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CSS History Stealing Applied to Black Hat SEO

October 8th, 2006

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CGI security has an interesting write up on how to use Jeremiah Grossmans CSS History Stealing Trick. For those of you who haven’t already read, there is a way to check where your users have been by checking their CSS history. So, in answer to his August ponderism:

I wonder how long until the marketers start using this for additional visitor profiling. Feel free to view-source and find the trick.

Less than 2 months!

You run www.sitea.com and www.siteb.com and www.sitec.com are competitors of yours. Now you know these companies use www.ad1.com and www.ad2.com to serve up ads on. What you don’t know is how effective these ads are, simply put without direct access to the web server logs you can’t tell really. Well this isn’t entirely true!

Lets say VisitorA visits your site www.sitea.com. You can use the CSS history stealing trick to see if they have visited www.siteb.com and/or www.sitec.com. If they’ve visited a competitor you’ll know that this person is semi serious about whatever reason they’re visiting your site for. Using the same CSS trick you could also enumerate a list of links (only enumerated if the link was visited) against each competitor website to see what they viewed on this site. This could include seeing which products/services they are interested in, if they visited the ‘contact us’ page and possibly if they also visited the ‘thank you for submitting your data’ (Letting you know they submitted a form). Now that you know where your visitor has been you can utilize the same trick on websites advertising your competitors to see where they came from. Why bother? Well now you know which ads are in fact paying off for them and can advertise with the same company.

A more elaborate example would be dynamically generating a discount if the current visitor has visited a competitor potentially winning a deal.

So now you can map out all of your competitors and if a visitor has visited one of them and you know the price on that site to be X, you can sell for X-5 (for example). The possiable applications are endless . . . but are they legal? Donno. I doubt there are any laws written about grabbing someones CSS history. Any lawyers care to chime in?

How could SEO blackhats use this? Off the top of my head for manipulative “link trading”. To automate the process, you set up a script that grabs the URLs of all the places you send this email:

Hi,

I really like your site (sitename.com). In fact, I have put a link to your site from my site (as you can see here). Don’t feel obligated, but I would really appreciate a link back when you get the chance.

Thanks much!

-Fakename

Then the link is only served when thier site’s CSS is in thier history (which will be about 99% of the time).

Or, you could use the same application with trackback spam . . . or Referral Spam. Trackback someone and only serve a link if they have their own CSS in their history. That’s some dirty pool, but you can bet that people are going to be doing it because of how Google dramatically discounts reciprocal links.

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

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How A Headline Can be Link Bait for Bloggers who Love Viral Marketing

October 6th, 2006

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

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Google in the Uncyclopedia (Funny!)

October 4th, 2006

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Via Waxy, I found this entry in the Uncyclopedia For Google. It’s Hilarious . . .and under the creative commons License! So, I put the whole article here in case you want to discuss in the comment section:

“ I must say, I love their image search, I can type in anything I want and I’ll get such sexy naked pictures in return and the best part is no one knows! Wait, the govenment monitors these now? Oh, dear….”~ Oscar Wilde on Google Image Search

“I’m going to fucking bury that thing, I have done it before, and I will do it again… I’m going to fucking killâ„¢ Google”
~ Steve Ballmer on Google

“Don’t Google the question Moss!”~ Chris O’Dowd on Google

Google is the world’s most popular file-sharing network, powered by their patented EvilRank technology.

History of Google

The word ‘Google’ is derived from the latin word googlus which can be translated variously as “search engine that finds great Pr0n“, “The Great Satan”, or “Error 404: File Not Found”. Google Inc. began on the 6th of June 1996 (66′96)as a highly secret government program focusing on the effect of blank pages on Internet users. After three years of subjecting hapless Internets users to the pages, the project collapsed under fire from top government officials for failing to collect any data whatsoever.
(more…)

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

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Why You Need to Dump that Google Sitemap: Today!

October 3rd, 2006

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Have you ever had a friend that’s in a bad relationship? You know the skank he’s with is just bringing him down. You know he can do much better. In the beginning, there were all these great hopes about how the relationship was “gonna be”. Now, all you hear is him complaining about how things are just not working out: the broken promises, the failed plans, the betrayals.

We’ve all had friends like that at one point or another. If you’re good friends, you’ll have an intervention and tell your friend how things really are and what he needs to do. You will sit him down and tell him straight up: “Dude, you can do much better than this. It’s time for you to Dump that Bitch.”

Well today that friend is you. The skank you are with is the Google Sitemap. In the beginning, it was all lovey dovey. There was all this hope about the Google Sitemap helping you to get indexed. At first, it even seemed like it was going to work out. But by now you should realize that it was all a lie: that she does nothing but breaks her promises to you. I understand that you’re emotionally involved at this point, but take a step back and take a serious look at the situation. Is this relationship really working out the way you wanted it to?

No. And that’s why it’s time for you to dump that Google Sitemap. You’ve become overly dependant on her and she has turned into a negative rather than a positive in your life.

Just look at her own words. She’s doing more than giving you signals when you hear this every day:

“Make pages for users, not for search engines.”

(Google Quality guidelines – basic principles #1)

If that’s true, why is Google Sitemap asking you to make a page just for her? When was the last time your users ever wanted to look at an XML Formatted Sitemap?

Never!

The Google Sitemap is like Google’s deranged multiple personality. You can’t have a healthy relationship with someone who’s schizo. Google is who you really care about, not that Google Sitemap.

So, instead of wasting time with a Google Sitemap, make one for your users. This way everyone will be happy: you, the REAL Google, and your users.

If you’re using wordpress, you should dump those standard monthly archives while your at it. When’s the last time you were on another blog and thought “What I really want to look at is February 2005 archives – I sure hope this site has THAT page.”?

It’s Crap! What a user might want is a listing of all your posts: either from most recent to first, or sorted by most commented.

If you check out my sitemap above (top nav yellow), you can easily read every post I’ve ever written. The Visited hyperlink is a different color than the non visited. So, if you want to go from post to post just scanning the headlines that interest you, it’s easy to do so. Plus, with this setup, the click distance from any post to any other post is at most 2.

Google Sitemap doesn’t do any of that for you or your users. She just weighs you down and lulls you into a false sense of security. Dump her today!

You too can get a great chick like I have. Here’s how in wordpress: Just make an archives.php template that includes this function:
<?php wp_get_archives('type=postbypost&show_post_count=true'); ?>
The added advantage is that you can go to that sitemap page and do a quick ctr+F to find any headline you have written . . . and so can your users! If users can more easily find your posts, they are more likely to link to them. More links = Higher Rankings in all the Search Engines. When you take on this approach in the Relationship, you’ll see the real Google crawling back to your door and begging for more.

I say you shove Google’s words in the face of her schizo Personality. Stand up for yourself and Say “Sorry, we don’t make pages for search engines, we make them for our users!”

I already have and I’m happier because of it.

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

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Forget the Digg Effect – Check out the SEO Black Hat Effect!

October 2nd, 2006

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I did several things to prepare for Digg with my last post, 10 Steps to Guarantee You Make the Digg Front Page, because I was confident it would make it to the front page. For example, I enabled the wp-cache plugin and moved my entire Wordpress theme (images +CSS) to another server. Then I changed the link rel in the header.php to point to the CSS on the other server.

These kind of precautions help you to prevent the load from all the new visitors from Digg from crashing your site.

Unfortunately for digg, they had no time to prepare for a site with the massive readership of SEO Black Hat. While My story was number 1 on Digg’s “Today’s most Popular”, their site went down!

Here’s a screen shot.

Maybe next time Digg should prepare for the SEO Black Hat Effect.

muhahahahaha

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

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10 Steps to Guarantee You Make the Digg Front Page

October 2nd, 2006

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As I sit here writing on the world’s greatest personal computer (The Mac Pro Quad Xeon 64-bit workstation with dual 30 inch monitors):

I can’t help but pity you Wal-Mart shoppers who still use software from the Antichrist (Microsoft) and can’t figure out how to get on the front page of Digg (Idiots!).

So, I did some statistical analysis, using my Open Office Firefox plugin, of all the stories that made the front page of Digg in the past year and have come up with:

The 10 Steps to Guarantee You Make the Digg Front Page

Hopefully, you will be able to use them before we all die because of global warming next year . . .

1. Make A List or Tutorial Headline. Your Headline should make it seem like the reader’s online success is just a 5 minute read away. Remember, the average digger has the attention span of a gnat on crack. Diggers want the fast, easy answer that will solve all their problems. Your headline must appeal to people with severe ADD or most people won’t even read your article – let alone Digg it.

*In the past year, a “top 10” or “top 100” list has made the front page on average once every other day.

2. Write about Digg. Could a site be any more narcissistic? I think not. Digg likes itself so much that Paris Hilton looks about as humble as a Nun by comparison. People must be sitting at their computers going “OMG Look it’s a story about Digg! That’s sooooooo cool! I’ll totally digg that!” Bonus points if you mention Kevin Rose.

* In the past year, stories with “Digg” in the submission have made the front page a whopping 554 times and mentioned Kevin Rose by name an average of once a week.

3. Appeal to the Apple fanboys. Did you hear from someone who knows someone who served a Cream Chai Latte to Steve Jobs about some Mac Rumor? Well that’s front page Digg Material all the way! Don’t know why, but if Apple lets out a fart, diggers can’t wait to comment on the rosy smell.

* Stories with “Apple” in the Submission have made the front page a mind blowing 1225 times in the past year.

4. Doom and Gloom about how Global Warming will destroy us all. Who cares if we only have real data that covers about 1/20,000,000 of the earth’s history? (unless you’re a creationist, then it’s like 1/40th). So what if there is nothing but anecdotal evidence to support almost every claim? Does it matter that world’s best meteorologists can’t even tell me if it’s going to rain tomorrow?

No!

Diggers don’t really like to DO anything about global warming, but feel guilty about it despite a lack of conclusive evidence. In that sense, I guess it’s kinda like “Religion 2.0”. Diggers will Digg Global warming Doom and Gloom stories so they can “feel” like they “did something” to “help mankind.” All while consuming more electricity, more oil and more natural resources than the 80% of the world’s population that doesn’t even have a computer.

* A junk science, doom and Gloom story about Global Warming will make the front page of Digg on average of once a week.

5. Write about how great Firefox is. When it comes to Firefox, no story is too lame, no plugin is too useless and no article can praise Firefox too much for the front page of Digg. Sure, it’s just a freaking browser. Sure, it leaks memory faster than . . . umm . . . some kind of leaky thing leaking much faster than usual. Sure no one really needs YAFFFP – but who cares?!?

* In the past year, a firefox story has made the front page on average once every day.

6. Remember: Walmart, George Bush, and Fox News have NEVER done ANYTHING right. Everything they do is because they are 100% evil to the core. This REAL Axis of Evil delights in the clear-cutting of forests just for shits and giggles, the sadistic torture of children, and is right now plotting the Next 9/11 attack on America. Here’s a link to a Jon Stewart Video that proves it’s all true!

* * actually, I’m not a fan of George Bush; but his coverage on Digg is more rigged than a Diebold voting machine. Maybe he should ask for a Digg recount?

7. Repeat after me: “Microsoft sucks, Microsoft Sucks, Microsoft Sucks.” So what if 97% of all computer users use their products? Ignore that they’ve been the most consistent winner for the last 25 years in a space littered with failures. Who cares if their founder has given more to charity than any human in the history of mankind? They suck! And they are evil! Why? Because it’s cool to say so.

Don’t believe me? Check out this screenshot of the most recent Digg front page Microsoft Stories. I was going to parody it up, but there’s no need!

* 94% of the front page articles that mentioned Microsoft in the past year cast the company in a negative light.

8. Make up outrageous statistics that you have not researched. State your opinions as fact. Sure, they might get vetted by some geek who has nothing better to do, but that probably won’t happen until you’ve already made the front page.

9. Insult as many groups as you can. Flamewars are popular for a reason. Throw out bombs that dare people to comment on your story. If you haven’t pissed off half your readers by the end of your article, it’s probably because you don’t have the balls or you’re too stupid to figure out how.

10. Include the word’s slowest loading Plugin so people can Digg your Story without leaving your site. If you manage to type 1000 words, there’s at least a chance that it will finish loading before the reader has finished reading your article. Then if you’re lucky, about 5% of your lazy-ass readers might actually click the button to digg your story:

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

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Click Distance Matters.

October 1st, 2006

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As an SEO experiment, a little less than a month ago we:
1. Removed all the categories from the sidebar
2. Listed titles of every post with links every page
3. Got rid of the Google Sitemap.

Because we updated the theme on friday to include a new navigational setup, it’s time for some observations about the experiment.

For the month of September, SEO Black Hat had these search referral numbers:
Google 24889
Yahoo 1047
MSN 503
Ask Jeeves 91
Google Images 82

In August, 2006 with search referrals of
14258 – Google
1603 – MSN
1266- Yahoo
41 – Ask Jeeves
19 – Google Images

and these numbers in July
11995 – Google
1145 – MSN
828 – Yahoo
514 – Google Images
34 – Ask Jeeves

There was a 74% climb in the number of Google search referrals. MSN switched to live – and live hated my old layout because it was ugly (let’s see if that picks up any with the new design).. Yahoo was down slightly and Ask Jeeves up slightly.

Also of interest is that SEO black hat had gone supplemental after 182 results prior to the experiment. Today, SEO Black hat does not go supplemental until 554 results (which is pretty good considering this is only my 334th blog post.)

Of course, all this did not happen in a vacuum. I continued to write posts and people linked to those posts. Also, I took advantage of two internet “trends” with a couple of my posts that contributed to these search referrals:

Keyword Search Referrals
Fortuny 3151
lonelygirl15 715

Those Keywords, which accounted for about a third of the increase, should probably be disregarded.

The private SEO Black Hat forums increased stickyness and number of visits. Therefore, if Google is tracking user behavior, there’s a good chance that SEO Black Hat would be seen as more authoritative site.

My theory is that Google probably does track user behavior and is factoring this into their algorithm. It also seems very likely that Google cares about click distance from the homepage – especially for indexing purposes (as in: what goes supplemental).

What is click distance? Click distance is the minimum number of clicks it would take you to get from one page to another. During the experiment, the click distance from the home page to any post (or from one post to another) was 1.

What does that mean for your site design? Make sure your navigation is set up well. Google sitemaps are not the answer. If a post is 10 clicks from the homepage, it’s going to be a lot harder for that post to rank in the search engines.

I’ll detail what changes were made to SEO Black Hat from an on page SEO and usability perspective throughout this week.

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

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Upgrading the Wordpress Template and Theme

September 29th, 2006

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SEO Blackhat is going through a live revamp. We did some staging and are now down to ironing out the bugs. Of course I expect the full gambit of comments on the new theme. So please feel free to fire away in the comment section.

“And of course, with the birth of the artist came the inevitable afterbirth – the critic.” – History of the World Part 1

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

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Dude, You Stole My Idea!

September 28th, 2006

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Cumhur manually comment spammed me three times with this. He must really want it read by everyone, so I figured I’d make it post all by itself:

This idea originally belongs to me,
I wrote an advisory about it a few weeks ago.
Here are some links for proof, you can also make a google search about
http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2006-07/0211.html

You could at least give a reference to my advisory..
Cumhur Onat
cumhuronat[at]php.net

One of his comments was on a post that I wrote more than a year ago:

http://seoblackhat.com/2005/09/26/inbound-link-authority-sites-exploit/

Notice the 2005 my URL. So, umm . . . Cumhur, you could at least give a reference to my advisory . . .

Disclaimer: The email used in the login was different from the one left in the post, so it’s possible that someone else dropped these comments.

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

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The Google “PDA Hack” Was Great While it Lasted!

September 27th, 2006

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About 4 weeks ago, one of the posts on the private SEO Black Hat Forum showed how to get your content indexed on a Google Domain AND have backlinks that counted from the big G.

Here was the original post:

I call this the Google PDA Hack as that is simply what it is. A small breach in Googlebot makes it index it’s own PDA search results.

This will probably not last for a whole lot longer as more and more people are starting to use it but anyhow here is a quick guide on how to.

1. Let’s first see it in action
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=round+and+brown&
btnG=Google+Search

Second listing
http://www.google.com/pda%3F&as_q%3DRound+N+Brown+site:
kimosabi.en.wanad oo.es&num%3D20

2. To get your site listed with the PDA hack its important that the site you want listed is already indexed by Googlebot otherwise it wont show and even more important it is that your domain don’t get banned. F.x last week some guy refspammed the [heck] out of this gimmick and he was 3rd on Viagra so his domain was listed under the PDA search pages but no pages was indexed as he was banned. Don’t make that mistake. Just get your pages indexed don’t get them ranking. The PDA hack will do that for you.

3. Now we change the pda search string. It’s easy as ABC.
http://www.google.com/pda%3F&as_q%3DSearch+Term
+site:domain.com&num%3D20

4. Ok now you ready with your PDA search string. Simply take it and get it linked from somewhere and you should be in the SERPs in no time.

That’s all folks!

It’s funny, because a couple of people PM me saying they can’t find anything to use in the forum – while others tell me it’s far and away the best forum they’ve seen.

Most of us knew the Google PDA Hack was incredible; we also knew it would not be around forever. Alas! The exploit has been fixed — but it was great while it lasted! Several people IMed me about how they were raking in the cash on very competitive SERPs because of this Google PDA hack.

Indeed, Black Hat SEO is a constantly evolving art form. That’s why if you have the tools and knowledge to take advantage of an exploit when it becomes available, you want to be one of the first to know about it.

Is this kind of information worth paying money for? Well, not for everyone. Clearly my Grandmother would not have benefited from having this information 4 weeks ago. On the other hand, many of our members were able to abuse this exploit before it was patched up and made more than enough to pay for YEARS of membership to the Private SEO Black Hat Forum.

Will joining the forum be worthwhile for you? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s definiately not for everyone. However, your opportunity to “peek under the hood” for $100 will soon be coming to a close . . .