Irishwonder’s Black Hat SEO Blog A blog about blackhat, general SEO issues and other things related to the life on the web

You know why I used to love Quantcast, among other reasons? Quantcast.com is a PR 6 authority domain, not very old (registered in 2005) but it gained popularity fast and has 1,480,000 pages indexed in Google. Until recently, you could query any domain and it would create a page for it - and guess what, that page would rank in Google and give you a direct link from this nice PR 6 authority domain. Heck you could even write a script that would query a bunch of your spam domains and create you those pages and consequently, links on autopilot! Parasite hosting web 2.0 style, so to say.

Not any more! Quantcast has not only disabled creation of pages like http://www.quantcast.com/profile/yourspamsite.com, seems like it has also removed all pages that were already created that way. Moreover, Quantcast has added these little lines in its robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /traffic-compare

- and that’s where links from places like Statsaholic used to point at.

What’s left of this authority monster that’s still usable? Well, Quantcast is pushing its users to register, it tries to make the most of its traffic to build up its user base. Smart step, as for me, and they achieve two goals: they recruit their users who register accounts AND eliminate the spam issue. Hence, if you own a whitehat site, go ahead and register an account, Quantify your site and get a nice fat link. If not, forget about Quantcast - it’s not a blackhat haven any more.

Last week, everybody was discussing Google’s leaked AdWords score values. I guess enough guesses were voiced already about what those values might mean so I wouldn’t bother posting about it if not for one thing. I believe one more question that needs to be asked is WHY these values leaked.

Here are the two scenarios and it’s up to you to decide which one is more likely, if any:

1. Google is tweaking something - why else would their programmers touch this bit of code and leave these parameters slip into the open? As in, forgetting to comment it out or something.

2. Google is playing some PR game - as in, public relations, not PageRank. Google lets the scores leak to show something to all the SEOs out there, threaten them, keep them busy discussing it, or something.

Sure thing Google employees are human like all of us and Google is not immune to leaking these scores accidentally - but do you believe this was accidental or is there an agenda behind it?

… but I’ve been seeing discrepancies between different tools and toolbar PR on multiple sites - could it be an update?

You think I’m mad? Lately I have seen so many weird things in google.co.uk that are way too different from google.com that it would lead one to believe these are two separate search engines!

1. Why else would google.co.uk show ads for searches for something like http://www.somedomain.com/somepage.html? Especially since they are ads for the same somedomain.com? Sure UK googlers are greedier than their google.com counterparts and they are trying to squeeze every penny out of the poor advertiser!

2. Why else would a search on google.co.uk for a bit of page content in quotes (=exact match) result in two results: “Nothing found for your search in quotes but here is a result for your search but without quotes”?

Anybody else seen any more inconsistencies between these two different Googles?

Clearly not linking to this mess but for the sake of a live example:

www.musicstaff.com/links.asp

On the surface, it’s a legitimate decently looking 1997 site with a legitimate business model. But if you look at their links page… sketchy is not even descriptive enough of a word. There’s everything there from discounted adjustable beds to ringtones to car rentals to levitra and viagra… A total of 2025 outgoing external links of mostly this kind off that page. What does it all have to do with music? Moreover, how many of those sites are banned already or will be banned in the next few weeks? Repeat after me: want to ban your site - link to banned sites and bad neighbourhoods. Kindergarten SEO.

Now, don’t get me wrong as I don’t mean to discriminate against anyone, we live in the times of global economy, but let’s face it: overwhelming majority of Indian, Chinese, Philipino and Pakistani link builders that invade the freelance sites these days are horribly unskilled. Outsource your link building to them, and you don’t even need to worry about unscrupulous competitors doing negative SEO - you will get your site banned with your own hands - or to be exact, with the hands of those “linkbuilders”. Sure, in case of the above mentioned site it won’t happen very fast - at least the top 1,000 backlinks out of the 3,000 + of musicstaff.com are really high quality - whoever was handling their linkbuilding prior to this outsourcing hell did a good job, with a bunch of authority sites in the mix. But over the last few years since outsourcing link building has become widespread we’ve heard of many others, big and small, who have run into all sorts of troubles, from site bans to reputation issues - all due to poorly done outsourced link building. Sure, not every company can afford an online marketing budget that would allow hiring some of the industry’s best specialists - but if your business depends on your site’s rankings you better think twice before deciding to outsource it to a third world link builder (this is not to say that all US and UK based SEOs are equally good - but you get the idea).

Hence, here are a few tips for those considering SEO outsourcing. Before you decide to go for it, ask the candidates you plan on hiring as outsourced workforce at least the following questions:

• what are the examples of your previous link building work?
• how did it affect the positions and reputation of the sites it was done for? (e.g. what positions did the site have before the campaign started and how did they change as a result of it)?
• what are the principles you use for building links?
• who exactly will do the actual link bulding and what experience and skills do they possess?
• who will overview the quality of built links and am I paying for the sheer volume or for the quality of built links?

There is no guarantee of course that you will get honest answers to your questions but at least they will know it might not be a good idea to mess with you, and depending on the answers they do give you you will also know if they are any good or if they are simply bullshitting you and scamming you out of your money, however lesser the costs are.

If you have been looking for blackhat tools now is a good time to shop for some of the best tools available in this industry. I have negotiated a special discount for my blog readers with nobody other than the great Fantomaster, the maker of the best cloaking tools out there. Generally speaking, for those who might not be aware of it he has a lot of tools but he is most famous for his cloaking technolodies.

Cloaking, strictly speaking, is not a 100% blackhat technology. There are many totally legitimate reasons why people cloak their sites. Add IP delivery into the mix and you get a great technology allowing you to target your site visitors better, depending, for example, on their location. But cloaking or IP delivery done incorrectly can do a lot of harm.

The key to successful use of cloaking technologies is the correct information. Fantomaster surely has it - their spiderSpy™ botBase is updated every 6 hours - can you imagine the resources and server capacities it would take YOU to match their base?

So here’s the deal: surely Fantomaster’s tools are expensive, but all you have to do is enter this exclusive promo code:

2008IW102903

- in the “promo code” field on the purchase form and you will get a 10% discount on any tools on their site.

Go get it while the offer lasts and see how it will save you a lot of headache.

Thanks for sending me your comment spam with your site map - saved me an extra step looking for it and the keyword selection is really high quality, looks like you manually filtered it to exclude all the meaningless scraped keywords. Great job. I was just considering generating a MySpace related site or 100 as I have an affiliate program to monetize them properly.

However, there is one thing that makes me wonder - I don’t suppose $99.95 for the Basic membership at iDisk, even less so $179.95 for .Mac Family Pac - so it must have been the free 60-day trial. The part that worries me is “60-day”. You put all this effort in spamming your links only to lose your parasite hosted site in 60 days? Hmmm… All parasite hosting is surely a gamble, it may or may not last, but KNOWING exactly that you would lose it in 60 days? Did that PR9 tempt you so much?

Those who know me also know how much I like all the comment spam I am getting on this and other blogs of mine Really folks, could I wish for more than free research delivered straight into my moderation queue? You just gotta figure out how to use it, make a few steps to implement it - and you’re set. If something is being spammed there is money in it to be made.

Sometimes the spam I get is weird, sometimes it is funny. Sometimes I can’t help laughing at the broken tools the spammers are using (e.g. the one that splits their keyword list into single separate meaningless keywords and spams that - just one of the recent curiosities I came across). Sometimes, however, my comment spam really makes me wonder.

I’ve been getting “tramadol dog” spam for ages now - and it always made me wonder if that’s just uncanny scraped keywords that have never been filtered from complete nonsense or if it’s a legitimate keyword for those pharma guys. Today my curiosity took over and I decided to do a quick check.

The Google search for “tramadol for dog” has revealed that this infact is not a made up keyword. In the top 10 results, I have noticed some vet sites, some .edu sites - and I don’t mean spammed by parasites but a legitimate research on a College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences site, Yahoo! Answers - and the question/answer seemed legitimate as well… It appears that tramadol is prescribed to dogs to relieve pain, e.g. after surgery or in case of arthritis or other chronic conditions.

I have noticed that Google only lists 565,000 results for this search - hmm, not too competitive is it? What’s interesting is that there’s not that much spam in the top 10 either - I have only seen two outright spammy results and one a bit spammy looking blog seemingly written manually but for the sake of placing AdSense onto it. I wonder why, considering that I do get all this comment spam for this keyword? Maybe the search volume is not that big for spammers to target seriously?

I checked Google Trends and got this:

Your terms - tramadol for dogs - do not have enough search volume to show graphs.

OK so that could be the answer - but still I guess as a long tail keyword it might be of some interest to pharma spammers, no? Actually, ranking for it should only take an aged domain (at least 2006) and a few thousand links… If you are/were a pharma spammer would you go for it?

I’m not telling you where to stick it and it’s not even my idea - AdSense folks have come up with it themselves - go have a look to get the complete story. Pay the shipping and handling and stick it all you want

Among other news, AdSense is experimenting with ads - I have noticed recently these arrows next to the AdSense ads on one of my sites that still has them:

Other people have been reporting seeing these arrows since December 2007 and I have found explanations in Google AdSense forums that this was an experiment - well considering that there’s still no official word on it anywhere in AdSense it probably still is an experiment.

Recently I have noticed that Google has become much more sensitive towards automated queries sent to it. It bans the IP very fast - much faster than it used to before. What’s funny is that the tool that got caught when I discovered it wasn’t even a site geenrator of any kind scraping the SERPs - it was a simple position checker Previously, it was possible to solve the problem by simply increasing the wait time between the queries sent to Google - not any more it seems!

Just another example of Google creating a problem for itself - if there was API for search still publicly available who would have queried the human interface SERPs directly?

As to the solution - I am now simply sending queries from multiple IPs instead of the same one