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

Shoemoney, known for all kinds of funny things like running a live webcam on his blog and offering a $25 prize to the first person who catches him eating on his web cam, has removed the cam off the blog it seems. I haven’t seen him say anywhere whether it is permanent or temporary. Well in any case, I guess we all need some privacy at some point…

UPDATE: as of April 13, his webcam is back on

A lady named Roxana Hanson has posted this as a comment on this blog:

Please HELP. I canot access my gmail account. I need help, information and support. This problem started 2 days ago. I cannot solve the problem. I followed instructions of the Help Center list of issues with no avail whatsoever. Can anybother outhere help me? or I am all alone with this?

PLEASE HELP. I am a translator and all my translation orders are made through y gmail account. HELP!!!!! PLEASE!!!!

I thought it’d be easier to attract people’s attention if I posted it as a separate post rather than just leaving it as a comment. I have seen people posting about Gmail problems before - but cannot think of a proper solution to the problem right away. Can anybody help this lady and advise what can be done?

Anybody out there with any serious business targeting young audience , e.g. fashion, health, wellness & fitness, sports & rec, music, film, TV, etc, MUST contact MySpace for their media kit for advertizers. Even if you’re not interested in placing paid ads on their  site, it’s a worthy read. Their media kit provides data on demographics, Media Metrix data on pageviews, specifics of MySpace site - a lot of food for thought.

I have been getting emails from people asking me to let them into the forums. As you probably know, currently we have limited access of the new members and they should get manually approved before they can join. This has been done for a number of reasons that are detailed here. It DOES NOT make sense emailing me or Earl Grey unless you personally know me or him. It DOES NOT help and might even work against you if you piss us off. Just be patient or become someone we would be really interested in having in our forums.

We have all seen sites that are basically one-page sales letters with design as ugly as can be. They lack any elements a normal site is suposed to have, like proper navigation, they are incredibly long and can take many scrolls to get to the bottom of the page (and to the point/price/whatever it is that people should get to). Yet these are the sites of the people who make nice money online by selling their stuff through these sales pages. Check any site selling stuff through Clickbank and about 90% of them are that type of sites, ugly long pages with no intelligent design. You might have wondered, this couldn’t be accidental, right?

Talk all you wish about poor design relating to more clicks on AdSense sites, but this one is slightly different. Here, clicks are not the same factor as with Adsense sites. In this particular case, people only have to click once but pay for it - so it takes them more than just wanting to navigate away from the ugly page. The reason for poor design is psychological here. Site owners trying to talk people into buying their fantastic software that will help you make thousands on the web fast need to get as many people as possible clicking and paying. So people with little web design skills look at those sites and think, ah that must be easy, see he only made one page and here he is selling his software and making good moeny - so I will be able to do that as well won’t I? People with more skills think, if this eejit who made this ugly page can make money on the Internet I will surely be able to do the same or even better - and they buy it!

Design is not something you have or haven’t time for  - it’s something that should serve its purpose. Just doing things because somebody else said so won’t cut it - think of who YOUR visitors will be and what suits you best. (Sounds so whitehat, I know, but still true )

I got a spam email today. Its title looked scary at first glance, all this stuff about PayPal and warning notifications, ya know… But I know better than that so I looked at the full headers and what do I see but:

From: PayPal Security Center
MIME-Version: 1.0
Message-ID:
Received:

* from [62.139.102.34] (helo=62.139.102.34) by *** with smtp (Exim 4.52) id 1FBXDI-00025a-Vc for irishwonder@***.com; Tue, 21 Feb 2006 08:05:57 -0500
* from 42.0.202.114 by ; Tue, 21 Feb 2006 11:05:38 -0200

Reply-To: PayPal
Return-path:
Subject: Warning Notification issued for your account
To: irishwonder@***.com
X-MSMail-Priority: High
X-Mailer: MIME-tools 5.503 (Entity 5.501)
Priority: High Priority 1

I remembered Greg Boser’s (a.k.a. Web Guerilla) post about comment spammers and thought I’d try and see  who the spammer  was and what I can find out using the full headers of this spam message. This is what I digged out in Whois:

The first IP mentioned in the headers:

62.139.102.34

Blacklist Status:	Listed (details)
Record Type:	IP Address
IP Location:	Egypt - Al Qahirah - Cairo - Egynet
Reverse IP:	Web server hosts 1 websites

The blacklist for this IP has two entries, dated today and 2006-02-18. The site hosted on that IP is :

Domain Name:LRCEGYPT.ORG
Created On:10-Dec-2003 13:03:37 UTC
Last Updated On:22-Nov-2005 17:23:33 UTC
Expiration Date:10-Dec-2007 13:03:37 UTC

Blacklist Status: Listed - Cached Today

****
Registrant City:Cairo
Registrant State/Province:Cairo
Registrant Postal Code:12411
Registrant Country:EG

Now, there is no way for me to tell whether it’s these Egyptians spamming me or somebody uses their server as a proxy - but if it was somebody else it still got the Egyptians effectively blacklisted for spam.

Oh yea, and the link in the phishing email (yes that’s what it was of course) was poining at a Korean server… What a collection!

Had a look at Matt Cutts’ blog today and noticed something I haven’t seen there before: he changed the default WordPress text that goes before the comment form to this:

Leave a Comment (unless you are a spammer

I wonder how effective that might be in fighting spammers (do they run away Matt?) but at least it made me smile.

… and egoSurf actually does have a way of displaying a vanity logo on your own blog - here we go:

Also, somehow the second time I ran that check it showed a higher result… Talk about tools’ credibility

Randfish mentioned egosurf, a tool that calculates how much you are associated with your own blog/site/whatever. Well I just ran it for myself out of curiosity, and this is what it told me:

ego points
irishwonder
4810
www.google.com

On Yahoo it’s even better:

ego points
irishwonder
5809
www.yahoo.com

The way they do it is pretty interesting and I’d love to have a tool for deep link analysis based on the same principle (on the second thought, there it is, right? *). One more interesting thought inspired by this toy is that this could be a criterion for choosing the right SEO - where do they rank for their own name/company name? I mean, come on, if you can’t rank #1 for your own name what can you do for other people?

They also have a link for suggesting more features for the tool - I didn’t suggest it there directly but will say here what I thought would be neat - they should make something people could place on their sites/blogs to display their points - with a link back to egosurf - So here we go, a free linkbait idea for you guys - no need to thank me but I’m not placing a direct link to you until you implement this feature

——————-
* - Oops I probably shouldn’t have posted it, now everyone and their fleas will use it for that until the lads implement captchas or something….. oh well….

I’ve been checking out one - relatively - new web outlet to hang out at and among other features it has there are of course blogs - well, just like any community-oriented web place nowadays. The funny (or not so funny) part of it was when I actually wanted to take a look at one of the blogs - this is the message I got:

Blogs are currently disabled for special maintenance. They will be availble again in about 20 minutes. Sorry for the inconvenience. April 12 11am PST

Considering the date today, this is definitely lasting more than 20 minutes already… Very sad, considering that the place - I am not mentioning it just yet - has gained significant coverage and notoriety lately…