Comment Spam

Marcus writes about how short comment spam is getting by Aismet:

I’ve been seeing a lot of short spam comments bypass Akismet’s spam filters on this blog lately. This type of blog spam is a rather clever way to deceive the less-astute bloggers who don’t realize that it’s spam and approve the comment because it’s perceived as marginally relevant, only because it’s so general and vague.

This is one word blog spam that says something like:

* “excellent” or
* “great post”or
* “i agree”
* “nice”
* …

Then the URL is a spammy backlink and email is made up. By the fact that I’m seeing so many of these get through, I’m guessing they’re effective.

 

I agree.

Great post.

Nice.

Tagged none | 8 Comments »

Work has been non-stop lately and we finally got a a few projects where they need to be. On Copyblogger, Brian Asked “What to Do When Your Idea Sucks?”

In my case, i’ll just publish this crappy post and take a much needed vacation for the next few days away from my computer.

The 9 personality types of a Comment Spammer:

1. The Suck-Up:

Wow great site! Some really helpful information there. I’m sorry for little off-topic, but I want to ask you about design of this site. Did you make this template yourself or got from any templates website? Looks pretty cool for me

 

2. The Foreigner

Wonderful well this reading. More Mr Sparkle send greeting at Japan. LOL

 

3. Mr Turrets Syndrome:

Purple car parts, Rusty Ringtones, Used Alligator Book Racks, Q-Tips Currency trading, Expert Smoker’s Bottle, car insurance mercury rate

 

4. The Compulsive Gambler:

800% free sign-up bonus at supper lucky guy casinos. Win big cash fast payouts!

 

5. The Exhibitionist:

Watch me sucking and slurping these 14 guys at superhorneyslutshack.ru - 3 days just $1.99! Also, check out my great webcam sex profile.

 

6.The Combatant:

Is this today’s blog post or did your dog just shit on the keyboard? Check out my site for far better information.

 

7. The Crazed Drug Addict:

Buy Cheap Viagra Here Hydrocodine online buy ambient discount phentermine order phentermine phentermine phentermine online cheap phentermine.

 

8.The Insecure Guy:

This penis pump and these cock enlargement pills helped me add 7 inches in just two weeks.

 

9.The Headbanger:

adklgd dgdjls galse maoeral pgjmew dsg e brfa ragesae asknlasd gad lkhpwen ghasopg tnesg pqqilk

 

Weak.

It could have been funny but I clearly need to recharge. SEO BlackHat should be back to form next week.

Here are some quick hat tips to interesting posts:

Comprehensive State of Online Gambling (Del.icio.us that post if you promote gambling)

SEO by the SEA’s Search Engine Ranking Factors

What’s that mean? Translating Rejections from Chick to Geek by SEO Egghead.

Digg is Doomed Seriously, that site is sooo slow. They need some faster way to access the DB and build pages.

Tagged Funny | 10 Comments »

Here’s a great thread over at threadwatch discussing the criminality of SEO and certain black hat SEO techniques:

And well you could argue if you’re signing a ton of guestbooks really fast, or you’re doing a ton of trackback or referer spam, you know that almost does get towards the denial of service attack, but this is the first time where you could actually go to a court of law and you can say, “look, here’s my account, I got hacked, here’s all the stuff.”

And on some level, it is almost kind of a silver lining, in that for the first time you could go, and you know, you could actually get an SEO convicted of doing something like this. - Matt Cutts of Google

 

The audio on webmaster radio is here.

Clearly, Matt is making moves so he will be ready to be National Security Director in 2008 and crack down on spam.

Tagged Matt Cutts, Politics | 2 Comments »

You know that the best SEO Black Hats are doing something more than scraping, using a site generator, comment spamming, and pinging to be raking in more than $100k per month.

But what is it?

Right now, there is way too much good stuff that I simply can’t publish on the SEO Black Hat blog. If I posted these tactics and exploits they would immediately get all the wrong kind of attention. The detailed conversations about how exactly to abuse search engine algorithms, generate massive traffic, and what other Black Hats are doing must remain underground to retain their effectiveness.

But what if I told you that you could discuss these exploits with me without paying my $500 an hour consulting fee? What if I told you there was a way to join in on the private, cutting edge discussions with some of the best Black Hats and web entrepreneurs in the world?

Would you be interested?

Because now you can . . .

Today is the official launch of the resource you’ve looked everywhere for but never found:

The Private SEO Black Hat Forum

Normally what you get on forums are people who don’t know anything talking with people who don’t want to say anything. You can occasionally find amazing tips on some forums: but you have to dig through 400 crappy posts just to find one post that is useful. That becomes a huge time sink.

How are the SEO Black Hat forums different?

Quality: We’re not going to have any contests to see who can make the most posts. That just creates tons of crap that no one wants to read. Our focus is on quality over quantity. Our primary concern is with succinctly answering one question: “What works?”

Sophisticated: Many of the topics we discuss are very advanced and require a high level of technical or business acumen to appreciate.

Expert Discussions: The SEO Black Hat forums are not for everyone and they may not be right for you. If you are relatively new to SEO or building websites, then do not join the SEO Black Hat Forums: you will be in way over your head. There are plenty of newbie forums out there for you – this is not one of them. Our forums are for successful web entrepreneurs to develop strategies that drive more traffic and generate more revenues.

Forum Membership Benefits

Access to Expert Advice and Discussions
We have both White Hat and Black Hat Experts that are already benefiting from new tool development, techniques, scripts and the sharing of ideas.
Some members you may already be familiar with include:

* CountZero from blackhat-seo.com (Black Hat)

* RSnake from ha.ckers.org (Web Security Expert)

* Dan Kramer from Kloakit (Cloaking Expert)

* Jaimie Sirovich from seoegghead.com (Token White Hat / SEO Geek)

There are several other members that you are certainly familiar with who are using handles for anonymity. We have others who are more focused on security, vulnerabilities, and coding. There are still more that you are likely unfamiliar with but are nevertheless web millionaires.

Databases – Large Datasets
If you want your sites to have massive amounts of unique content you need large data sets. The trading, discussion and posting of large data sets is going on right now on our forums.

Expired / Deleted Domain Tools
Want to use to use the same domain Tool that I used to get a Page Rank 6 site in the Gambling Space for just $8? This domain tool is available for members to use for free.

50% off on Kloakit – The Professional Cloaking Software

Scripts – Several useful scripts have already been posted – interesting thing you may not have thought of before are being discussed and developed.

Exploits and Case Studies: The really good stuff I can’t talk about on the SEO Blackhat Blog is being discussed on the SEO Black Hat Forums. Right now, some of the conversations include beating captchas, domain kiting, data mining, hoax marketing, XSS vulnerabilities as they relate to SEO, and much more.

Pricing: $100 per month.

The price will soon be rising significantly as more databases, hosted tools, scripts and exploits are added. However, once you lock in a membership rate it will never go up and you will continue to have access to everything.

So, if you think you’re ready for the most intense Black Hat SEO discussions anywhere, then here’s what you need to do:

1. Register at the SEO Black Hat Forums.

2. Go to the User CP and select Paid Subscription.

I’ll see you on the inside!

Tagged Forum | 9 Comments »

I used technorati today to find another site about seach engine spamming. Here’s what I found:

The script does the following things:

A - look for WP blogs in Yahoo
B - post a comment

A) The script has a basic list of 100 most popular words in english language. It takes 2 random words, then queries Yahoo for WP blogs containing those words. Normally spammers take Google results. But I don’t wanna mess with my Biggest Friend.

B) Every post on WP has an ID. We don’t really wanna be bothered with extracting it… we just take a random number between 10 and 30, and try to comment on post with that ID.

Just select the text below, save it as commenter.php, put it on the server and you can start your career as a comment spammer.

 

Tagged Wordpress, Tools, Link Dumping | 5 Comments »

Dataminning has a nice graph showing the rise of comment spamming this year. Almost all comment spam that gets through today has the nofollow tag attached to the link.

I am starting to believe that Google does more than simply not follow “nofollow” links. I think that they may look at the percentage of nofollow links a site recieves and if it is greater than X %, the site is considered spammy.

If that is the case, one has to wonder if a “nofollow” link actually works as a vote against a site. After all, if you are saying with the nofollow tag “I don’t trust this link”, the search engines may decide they don’t want to trust that site, either.

Tagged Design | 6 Comments »

So this guy caught a comment spammer using his wi-fi and tracked him back to his house! Now he is taking suggestions on what to do with this new found knowledge. While this is certainly not the norm, it does place us spammers on the defensive. People will go far beyond just reporting you to Google these days.

Tagged Security | 11 Comments »

Toady I recieved more than 900 comment spams (probably all from the same person). Maybe it’s a flaw with Wordpress 1.5 that allows comment spamming without a login? Is anyone else having this problem? or does anyone know how this is being done?

900 comment spams on a single blog from the same person in one day is not black hat SEO, it’s just an attack. What do you think is the appropriate response for something like this? - it took me more than 10 minutes just to mark them all as spam and delete them all from my inbox.

On another note, remember that this Saturday at noon is the deadline for signing up for next Saturday’s SEO Poker Tournement.

Tagged none | 14 Comments »

I’m sure many of you have noticed that I now require accounts for comments. That’s because I was deleting more than 200 comment spams per day - Now, it’s down to around 10. I’m not sure how they are posting without a wordpress account on this blog, but I digress.

For the IP of one of the comment spams I got today, it said:

Author : buy tramadol (IP: 85.214.38.21 , dont-DoS-me-i-am-just-a-tor-exit.yi.org)

[site and comment ommited]

The target site has no redirects (they are monitizing directly). If one were pissed off enough to DoS them, wouldn’t they at least take the time to look at the where the spam was pointing and attack that server instead?

Tagged none | 4 Comments »

You’re broke as a joke but want to cloak: So what can you do? How about a free cloaking script?

Let’s say you’ve used widgetbaiting or the markov chain to create 30,000 pages of unique content about bacon polenta recipes. Of course, no human surfer wants to read those pages but they are great spider food.

Well if you don’t want to use IP delivery like you’re supposed to, you can use this code to send your surfers to a sell page with text written for human consumption.

Now, this is not some unsneaky java redirect that will get you banned in the Search Engines. * If you use this code, you may get banned in some search engines.* Rather, it’s a error loophole designed for you to exploit:

<img src=nofilehere.gif onerror=window.open(’http://seoblackhat.com’,'_top’)>

Just make a page with any kind of spider food / keyword spam that you want on it and then add that line to the page.

When surfers visit the page, they will be sent to “seoblackhat.com” because the requested image file does not exist (therefore there will be an error). The spiders and search engines, on the other hand, will all see the original page.

This free cloaking script is inferior to premium cloaking software for many reasons. If you are scraping content, this method does nothing to help you get past duplicate content filters. This free cloaking code does not protect your code from surfers or your competition. Surfers will briefly see these spider food pages load. They may, in turn, report you to the search engines who could decide that using this code in the manner described is abusive. So, I would not recommended it for sites that you cannot afford to have banned.

Many high profile sites and fortune 500 companies use Cloaking to send different content to different IP addresses. But they don’t use code like this or cheesy redirect scripts - they use sophisticated cloaking software - IP delivery is the safer and preferred way to cloak. Honestly, I’ve never even heard of someone actually getting banned just for IP cloaking. I know that people do get banned for using crappy JavaScript redirects but in my opinion, getting banned for IP Cloaking is one of the great Black Hat SEO myths; it just doesn’t happen.

Tagged none | 3 Comments »