Archive for the ‘Black Hat’ Category

For Sale: SEO Black Hat

February 24th, 2007

QuadsZilla

I missed the boat on the Internet Bubble in the ’90s and don’t want to miss out again this time. So let’s do a quick comparison between MyBlogLog and SEO Black Hat:

MyBlogLog sold to Yahoo for $10 Million.

Yahoo has acquired MyBlogLog reportedly for $10 million. Does anyone stop to do the math on these things? MyBlogLog started business in July…just 6 months ago, and they have 5 employees. They reportedly serve 45,000 blogs, have 33,000 registered users, and zero revenue.

MyBlogLog did actually have some revenue for the real time stats – $25 per year per user that bought the upsell. But it is dwarfed by the $23,000 per month that SEO Black Hat makes in subscription revenue.

MyBlogLog is fad widget that will be destroyed once spammers attack it in full force. SEO Black Hat is the most recognized brand in black hat that will continue to grow as more people understand the value of spamming, algorithm and social network manipulation.

MyBlogLog has a bunch of “look at my boobs” icons and no real community. SEO black hat has the attention and discussions of the most successful, clever and affluent web entrepreneurs in the world.

But MyblogLog had the “right people” and the “right money” involved. They were great at playing the Venture capital Ponzi Scheme.

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that involves paying abnormally high returns (”profits”) to investors out of the money paid in by subsequent investors, rather than from net revenues generated by any real business, named after Charles Ponzi.

About 9 months ago I asked a very prominent Venture Capitalist what they would pay for a network of 5,000 sites that generated a profit of $1,000,000 per year. The reply I got was:

“That would not be the type of deal we would be interested in getting involved with”

Why? Because Internet Venture Capitalists are not interested in revenue or profits. All they care about is finding that greater fool who will pay more for the crap widget or network than they paid.

So yes, SEO Black Hat is for Sale. It’s definitely worth more than MyBlogLog – but I’m not too greedy. I’d be willing to part with it for just $1 more than the $10 million MyBlogLog pricetag.

Unfortunately, it’s not a clever Ponzi Scheme that fits into the greater fool theory that governs Internet Venture Capital Investing today. So I suspect that SEO Black Hat will stay under its current management unless we experience a paradigm shift that brings Internet investing and business in the Venture Capital Space back to what’s really important:

Profits.

Posted in Black Hat, SEO

7 Comments »

Do Yourself a Favor . . .

February 16th, 2007

QuadsZilla

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and read this.

Posted in Black Hat, Poker, SEO

8 Comments »

Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval Spam Detection

February 11th, 2007

QuadsZilla

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Via the Mad Hat, here’s the interesting part from a PaIR system article:

The process takes place both at indexing and retrieval. In essence the document gets its spam score at indexation and then upon retrieval, should that page be included in the results, weighting is then removed and the page is devalued during the ranking process for previously calculated Spam threshold scoring/weighting.

According to the folks that drafted it, a normal related, topical phrase occurrence (or related phrases) is in the order of 8-20 whereas the typical Spam document would contain between 100-1000 related phrases. So by looking for statistical deviations in related phrase occurrences the system can flag an item as Spam. Once again it is mostly for the high end, but a low deviation count can also be used as a flag for a low occurrences (which could be compared to the link profile for link spam)

Two things to digest there.

1. The indexing method applies a spam score both on indexing and retrieval and
2. Standard Deviation on both the high end and low end could count as a spam flag.

Of course, the only reason spammy docs sometimes have up to 100 times the related phrase density of a non spammy page is because this behavior continues to be rewarded in the SERPs. Even if the spam flag is raised and the site eventually banned, classic keyword and relate phrase stuffing continues to rank in the SERPs.

Posted in Black Hat, Google, Internet, Internet Marketing, Keyword Stuffing, SEM, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Weblogs

3 Comments »

Google Torpedoes Navy: You Sunk my Battleship!

February 5th, 2007

QuadsZilla

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You sunk my battleship

This is the story of Bill the Navy Guy. Bill learned a battle plan that worked like a charm:

(computer spun content) + (aged domains) + (Adsense) = $ Money in the Bank $

Bill worked his way up where he was purchasing hundreds of domains per day and was hosting thousands of domains across more than 65 dedicated servers. He was pulling in more than $60,000 per month from Google Adsense.

$60,000+ per Month . . . on 1 Adsense account.

Here’s the kicker: All his content across his entire Network of thousands of sites was spun from a total of about 45 sentences. So you could Google one of his sentence fragments and find his entire Network.

What could possibly go wrong here?

The curator of a Western art museum commissioned a local artist to paint a mural-sized painting of Custer’s Last Thought. The artist was told to make it highly symbolic of Custer’s mindset during the debacle at the Little Bighorn. Deep in thought, the artist went to his studio. After many false starts, he proceeded to paint an enormous oil painting.

Finally, after months of work, the opening of the exhibit drew a crowd of people for the unveiling of this, the centerpiece of the exhibit. The canopy came off revealing the artist’s large painting:

In the foreground was a beautiful crystalline blue lake with a single fish leaping. Around the fish’s head is a halo. In the background, the hills and meadows are covered with naked Native American couples copulating.

The curator was both disgusted and baffled by what he saw. In a rage he turned to the artist and asked, “What the hell has this got to do with Custer’s Last Thought?”

The artist replied, “It’s simple. Custer’s last thought must have been, ‘Holy Mackerel! … Where did all these fucking Indians come from?’”

Unlike General Custer to the Indians, Google had an answer to Bill the Navy Guy and Torpedoed the Admiral’s lone Adsense account: $60,000+ a month revenue to $0. Overnight.

Google Battle Lessons

War Buffs and Search Engine Spammers alike will want to learn from Bill the Navy Guy’s critical mistakes. Here are some of the lessons we can glean from Bill’s defeat:

1. Diversify and protect your supply lines. Redundancy is the law of the military; you never want a single point of failure. In fact, that’s why the DoD invented the Internet. Even if you love Adsense, you should never have all your sites under the same Adsense code. Multiple Adsense Accounts + other PPC Engines + Affiliate Revenue makes it so that a hit to any one of your supply lines does not cause a total system failure.

2. Troop Diversification. Did Alexander the Great have just light cavalry? Did William Wallace have only pikemen? Does the US Navy have only submarines? No! By spinning all his content from the same 45 sentences, Bill the Navy Guy went into battle with all the same type of troops. Don’t make that same mistake; build your sites from multiple content sources.

3. Never give the enemy your battle plans or the locations of your troops. You think the landing at Normandy would have been as successful had we sent Hitler the battle plan and troop locations 2 weeks before the invasion? By using the same Adsense account and leaving such huge footprints, Bill the Navy guy might as well have sent Google this email every day:

To: Google Spam Team
From: Bill The Navy Guy
Subject: Please Ban Me

Dear Google,

I am spamming your index and using Adsense to monitize. Please ban my sites and Adsense account at your earliest convenience. Here is the complete list:

[list of every site]

-Bill the Navy Guy

PS: Don’t Give up the Ship

Even if you’re not an SEO Black Hat, there’s a good reason not to use the same Adsense account across your network of sites. Let’s say you want to interlink sites in your 300 site network. With all your sites on the same Adsense account, Google can and will discount the value of intra network links. Instead of a potential 299 quality backlinks, you’re probably looking at a value closer to several on site links (closer to Navigation links).

Don’t lose the War do to tactical mistakes: Get multiple Adsense accounts and diversify your online income to other sources.

Posted in Adsense, Black Hat, Black Hat SEO Site Reviews, Computer Generated Content, Google, Internet, Internet Marketing, SEO

13 Comments »

Mybloglog – Just BEGGING to be Spammed

January 24th, 2007

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Have you seen My Blog Log?

Basically it’s a widget that shows who the recent users of a blog were with a link to a page like this.

This seems like a rehash of the “latest referral” feature that all but killed the b2evolution blogging app.

Funny thing is, I’m in Brazil right now and just went to the b2evolution.net website and got this message:

403 Forbidden
Please stop referer spam.

We have identified that you have been refered here by a known or supposed spammer.

If you feel this is an error, please bypass this message and leave us a comment about the error. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

If you are actually doing referer spam, please note that this website/b2evolution no longer records and publishes referers. Not even legitimate ones! While we understand it was fun for you guys while it lasted, please understand our servers cannot take the load of all this cumulated spam any longer… Thank you.

Also, please note that comment/trackback submitted URLs will be tagged with rel=”nofollow” in order to be ignored by search engines

Interesting considering the referral was from Google!

I’m sure there are some safeguards in place for mybloglog, but my first impression is that the app and people who use it are just begging to be spammed.

Update: MyBlogLog Exploit – Getting Free Keyword Targeted Links

Posted in Black Hat, SEO

3 Comments »

Buying Diggs

December 13th, 2006

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Usersubmiter is suppose to be this great way to buy diggs to help get your stoires to the front page. The problem is that when you make a program like this out in the open it becomes a honeypot. A honeypot is a trap set to detect, deflect or in some manner counteract attempts at unauthorized use of information systems.

Ajaydsouza managed to get his IP address banned by using usersubmitter:

I wrote to Digg today about the IP address problem. Seems like I was totally mistaken about the reason I was blocked. The reason I was blocked was because I gave UserSubmitter a shot and after a single set of diggs itself, my Digg account was blocked. Digg was kind enough to let me off this time with a warning.

Lesson learnt. Am posting it out here so that all you folks out there will be careful before using such services like UserSubmitter.

While socialham, (who apparantly never heard of akismet), tried to do a story about the program while buying diggs for said story:

** Update 10pm 10/03/06 – Almost 24 hours later and it appears this story was never promoted. We learned that its not easy to manipulate the Digg system but it is possible. On a side note I was contacted by an anonymous Russian man who let me preview his “digg rigging” system and I must say it was pretty well done. I didn’t actually use it because he would only take payment through www.wmtransfer.com which I am not familiar with.

** Final Update!!!! The next day this story was minus 25 diggs, so I guess there was an audit done at some point or this story was brought to the attention of digg.com.

So yes, safeguards are in place. I mean come on, they have like 60 people working there – they have to do something all day.

No matter how you try to game it, it’s difficult to get stories to the front page that are not sensational. Understand that even though it’s possiable to game Digg, you still need to get passed the editors to make it to the Digg front page. That’s why it’s important to understand the community to get to the Digg front page.

Of course, nothing is guaranteed. Even if you have 300 diggs you may not make it to the front page – even if they are all legit.

If you’ve got the cash, you could try to just appeal to every Apple Fan Boys wet dream by giving away a MacPro with Dual 30″ LCDs as part of some free photoshop contest. That might work.

Posted in Black Hat, SEO

2 Comments »

Google Funding Terrorists

December 8th, 2006

QuadsZilla

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Do you recall when the “funding terrorist” campaign was targeting Marijuana, online gambling and Porn? Almost everyone was happy to stand by and let that bullshit be spread around without questioning it – even many of those who understood that this was nothing but political scare tactics.

Who cares what the ignorant masses believe? It’s not your business – right? No need to stand up for intellectual honesty. That whole “slippery slope” argument has no merit and those same tactics couldn’t be used against a real company – Right?

Well it now appears that those same sheeple are now looking at a new target and for the “Google Funding Terrorists” connection.

So for those of you that haven’t figured it out, the whole “funding terrorist” thing is total bullshit. If you buy into it, you’re a fucktard. When I wrote the Poker Bann Would fund Terrorists post, I did so because Frist is just the kind of asshole that would play the “terrorists funding” card for anything; just like when Gonzales said that illicit businesses (copyright infringement) are used, “quite frankly, to fund terrorism.”

You know how much it cost to take down the World Trade Center, put a hole in the Pentagon, and take down 4 Commercial Airlines? About $50,000. You know how much Bin Laden had in his personal fortune at the time? About $600,000,000. To put this in perspective, with the personal funding of just that one guy, they have enough funding for 12,000 similar attacks.

The Terrorists don’t Need Funding – They’ve already got it.

Is Google adsense being used to fund terrorists? Yes. All someone has to do is set up a damn adsense account like anyone else and send traffic to it. The argument is just as valid as saying that buying Marijuana or playing poker funds terrorism; it’s not valid at all.

So the next time someone says that pot, poker, Google, or Porn is being used to fund terrorism, knee them in the groin, sweep their legs out and start kicking them in the head until they stop acting like a such fucktard.

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

14 Comments »

Do you Brandverb?

December 6th, 2006

QuadsZilla

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For a long time, we have not had a term for when a company’s brand becomes synonymous with an action. Today we do: brandverb.

The brandverb you will be most familiar with is Google. When someone says “Google it” or “I got the answer by Googling it” they are using Google as a brandverb. As you can see, the brand “Google” is being used to replace verb “search” becoming a brandverb.

Yesterday, I used Jetblue as a brandverb. While contemplating going out to Los Angeles for New Years, I said “Maybe I’ll Jetblue out there.” Once again, the brand replaced a verb (fly) and became a brandverb. Here is how the term brandverb was born:

[23:49] QuadsZilla: my flight to RIO is on the 4th from JFK
[23:50] QuadsZilla: maybe i’ll jetblue out there
[23:50] QuadsZilla: for like 3 days or something
[23:50] QuadsZilla: if that’s cool
[23:50] Jeff Random: I just made up a word based on your word
[23:50] Jeff Random: brandverb
[23:50] Jeff Random: example jetblue out there
[23:50] Jeff Random: aka to google
[23:50] QuadsZilla: nice
[23:50] QuadsZilla: i like it
[23:50] QuadsZilla: i’ll blog it

If you are going to photocopy something and say “I’ll Xerox it” you have used a brandverb. If you want your maid to vacuum your bachelor pad and ask her to “Hoover the place” you have used a brandverb. When you advise your grandmother to get rid of some junk and say “Ebay that crap, some idiot will buy it” – you have brandverbed ebay.

Want an important signed document delivered to finalize a deal? Fedex it over – you sexy brandverber!

By understanding the power of brandverbing you will become a better marketer. If you are thinking in terms of “How can I brandverb my company?”, your marketing will have a longer term impact. Especially if you brand becomes engrained in culture.

Do you brandverb?

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

13 Comments »

Google and “Spammy Requests”

November 30th, 2006

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This morning I did a search on Google for:

inurl:.edu photoshop class

The first results included tons of non edu sites that did not have .edu in the URL. Strange. So I figured maybe I needed to troubleshoot a little and after changing the language preferences from portuguese to english and the number of results to 100, I got this crap:

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

The thing is, this wasn’t an automated query! It was just me typing on my keyboard and clicking with my mouse. I know, I know – Only an evil black hat spammer could want photoshop classes ONLY from edu sites. Clearly there can be no legitimate use for this query.

Better sound the alarm and tell me that I probably have a virus or spyware!

We know in the past that Google decided to cripple their backlink checker to reduce “spammy requests.” Now they are going to cripple thier inurl command?

I have this feeling that some day I’ll be sitting with my (still-to-be-concieved) son and he’ll turn to me and say:

“Dad, Tell me about back in the day when Google didn’t suck.”

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

24 Comments »

Disruption Causes Opportunity in the Marketplace

November 23rd, 2006

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It’s not just adult. This past weekend represented a huge shift in Google. This Disruption has created opportunity in the marketplace.

Learn what has changed, figure out what is happening and adapt. These disruptions may seem bad at first, but if you’re ahead of the curve you should be able to ride these changes all the way to the bank.

I haven’t seen the outside world in days . . . this is like an ever shifting video game on a global scale.

I’m sure you’ve heard the JFK quote

“There is a Chinese curse which says, “May he live in interesting times.” Like it or not, we live in interesting times…”

Funny thing is, that was just more hoax marketing. The Chinese never said that.

Change is good.