SEO Black Hat: SEO Blog and Private Forum

It seemed to me that Google never intended to buy Digg. They just used the tested Microsoft trick of starting a takeover bid to get their hands on all relevant information via the due diligence process. Then once they had that info, they were just like “nah, that’s OK. We’ve got what we wanted without paying $100 Million. Have a good life!”

We may never know whether or not that research has anything to do what I’m dubbing the new “Google Hot or Not Buttons.”

As you can see from this screenshot, now two buttons appear to either promote or remove a result:

It’s probably too early to start trying to abuse this feature. That’s because it’s unlikely they will use this initial data to rank results.

I say, don’t break it til we’re sure it’s being used and worth breaking.

Then, of course, you’re gonna want to get to exploiting on a major scale. Malware is the most obvious attack vector, but that’s likely to be on the illegal side. Other exploit methods will include creating fake profiles - although that may prove difficult if Google is using email usage as a metrics for verifying user authenticity.

I don’t think it will benefit you to search for every term your sites rank for and promote every result; I have faith that Google isn’t that stupid in 2008. That method will probably not work, may be detrimental to your “user rep”, and will probably be a dead end that will have you wasting days on something that is unlikely to bear any fruit.

My advice is to take some time to think of how to best attack this new feature. No need to jump in, as your experiments may not show results even if those same experiments might work 8 months from now.

You want to abuse the Google Hot or Not Buttons?

Yea, me too. But be patience young Jedi.

A father Bull and his Boy are at the top of a hill. They See a heard of Cows grazing in a pasture down below. The Son says to to the Father Bull “Hey Dad, Let’s run down there and fuck one of those cows!”

“No son. Let’s walk down there and fuck ‘em all” - Tony Soprano

Tagged: Digg |

Digg recently announced that they passed the 1,000,000 Mark for number of registered users. But as Michael Arrington points out, everyone who uses Digg is spamming it by creating multiple “sock puppet” accounts:

“Congratulations to Digg, which announced that they’ve had a million accounts registered at the site (at least ten of which are mine).”

 

More than 10 are his, and 10 belong to every other “white hat” who passively games Digg. How many serious spammers have more than 5 thousand accounts with bots creating real looking histories? More than a few!

For more on the story, I went to Digg Headquarters to get a photo of a random group of Active Diggers:

So, congrats (I guess) on getting 1 million registered users. But it would be a hell of a lot more impressive if you told me you had 250,000 verified accounts - accounts that we knew tracked back to unique individuals. And no, verification emails to a freemail account don’t really count.

Tagged: Digg |

Sam at Sugarbank has takes some shots at digg in his 5 ways to keep your blog off Digg (NSFW):

Writing original copy will not get you noticed. Web users respond to words the same way online as they do off and, despite vocally decrying all forms of spam, spamy sounding copy of the “10 ways to…!”, “Secrets of successful…!” and “What they never told you about…!” ilk is precisely what most people notice and share.

A fantastic article capped by a title better suited to The New Yorker than Skymall won’t get seen. A generic list of truisms headed “10 Hidden Daily Show Futurama References” will earn you the cock-snot crown in fanboy heaven.

 

Too True.

Tagged: digg |

Usersubmiter is suppose to be this great way to buy diggs to help get your stoires to the front page. The problem is that when you make a program like this out in the open it becomes a honeypot. A honeypot is a trap set to detect, deflect or in some manner counteract attempts at unauthorized use of information systems.

Ajaydsouza managed to get his IP address banned by using usersubmitter:

I wrote to Digg today about the IP address problem. Seems like I was totally mistaken about the reason I was blocked. The reason I was blocked was because I gave UserSubmitter a shot and after a single set of diggs itself, my Digg account was blocked. Digg was kind enough to let me off this time with a warning.

Lesson learnt. Am posting it out here so that all you folks out there will be careful before using such services like UserSubmitter.

 

While socialham, (who apparantly never heard of akismet), tried to do a story about the program while buying diggs for said story:

** Update 10pm 10/03/06 - Almost 24 hours later and it appears this story was never promoted. We learned that its not easy to manipulate the Digg system but it is possible. On a side note I was contacted by an anonymous Russian man who let me preview his “digg rigging” system and I must say it was pretty well done. I didn’t actually use it because he would only take payment through www.wmtransfer.com which I am not familiar with.

** Final Update!!!! The next day this story was minus 25 diggs, so I guess there was an audit done at some point or this story was brought to the attention of digg.com.

 

So yes, safeguards are in place. I mean come on, they have like 60 people working there - they have to do something all day.

No matter how you try to game it, it’s difficult to get stories to the front page that are not sensational. Understand that even though it’s possiable to game Digg, you still need to get passed the editors to make it to the Digg front page. That’s why it’s important to understand the community to get to the Digg front page.

Of course, nothing is guaranteed. Even if you have 300 diggs you may not make it to the front page - even if they are all legit.

If you’ve got the cash, you could try to just appeal to every Apple Fan Boys wet dream by giving away a MacPro with Dual 30″ LCDs as part of some free photoshop contest. That might work.

Tagged: Digg |

While trolling digg this morning, I noticed that Google made the front page because of a $30,000 donation to creative commons. Now, don’t get me wrong, if someone in the SEO community were to give $30k to Creative Commons or any charity - that might be link worthy: maybe even Digg worthy.

But why is it news that a company that made $800,000,000 in profits last quarter gave $30k to charity? What is Google putting in the freaking Koolaid to make this a news worthy event? If they weren’t there already, this surely signifies that Google has reached cult status and is now a religion rather than just a company.

“I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is!” L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology Cult Founder. 1947.

 

Compare that paltry donation to what Microsoft did in October. Microsoft had a giving campaign during last month, October, where it matched employee donations, and in one month they raised $63 million dollars. That’s what a one month campaign resulted in. 58% of the employees at MS contributed and MS added $1 for each $1 the employees gave.

Imagine how many people were helped by Microsoft’s Giving last month. Contrast that with how many people will be helped by Google’s Giving. We don’t even need to start on the personal giving of Gates this year - that would put things in an even sillier perspective (if that’s even possible!)

$63 Million dollars vs $30,000. The $30k makes the front page of Digg. The $63M - well at least it went to a good cause.

$63,000,000 / $30,000

So IF This story makes the front page of Digg, Google’s Marketing is 2100 times better than Microsoft’s.

Of course we don’t expect that to happen. For Digg, and much of the blogosphere, Google = God and Microsoft = “teh Bad”. Here’s the button - You can try, but I doubt it will make a bit of difference:

Tagged: digg |

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

Tagged: Digg |

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:

Tagged: Funny, Link Bait, Digg, Best Posts |

In the past, we have pointed out different ways Digg is rigged and how people are gaming Digg.

But today, Jesus Phreak asked is digg rigged? and got 400 Diggs detailing how the top 30 basically just Digg each other’s stories and game their way to the top every day. The story was buried so he followed up with a what happened to digg post that received enough publicity to make it the front page.

What is the significance of this? It would seem that despite Digg’s emphasis on being ‘democratic’, truly only a very small group of users get to actually have any kind of a say in the site. If you aren’t a part of this group, then good luck. Even if you submit an article about a certain subject first, if one of these users in question comes along and submits it also, your story will never see the light of day. Further, it means that Digg’s moderators have no problem with this abuse of the system. They seem to actually be restricting access to anything that may be critical of Digg’s flaws (even if this is constructive).

 

These stories got so much attention that Digg CEO Kevin Ross has Responded:

I can say that a key update is coming soon. This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn’t mean that the story won’t be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story homepage-worthy.

 

Interesting stuff. Algorithm changes to combat abuse? Where have we seen that before?

But the Digg Quote of the day comes from this awesome wired article under the title of “Blogs and their ultimate perfect entry.” Examples included:

Boing Boing: Crocheted replica of subway map cracks DRM on collection of old video games.

FARK: Drunk frat boy in Florida has sex with underage donkey, sues Strong Bad for negligence. Still no cure for overused in-jokes.

Slashdot: AMD, SCO patent MP3 over TCP/IP, sue ATI, EA. Microsoft probably responsible somehow.

 

for Digg, Lore totally nailed it:

Digg: Hey, cool, someone wrote an article about Digg!

 

Note: this article was written before today’s Digg drama. Very nice work Lore Sjöberg!

Update: Top Digger Quits in a tantrum after Kevin’s Post.

Generaly consensious from Diggers: Please don’t leave don’t let the door hit you on the way out!. It’ll be a better place without you.

What do you suppose that digg account is worth? Anything?

Tagged: Digg |

Can contests get any easier? It will probably take you about 15 seconds to enter both.

Check out the details of how to win the contest. I have a feeling that some of you might enter more than once.

;)

Good Luck!

Tagged: Poker, Digg, Delicious, Case Studies |

1. William George of pugetsystems.com writes an article about dual Dual Processor vs Dual Core. It makes front page of digg 111 days ago.

2. Frameworkx.com reposts the entire article and gets it to the front page of digg today.

Here’s the kicker, if you check out the farameworkx article, they are even hotlinking the images from the original article. LOL. Now that’s ballsy.

From the Digg Comments:

Dude, all they did was just repost *our* article! http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles.php?id=23

 

They did attribute you in the bottom of the article - the poster just didn’t see that or chose to use the ‘Framewokx’ repost for whatever insidious reason he might have.

 

They are stealing bandwidth for those images as well. They didn’t even have the courtesy to ask they were too lazy to try and make it look like they wrote the article.

 

Well, then the solution is to go in and do a little mod_rewrite magic in your apache config. for these guys.

 

Amen, Seumas. 111 days ago! http://digg.com/hardware/Dual_Processor_vs_Dual_Core

 

Indeed, why rack your brain trying to come up with something that can make the front page of digg? Just take anything that is 4+ months old, post it to a legit looking site, digg it about 60 times and you should be in business!

Although, I might avoid hotlinking any of the original images

Tagged: Digg, Case Studies |