Graywolf published a short essay on an interesting SEO practice he names Predictive SEO. Basically, try to think about what the future on a topic which suits your activity could be made of, and prepare search engines for it.

For instance, if baseball is your game and you want to be ready for web traffic in 2007:

1. build pages with titles such as “New York Yankees 2007 World Series Champions”, “New York Mets 2007 World Series Champion” and so on with every team name.

2. put them on a mini site map page on a well established domain to make sure they get spidered and eventually give them some relevant content.

As the season would go by and you would foresee potential season winnners, you would already have spidered pages ready for real content and real traffic.

Predictive SEO can apply to any subject, as long as you have a manageable number of events likely to happen. Graywolf tips a few suggestions, and among them Hurricane Names, which I spent a few minutes on as a live example.

-Ozh

If you would like to publish a story on SEO black hat and grab a free link to a site like Ozh just did, then register and send in an article.

The following dumps are avalible:

special | wikibooks | wikinews | wikipedia | wikiquote | wiktionary | images

At the root of each Wikimedia project dump, you will find a listing of languages and the md5 sum for all files available in the tree. Each language directory contains these XML dumps:

pages_current.xml.gz – Link to the lastest current pages dump
all_titles_in_ns0.gz – All titles in the main namespace
pages_full.xml.gz – Link to the lastest full pages dump

Now what could a search engine spammer possiably do with these dumps and the markov chain?

Well, with the language feed and markov, you can now spam the search engines in tongues you don’t even speak. With markov, keep in mind that you need about 300+% imput to output ratio for optimal articles.

Aaron Wall takes a scrupulous look at trustrank and link spam detection by analyzing the recent Stanford (Google alumni connections?) paper: Link Spam Detection Based on Mass Estimation.

I could rewrite his analysis, but why bother when he nailed it?

Today Boing Boing Illustrated one can generate thousands of uniques by submitting “borrowed” link bait.

topbit: Just spotted this on BoingBoing, and while I love this piece, I think it only fair to link to the original writer and his page:
http://www.ernestcline.com/spokenword/npa.htm

Clearly, if you give a link to the original source, you’re not going to get a link from Boing Boing. Obviously, posting someone else’s work with out adding ANY comment or value is spam. Kudos Ghanimachan on correctly “borrowing” some link bait!

So my fellow SEO black hats, what’s the coolest or best link bait you ever stole “borrowed”?

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.