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

Seems like Wikipedia folks really got nothing else to do with their life than catch wiki spammers - or whoever they consider such.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:A._B./To_do_list (no link love for you!)
This is a to-do list of some Wikipedia editor where I am listed along with Threadwatch, Graywolf, Searchguild (recently bought by SEONews) and Syndk8.

I, as well as other sources mentioned on that list, did write a post about getting links off Wikipedia - this was a while ago, they finally got to reading that stuff and acting on what they read It has only been two years by now

I used to have a user profile on Wikipedia - they now moved my page to Wictionary (en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:IrishWonder) and removed my logo that used to be on my user page. Well if they refuse me the right to be their user - so be it, I will take the pride in being treated the same way as Danny Sullivan who was refused a (totally valid) mention in Wikipedia a while ago. Now that’s a worthy company!

Lately, there has appeared a number of articles speculating about whether or not Google is about to drop PR (we’re of course talking of toolbar Page Rank here). Of course we all know PR is just one of a huge number of other factors Google looks at when ranking sites, and it gets to play a smaller part in the ranking algo as time passes. Of course we also know that TBPR is just a joke to give silly webmasters something to talk about and the real pagerank is calculated by Google in real time dynamically and may have nothing to do with what we get to see in the toolbar.

Whether or not it will be buried by Google I personally have no idea and we may speculate here all we want but the facts speak for themselves:
1. Last time there was an update, it wasn’t like all the previous updates in the way that new sites that would have otherwise received at least PR2 have not received anything
2. If you look at any given top 10 of any SERPs you will notice very little corelation between the pages’ pagerank and their positions
3. It’s been a while since last PR update and it makes me wonder if there ever gonna be another one.
4. PR is soooo DP…… who talks about it these days except DP folks?

Back to work. Go ahead and talk some more about it if you wish. I know a couple of years ago when the PR on the tool bar went dead for a few days I could have pulled a nice and potentially profitable trick if only I was a bit faster and talked a bit less and acted a bit more organized.

I won’t list all the recent instances of Microsoft’s search presence being broken - everybody sure has at least someting to complain, from easily spammable SERPs to slow indexing. This time, it’s their submit a URL page. Enter your URL, type in the captcha, press Submit and wait for MSN to pick up your site? - yea rite! Not any more!

I wonder if it’s just a normal routine fuckup or a pre-Christmas spam protection, MSN style?

Entry Page: www.irishwonder.com
Number of Entries: 25
Entry Page Time: 3rd March 2007 08:21:29
Visit Length: 5 hours 18 mins 25 secs (!)
Referring URL: www.seoidiot.com/seoblog/

Paul what you been doing on my site for so long??? And if you’re really itching so bad for me to link to ya there ya go lmao

Checking my stats recently I came across this bit in place of a search keyword my visitors came from:

[encrypted by AOL]

I guess it’s their belated reaction to the old story with their search data. Well not releasing the actual searches even to the site owners getting those visitors is a bit of an overkill IMO - but they must have felt very embarassed if it got to this.

This is slightly old news - a couple days old - but the idea is great and needs as much support as possible so I’m blogging about it. There is a new initiative aimed at protecting search engine users privacy that is very promicing and it’s called #Privacy:

What Is #Privacy:
“Pound Privacy” is a campaign to create the first standard for search engine query privacy. The implementation is fairly straightforward: If you append the phrase “#privacy” at the end of a query on any search engine or site search, your query should not be tracked by IP or cookie, and should not be made public in keyword tools. It is that simple.

The web site is an open letter to the “big four” - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask - with an offer to implement the technique to searches performed by their users. Let’s see what their reaction will be but if this does get implemented I believe we will all benefit from it. Support it and spread the word!

She would never say where spam came from
TOS don’t matter cause it’s gone
While the sun is out
Or in the darkest night
Noone knows
She spams and goes

Good bye SERPs relevance
Who could spam the hell out of you
When you change with every update
Still I’m gonna spam you!

;-)

I know I’ve been really slow at posting stuff recently and the thing I’m posting about here happened a couple weeks ago already but still it’s worth a post. SEOIdiot, a friend of mine who is a very talented cartoonist and the author of my logo on the other blog/site has noticed Matt’s problems with designing a proper favicon for his blog so he decided to help him out. Here’s how it worked out: Cartoon Matt Cutts. Hey Matt, I hope you enjoy this one and maybe even use the favicon for your blog

Recently, Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal anounced the launch of Umdum, a new human edited directory. The even offered free submissions to the readers for a limited time. Well, I missed the deadline for free submissions but thought I’d try anyway and submitted this blog and my other blog. To prove once again it pays to watch your logs, I’ve seen the guys from Umdum looking at this site today! The blog hasn’t been added so far but I’m ready to wait soem more until they make their final judgement. So guys, am I good enough?

You know those services offering you a subdomain/subfolder for free with a funny domain name like go.to/mysite or getit.at/mysite and the like? Well, getting those cool free names is becoming slightly difficult these days as search engine spammers cast their eye in that direction in masses. For example, this is a message you get when trying to register for a subdomain at moved.to:

We apologise for any inconvenience, however the moved.to sign up process is currently unavailable. Over recent days we have had some large scale spam attacks on the moved.to system that have been compromising the user experience.

As a temporary measure we have disabled the sign up process, until we have solved the problem of these large scale spam attacks, this has been done to give our users a better usage experience, and we will reactivate the sign up as soon as we can prevent the spam.

We are working hard on creating a spam free service for our member, please visit us again in a short while and get your desired moved.to address.

Please report SPAM abuse to us, moved.to does not support Spam and will delete such short URL’s reported to us, Please include full details including the URL name and what type of spam was done on on which site, Please help us keep this free service clean from spam. thank you!