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

Continuing the series of my blackhat tool reviews, here is the review of Immortal Promoter released last year by Vsloathe who is an old member of syndk8.

Immortal Promoter is a tool for automated link building. It may sound like just another script for linkspamming out there but it’s not. Infact, all you need to do for it to work is insert a bit of code into your pages and sit back. IP runs on its own server so you don’t have to install anything. It works off the traffic that your site gets (naturally or with a bit of your help - whichever way you wish). It creates not only one particular type of links like so many scripts out there, but a whole variety of them. It finds the source sites for these links itself, takes your keywords and your page URLs and creates links for you. It even has a special module of code you can use with your WordPress blogs or your generated sites - and it will get the keywords or post titles and use them as your anchor texts. It can even use the traffic of one of your sites to promote your other site. Does it ever get any handier?

It may sound like something that is too good to be true but behind this tool is the expertise and many hours of research by Vsloathe and his guys - and this guy definitely knows what he’s talking about.

To demonstrate you what it’s all about, here is the result I got after running a quick test of Immortal Promoter. I started with a brand new site based on WP (my URL is obscured, sorry, as it’s a real site I still intend to use, but you will still get the picture) and here’s what I had at the beginning (September 2008):

No links since nothing has ever been done with this site before I started my experiment. I had no real traffic to the site either. So I ran a script loading random pages on my site and refreshing them every few seconds for a few weeks, on and off, as you can see from these traffic stats:

I didn’t run it much - anywhere from 500 to 1,000 pageloads a day mostly. It wasn’t even every day. But even with this setup, I still got some results:

But to make matters even more complicated, I didn’t make this screenshot right afterusing IP actively - I took it almost half a year later, yesterday! So, as you can see, not only have I acquired 128 links but these links have survived for a prolonged period of time.

So this, in my opinion, is one of the main differences: Immortal Promoter provides you with links that do not get deleted right afetr you spam them around - they survive and benefit you long term as well. Among other pleasant features of the tool is a forum for its users where the developer has posted a number of how-tos for different setups and platforms. In that forum, the users can also report all the bugs they can find when using IP as well as request additional features - e.g. I know that both YACG hook and WP hook have been developed at the request of the tool users. Vsloathe, being in your shoes, understands your needs and is being really proactive in answering them. All of the above makes Immortal Promoter a worthy investment.

Those who have been waiting for purely blackhat posts from me, brace yourselves cause this is as blackhat as it gets.

I was checking the “buy viagra” SERPs in Google today and came across something that entertained me a lot. Who did I see ranking at #1 for “buy Viagra” but… Michael Martinez!

Why would a well respected member of the SEO community, known to be as whitehat as they get want to spam his forum profile to the top of buy viagra SERPs? Something smelt fishy here and I decided to dig deeper. Heres’ what I’ve seen when I clicked through to see the actual page:

Upon further examination, it became clear that the well respected member of the SEO community has nothing to do with this profile and some spammer just used his name randomly (or not so randomly?). But what totally amazed me is how fast this profile reached the goal of its creation:

As you see, it’s been created only9 days ago - and already succeeded in making it to the top of such competitive SERPs!

Little wonder here, really. OpenX is a free, open source ad server that manages the selling and delivery of online advertising inventory. It is also a 2001 authority domain with over 6 million links as reported by Yahoo. The profile page itself has 485 links that Yahoo already knows of. Using the power of an authority domain at it best!

While the spammer made a great choice of his parasite hosting resource, he has, however, made one mistake. If not for such a renown name he chose to use, his trick would have probably gone unnoticed.

This blog gets a lot of traffic from people searching for blackhat and general SEO tools and software so I thought I’d continue my series of tool reviews. Today, we’ll look at a tool called BruteForce SEO, all the hype around it and what’s behind this hype.

Strictly speaking, BFSEO is not really a blackhat tool - and has never been positioned as such by its owner, a certain Australian named Peter Drew who has previously enjoyed some tool related fame connected with his previous release, Bad Ass RSS (infact, when you search for him in Google, you get nothing but his own blogs, search pages etc. - which can only mean one of the two things, namely that either nobody is talking of him or he does a really good job at reputation management - or possibly even both).

But however Pete’s skills at online marketing himself and his releases may rock, the tool itself, BFSEO, is a failure at large. First announced and prelaunched  in September 2008, this tool boasted a nifty set of features that were either supposed to come with it right away or be delivered soon after - e.g. an automated solution for social bookmarking submissions - only to be failed or released much later, this all with a monthly subscription fee. That very social bookmarking automation module only came out with the February update, so you would have had to pay the monthly fee for half a year to get what’s been announced as the functionality to arrive next week after the launch. The tool itself came out buggy, many early subscribers complained they couldn’t install the updates, or the tool stopped working after installing the updates. The software’s windows do not fit smaller resolution screens, some buttons end up below the fold with no way to access them, the tool crashes often in the middle of something… - the list goes on and on.

A typical screen a BFSEO user is likely to see :

Technically, BFSEO is a Windows-only desktop application built on .Net and running in a browser (IE, of course) instance. Consequently, there is little to no way to integrate it with your server based tools.

From the point of view of its functionality, BFSEO is a ripoff of SENuke for those who are familiar with it, with a little twist. It starts with a screen where the user should enter the details of the project - such as keywords, the URL of the site to be promoted, existing accounts in Google, Yahoo, Tripod, etc. or as an option create those accounts. It took the developer a while to figure out the places such as WordPress.com actually send email confirmations with a link to be clicked before anything is activated there - and for the audience the tool is mareketed for (beginners wanting to make some money on the web and not knowing much about it) this is of course far from the obvious. The tool has often been struggling with captchas in its different versions - and truth be told, it does not solve captchas but serves them up to the user for the user to solve them manually.

The next step is adding the articles/content - here we meet the next bunch of problems, such as lack of support for UTF encodings and consequently, inability of the tool to work adequately with any languages other than English. In the later versions, Pete added a twist claiming to generate “unique” content out of any material given to the tool - but the same content with a different set of HTML tags inserted into it hardly qualifies for being unique. Also, at different stages users have complained about their content disappearing should they want to save the project for later use and quit in the middle of it - which is kinda a desirable bit of functionality, considering that the complete run of the tool takes about 4 hours with the user having to provide input every now and then.

OK so, after you’re done struggling with adding your content the tool starts creating your pages in Yahoo! Geocities (that is, provided it hasn’t failed to create you an account there), Google Pages (never seen this one succeed in half a year), Tripod (50% success rate), Wordpress.com, Blogger.com and submitting your article to a bunch of article sites. (The accounts for those article sites are created by a separate module that is not connected to the tool in any way and does not support automated exporting of created accounts into BFSEO, so you have to enter them manually). After this step is done, the feeds from all the places that have them are submitted into feed directory sites, for some of them again you had to create the accounts beforehand with a different tool and no export option. After all of that is done, theoretically you can also bookmark all the stuff that’s just been created in social bookmarking sites - again same story with their accounts.

Mind you, from the point you start the tool running creatoing the pages and up to the point it is done submitting bookmarks there is no way to stop or pause the tool or skip any of the steps - you are bound to sit and watch it run slowly without any real progress indication you could trust and enter captchas manually every now and then. hence, definitely not a blackhat tool. I cannot really imagine a blackhat having so much time on his hands as to sit and watch his sites’ pagerank grow like this.

Truth be told, the results of such a run are quite effective, and the sites run through BFSEO get indexed pretty fast, and the mini network, should it get created successfully and not dropped or hung up somewhere in the middle, is quite powerful due to kinda smart interlinking done in the process - but should the run fail anywhere there is no way to intelligently redo it or fix what has failed or pick up where it dropped, or even get the info of what has been craeted already, thus turning it into waste.

What is even more disappointing is Pete’s attitude towards his users - he kinda had a system in place to listen to all their complaints and bug reports, with multiple channels to do so - from built in functionality in the early versions of BFSEO (which he later killed off) up to having a forum for his tool users - but he tends to ignore most of the feedback and suggestions anyway. His developer (not even sure it is the same developer still, seeing how the tool was completely overhauled at some point) contected at least some of the users soon after launch - but even the feedback on bugs provided to the developer (Pete himself is no coder and maybe it explains it) did not help as we haven’t seen the bugs we mentioned fixed up to the version we’ve seen last before we unsubscribed.

Why have I subscribed to it in the first place? The hype around the launch was pretty big, the marketing campaign was quite an interesting one, with a countdown till launch page, pre-release signups, limited number of spots available at every stage etc., plus as some of you may know I am into building my own tools lately so I kinda wanted to see how others handle it. Besides, since one of the goals of this blog is to review the tools currently available in the market, and Pete himself has not offered me to review his tool like some developers do, I needed to know what it’s all about to then be able to answer people’s questions adequately.

Was it worth the money spent for me personally? Yes absolutely - I now know what mistakes to avoid and how not to kill an effective marketing campaign by releasing a failsome tool. Would it be worth it for you? I doubt so, unless you are a newbie wanting a quick start and even ready to tolerate the bugs for that purpose - but as soon as you learn about the mini-networks, authority sites, interlinking and what works best, unsubscribe. No matter what new features he promises. It might take him another half a year to release them.

Those of you following me on FriendFeed already know that I’ve been rehosting this blog - which has now been completed successfully, with much less hassle than the irishwonder.com one. While at it, I had Earl Grey email me some of the old files from the previous server and when I opened the email in Gmail here’s what I have noticed:

There wasn’t a single word in the email referring to blackhat SEO or anything of the sort - there was, as you can see, only the mention of Syndk8 and me - and yet it was enough for Google to target this ad at me. I obscured the actual site URL not to provide any free advertising to yet another clueless newb wanting to cash in on an ever-so-popular (up to the point of becoming painfully mainstream) concept of Black Hat SEO.

What proves my point even more is the fact that it’s not the first or one of a few sites trying to cash in on blackhat I’ve seen lately. The other day, I came across a newly started forum of another clueless newb - again, claiming to be a useful source of information about blackhat seo - yea well, maybe in a few years, dude, so far the forum was pretty empty. That one, though, had quite a creative way of promoting himself - he was distributing torrents of popular BH software with its title modified to include his site’s URL - if only the software owner doesn’t catch him at some point and kick his arse he might even be able to create himself a small following of equally clueless newbs - blackhat wannabes.

As I watch it all I am not worried about “competition” or disappointed or anything - first of all this is no competition to seasoned blackhats who do more than they talk. Gaming Google has become so much more difficult that it actually requires skills, experience and a good deal of creativity these days - not just stealing somebody else’s tools and running off with them. These wannabes give blackhat SEOs a bad name - well guess what, our reputation has never been really fluffy so who cares. I am only slightly nostalgic about the days when Syndk8 was the only blackhat SEO forum, we were the only blackhats, all mainstream forums used to kick us out so we had to start our own place to talk about BH and share our ideas - since we had a lot to share. Do these mainstream wannabes have anything worthy to share? Somehow, I doubt…

But those of you just starting and not knowing any better - watch out, they are in it for your money. Well, I guess everybody does what they can to make their dollar or two - but use your best judgement and check around what everybody is saying about them before getting out your credit card.

Came across this web2.0 toy for graphical/verbal representation of any site, blog feed, delicious tags of a user etc. - ran this blog through it and here’s what came out of it:

title="Wordle: Irishwonder.syndk8.co.uk"> src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/374002/Irishwonder.syndk8.co.uk"
style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd">

(Disclaimer: there’s nothing really blackhat in these techniques and I used this title more for attention driving purposes - but read on, you may find some useful bits and pieces below)

Have you ever wished you knew just how much traffic a competitor’s site is getting? Lots of SEOs, affiliate marketers and site owners face this question every now and then. Yet, there is no reliable way to get this kind of data unless you have access to a site’s logs… or is there?

OK, all I’m going to describe below probably does not exactly match the server logs in terms of reliability of the information you obtain, but it gets you pretty close. Do not, however, rely on just one trick and try to verify your information using several methods at once.

To start with, especially if you’re trying to compare the traffic of two or more sites, go to Alexa. Yea I know, enough has been said about how unreliable their data are, some sites may even be blocking the Alexa toolbar altogether, but hey, this is just the starting point.

Compete and Quantcast are the two services that collect traffic data for sites - check them as your next step. These tools are especially useful for higher traffic sites. For sites that do not get much traffic, you may not get any data at all - but at least you’ve tried.

Next and most interesting step involves Google - and you bet a monster like Google does know a thing or two about a site’s traffic. What you should do is get a few keywords that you know the site in question ranks for high enough to get the benefit of those rankings, go to Google Trends, enter the keyword the site ranks for and some other keyword that one of your sites ranks for that you know the kind of traffic it gets - and compare the two. (In case you don’t know what keywords a site ranks for, SpyFu should be your tool of choice to get these keywords - just enter the site’s URL and look what comes up as its organic rankings)

Another option you could use in Google Trends is enter the URL of the site in question and a URL of some site you own and know the traffic it gets and compare the two.

While not a single one of the listed methods can guarantee 100% correct information, at least the data you get is good for estimation purposes.

Oh and BTW, to facilitate using the tools I have mentioned here, I have created a bunch of custom Ubiquity commands which you can subscribe to and use all you want - and if you don’t know yet what Ubiquity is make sure you read this post on my other blog.

Recently, I got approached by SEOQuake developers (of SEODigger fame) who let me know about their new tool called AdsSpy. AdsSpy is a tool that does the opposite of SpyFu - if SpyFu lets you see “inside” AdWords and who bids on what keywords, AdsSpy lets you see what sites belong to the same owner based on their AdSense pub id, Yahoo partner id and so on.

Besides AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network, AdsSpy also handles smaller advertising networks such as Chitika, AdBrite, Kontera, Amazon and IntelliTXT. The source of information for AdsSpy is the SeoDigger database of sites. As of today, that is 338 835 unique advertiser IDs. Not much compared to the overall number of sites using different ways of monetisation through displaying ads, but it’s growing, just as fast as the user base of SEODigger (for those unfamiliar with it, it’s a tool that lets you see what keywords a site ranks for, based on the keywords appearing on the site itself).

What are the possible uses of this tool? Well, when I had my first look at it, I thanked God it’s not 2005 any more when most people’s main source of income was AdSense. Back in the days when blackhat MFA networks consisted of thousands of sites, this tool could have been a threat to a lot of them. However, nowadays that a lot of people have switched to affiliate networks and learned to mask their affiliate IDs, this is not that scary any more.

AdsSpy basically fills the niche that was empty so far, with people wondering how to search for bits of JavaScript code (which is how advertisers’ IDs are mostly implemented in the pages displaying ads) - something that traditional Google search is not capable of, despite Google’s long proven ability to index JavaScript. I see how this tool can benefit AdWords publishers using Google’s publisher network first of all. The developers suggest also such uses as researching ad placement and identifying site owners.

While playing with the tool, I tried looking up the O’Reilly network and found out that they use AdSense on at least 12 domains and 2 subdomains and Yahoo ads on at least 5 domains that AdsSpy knows about (the tool displays the complete list of all sites). Too bad the tool doesn’t show you the size of income the site owner gets from these ads - would have been interesting to see how AdSense treats its premium publishers these days (O’Reilly is one, isn’t it?)

You may remember a post I did about tramadol for dogs and spam associated with it a while ago. Well so, recently I noticed in my stats that I am getting referrals from Google searches for related terms, e.g. this one. I checked and well, it appears that out of over 23,000 results in Google.co.uk I rank #5… Do you think I should start selling tramadol in special packages for dogs exclusively on here yet?

As for other stuff people are trying to sell in these SERPs, one has striken me as particularly funny:

Click here to GET tramadol dogs side effects. Save your $$$. FREE delivery: tramadol dogs side effects.

Ah, the clueless newbie scraper builders! I am still of the opinion that no matter how large my keyword lists are, I need to have at least a quick look at them before I run them through the site generating software (that is, if I don’t have a nice intelligent filter to do that ) - or else, this is what you get.

On the second thought, Google could build a list of such meaningless keywords and hammer down scrapers using these patterns - that is, if they are not doing it yet.

Talking of keywords, watch this space (which is my other, whitehat blog if you are not familiar with it yet) for a nice long keyword research article that I am going to post there soon.

The news has reached me that Bompa, a.k.a. the newbie babysitter of Syndk8, has started a Blackhat SEO Bootcamp - basically, a standalone version of his newbie babysitting at Syndk8.

Who is it good for? Clearly, newbies. Those same newbies who come to syndk8 without knowing the first thing about SEO in general, let alone blackhat, and start by pissing people off and getting themselves under attacks for asking newbie questions. Bompa solves this problem by giving them an option to get their answers elsewhere without being ridiculed. Moreover, he gives them some basic tools good enough to get them started and get the feel of making money online as blackhats - basically, empowers them to make a step from a blackhat wannabe to a real fully-functional blackhat.

Do I recommend it? Absolutely. Knowing Bompa for all this time, I know he doesn’t promice anything he cannot deliver, and I know how experienced and, even more importantly for this case, patient he is. However, he only lets in 25 people at this time so don’t blame me if all seats are taken by the time you get there.

Last night I have been researching something and came across some weird stuff in Google. A lot has been said already about Google updating the SERPs more often for the more competitive markets (e.g. “buy viagra” and such) but I saw the proof of the opposite: the less popular a query is (=the less competitive a market is) the less Google will care about spending their resources on keeping its SERPs up to date.

I was searching for something quite obscure which I am not going to mention here directly but suffice to say it only returned about 500 results. The query contained a bit of text in quotes, inurl: , -site: and such shit. Not something you would normally compete to rank for consciously. Well approximately the first 25 results were ok but then the interesting bit started coming up. Almost every result I would click would take me to a parked page with nothing but your regular parked ads on it and no hint why it could be even coming up for that search query. It was late and I was tired and it just pissed me off so I said feck it and went to sleep but didn’t forget it. I decided to research it deeper today as my perverse blackhat mind suspected things like cloaking and the like.

Well, armed with my tools I checked that query again today and in Google cache of the SERPs in question there was the bit getting them to rank for the query. But Google cache was anywhere from a week to a month old for each one of those sites. Each one of these sites was not expired but parked - and by checking the domains in Domaintools I found out that these domains had their nameservers changed and got parked in the last couple days - i.e., after Google has last cached them.

As a result, a site may not be relevant to a query for a while but still ranking for it. The reverse Viagra law of Google!