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

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.

Once upon a time it was enough to just break your homepage into pixels and sell them all for a million dollars to become the coolest linkbait on the net. Not anymore. With the amount of clones created for the original Million Dollar Homepage everybody is bored to death with that simple concept (isn’t it the beauty of linkbait - really talanted link bait cannot be copied or stolen). Now, it takes a bit more to stand out of the crowd.

When Michael Gray a.k.a. GrayWolf mentioned he was really awesome it looked pretty catchy but it still was sort of a repetition of an old school “somebody.isgay.com” trick. Now, when I saw Jon Henshaw mention Paul Dixon’s Flyer Wall, that was indeed a cool concept! This guy not only offers you a link but actually designs you a flyer to go with it - very stylish, if you ask me. The idea seems to be picking up too - the current Alexa rank is a bit over 303K.

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?

I’ve discovered UKGimp’s blog yesterday by following a link from Threadwatch to his interview of Danny Sullivan and also read a few interviews back, and while I enjoyed them this made me think of one issue.

Aaron Wall whom we can easily consider the father of the SEO interview genre said not so long ago that

interviews are currently the hottest form of spam on the SEO circuit

You know you’re popular if people interview you in packs (heck even I was asked to do an interview a couple of times though nothing came out of it so far yet). however, not all of these interviews are equally good. I do enjoy reading interviews done by masters of interviewing peole such as Aaron Pratt… but there’s only so many things you can ask a person if everybody’s interviewing him currently, and only so many ways you can word your answers - when 100 people run off to interview Matt Cutts I doubt there’s a lot of value in all of those interviews. So what once was an effective linkbait tool becomes dull duplicate spam.

As all of us are located in different parts of the world and many haven’t even met each other, many of those interviews are not even done live - but that’s another issue. Unless you  really do your best to work on the interview and communicate with your interviewee, interviews not done live or even on an IM are so evident. When the answer begs for a follow-up question and there’s none it gives you away and you interviw is lacking so much… So it’s not just an easy way to get your linkbait out and get everybody to link to you - with the competition there is currently, only most creative interviews will make it.

I have noticed yesterday that whois.sc had a redirect to domaintools.com and the overall design looked very different even if I didn’t pay attention to the address bar. Well, today there is a confirmation posted by Gary Price. What’s notable about the new site is that they offer a number of new services, most of them for free, and some services have been expanded. For example, now you can list an unlimited number of domains hosted on an IP.

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.