Last weekend, I floated the idea of a Black Hat SEO wiki and received several interesting responses.
First of all, it was strange having some of you ask me to charge for the wiki. Users chanting “Please take our money” is something most webmasters would kill for. So, thank you. But I don’t want your money - not yet anyway.
Some of you are concerned that discussing these ideas will “tip off the search engines” to what we are doing.
Not to burst your bubble, but
1) There is no Easter Bunny.
2) The Search Engines already know.
They hire the best and the brightest: Every PHD out there, Ivy leagers, former NSA Agents, and even Al Gore that guy who invented the Internet.
And I happen to know for a fact that some of the best search engine spammers currently work for Google. So trust me, the search engines are not coming here to learn anything new.
Fortunately, we we don’t need to outsmart the Google engineers; we just need to out maneuver the best algorithm the Google Engineers can come up with.
I do agree that it should be by invitation only, with the ip addresses logged for tracking purposes to keep potential spies out. -joker
Somehow I think that the 50 or so ex-NSA spooks working at Google just might be able to figure out a way to infiltrate our community. I’m assuming there are spies, but that’s just part of the game.
Others of you are concerned that making blackhat seo methods openly available will dilute their effectiveness. Yes, it will dilute the effectiveness of sloppy spam. But, considering that page jacking exploits were used prior to 1999, and widely known by 2003 before being actually used on Google Adsense this year, I don’t think we have too much to worry about.
Plus, an informed, collaborative black hat community will be able to foresee, adapt to, and possibly influence search engine algorithm evolutions.
For that, we need a common base of knowledge. We need to agree on terminology and concepts.
Enter the SEO Black Hat Wiki.
First things first. We need to decide which wiki engine to use. MediaWiki is an obvious choice as it’s behind the WikiPedia and well supported. But, Tiki wiki seems simpler and a bit hotter. Any expert advice on which engine to use?
Let me know if you would like to help steer the wiki, be editor/moderator, or simply contribute.
Please leave me comments /trackbacks on this. The level of interest, or lack of it, will determine if the black hat wiki ever gets off the ground.
12 Responses to “Damn The Spies . . . Full Speed Ahead!”
i’d be willing to help try to add some content or help moderate, i think the most important thing is to encourage references and attribution but probably either require registration or use nofollow to prevent spam.
personally i tried to use tikiwiki once and i hated it, and i always find editing wikipedia style articles very easy, but i really didnt give tikiwiki a fair shot.
heres one SEO Wiki i know of
I believe more people will be familiar with MediaWiki simply because of WikiPedia. That’s just my opinion.
Sorry, dude… I agree with J. Sure the info is out there for those who go out of their way to find it, but some things work because they’re fairly limited.
Look at what happened to B&P once everyone and their mother started doing it.
Just my .02.
Vic
” an informed, collaborative black hat community will be able to foresee, adapt to, and possibly influence search engine algorithm evolutions.”
Exactly. Stay one step ahead. As the SE algos change, find ways to change with them and/or outsmart them.
Get enough interested, well-informed people involved and give it a shot. I”ll participate any way I can.
Joker
awesome idea, either wiki will suffice. I agee with the earlier post that stated they would pay for this kind of info/forum. Free wiki makes it even better
i`ve used and installed mediawiki in some projects and found it pretty simple to manage and use.So my vote goes to it,even though I`ve never tried the other one.
Spreading lies like this are what gives black hatters a bad name.
I’m talking about your falsehoods about the Easter Bunny.
I’m in. Still looking for moderators?
Great idea, I would like to contribute to this project, just let me know how can I help.
I have some SEO experience so maybe this will help, y tambien lo podemos lanzar en español
I’d love to help with this. Any updates?
the most apparent problems:
1. google spies (oooh)
2. mis-information/misdirection (you know the kind that happens in white hat to the clueless)
3. webpostion gold users - ughh. sorry, but teh common folk just ruin it for the rest of us.
One answer to solve them all…by personal invitation only. well, #2 may not be eliminated, but do a decent job. of course, useing nofollow links might help spam, but i doubt this should be much of a problem with this approach anyways.
I personally think that it lowers the barrier to entry too much. Black hat techniques continue to work because only a relatively small proportion of site owners use them, and it takes considerable dedication to work out how to spam in theory, and then to actually implement your knowledge. What will be next, GPL spamming scripts?