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

If you have been looking for blackhat tools now is a good time to shop for some of the best tools available in this industry. I have negotiated a special discount for my blog readers with nobody other than the great Fantomaster, the maker of the best cloaking tools out there. Generally speaking, for those who might not be aware of it he has a lot of tools but he is most famous for his cloaking technolodies.

Cloaking, strictly speaking, is not a 100% blackhat technology. There are many totally legitimate reasons why people cloak their sites. Add IP delivery into the mix and you get a great technology allowing you to target your site visitors better, depending, for example, on their location. But cloaking or IP delivery done incorrectly can do a lot of harm.

The key to successful use of cloaking technologies is the correct information. Fantomaster surely has it - their spiderSpy™ botBase is updated every 6 hours - can you imagine the resources and server capacities it would take YOU to match their base?

So here’s the deal: surely Fantomaster’s tools are expensive, but all you have to do is enter this exclusive promo code:

2008IW102903

- in the “promo code” field on the purchase form and you will get a 10% discount on any tools on their site.

Go get it while the offer lasts and see how it will save you a lot of headache.

Just noticed that WordZe is offering a free 30-day trial which will be valid still for the next 5 days - if you’re a red blooded blackhat and your keyword lists are a few thousand entries long this is a must try. For those unaware, WordZe is pretty much the current industry standard. Overture is dead or almost dead, and even when it wasn’t it was screwed up with their alphabetic keyword sorting. WordTracker - well I have never viewed it as a serious tool unless you go for the paid version, and with BH keyword list building volumes this paid version becomes rather costly… Google keyword tool is so limited I hardly ever use it these days. But WordZe offers much more than any other tool I know or even all of them combined. Let me just mention API and daily search limits that not many of you can even reach realistically.

Strictly speaking, WordZe is not exactly a black hat tool - but it has everything a blackhat could ever wish for. It’s been my keyword research tool of choice almost since it was launched. Go see for yourself and thank me later.

That is, I will surely use it to spy on others. I will never use it on any of my own sites. No matter what amount of popularity it gains. No matter what they tell Guy Kawasaki. It’s worse than installing both Alexa toolbar (deemed spyware by any decent spyware detector, and pretty useless as of now) and Google toolbar (even the sound of using which makes me paranoid - and more so in the recent years) at the same time. It’s worse than hosting your spam generating scripts on some scammer’s server whose main goal is to steal your scripts and see what you’re doing. They act - or at least seem to act - like a true Big Brother, claiming to use “ISPs+ASPs+toolbars+opt-in panels” for collecting their data (since Overture/GoTo never got to be THE Big Brother of the Internet, Google style, doesn’t yet mean Bill Gross has no ambition to create something else that would). They are worse than Google Analytics even - because they make all that data public. Sure this could do a better job for evaluating what to charge for a link off a site using Compete than relying on oh-so-tweakable Alexa rank or oh-so-droppable Google pagerank… but I’m not selling links off any of my online properties for now, and to buy a link off elsewhere I have my own, erm, ways of evaluating their possible worth - so I’m not interested thank you.

Oh, and Compete can also make you look like a selfish moron too - just caught a glimpse of the top search keywords for Problogger.net:

1. problogger
2. about me
3. blogging
4. blogging tips
5. what is a blog

Hmm I wonder in what way can it help Darren Rowse “build search marketing campaigns that drive site traffic and increase sales”?

So recently there has been a number of weird posts in Syndk8. Seems like some people were only registering and waiting for approval to post their spam. I am aware of how many people use forum spamming tools to get their stuff indexed and ranking - and since Syndk8 now is viewed by Google as an authority I can see why people will want the links from a place like this… But those spamming Syndk8 must be unaware of one little issue: this is a CLOSED forum that doesn’t get indexed! So posting your spam here is no use… But of course the publicly available scripts for posting forum spam are not smart enough to check if a forum is a closed one. They just find a bunch of forums, in the best case target them by topic, and stop it at that, and just post anywhere they can.

Buying a tool written by somebody else and using it thoughtlessly does not solve a problem in most cases - and in some cases it is likely to even create a problem.  Using a tool without even trying to analyze the results is no good either. If you never get to see the results of your work you’re missing a lot and will never learn.

Digg, everybody’s favourite source of traffic, has been undergoing a  lot of changes recently. One of those changes that is sure to affect the ways we get our stuff noticed is a fix they applied to the way you can digg or undigg stories. Before, it was possible to digg a story, then undigg it then digg it again which lead to it showing higher on the list of newly submitted stories - thus increasing its chances to get noticed by other people unaffiliated with the original submitter. Some people used this technique quite a lot - and probably it got it burned finally. Now, when you undigg a previously dugg story there is a popup telling you you WON’T be able to digg it again. Backdoor closed.

As I was browsing around I saw a Google ad that looked interesting to me and decided to go and check the advertiser’s site - only to see the “Problem Loading Page” screen. This is not the first time I see this happen and of course this is common sense but I thought I’d still post about it.

The ad was for quite a competitive keyword on a site that gets plenty of traffic. High CPC times high clickthrough rate (due to extremely good targeting - the site is very relevant to the ad)… you get the picture, 0 ROI and a lot of money thrown away for nothing. That server being down could really cost a lot to the advertiser.

Of course, rule number one for any PPC advertiser would be to turn off the ads if the server goes down to stop losing money. But in real life, not too many site admins spend day and night watching for the server downtime - this resulting in PPC money getting wasted for some period of time until the problem is discovered.

This got me thinking: is there a tool anywhere that could ping the server every so often and in case of the server going down turn off the ads display in the advertiser’s AdWords (or Yahoo Search Marketing, to that matter) account? In theory, this shouldn’t be too difficult to build, and with the number of PPC advertisers using Google or Yahoo or both, the market is pretty large.

(Next possible steps for me: run a little research to find out what’s going on in this market, write an e-book, advertise it through PPC, see what ther esponse is, invest into building the tool, market and sell it. I’m not sure tho I am interested enough in this project that can turn pretty huge and time consuming. So instead, I decided I’d just blog about it and see if there’s any response in the form of comments.)

So what are your thoughts on this?

P.S. I know I have shifted a bit towards PPC in my recent posts, I promice we will return to our usual program soon

… or How to Make Identifying Connection Between Your Sites Nearly Impossible.

Quite a few things have already been said about connections between sites identifiable by Google becoming the reason for mass bans - this excellent post by Graywolf comes to mind, as well as one memorable practical lesson from Matt Cutts. But these are things that are kinda more or less on the surface and possibly can be identified algorithmically. Now, what happens if somebody is so curious about your network that they start digging into your details manually? You think it’s enough to just take care of the basics and you’re safe - well think again.

Recently, I have been looking at somebody’s network of sites (for research purposes mostly, competitive analysis and such, ya know) and found it incredible how many stupid things people can do with their domain information that leaves them wide open to anyone skilled enough to look deeper. I am not going to tip anyone as to all the evil uses of such information but I couldn’t help posting a few things many people seem to either ignore or be unaware of.

So, what in your WHOIS info can be potentially vulnerable?

1. Unless it’s a shared host hosting hundreds of sites that belong to different clients of this hosting provider, hosting your multiple sites on the same IP is a surefire giveaway - infact, this was the first thing that revealed the whole network in question to me.

2. Nameservers: these should either be separate for every domain you own or belong to the host whose shared hosting you’re using, along with hundreds of other sites hosted there.

3. Registrant info: this should either be privateor completely unique for each domain. Using email address like myotherdomain@yahoo.com as you contact email in registrant details is as stupid as can be.

4. Screw any of the above once and your domain is screwed for good as the WHOIS history and nameserver changes can all be tracked for as much as $149/year (the cost of silver membership at Domaintools).

A few days ago, Michelle has announced a $100 discount on the Pro version of RSS2Blog. The popular tool is now available at $197 for a limited time, including the bonus materials and forum access. I decided to let my readers know about it in case they haven’t heard of it yet.

Those interested in RSS2B affiliate program can sign up here.

Wordtracker free trial version is currently down. This is what I saw when I went over to their site:

We regret that the free trial is currently unavailable.Our servers have just been subjected to a denial of service attack that abused the free trial. To safeguard our paying customers we are working to prevent this from happening again.

The free trial will return as soon as possible.

Please note that this issue does not affect our paid service.

Could it be some blackhat hard at work scraping for keywords?

As a sidenote, they surely don’t miss a chance to sell their paid service…

Back in November, Jeremy Zawodny posted about RSS2Blog labelling it a splog tool and there was a whole choir of those condemning everybody using RSS 2 Blog as spammers, sploggers and what not - while I and at least one more person noted in the comments that it’s not the tool that spams as a tool can be used for different purposes. Well, this might be a bit surprizing for this black hat blog but I thought I’d still list all those reasons I can come up with for legitimate (e.g. not spammy, or sploggy, to that matter) use of RSStoBlog.

1. You go on a holiday and want your (pre-written) stuff posted to your blog daily - you put it inot RSS2Blog and set the time when to post.

2. You want to track the search results for a particular term/keyword/maybe even group of keywords - set up these search results to be posted with your RSS to Blog and you’re done.

3. You want news on a specific topic posted to your blog regularly along with something you normally write manually  - RSS to Blog is an easy way of automating that task.

4. You want to keep track (and maybe let other people keep track) of stuff posted on multiple blogs, 301powered.com-style (some may call it spam or scraping or whatever they like - I’d simply call it aggregation, not much different from what Google News does) - this can be achieved using the feeds from those blogs and, again, RSS2Blog.

5.  You want to post (even if manually) to several blogs using one and the same interface not to overcomplicarte things - RSS to Blog is of use in this case as well.

6. You want to use a user-defined list of services to ping every time you post to your blog (not so easy if your blog is not WordPress-powered) - RSS to blog is the solution to this.

7. Finally, what if you simply hate your blogging tool’s interface? OK RSS2Blog’s interface might not be the coolest one out there but it’s still a solution, no worse than Blogger’s official plugin for MS Word…

So as we can see, the legitimate uses are a no-brainer - now, to come up with really smart black hat solutions where RSS2Blog can be employed really neat takes some imagination - and it’s up to you to figure that out - just like with any other tool…