today my curiosity took over and I decided to do a quick check.

The Google search for “tramadol for dog” has revealed that this infact is not a made up keyword. In the top 10 results, I have noticed some vet sites, some .edu sites - and I don’t mean spammed by parasites but a legitimate research on a College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences site, Yahoo! Answers - and the question/answer seemed legitimate as well… It appears that tramadol is prescribed to dogs to relieve pain, e.g. after surgery or in case of arthritis or other chronic conditions.

I have noticed that Google only lists 565,000 results for this search - hmm, not too competitive is it? What’s interesting is that there’s not that much spam in the top 10 either - I have only seen two outright spammy results and one a bit spammy looking blog seemingly written manually but for the sake of placing AdSense onto it. I wonder why, considering that I do get all this comment spam for this keyword? Maybe the search volume is not that big for spammers to target seriously?

I checked Google Trends and got this:

Your terms - tramadol for dogs - do not have enough search volume to show graphs.

OK so that could be the answer - but still I guess as a long tail keyword it might be of some interest to pharma spammers, no? Actually, ranking for it should only take an aged domain (at least 2006) and a few thousand links… If you are/were a pharma spammer would you go for it?

I just noticed Bompa of Syndk8 mentioned me in a post about people paying attention to buy Viagra SERPs. He bitched about me having only two posts on the topic - so here goes another one!

Watching the folks who watches the BUY VIAGRA SERPs seems to be a new fad doesn’t it? Well so, I had a look at the Viagra SERPs in Google and to me the top 5 are a bit different cause of different geolocation - but pretty close still. Fantomaster really does a great job of his Viagra watch. Out of the people I know I also see Dink in there. There is one more very interesting thing I noticed, namely a parasite page off Brooklyn College of the City University of New York - targetting - guess what keyword??? Get ready for it…. BUY VIAGRA SERPS!

Holy shit, some keywords they are scraping! I even know whom they are scraping - sure enough, Viagra study at Syndk8. There is a bunch of results like I mentioned in the top 10 in Google for viagra serps. One of them that I noticed even had the syndk8 URL in their scraped content. Well if this keeps on going like this, Google will end up considering “buy viagra serps” keyword long tail of “buy viagra” and next thing we know is I’ll be selling Viagra off this blog!

I have decided to relaunch my other blog over at IrishWonder’s SEO Consulting. There I list the reasons that lead me to this decision - and one of the reasons is me wanting to get back to the consulting scene. I happen to have a bit more time for that now (and a specially trained team too to assist me), and besides I believe consulting gives you a chance to look at a wider range of things than you get to look at while only doing your own thing. I don’t really intend to run your whole SEO campaign (unless you’re ready to offer a really good price that would make it totally worth it) - what I offer is rather strategic planning, research of more intricate things such as techniques applied by competitors, site bans, market niche analysis, etc. In other words, I offer to do what I’m really good at and provide my advice to people. Those interested can find my contact details over at IrishWonder SEO Consulting.

Oh come on, you mean somebody is still unaware of this?

Wow look at this - our G-Man is at #13! Congrats mate, never had any doubts about your capabilities!

Recently, I was asked a question:

What is better to use - subdomains or subfolders? And when an authority domain comes into play, how does it affect my choice?

Sometimes there is lack of understanding here so I decided to post my answer.

Generally, the choice of using a subdomain vs a subfolder should depend on the purpose you’re trying to pursue. But whether you’re using a trusted authority domain or a newly bought .info has a lot of influence on your choice.

If we assume that G treats subdomains as separate sites - and I see no evidence of things being otherwise as of today - then making a sub on a trusted domain kinda cuts it off that trusted domain and makes it a separate entity, with its own reputation, trust rank and authority level. Now, if we make a directory on a trusted domain, supposedly the authority is being passed to it from the main domain. With any other domains you want to achieve the opposite. First: you want to escape whatever cap G might have on indexing pages from the same domain, considering the number and quality of incoming links. Second: if you are using a domain that already has some sort of usage history - either by you, or previous owner, or if its some free host by other users - by creating a subdomain you cut yourself off whatever bad rep could be generated through that usage.

Of course this cannot last forever, either. Generally I am of the opinion that this cutting off has its limit - at some point, if subdomains of a domain get banned one after another it will lead to the whole domain getting banned. The domain loses its trust and value, and new subdomains created on it may be flagged as spam right away. So whatever you do, make sure you don’t overdo it, and of course never make a fixed number of subdomains on all your domains (i.e. where you have control over everything being created) so as not to create a pattern.

So you were asking for it - here goes. I am back into posting mode, don’t know how often I will be able to post but anyway there are certain things I feel I have to share.

Nothing makes me laugh more than seeing the process of learning in some whitehats and how slow it goes. However, whitehats still do learn new tricks and blackhats should not slow down their learning process either.

This is really old news for those who somehow happen not to know - it has been made public almost 1 1/2 years ago and even if somebody happens not to read Threadwatch (gasp!), Quadszilla has been talking about this trick ad nauseam afterwards so even the blind have seen it and even the deaf have heard it. So funny when whitehats are making big news out of it

What’s a bit troubling there is the ethical question of people getting outed - sure the spammer was not careful enough and got caught but there are precautions to be taken. I believe (and a lot of experienced people will agree with me) it’s really dumb to use brute force spam like that to link directly to your MFA sites - let’s just hope this poor dude had more than one AdSense account. Now then, don’t I just love it how affiliate networks like CJ let you encode your aff id!

Now then, I don’t believe blog comment/trackback spam  is anywhere as effective any more as it used to be - so was it worth the effort and all the exposure that followed? And blog spammers, quick, take note: that blog mentioned in the post is now to be filtered out of your spamming list! Dohh - haven’t I been talking for ages about filtering the blog lists to spam? Also, mass stuff only works when done with brains - I’ve been moderating trackback and comment spam on my own blog here where the same person hits several posts over a couple hours - if you don’t get through once do you think more attempts cut it? Sooo lame… Yawn.