Online PR UK & Expert SEO

Affiliate Black Hat vs White Hat. I see my old acquaintance Jason Duke has been sharing his thoughts on ‘black hat’ SEO for affilaites (Jason is very good at this stuff by the way). I have said for a while now, that Google sees affilaite income as theirs. (Get rid of affiliates and merchants have to advertise with Google) Hence the war on affilaites where they are atttacking thin affiliate sites which have not a lot of content to offer…. for now.

The assertion is that 80% of traffic to bingo, casino and poker sites are from blackhat efforts. I guess the 1st quesiton is what do you call black hat? Is that any deviation from the Google webmaster guidelines? If so, then thats a reasonable figure. But all things are relative as you would see if you read this real blackhat hard core approach to getting ranked. This level of activity probably gets about 30% bingo, casino, poker sites ranked for secondary terms.
What are secondary terms? In these areas (casino, poker bingo) there are very few keywords that make money, in other words they have a very short tail. So once you’re outsitde of (forinstance) casino, online casino, casino UK, then you are in the secondary and 3rd level keywords where spammers rule, but where the pickings are not great. The lack of economic incentive means a restriction in spammers efforts.

And since Google treat different verticles differently, it means they will probably hand pick those top sites for casino, poker and bingo. I believe the reason they do this, is to prevent a spam arms war which would go on to contaminate large chunks of the internet.

The reality is that black hat works, but not like it used to. The cleaver money is on building love of a site and being clever at optimising it efficiently. I know, since I’m lucky enough to be responsible for one of the great new affilaite success stories… and no I haven’t spammed, I’ve just helped things along. ;-) 

Link: Affiliates4u article

Some interesting links I’ve found over the last few days:

DigitalPoint Co-op, spammers heaven. Use these links to build the base for your spam network, but don’t get busted by the BOG G Blogstorm

Google releases benchmarking on analytics. Apart from the coolness of being able to match yourself against the industry norm, it also gives you an idea as to how Google are able to effectively segment the internet into specific verticals. (they also do this on their adwords console when you define which type of sites you want to advertise on when advertising banners etc)

When you mix this with the leaked google reviewers document you end up with a sense that they really do have a very solid handle on what sites are good for what subject and wether they are genuinely worthwhile to the user. It all comes back to the idea that content is king and if you make like easier for search engines through sensible optimisation, you will be rewarded.

Make those landing pages faster! If you are running a Google PPC campaign, then remember to keep an eye on your landing pages, since you will be penalised for slooooowww loading, iframe, interstitial riddled pages. Yes the BIG G is more interested than ever in making sure you work to their guidelines, as opposed to letting your profit/loss determine how you should deal with teh traffic you have paid for. Affiliates4U

I have an iphone now - and so it means I can read more blogs and web stuff then ever - anywhere.

As a result, I’ve been sending friends various links, so I figured you might like to see some of them too. I expect I’ll doing a fair bit of this link finding on an ongoing basis.

Online reputaiton management : 10 ways to protect yourself online
http://mashable.com/2008/03/11/online-reputation/

Black hat spamming how to
I have copied this to my blog since i don;t know how ling its gogin to remain up for. if you ever wondered how genuine black hat spammers do their thing…. then this is the ‘tell all’ guide to a small piece of the dark arts of spamming. My version

The growing power of google - the moral: absolute power corrupts!

Google will own your banner ad distribution soon

Don’t mess with the BIG G
Interesting article about a company buying old domains and loading the up with spam content and then running adsense (yahoo version) - then getting busted by google because someone from Cambridge Uni worked out that it was a network of 329 spam sites.
Lesson here …. if you build networks of sites, be very careful to really, really hide your tracks

GoCompare gets busted for spamming! Google search for their brand / an interesting article on the case showing the dive in overall traffic to the gocompare site , again its a case of if you excessively pollute the internet - expect BIG G to whack you!

Great beginners chart for learning how to linkbuild (PDF)

In case you ever wondered - yes Google do use humans to augment their search index. From what I gather its about 10,000 in total. Obviously, thats a speculative number, but the point is that your site will be human checked if you rank for anything meaningful.

This doesnt mean Google human rank the index, it just means that the algo they use is augmented by humans . Occasionally of course a spam site is identified and blown out f the index, but generally G like to let the algo do the vast majority of sorting.

So what do these human reviewers look for ? Well now thanks to a very, very helpful person, the human reviewer document has been outed and I have uploaded a copy for you to read. Its 43 pages of SEO heaven!

Download it here (2mb)

I’m not into plagiarism, however sometimes its important to keep a valuable piece of information for posterity, so I’ve saved it here….

Link building expert Peter van der Graaf dishes out a never-before revealed link building strategy.

“Nobody will ever link to this!”

So how do I score in search engines?

Creating linkable sites and redirecting them

The dilemma

Many industries pose a problem when it comes to getting links. For instance, how do you get links to a porn site? I had this problem with a website about bukkake (What? A Japanese fetish of mass ejaculation on a woman).

When I was asked to get links for the Bukkake website I first got many links from crappy porn directories and traded a few links with other porn sites, but that was all I could get. It provided me with a top 20 position but because budget was limited, I couldn’t rent/buy the amount of links the results above me had.

So how could I get links to a porn site with a limited budget? Good links would require some relevance to bukkake and in an ideal case the anchor text would contain the word bukkake.The solution

The real question was: What would people link to? As I began brainstorming for linkbait it was clear to me that it would be hard to get any links to the Bukkake website. I needed a decent site that had little to do with erotic content.

Should I explain the working of bukkake in a clinical fashion? Should I publish some research explaining a mental illness causing the crave for bukkake? Or should I just take all sexuality out of bukkake?

The last option gave me an idea. Not that many people know the word bukkake (or act as if they don’t). The best related keyword to bukkake is “facial”. I would create a website about “John Bukkake” a professor of “facial dermatology” on the University of Calcutta, India.
Click image to enlarge.

Because this website was more about proving the success of the following technique, I can be very open about what we did. The website is still live, but it has no financial value for the customer anymore. Naturally I’m very discrete about other projects that still use suspicious techniques.

The problem with sharing techniques, is that search engines develop cures for them once they get overused. Once you share them, they lose their value. Hopefully this example won’t be copied exactly, but it should serve as an eye-opener to create your own mutation.

http://www.johnbukkake.com Read on to find out more about the used techniques.

The details

Creating the website

To make the site look more authentic we copied the look and feel of the original University of Calcutta. We took a picture of a serious looking Indian man and made him our professor. To add some extra credibility we added research and more linkable content like the Bukkake fund for research in facial dermatology.

A couple of jokes were added, like the buildup of semen that would work good as a treatment against eczema.

Getting links

After we created a non-commercial, non-erotic website it was fairly easy to get links in all kinds of directories. The anchor texts all contained the words “bukkake” and “facial”. But could we get even better links?

This joke worked better than planned so we wanted to try even harder links. We created some fake Bukkake research that confirmed that the chemical compounds in Bayer eczema treatment worked under certain circumstances. The result was astounding, we got a couple of great links from Bayer that also included the search terms we were focusing on.

Getting links from Wikipedia wasn’t that hard either, but eventually somebody that knew the word bukkake removed it. And yes, there are still link types in Wikipedia they forgot to nofollow.

The Bukkake Fund pages got many links by trading them with other medical funds. The link pages were eventually removed from johnbukkake.com because it also showed where we got links from.

As you can imagine we got many links from many different places and if we wanted to, johnbukkake.com would rank number one on “bukkak””.

Diverting links

We needed the links for a porn site, so how did we get the links there? We cloaked a 301-redirect!

First we created a rewritemap text file that contained the IP addresses of all search engine bots. In this case http://www.fantomaster.com/ provided us with a nice up-to-date list we imported on a daily basis. Then we used rewrite rules to redirect search engines the correct way. Only the Yahoo and Google search bots received a 301-redirect instead of the normal professor website.

Normally cloaking can be detected by humans when they look at for instance the Google cache. Because of the 301, Google didn’t index the site and didn’t show any cache. This could arouse suspicion, so we added an obvious noindex, nofollow to each page, so not being indexed had an obvious cause.

They could also use Google translate to see something like Googlebot sees it. But Google translate uses its own IP ranges and we excluded those from the redirect.
Detecting the cloak should be very difficult, but please mail me if you know other ways?

Other advantages

In stead of cloaking you can also add the 301 for all visitors after you’ve gotten the links. After I stopped my involvement in the website, that is just what the owner did. He removed the cloak and placed the 301 for everybody to see/follow. It caused the removal of many links, because people found out. He has recontinued the cloak, so it should work again. So this proves that a cloaked 301 is more efficient in the long run.

We also stole/borrowed some content and research about facial dermatology. Normally a Google query would reveal our fraud to the original author. But because johnbukkake.com isn’t indexed it will never show up.

The porn site has a PageRank of 5, but when you do a Yahoo linkdomain: it shows only a few crappy links. 301-redirects never show in any reports, so it made the ranking of the porn site even more mysterious.Conclusion

When nobody will link to you, what will they link to?

Create a separate website with much more linkable content. Non-commercial messages work best.

Requesting links still works

You could hope for people to find your site, but it is better to create linkable content specifically for a linker. Then you mail them to get their attention.

301redirects divert all linkpoints

A cloaked 301 however diverts all linkpoints without showing to normal visitors.

Tricks are fun until they get overused

This is a trick and nothing more. When it is detected a cure can be devised and it stops working for everybody. Learn what you can but don’t copy it blindly.

Peter van der Graaf
http://www.vdgraaf.info