SEO Black Hat: SEO Blog and Private Forum

There are tons of great firefox extensions to choose from - this post does not attempt to catalog them all.

This setup does everything I need as an SEO and Web Developer, is lite, and rarely (if ever) crashes:

Download Firefox 2.

Web Developer - Hands down the most useful Firefox Plugin Ever.

SearchStatus - Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.

ShowIp Show the IP address of the current page in the status bar. It also allows querying custom services by IP (right mouse button) and Hostname (left mouse button), like whois, netcraft. Additionally you can copy the IP address to the clipboard.

Dom Inspector - Inspect the DOM of HTML, XUL, and XML pages, including the mail.

Downloadhelper - The easy way to download Web videos from hundreds of YouTube-like sites. Also works for audio and picture galleries.

Youtorrent Search Plugin - THE best way to search for torrents: Search all the torrent sites at ones.

Custom US Google Search - Click the “OpenSearch plug-in Google USGoogle Toolbar” link near the bottom, after the “Change the plugin”-button. If you’d want more options with different localization, just change the ‘gl’ parameter in the url to be the country code for the localization you want.

Via File -> Preferences, I set homepage(s) to:
http://popurls.com/|http://mail.google.com|http://www.seoblackhat.com/forums/|http://bloglines.com/myblogs

The | allows for multiple tabs to be opened on launch.

Add a couple of bookmarks to the quicklaunch bar and we’re done.

Tagged: tools |

Normally, buying and using an aged domain with existing backlinks for a new project is the best option for a webmaster. However, if you already have a sizable network of sites and tons of great contacts in the industry, you should consider selecting a name that is brandable and fits with what you are doing.

This process can pay large dividends later on when your brand name becomes synonymous with the service you offer. Plus, brainstorming doesn’t have to be a painful process – you can have fun while being productive. After all, when the game stops being fun, it’s time to find something else to do.

Take the example of Levi from boogybonbon. About a month ago, we started talking about an incredible new Keyword service he was developing.

These excerpts from our ICQ conversations should help you when you’re brainstorming about a new project:

Session Start (L3vi): Tue Aug 15 18:09:04 2006
L3vi: I’m asking a handful of friends. Got any good ideas for a keyword search service domain name? The guy at searchables.com will not sell me the domain no matter what I offer so I’m now scratching my head on something that is marketable to the point that I could standup to wordtracker or better.
QuadsZilla: consider something brandable without kw
L3vi: yeah.. that’s what I been trying..
L3vi: looking for something with word or keyword.. or something that will feel like keywords stuff. lol seo, design, marketing is easy.. this is always the pain in the ass stuff.
QuadsZilla: keywordalizer
L3vi: hmm not bad how about wordalizer.com
QuadsZilla: you could also go with something like keywordromp
QuadsZilla: wordromp
QuadsZilla: if its avail
L3vi: that sounds like a sex site. ;p LOL
QuadsZilla: = more traffic!
L3vi: how about wordzar
L3vi: wordzar.com
QuadsZilla: is that how you spell zar?
QuadsZilla: isn’t there another letter in there?
L3vi: yeah
L3vi: its tzar or also spelled ZAR
L3vi: ref dictionary.com
QuadsZilla: wordbot?
L3vi: taken
L3vi: Zar may refer to: Alternative spelling of “Tsar” was the official title of the supreme ruler in the following states. ref wikipedia
QuadsZilla: that’s what i was thinking
L3vi: that one has come back around 3 times. Larry gives a B+. I’m middle ground about it, but been spitting out domain names all day so I’m getting run down on what sounds good and what is just another word. LOL
QuadsZilla: justanotherword.com
QuadsZilla: ;p
L3vi: lol
L3vi: “[16:55] l3vi: Thebestknownblackhatkeywords.com
[16:55] l3vi: lol
[16:55] l3vi: wordtrackertookalltheotherdomains-soimstuckwiththisshit.com
[16:56] Larry: lol”
QuadsZilla: i own yembi.com
QuadsZilla: if you want that
QuadsZilla: not too descriptive
QuadsZilla: but very “2.0″
QuadsZilla: you really going to start that on a fresh domain?
L3vi: don’t know if it feels right. Ill have to sleep on that..
QuadsZilla: that’s madness
L3vi: yeah. why not. LOL built my empire from fresh domains. ;p
QuadsZilla: back in the day
QuadsZilla: how about wordtacker?
QuadsZilla: wordtackler
L3vi: I could put it on boogybonbon.com, but I don’t know how well it will hold up on my blog for a service.
QuadsZilla: wordsmacker
L3vi: I don’t want to get in any wrangles with wordtracker of copyright and C&Ds
QuadsZilla: i know. i was kidding
L3vi: bbl going to go play some 360 and drink a beer. ;p get my mind off of it till I get a better idea.
QuadsZilla: you’ll think of it when you’re half drunk
L3vi: yeah then forget it. LOL

Finally, after he decided to take a break and walk away from it - it hit him:

Session Start (L3vi): Tue Aug 15 19:32:39 2006
L3vi: I did not even get down the steps. LOL I think I found it.. wordze.com
QuadsZilla: that’s GOOD!
L3vi: cool that’s 3 thumbs up.. Ill go with that. now im taking that break..

We’ve had tons of other talks about Wordze since. I finally got to take it for a spin last week and was VERY impressed with the caliber of the product.

From today’s official release:

Unlike any other keyword research service available today, Wordze.com provides users access to a whole new level of keyword research by giving users up-to-date historical and sessional data on keywords that are being search for by internet users through ISP’s or Internet Portals.

 

It’s head and shoulders above the other keyword research products out there and can even give you an estimate on how competitive a search phrase is with its’ patent pending “Wordrank” technology.

Already, forum members have a great domain tool to work with and a 50% discount on the profession Cloaking software Kloakit. Levi and I are working out the details on how exactly to give access to members of the private SEO Black Hat forum. It will most likely be some sort of discount and the ability to test drive the product.

Look for an announcement on that in the next week or so.

We will be announcing yet another service that is only available to members of the Private SEO Black Hat Forums tomorrow . . .

Tagged: Tools, Forum, Domains |

Want to know what it means to rank 4th in MSN? How about to rank 2nd in Yahoo? Or what about ranking 1st in Google and 3rd in MSN?

Well then grab the number of overture searches the term had last month and use our new “Expected Clicks by Rank in Google, Yahoo, MSN and Other Tool.”

By combining the AOL User Search Data, Hitwise Search Engine Market Share and Overture Search Tool, you can now estimate with some certainty how many clicks to expect for ranking anywhere in any search engine for any term.

The AOL user search data has been harvested to determine the CTR (Click Through Rate) for ranking number 1 vs. number 2-10. The sample size is large enough and broad enough that we can infer that this average holds true across many verticals:

Results from:
Total Searches:9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623

Ranking Number 1 receives 42.1 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 2 receives 11.9 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 3 receives 8.5 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 4 receives 6.1 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 5 receives 4.9 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 6 receives 4.1 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 7 receives 3.4 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 8 receives 3.0 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 9 receives 2.8 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 10 receives 3.0 percent of click throughs.

The rest of the Long Tail (ranks 11-1000) = 11.3 percent of click throughs.

Search Engine Ranking #1: 2,075,765 clicks
Search Engine Ranking #2: 586,100 clicks = 3.5x less
Search Engine Ranking #3: 418,643 clicks = 4.9x less
Search Engine Ranking #4: 298,532 clicks = 6.9x less
Search Engine Ranking #5: 242,169 clicks = 8.5x less
Search Engine Ranking #6: 199,541 clicks = 10.4x less
Search Engine Ranking #7: 168,080 clicks = 12.3x less
Search Engine Ranking #8: 148,489 clicks = 14.0x less
Search Engine Ranking #9: 140,356 clicks = 14.8x less
Search Engine Ranking #10 147,551 clicks = 14.1x less

Search Engine Ranking 11+: 501,397 clicks

Now you may want to know the Market Share of the Search Engines Google, Yahoo, MSN and Everyone else: From Hitwise, we find:

The Search Market Share for Google: 60.2%
The Search Market Share for Yahoo: 22.5%
The Search Market Share for MSN: 11.80
The Market Share fore Everyone Else: 5.5%
Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: Tools |

Last Thursday, the boys at the ‘plex announced that they would be releasing 10 gazillion keywords for statistical analysis and other research. That perked my ears up right away. We love large data sets because they are the cornerstone of building massive spam sites targeted niche aggregators.

The fine print is that you have to jump through some hoops to get the data - details are to be released, but you will likely have to be a member of the L.B.C.

“So tell me wuts up wit dis LBC thang?”

Wait . . . make that the LDC, the Linguistic Data Consortium. Their annual membership is $20k and they sometimes make you pay more for certain data sets.

The almost invisible print is pointed out by greywolf and confirmed by Matt Cutts in this threadwatch discussion.

When people sell a mailing list it’s extremly common for sellers to seed the list with some names that only exist for the purpose of catching people who are misusing it. I would have to assume the boys and girls at the plex would do the same. - Greywolf

 

graywolf, you have a devious, devious mind. How many other people would consider seeding the terms with some nonsense phrases? I ask you–how many other people would come up with an idea like that?

Well, I guess I can think of a couple people.. - Matt Cutts

 

graywolf, yes you should take it as a compliment. Not to worry, I’m familiar with the practice. My favorite is Lye Close, the fake street in London: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Copyright_Easter_Eggs

billhartzer, sshhh. I was just watching boogybonbon find out about “google monitor query or googletestad” today. Don’t ruin the fun. - Matt Cutts

 

referring to boogybonbon’s post on keyword research.

That’s right, it’s a trap.

We know about poisoning seasoning keyword lists - in fact sometimes we’ll do it ourselves. However, this exchange confirms what a few of us have been thinking all along - that the search engines are on to this tactic and use it as well.

Are you using wordcatcher, overture, the google keyword suggestor or any data directly from the search engines? It seems there’s a good chance that it could be a trap. If you’re using poisoned data, that could certainly explain why your sites are only lasting 6-9 weeks in the SERPs.

Understanding this kinda puts a damper on the 400+ meg file (update:mirror with data)that contains all the AOL searches of 500k users for the last 3 months.

“Jacta alea est!” - Julius Caesar

It’s a war. Develop your own supply lines so you don’t have to get food from the enemy.

Tagged: Matt Cutts, Tools |

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 |

The simplest way to create pure orignal spam content, that can bring you millions of visitors if you are using this properly.
The code is really, really simple. You need:
1) webserver, supporting php / or in advanced mode - php+mysql
2) text file with words (you can just copy and paste 100 articles in this file)
3) little technical hand to adjust the code to your specific needs.

The script generates 2 strings:
- title (or the main random keywords, for title, meta keywords, description etc)
- the content (random words)

For 5 minutes this can be integrated into your database - just create a table, name it whatever you want,
add 3 fields (ID, title, content) and you are ready to gamble on the SEs
The coolest thing is that actually the SEs will see the same text when they reffer to specific ID, so the only thing you have to do is some basic on-page seo.

Here is the code
< ?php
#define the text file
#we will get the words from
$content_file = "content.txt";

#split the string, using each space as a pointer
$words = split(" ", join("", file($content_file)));
srand((double) microtime()*1000000);

#define how many words can
#be in the title (actually,
#thats the string we are going to optimize for)
$bh_title = rand(4,13);
$bh_real_title = " ";

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: Tools |

This looks like a great tool to quickly evaluate websites. The SEO Firefox extension includes:

PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
.edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
.edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
.gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.

 

This Cool Firefox Extension is brought to you by Aaron Wall, the man who wrote the book on SEO.

Tagged: Tools |

In the spirt of putting more guns in the hands of children, we bring you more ways to create inbound links with cross site scipting.

Rsnake must have finished moving and unpacked his computers because he has created a Grease Monkey Detection Script for XSS (Cross Site Scripting).

Here’s the crappy redirect detection Greasemonkey script. I don’t recommend using it, because it sucks, but it was a good proof of concept.

 

Now granted a good chunk of these do not work, but that actually shouldn’t matter much. Without even testing, sending multiple possible attempts to Google, even if 80% of them fail, it’s not like you are giving anything up, you are sending valid links that probably have some custom error logic. It just looks like you are linking to a lot of custom error pages, potentially. So pruning the redirect attack list may or may not help.

 

SEO by spray and pray. Hat tip to v7n.

Tagged: Tools, XSS |