SEO Black Hat: SEO Blog and Private Forum

Looking to jumpstart your career as a web entrepreneur or SEO Consultant? Aching to see how the pros really do it? Want to work alongside me, QuadsZilla?

Well then today just may be your lucky day.

SEO Black Hat will be taking on an unpaid intern to work on various projects in Search, Mainstream Web Projects, and porn Adult (and no, we’re not shooting content).

The Hours will be long (about 25 per week), the pay sucks (nothing), you have to put up with my shit (yay fun!) and you will be doing mostly white and grey hat projects (read “somewhat boring”).

I can be a demanding hard ass who doesn’t have time for people who can come up with “great excuses” for not getting things dong.

If you’re not responsive and reliable or there just isn’t a personality fit, I’ll fire your ass from this unpaying job faster than a [see here].

However, you will get hands on experience and training on how to:

• run extremely profitable web businesses
• build sites from scratch to profitability
• grow web communities
• network and develop a digital rolodex of successful web entrepreneurs

Most Good SEOs are taking home more than $350k per year and doing it on their own terms. Look at me – I basically work when I want, where I want, and with whom I want.

My ideal candidate is a sexy English major senior at an Ivy league University who has worked summers as a successful sales rep even though she’s a trust fund baby. . . but I might just settle for you.

Think you should get the job?

Convince me.

Tagged: future of search |

Many SEOs have dismissed personalized search. It’s been seen as a nuisance because when we’re logged into Google, we think our sites are ranking higher in the SERPs than they are for the rest of the world. “What good is that?”

But personalized search will be great and is undoubtedly the Wave of the future. Don’t judge its eventual success or failure on the current incarnations.

Consider the Microsoft acquisition of Medstory Inc. and the longer-range goal

“to link personal information like age, sex, drug regimens, family history and even genetic markers to search. The ideal is that search results are tailored individually, identifying treatments, drug interactions and medical journal articles of interest.”

 

That’s extremely powerful!

Already an earnest Googler will often come up with a better medical diagnostic than a doctor who sees you for 20 minutes a year. Imagine if the search engine had your entire medical history and genetic information: the results could be a revolution in medicine that empowers individuals.

Take another vertical: porn. If a site had smart meta data on every pic and movie, they could determine a users preference or fetish by displaying a page of thumbs and tracking which ones were clicked. Then, on future visits, content could be delivered that closely matched that users preferences.

Tivo already records TV shows and movies it thinks you will like. Amazon has their “User’s who bought this also bought” feature. When you go to a supermarket, custom coupons are printed out based on what you purchased that day.

Imagine how well both content and advertising could be tailored if you had a users:

• Amazon profile

• Google Search history

• Complete Medical File

• Tivo (Digital Video Recording) History

• Every site they’ve ever visited and in what frequency

• Del.ico.us bookmark (2.0 history)

• Items Purchased as Supermarkets (tracked with discount cards) and

• Complete Credit Card purchase history

Eventually, the algorithms will be smart enough to parse the data and deliver personalized results that far outmatch anything that we see today.

That’s why the real money is not in search, it’s in Data Mining and why the future of search (and indeed all forms of content delivery) will be personalized.

Tagged: Future of Search |

There are dreams that have been around for a while…a tablet computer for students instead of text books. We’ve wanted that for ages. A computer that can see, that can learn…computing today is really in its infancy.

- Bill Gates

 

19 years ago, this was a top of the line, monster Personal Computer:

Now, multi-touch screens that could revolutionize computer input are right around the corner:

50,000 Gigabyte DVDs will allow every person with a computer to store more information than is currently in the entire Google Index.

What will we use that kind of storage for? Things like Microsoft’s Lifelogger

For the past seven years, Bell has been conducting an audacious experiment in “lifelogging”–creating a near-total digital record of his experience. His custom-designed software, “MyLifeBits,” saves everything it can get its hands on. For every piece of email he sends and receives, every document he types, every chat session he engages in, every Web page he surfs, a copy is scooped up and stashed away. MyLifeBits records his telephone calls and archives every picture–up to 1,000 a day–snapped by his automatic “SenseCam,” that device slung around his neck. He has even stowed his entire past: The massive stacks of documents from his 47-year computer career, first as a millionaire executive then as a government Internet bureaucrat, have been hoovered up and scanned in. The last time he counted, MyLifeBits had more than 101,000 emails, almost 15,000 Word and PDF documents, 99,000 Web pages, and 44,000 pictures.

 

will be a mere drop in the bucket. The entire library of congress will be digitized along with every video ever available in Ultra-High Resolution. In 20 years, who knows? We could be browsing holographic libraries like a scene out of Minority Report:

Search still has a long way to go before it can sort, order, and prioritize that volume of information. We act like the game is already over and Google has won. But there are already more than 100 other search engines working on how to best organize the worlds information.

As the amount of information continues to increase exponentially, the shift towards an attention economy will become even more pronounced:

The primary economic consequence of the micromedia explosion is that the equilibrium price of media everywhere falls. This is due to the simple economics of supply and demand, where prices fall when the supply curve shifts outward. In turn, the micromedia explosion means that competition for attention becomes truly intense, with economics most media markets haven’t seen since the era of the printing press: attention becomes relatively more expensive than production.

 

Search Engines will continue to be a gateway to that most valuable prize in the new economic paradigms: Attention. As such, the importance of Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Engineering and Viral Marking will become even more pronounce in the decades to come.

You’re in the right industry. You’re in it at the right time. You’re in it while search is still in its infancy.

Tagged: future of search |

This one require that you get up, go outside and actually DO SOMETHING in the real world. But that’s not stopping a few dotcoms from making signs that that are large enough to be viewed from a satellite with their brand on it.

From Google’s page on the event in Sydney Austrailia:

So when you see the Google branded plane flying overhead this January 26th, hoist a sign, arrange your family into a fun formation or just get a bunch of friends together to wave.

 

Some people worked quite a bit to get signs ready for this Google Fly By.

There are several examples of this tactic working including:
Target store in College Point, NY

for KFC:

and of course a penis or 2 like this rooftop,

or this spot in arizona

Other interesting ideas include:

1. Hi Mom!
2. A sign on your ex’s roof with the word “Slut”
3. An arrow pointing to that asshole neighbor’s house with the caption “Unsecured wireless network here!!”
4. “Fuck off Google”
5. “Mostly Harmless” (my favorite)

Obviously, the key here is to make the signs BIG and to have an easily recognized logo.

We’re not far from a future where most all major companies put forth the effort to make sure their buildings can be easily identified on satellite maps. The people who do it first are the ones that will be mentioned time and time again in case future studies.

If you’re gonna try this, remember - North is up.

Tagged: future of search |

It’s official. Google has acquired YouTube for $1.65 Billion in stock.

The Google YouTube deal will go down as the most important Internet acquisition of the decade. It’s a brilliant move by Google that positions them as the dominant player in digital video distribution.

Shoemoney did a great writeup on why the Google YouTube deal makes sense before the deal was final. He got hosed from the front page of digg (had way more than enough digs but didn’t pass the editors = lame).

Some people think this buyout is a sign we are in a bubble. While most VC money is foolishly invested in piss poor Internet businesses, YouTube is a bargin for Google at $1.65 billion. Plus Google bought the company in stock. As I write this, Google’s Stock is up 4 points (or a market cap of $1.2 Billion). That means the deal is already almost a wash (it cost Google NOTHING) and they have become the undisputed leader in digital video distribution on the Internet.

“But Quads – How Are they Going to monetize it?” Please. It’s not even about the fact that they could probably make the money back in 6 years with adsense alone. It’s about paid content syndication and (more importantly) paid interactive product placement. We have not even scratched the surface of what digital video advertisement will look like in 10 years. Mark my words, it will be Bigger than Adsense and Google just made the purchase of the decade.

Tagged: Future of Search |

In the past few days, I’ve been playing around with Live.com. My observations have led me to the theory that “Live” is a very human editorial intensive project. As such, how aesthetically pleasing a site is will dramatically effect how well that site ranks. Understanding this shift will be crucial to you if you want to rank well search engines in the years to come.

Here’s why . . .

Let’s say that you are in charge of Search at Microsoft. You have a virtually unlimited budget and your job is to do what Microsoft has done in every market they have entered: your job is to win.

Step 1.
The first thing you should ask yourself is “Who is my target audience?” Who do you want to adopt your product? Is it the technically savvy? The very intelligent? The techie crowd? The power user?

No!

If you are at Microsoft and your goal is to win, your target audience must be the median 80% of searchers.

Step 2
What does your target audience want to see as a result when they are searching? Do they want to see authoritative sites? Sites that have been online for 5 years? Sites with a lot of links pointed at them? The sites that are the most popular in a given niche?

No!

For your target market, when they click a result they want to see a professional looking site: a pretty site - something that is aesthetically pleasing. They want a nice layout with pretty graphics. They want simple navigation. They do not want plain Jane text or a site that looks like 95% of blogs do.

They want to feel like what they landed on is not spam, not old, not geeky and might just have the answer to what they were searching for. They want to think that there is a legitimate company behind the site they landed on.

This part may be the toughest part for you to swallow. But you are not in the median 80% of users. You are a power user and you are a geek. Don’t believe me? Try going to your average football game or night club and using terms like “SEO”, “Blog”, or “Tag Cloud” with everyone you meet.

Most people don’t even know what the term “Search Engine” means. Once you get your head around that we can move on to . . .

Step 3
How can we deliver what that median 80% searcher wants? Well, there are about 6.5 million sites tracked by Alexa. We can safely say that any site without an Alexa ranking does not need to be indexed. Is there an algorithm that can tell you if a site will be pleasing to the human eye? Probably not. “Art” and “Style” would be very difficult to teach to a computer.

But since you only have a set of ~6.5 million sites to worry about, why not just hire people to review all the sites manually? The top 500,000 sites would represent more than 90% of web traffic. So lets say you hire 500 people to review those sites and 1,500 people to review the other 6 million.

For the High priority sites that’s just 1000 sites per person. That’s Hardly a difficult task for 1 person to monitor. For the lower priority sites, it’s about 4000 per person. That’s more difficult, but still doable.

I’m not saying you throw out the algorithms, I’m saying you use them as a starting point and then pick the best looking ones from there.

This method would satisfy the greatest number of users and it would be a drop in the bucket relative to the value of the market.

2,000 people, even if you hired them in the US (although I don’t know why you would) would only cost you about $50k per person per year or $100 million per year. Considering that Microsoft made $12 Billion in profits in the past year, they can easily swing that.

In fact, they could spend even more on human review. They could hire people from overseas for much less. They could easily hire 10 times that number of editors for less than $600 million per year (just 5% of company profits). Considering that revenue related to search advertising brought Google $2 billion in profits in the past year, I’d say that investing $600 million to deliver the best results is a no brainer.

Now will these people all be experts in every field? No. But they don’t have to be. There job is deliver the results that the median user will like most. Those results will be professional looking sites that answer the searchers queries. The blend of human editorial review with algorithmic analysis will be the wave of the future. Simply changing algorythms will not be able to best what an army of human reviews armed with similar algorythms can produce.

What does that mean for sites that are ugly looking? Sites that look like, say, SEO Black Hat does today? It means that we will either have to redesign to “Look” pretty, or we will not survive in the rankings long term.

Look for an SEO Black Hat redesign in the very near future . . .

Tagged: Future of Search, Design |

The evolution of search will focus on extensively on user behavior. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft will move towards analyzing and trusting user behavior over other ranking factors because this factor alone is the best measure of a sites worth.

Consider this scenario:

Your task is to create an index of sites ranked by how much a user of your index will enjoy the results. You have a team of the best engineers and behavioral scientists in the world.

Imagine that the only data you have for creating this index is the surfing behavior of 10% of all web users. You will know what they search for, what they click, how long they spend on a page and what sites they visit and revisit.

I would submit that with the proper analysis of this data alone, one could devise a way to deliver more relevant and more enjoyable results than any of the search engines currently provide..

These would be some of the factors you would want to consider:

1. Profiling What is the user interested in? Based on which sites a surfer frequents and on query profiling, we can determine what a interests a user.
a. What sites does that user visit regularly?
b. What are the topics of those sites? (based on prior search queries)

2. Expertise Is the user a niche connoisseur or is his interest more passive? We might say that someone is a connoisseur of a topic based on what sites they visit and how long they spend on sites devoted to a given topic. Someone with a passive interest in Baseball might check one story from yahoo news per day while a connoisseur will be in baseball forums, go to online gambling sites, read detailed analysis about games, check lineups, and read many more articles about a topic.

3. Time investment How long does the user spend on the sites that he visits? If a user follows a search query to a site and then immediately leaves, that would indicate a poor quality site.

4. Do users visit multiple pages on a site? More page would be an indication that the user is interested in what the site has to offer.

5. Bookmarking What percentage of users bookmark the site or visit a social bookmaking site immediately after visiting the site? If a user wants to save a reference to a site, that is an indication of quality.

6. Repeat Visitors What percentage of users return to the site?

7. Usefulness Does the user continue searching after clicking a result? (was the question answered?)

So, for example, we determine that Mike is a Linux geek (connoisseur). Let’s say Mike
1. Makes a specific query related to Linux
2. Clicks on 4 results
3. Spends less than 30 seconds on the first 3 results
4. Spends more time on the 4th result
5. Bookmarks the 4th result
5. Browses more pages on the 4th result site.
6. Returns to that site at a later time.

We could say that Mike found the answer to his query and that the 4th result should be given more trust in future rankings. Over time we could develop metrics or filters to determine how much to trust a given behavior or behavioral pattern - mostly by trial and error, but eventually we would have it.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are already incorporating this data into their search algorithms. They just need to work out the kinks and get past the trial and error phase. Analysis of user behavior through monitoring and profiling will be one of the most important Search developments in the years to come.

So what does this mean for webmasters like you? It means that sites that have loyal users and traffic will get more traffic. Do everything you can to increase stickyness, user loyalty, site visits and page views; it will increase the trust value of your site with the search engines. The rich will get richer.

For Black Hat SEOs, this may signal a shift towards zombie networks to emulate users and fake user behavior - not for the purpose of clicking ads, but for increasing the perceived value of a site in the eyes of a search engine’s algorithm. It will be the equivalent of controlling a percentage of the Neilson Boxes. Without sufficient information on what the user behavior really is, this may prove too difficult a task in the long run. However, the early implementations of behavioral analysis in Search will create exploits that could yield incredible returns.

In the future, however, this Zombie Boosting technique will only work with sites that can pass human editorial review – even if only cursory. I will discuss why in the next week.

Stay tuned . . .

Tagged: Future of Search |

Today we are witnessing the amazing Synergy between Flickr and Yahoo come to life. By allowing users to easily drop and dragg photos onto a Yahoo map, the Flickr/Yahoo community is building a resource that competitors like Google and MSN will be hard pressed to match.

Want to know what Huntsville, Alabama looks like? How about a that small town in India? or maybe a tropical resort in Fiji? No problem. There will be thousands of pictures from everywhere in the world beautifully integrated into Yahoo maps.

This is significant because Yahoo maps now has a huge advantage over what Google or MSN will be able to offer for the forseeable future: an advantage that will win both users and search share.

This is just the beginning. Watch for similar improvements based on flickr and their other great 2.0 pickup, del.icio.us. Yahoo’s choice of acquisitions shows that they understand where the web is headed and what to do when it gets there.

So now the question is, will Yahoo complete the “2.0″ Trifecta by buying out Youtube?
Well, not yet . . . but if they could figure out how to solve the massive copyright problem, Yahoo would surely buy them tomorrow.

Tagged: Future of Search |

SEO Bomb has an interesting story about Burkely Thomas Financial doing what was once thought to be black hat SEO:

Mr Burkley of Thomson Financial said the computer-generated stories had not made any mistakes. But he said they were very standardized. “We might try and write a few more adjectives into the program.”

Thomson started, according to the story in Financial Times, writing computer programs for different types of stories, at a cost of $150,000-$200,000 (£79,623-£106,190) per project, to try to catch up with rivals.

And this raises the question - is auto-generation of content finally going to be a non-shady and accepted technique? Is the quality of the auto-generated content so high and accurate

 

So now we have:

1. Popular sites with nice user interfaces that are basically glorified scraper sites
2. The New York Times cloaking; in fact, of the top 500 alexa sites, less than 10% show the same content all over the world
3. Major sites creating computer generated content
4. Google Poisoning Keyword lists (by referral spamming)
5. Massive site Networks purchased and built primarily to link farm

and that stuff is all Kosher. Let’s not forget some of the over the top stuff that actually had some backlash like:

6. The BMW doorway pages
7. Wordpress.org Spamming
8. Syndic8.com caught with millions of pages of spam.

If Black Hat Search Engine Optimization is not already mainstream, it soon will be. There is already a convergence from all the big black hat players I talk to. The Hybrid Blackhat / Whitehat site will be the wave of the future. But it won’t be called blackhat.

If you’ve been reading this blog from the beginning, you might remember when I first predicted this:

Essentially, the highly personalized web of the future will use scrapers and computer generated content to deliver exactly what you want to you in exactly the form you want. The content will be the most relevant for your search queries and will be delivered in exactly the tone and manner you like best. But who is really pioneering the computer generated content, the rewording and content scraping technology of the Web?

The SEO Black Hats.

 

All the old tricks will just have new names so they can be used without the stigma: euphemisms like “Content Repurposing” (scraping), “Niche Aggregators” (spam sites), “Content Networks” (link farms), “Geo Targeting” (cloaking), “Indexing Assistance” (more cloaking+) and “Mashups” (scraping more than one source) are already becoming the norm.

Is MTV going to start comment spamming as soon as they figure out a nice name for it? Will we see landing pages on Toys R Us pushing Viagra? What about Sony Faking thousands of myspace profiles to promote their products . . . is that in the cards?

Who knows?!? At this point it seems anything is possible.

What do you think? Is Black Hat Search Engine Optimization Officially Mainstream yet? or are we all really just concerned with the same question regardless of Hat color: “What works?”

Tagged: Future of Search |

While reading a post on SEO egghead today, I saw this comment that amused me:

We are currently working on a law in Tennessee to be submitted to the state congress after the elections. this law will make scraping, spamming and spyware felonies. Creators of the software that does this will receive jail time and fines. companies using the software including companies being advertised will get mandatory minimum fines of 10% of yearly gross income and can have their company assets seized. You might want to inact a law like this one in your states.

 

For fun, let’s fast forward 2 years to after these types of laws are passed nationwide and check one of the news stories on the front page CNN.com:

The Search Engine Spammer Crackdown Continues

Thursday October 26, 2008; Posted: 5:44 pm EDT

ATLANTA, Georgia — The FBI continued it’s crackdown on Search Engine Spammers today with a raid on an Internet tough guy’s trailer park home Headquarters in suburban Atlanta. Policed seized more than 3 Terabytes of data scraped from search engines that was allegedly used to make thousands of “spam” websites. Whitnesses say the 43 year-old’s live in mother was hysterical with tears.

The raid marks the 200th arrest based on the “Cleaning Up the Internet Scum Act” singed into law into law by President Schwarzenegger in February of this year. National Security Director and former Google Employee Matt Cutts has since spear-headed a Global crackdown on spam that included the extradition and arrests of 38 High profile U.K. search engine spammers in accordance with the 2006 Cybercrimes Treaty.

In related news, the sentencing phase of the controversial Mark Cuban Icerocket Scraper trail begins tomorrow. Cuban, the CEO of Icerocket, became the 2nd person convicted of Search Engine Spamming for “Scraping and willfully using other’s content to harvest Search Engine traffic for profit” under the “Cleaning Up the Internet Scum Act” on Tuesday. Topix CEO, Rich Skrenta was sentenced to 2 years and $421 million dollars in fines earlier this month for similar violations.

Outcries from anti-spam political group charge that this is not how the law was intended to be applied. This morning, Martha West of Company 2.0 said on the court steps of Cuban’s trial “When we lobbied for this law, we just wanted to go after the bad guys . . . you know . . . the Internet Scumbags. It was not supposed to be used against upstanding individuals like Mark Cuban or Rich Skrenta - Just against the bad guys; the (whispered) black hats”

Others have challenged the equality of the “Cleaning Up the Internet Scum Act” because of the so-called “Google Exception.” Article 5 section 2 states that a company may scrape, data mine, and create “beta” websites with impunity if its Search market share is greater than 70%. An amendment sponsored by Microsoft in is tied up in Congressional committee that seeks to lower that threshold to 2.5%.

Shares of GOOG were up 19 points today to close at 4,236.

Tagged: Funny, Politics, Future of Search |