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?

Those who know me also know how much I like all the comment spam I am getting on this and other blogs of mine Really folks, could I wish for more than free research delivered straight into my moderation queue? You just gotta figure out how to use it, make a few steps to implement it - and you’re set. If something is being spammed there is money in it to be made.

Sometimes the spam I get is weird, sometimes it is funny. Sometimes I can’t help laughing at the broken tools the spammers are using (e.g. the one that splits their keyword list into single separate meaningless keywords and spams that - just one of the recent curiosities I came across). Sometimes, however, my comment spam really makes me wonder.

I’ve been getting “tramadol dog” spam for ages now - and it always made me wonder if that’s just uncanny scraped keywords that have never been filtered from complete nonsense or if it’s a legitimate keyword for those pharma guys. Today my curiosity took over and I decided to do a quick check.

The Google search for “tramadol for dog” has revealed that this infact is not a made up keyword. In the top 10 results, I have noticed some vet sites, some .edu sites - and I don’t mean spammed by parasites but a legitimate research on a College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences site, Yahoo! Answers - and the question/answer seemed legitimate as well… It appears that tramadol is prescribed to dogs to relieve pain, e.g. after surgery or in case of arthritis or other chronic conditions.

I have noticed that Google only lists 565,000 results for this search - hmm, not too competitive is it? What’s interesting is that there’s not that much spam in the top 10 either - I have only seen two outright spammy results and one a bit spammy looking blog seemingly written manually but for the sake of placing AdSense onto it. I wonder why, considering that I do get all this comment spam for this keyword? Maybe the search volume is not that big for spammers to target seriously?

I checked Google Trends and got this:

Your terms - tramadol for dogs - do not have enough search volume to show graphs.

OK so that could be the answer - but still I guess as a long tail keyword it might be of some interest to pharma spammers, no? Actually, ranking for it should only take an aged domain (at least 2006) and a few thousand links… If you are/were a pharma spammer would you go for it?

I’m not telling you where to stick it and it’s not even my idea - AdSense folks have come up with it themselves - go have a look to get the complete story. Pay the shipping and handling and stick it all you want

Among other news, AdSense is experimenting with ads - I have noticed recently these arrows next to the AdSense ads on one of my sites that still has them:

Other people have been reporting seeing these arrows since December 2007 and I have found explanations in Google AdSense forums that this was an experiment - well considering that there’s still no official word on it anywhere in AdSense it probably still is an experiment.

Recently I have noticed that Google has become much more sensitive towards automated queries sent to it. It bans the IP very fast - much faster than it used to before. What’s funny is that the tool that got caught when I discovered it wasn’t even a site geenrator of any kind scraping the SERPs - it was a simple position checker Previously, it was possible to solve the problem by simply increasing the wait time between the queries sent to Google - not any more it seems!

Just another example of Google creating a problem for itself - if there was API for search still publicly available who would have queried the human interface SERPs directly?

As to the solution - I am now simply sending queries from multiple IPs instead of the same one

I’ve been looking through my server logs and this has caught my attention. The site in question just had AdSense placed onto it but no links have been pointed at it. (The site is not new, it existed for some time, then AdSense ads have been placed onto it)

What I saw in the logs is Mediapartners-Google crawling the site some time after the ads were placed (about an hour or so) - and then right after it, 14 minutes later, Googlebot coming over. Googlebot just asked for the home page - but that’s till interesting. Another thing worth noting is they both came from the same IP - 66.249.67.104.

Looks like this is all AdCents is good for nowadays, however. As a side note, I’ve had a quick look at referral products at AdSense (I DEFINITELY have no intention promoting these - I’d rather find an affiliate program in the niche that interests me) - and the funniest part of it was Google taking its geotargeting way too far. Namely, it assumes you will be targeting only the local users with your websites and you need a few extra clicks to change it. Dohh! Hello Google, ever heard of websites being just slightly different from traditional offline brick-and-mortar shops or whatever? I get visitors to my sites from places I have never even been to - moreover, sometimes I even build sites SPECIFICALLY to target the audience in such places! How much dumber can AdSense get?

Targeting Asian markets? Nothing is better than the right domain for it. And there’s no such thing as too many domains for a blackhat of course

.Asia domains are not exactly the traditional target for domain mass-buying blackhats (the cost is 90 euro for a two-year registration) - but for your greyhat or whitehat effort, this should be perfect. The .ASIA name space was approved by ICANN on December 6, 2006 but at first the registrations were limited to companies and trademark owners only. Not Any more! The Land Rush phase has the only requirement to apply for a .ASIA domain name - provide a contact address within the recognized Asia Region. But even if you don’t have such address these guys will act as your contact so it can still be done. (These same guys btw provide registrations for all other possible ccTLDs)

Until March 26, 2008 multiple applications for the same domain names will be handled through an auction. After that date, free registration will open. But of course if you have in mind something really competitive you will want to apply for it as soon as possible.

Happy domain hunting!

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!

Been searching for something that is not indexed by Google and came across something I don’t think I’ve seen before:

So now, instead of just offering to check if your search terms are entered correctly and additional options like go to the URL directly, Google fetches whatever it thinks is close… Not the most logical step is it?

I just noticed Bompa of Syndk8 mentioned me in a post about people paying attention to buy Viagra SERPs. He bitched about me having only two posts on the topic - so here goes another one!

Watching the folks who watches the BUY VIAGRA SERPs seems to be a new fad doesn’t it? Well so, I had a look at the Viagra SERPs in Google and to me the top 5 are a bit different cause of different geolocation - but pretty close still. Fantomaster really does a great job of his Viagra watch. Out of the people I know I also see Dink in there. There is one more very interesting thing I noticed, namely a parasite page off Brooklyn College of the City University of New York - targetting - guess what keyword??? Get ready for it…. BUY VIAGRA SERPS!

Holy shit, some keywords they are scraping! I even know whom they are scraping - sure enough, Viagra study at Syndk8. There is a bunch of results like I mentioned in the top 10 in Google for viagra serps. One of them that I noticed even had the syndk8 URL in their scraped content. Well if this keeps on going like this, Google will end up considering “buy viagra serps” keyword long tail of “buy viagra” and next thing we know is I’ll be selling Viagra off this blog!

The importance of each one of different factors influencing the SERPs in Google seems to vary across different markets nowadays - e.g. I constantly see SERPs where PR6 pages go way lower than PR0 or PR 2 pages (old news of course, PR not being a major factor any more, at least in the form available to the general public), or I have seen SERPs where 100 links beat 10,000 links, and I have even seen SERPs (gasp! what would Jim Boykin say? ) where 2-year-old sites were beating 10-year-old sites to the top spots.

But here’s one example of SERPs where age factor is definitely overplaying to the point where it hurts the quality of these SERPs, as described in this post by Affiliate Money Maker:

I headed to Google and ran a quick search. Google returned almost 9 million results for “send a fax by email” - wow that’s impressive. What have we got here?

The first one was TPC Fax (tpc.int) - a site last updated in 2001. You see, in the old days of non-monetized Internet there was a community initiative to support sending faxes by email through privately operated printer servers. This was a free community service supported exclusively by good will of people participating in this project. Well that was a long time ago. I don’t know how reliable or widespread it was, but currently it is not working any more.

Digging through a bunch of FAQ’s and equally old sites that are of no use any longer,<...>

It is pretty clear that the search was meant to be for sites actually providing these services - and what comes up instead? A bunch of aged but practically useless results… Not a good job, Google.