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SEO Nostalgia – Blogrolling and Googlebombing

October 5th, 2005

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While many SEOs and webmasters are still living in 2002, it’s sometimes fun to just revisit old times for the rest of us. Take this article which details the burgeoning of blogrolling and and Google bombing.

Joining a Google Bomb Squad could let bloggers tap what’s become a multi-million dollar industry. It could even make life easier for the SEO industry – after all, as Google’s become more popular, their usual bag of tricks has become less effective. Google Bombs and Bomb Squads could be the killer app that SEOs have been looking for.

It’s not the birth of Black Hat SEO, but certainly a broader recognition that the Google algorythms could be manipulated.

BTW. The All Your Base link at the end of the article is 404ed. Here’s one that’s working.

Posted in Black Hat, Blog, Blogging, Blogs, Google, Internet, Internet Marketing, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Weblogs

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Mesothelioma – An SEO Case Study

September 30th, 2005

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Mesothelioma – I can’t even pronounce it.

However, after some inspiration, I decided to use mesothelioma as an SEO case study.

Mesothelioma is a form of cancer that can occur many years after prolonged exposure to a asbestos. Attorneys have been very successful suing large asbestos companies for billions (as in 9 zeros) of dollars. As a result, these lawyers are more than happy to shell out $15, $25 or more per click for targeted traffic.

After having donated to a cancer foundation last week, I felt compelled to build the best mesothelioma resource on the web. Ironically, this donation was an olive branch following mistakenly calling someone else a spammer.

With my humble and new-found appreciation of what is clearly not spam, may I present to you:

http://seoblackhat.com/mesothelioma/

If you run adsense and extensively quote this post (please link to the above URL), there is a very good chance of a $25 adword running on your site.

This, my art, is both original content and a work in progress. Your critiques and suggestions are welcome.

Posted in Black Hat, Blog, Blogging, Bloggings, Blogs, Internet, Internet Marketing, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Weblogs

7 Comments »

The Long Tail of a Black Hat

September 23rd, 2005

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Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory:

our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

Kevin Marks looks further down the tail and notes:

A true long tail business is one that copes with the ultimate niches – where there are just one, or even zero customers. You need to be sure that your submission model can cope with these limiting cases and not choke, especially as you do not know a priori which ones are going to garner customers. So, what businesses fit this model?

Answer: Black Hat Search Engine Optimization (AKA Search Engine Spamming).

Many SEO Black Hats create millions of pages over hundreds of domains using some form of automated website creation software. Each page is optimized for an obscure keyword phrase – perhaps one that is only searched for 50 times per month.

Just one of a Search Engine Spammer’s spam sites could have 30,000 pages. This site might receives just one unique visitor on less than 10% of the pages per day. Of those 3,000 visitors if only 2% (60) click on a 10 cent Adsense word, this site would generate $6.00 per day or $180 per month.

So does the smart search engine spammer stop at 1 or 5 site? Of course not. A true SEO Black Hat has hundreds (and in many cases thousands) of these sites operating at once.

As a black hat automates more steps in the site creation process, the time investment decreases dramatically. Recently, I spoke with a Search Engine Spammer who told me that he has automated EVERY step in the process from domain registration to Keyword selection, to new CSS design, to splog indexing. He claimed he can create and index a 50,000+ page website with less than a minute’s worth of incremental keystrokes.

As the cost of page creation, hosting and advertising (production and distribution) approaches zero, the number of customers required for a profitable search engine spamming business drops to much less than one per page (or micro-niche).

Search engine spamming is a business that “copes with the ultimate niches – where there are just one, or even zero customers.” It will therefore be interesting to see if Anderson devotes a few pages to Search Engine Spammers in his upcoming Long Tail Book.

Posted in Black Hat, Blog, Blogging, Blogs, Computer Generated Content, Internet, Internet Marketing, Long Tail, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Spam, Weblogs, longtail

6 Comments »

Spamouflage

September 20th, 2005

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Spamouflage: The method or result of concealing or disguising search engine spam to make it appear to be legitimate. Derived from spam + camouflage.

An example of Spamouflage:

Marco of pivot blacklist sent me an e-mail today about a blog spamming issue.

As a departure from conventional comment spamming, some SEO Black Hats have begun including links to non spam sites in their comment spam bots.

Someone (or more than one) is currently spamming with links to my site. At first I thought this might be some malicious SEO blackhat who hates me for writing rather effective anti blogspam software but later on I found out this isn’t the case. The fact that my site is affected seems to be a matter of bad luck and unrelated to my activities in the field of blogspam prevention. Several other bloggers who have nothing to do with spam on both the sending and the receiving end have been affected by it.

An article about it has been posted on spamhuntress.com

My question to you is:

Do you have any idea why this new kind of spam is happening?

Is this an attempt to disturb the already highly ineffective centralized blacklists? (they don’t work at all since spam domains tend to be created faster than anyone can maintain such a list).

While I do think that degrading the effectiveness of a blacklist may be the goal of some search engine spammers, our more important focus is the search engines.

Often, we comment spam on blogs that have been abandoned. When a blog is abandoned, the comment sections frequently has 10-20 links to pharmacies, adult sites, poker . . . etc.

Dropping in a few links to legitimate site is like planting pretty flowers in a “bad neighborhood.” I don’t want my backlinks nestled between 8 links to other spam sites. On a linear model, I would prefer my back-links to be between two trusted authorities – sites with impeccable reputations. It would be even better if these sites added contextual relevance, but that’s not as necessary.

We don’t know exactly how Google or Yahoo’s algorithms read. We can only make informed guesses about what they are and where we think they are going.

If I were Google, and I saw a site’s URL listed with 8 other known spam sites, the temptation would be to count that as a mark against the site.

This tactic, a form of Spamouflage, preempts the effectiveness of such a countermeasure; it’s like thinking several moves ahead in chess and makes it more difficult to categorize a URL as spam.

While there are clearly benefits to adding spamouflage to comment spamming, it’s always possible that someone just thought it would be funny to comment spam links to an anti-spam-site . Any serious search engine spammer could do much more to get your site penalized or sandboxed than link dumping in blog comment fields.

Posted in Black Hat, Blog, Blogging, Blogs, Comment Spam, Internet, Internet Marketing, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Spamouflage, Weblogs

3 Comments »

Avoid Common Splogging Mistakes

September 14th, 2005

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Jean VÃ©ronis excellent post, Google, Blogger and splogs explores some of the ways splogs can be algorithmically detected.

He shows how many splogs are so blatant that they are easily spotted:

[poor splogs] repeats the same words over and over again, so its vocabulary is much poorer than you would expect to find on a normal blog.

and

the distribution of outgoing links needs to be taken into account. If most of them point to the same site, something’s probably up. The number of incoming links is also an indicator: if there are a whole lot of them, and they come from very diverse sites, it is undoubtedly not a blog.

However, his conclusion:

It seems to me to be difficult to draw the line between sites which are worthless, useless or commercial (but nonetheless legitimate) on the one hand, and splogs on the other.

echoes the conclusion that seo black hats need to make search engine spam appear organic. Don’t fall into many of the common pitfalls: vary your outbound links, link to authorities, use intelligent computer generated contend.

Your splogs should not be easily spotted by a computer because of glaring statistically anomalies.

Posted in Black Hat, Blog, Blogging, Blogs, Internet, Internet Marketing, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Spam, Weblogs

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Looks Like Another Google Dance is Beginning

September 6th, 2005

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We are seeing different results and backlinks across different Google Data Centers. While it’s only been about two months, this activity normally only happens during the Quarterly Update. Maybe this is a curve-ball to keep the SEOs off guard . . . maybe Google is changing their update schedule. . . or maybe I just need to get outside a little more.

If Google’s past behavior indicates future actions, then it follows that there will be visible changes in a week or so.

So far we haven’t seen any evidence that PageRank is being updated. Having said that, it is too early to be sure. Also, there is a possibillity that this update could introduce a kinder, gentler “sandbox” policy, but only time will tell.

If it is a Google update, good luck and everybody hang on for the ride!

Posted in Black Hat, Blog, Blogging, Bloggings, Blogs, Google, Internet, Internet Marketing, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Weblogs

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Blog Post and Ping Frequency

September 6th, 2005

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Hosted blogs spaces (MSN Spaces, Blogger . . . etc) are beginning to combat splogs (spam blogs). They are starting to look at what properties make a blog “spammy”

Today, we will look at two factors that raise a red flag that a robot is blogging for you: Blog Post and Ping Frequency. Intelligent Black Hat SEO means staying below the radar. Your computer generated sites and zombie blogs must appear “natural.”

It may seem obvious, but humans do not post exactly every 5 minutes for 100 hours straight. It just doesn’t happen. If your robot is pinging every service on yesterday’s ping list every 15 minutes or hour, that’s a huge red flag.

Few services appear to check for it yet, but fixed interval posting and pinging will probably be a problem within the next 6 months. For example, if you post /ping exactly every 6 hours, odds are you are a robot – and your blog will be banned.

Random posting and pinging times (within a stated range) would be ideal and much more difficult to detect. While we have do have a windows app (an RSS2B extension) that posts and pings at random times, in LAMP environments, we have to use cron jobs.

Ideally, you’re splogs should update no more than 6 times per day – with 2-3 being closer to ideal. For splogs, you really don’t need to ping more than 2-4 times / day / blog to alert the search engines.

I recall giving this advice a while back and having one of my associates note that “it will take forever to index my site with just 3 posts per blog per day.”

I responded “I guess that means you don’t have a large enough army of blogs.”

Blog aggrogators and search engines will ban entire IP address for excessive/ abusive pinging. So, make sure you are using some discretion.

Posted in Black Hat, Blog, Blogging, Blogs, Internet, Internet Marketing, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Weblogs

2 Comments »

RSS Ping List

September 5th, 2005

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It may seem obvious, but you need to ping many services after you post to your blog. Ping-o-matic (default Wordpress ping service) does not ping all the services you need to syndicate your blogs and get them spidered. Neither does blogspot, MSN, or Livejournal.

While Pingoat is a great new pinging service, they have a pretty good spam filter so you can’t exactly use them for an army of splogs.

Here is the RSS ping list the we’ve been using.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

Our goal is not to ping every service, only the more popular / important ones. Our list was over 50 at one point, but some ping locations often timed out and/or did not yield any measurable incremental benefit.

Please comment with:
a. Suggestions for other important English language ping locations
b. Discussion and Suggestions for important non-English RSS ping locations (include what language the locations is for)
c. If services like technorati.jp are worth pinging if you are already pinging technorati and your blog is english only

Posted in Blog, Blogging, Blogs, Internet, Internet Marketing, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Weblogs

22 Comments »

Why Search Engine Spammers Want “Adsense-less” Blogs

August 14th, 2005

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Here’s an interesting juxtaposition of two facts for you:

1. Adsense is our greatest source of income from Search Engine Spamming.
2. We do not use Adsense on ANY of our blogs.

Adsense is such a wonderful program for black hat search engine spammers – but for the content sites, not for the indexing blogs.

We don’t put Adsense on any of our blogs – not even for white /grey hat sites. Blog readers as a rule know not to look at Adsense ads and rarely click on them. It seems that RSS and Blog readers have developed Adsense blindness.

In our experience, the conversion / click-through rate gap between search traffic and feed referral traffic is greater than ten fold.

Yea, you may get a click here or a click there – and I understand that if you’re barely scraping by every little bit helps.

However, we already know that PPC / Adsense ads raise a red flag to search engines that a site might be spam. From the Google spam guide that we sited earlier, they tell their human reviewers / spam screeners:

We want to mark as Offensive the pages that are set up for the purposes of collecting pay-per-click revenue without providing much content of their own. You will see such cases most frequently in conjunction with “search results” feeds.

and

Or, you see copied content from a legitimate, credible resource, without value added by the copying site, plus a PPC program in place.

and

. . . pages with the same content may be assigned vastly different ratings based on the absence or presence of a ppc program.

Why make it easy for for the search engines to identify other components of your spam cluster? Without Adsense on the indexing blogs, if the backlinks are checked, they apparently go to niche aggregator blogs that have no intention of turning a profit.

With all the backlinks you will get from legitimate sites to your spam content site (from reblogging, link farming, and aggregators) it will be difficult for even human reviewers to tell black hat indexing blogs from “legitimate” sites.

Posted in Black Hat, Blog, Blogging, Blogs, Google, Internet, Internet Marketing, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Spam, Weblogs

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Blogging for Black Hat SEO Spidering and Indexing

August 12th, 2005

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In our Black Hat SEO operations, we use blog and ping techniques to get our computer generated spam sites spidered and indexed quickly.

Basically, you set up many blogs to automatically post information relating to the keywords or topic of you black hat sites. The blog posts have links to pages within your black hat sites. After you ping google, msn, and yahoo, their bots follow the links in your posts and your sites gets indexed.

Sounds simple enough, right?

Well it is and it isn’t. There is a great deal that goes into doing Black Hat B&P (Blog and Ping) correctly so it’s going to take us several posts to cover it all.

Here are the basics of the Black Hat SEO B&P Process for Spidering and Indexing:

1. Create blogs with either Wordpress or one of the hosted services like MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, or Blogger. We use all 4.

2. Write or buy a script to automatically create content from news feeds or RSS feeds spliced with links to your sitemaps.

3. Set up Cron Jobs to Post to you Blogs.

4. Ping (Usually with a Cron Job).

For blogs that you will be hosting, Wordpress is the best free blogging software on the market. However, many other publishing apps will do the job and you can find a breakdown of blog publishing apps here.

For free hosted blogs, first, go to MSN Spaces. This will give you a new free e-mail account to create your LiveJournal, and Blogger accounts.

We at SEO Black Hat could REALLY use a script that automates the sign-up process for accounts at these three blogging spaces. Even if we had to be there to get passed the “Read these screwed up letters” pictures that are there to prevent script signups, it would be much better than doing it manually.

If you are up to this task and need the exact spec of what SEO Black Hat is looking for, please leave a comment and I’ll contact you via e-mail.

If you don’t know how to write a content grabber / link splicer and want to get your feet wet without spending much money, reblog.org may have your blog content solution.

Unfortunately, reblog does not do everything you need automatically and lacks several important features. But it’s free and will grab articles and feeds for post fodder.

We use RSS to Blog Pro. As with any application, there is a learning curve. But this product is ROBUST and customizable if you can code a little.

RSS to Blog Pro features include:

Randomize the Sources That You Use For Your Blog Posts
Grabs Search Engine Results, RSS and News Feeds for Sources
Random Posting Times
Splices links from list sequentially or randomly into posts
Adds Your Keywords to The Post Titles
Blog to MSN Spaces, Typepad, MovableType, LiveJournal, Blogger and Wordpress
Ping to many Sources
Separate Ping Functions from posting
Has an Enhanced Text area
Second Text area for content inclusion with each post
Save Word Press and Typepad Posts as drafts
Add ‘rel=nofollow’ to links
1 Installation for all your blogs
Blog Logs for quick birds eye view of your blog updates
and only one cron job needed to run multiple blogs

RSS to Blog Pro is $247 and worth every penny if you are serious about Black Hat SEO.

Note: even though they ask for a shipping address, you just download it after you purchase the software.

For more information check out RSS to Blog Pro.

More on SEO Black Hat Blogging tomorrow.