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

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?

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!

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.

So I see people slagging off .edu links a lot recently. I also know that people like to generalize, jump to conclusions and seek cureall solutions. So I think to myself, fine, very fine, the less competition non-creative spammers pestering those .edu sites for links the better

The Guardian used to have wonderful blogs on their site. They were frequently updated, covered plenty of topics, received an enormous amount of traffic, had many active visitors commenting… The best part about those blogs was the absense of nofollow on signature links, thus making the blogs really good for comment spamming cost-effective, easy and fast link acquisition.

Well, they’re not that good any more. Recently, the blogs have been redesigned and it is no longer possible to add a URL to a signature. Sad isn’t it.
I wonder how it will affect the number of commenters?

A while ago, I posted about how Google’s manual review can be detected through your logs. Well, last week I could verify it’s still true - the URL of doom http://www.corp.google.com/~pong/spam/ has appeared in the logs of my other blog splog and it has ceased to exist. But before it happened, the blog has received over 5,500 clicks averaging 50 unique visitors a day and it took Google about 10 months (and a manual review) to catch up with it. So guess I could call Blogger’s bluff with this on their “The steps we’ve taken have both improved the quality of content on Blog*Spot and improved the Blogger service as a whole” bragging - it still takes Google’s manual review.
For those wondering - the blog name on Blogspot has already been taken - giving the new user a jumpstart PR 3 right away! The new content, albeit manually written (it seems), makes even less sense than the original splog - some cheap kiddie verses and stuff. Heck my splog at least was useful for AdSense LOL

Kinda nice to know: I am #2 in Google for black hat seo consultants and probably the only blackhat SEO in that whole set of SERPs The rest is all like “Black hat SEO are the techniques used to fool the search engines” and the like crap.

Hey Google, you still can’t figure what people look for when they look for Blackhat SEO consultants?

Came across a (seemingly) whitehat SEO site recently that had a list of ALL sites owned by its owner - who claims to be an SEO consultant. Just how funny is that? I didn’t take the time to see his other sites but something tells me they could be all interlinked. Moreover, he had his clients’ sites listed on the same site in the same long list. Doh - linkfarm yourself like it’s 1998!

Now, a blackhat SEO would have never done anything like that. First, we don’t want Google identify all of our sites alltogether and ban them all simultaneously. Second, we don’t want other SEOs to see all our niches and increase the level of competition. Lastly, we’re just paranoid by nature - but in this business, it’s a good thing.

Does it take a practicing blackhat SEO to understand stuff like that? - Probably not, it’s all pretty much common sense. Do blackhats never do anything foolish? - Far from truth. But seems like sometimes those whitehats forget the common sense.

The post I’ve done on blackhat SEO vs. ignorance recently has gained some exposure - people have commented on the post itself,  it’s been commented on at digg, it’s even been translated into other languages. While it was pretty complete in the context of the discussion on  SEOMoz mentioned in that post (that discussion has actually ben one of the main things that inspired it), with this ider exposure it’s been taken out of context, so I fel it necessary to clarify my views on this topic. Do not worry, I won’t be bashing white hat SEOs (or even those who call themselves so) much anymore.  I just don’t want people to get the impression  that I endorse blackhat SEO wannabe scripting kiddies. Because  that is NOT  black hat SEO. that is stupidity in action, and ignorance of the same kind as whitehat SEO wannabe ignorance.

So you think the fact that you’ve got a comment spamming script makes you a blackhat SEO? you think firing it off to try to post meaningless bullshit accompanied by your pharm and casino links on my blog will get you far? If even 50 unsuccessful attempts don’t drive it home to you that comments on this blog are moderated you might as well  sell your computer to your neighbour and never touch anything related to the Internet again. What is it you’re trying to achieve, the same sort of relationship with me that Matt Cutts has with search engines Web? You’d be better off spamming A-list bloggers, they might actually let your stuff through  and if you piss them off enough they might even give you some link love.

So you want to be a true blackhat SEO? Put off all your scripts and start by learning all the classical whitehat stuff. Quoting Sugarrae, “every good blackhat I’ve ever known can whitehat their asses off”. Once you’ve learned the main things, make sure you’ve got some imagination. If you’ve got none btter stay where you are - a whitehat without imagination is mediocre of course but at least the amount of stupid things you will do is smaller. or you can still pass for a selfproclaimed whitehat guru if you start a KKK-style war against blackhats - the louder the better.

For those who hasn’t paid attention reading the first part of my musings, let me repeat it again. Blackhat SEO is NOT about pushing buttons to fire off scripts somebody else has written - it is about THINKING OUT OF THE BOX.