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10/16/2007 A while back I removed all of the social media bookmark links from my blog. At the time, my reasoning was that it was simply cluttering up the page and really added no value. It also looked rather silly to have 15 icons at the bottom of each post so that someone might bookmark it.I'd actually add it back in if:A) I thought there were some value in doing so.B...
4/11/2007 For the past 3 years I've followed the spamming/black hat community rather closely.During that period of time, it has been very interesting to watch the various tools that have come out to help people spam as well as the types of people who have used them.The majority of folks have basically fallen into two categories:Guru Black Hat - These are the folks who promot...
3/2/2007 Are you using an e-mail address for your business that people can easily get? Is it listed off your web page? Perhaps you've gone a step further and used a bit of javascript to obsfucate it so that bots can't crawl and find that link? Think that's enough? Well, think again... I just received a link spam e-mail today that wanted me to exchange links for my site: index...
2/28/2007 Let's take this from the point of view of a normal person who is just wading around the internet looking for something to read on a specific subject. We'll call this guy Bob. Bob heads over to Yahoo (It could be Google or some other search engine) and types in 'how to make waffles'. Here's what he sees: ...
2/13/2007 Although the exact name escapes me at the moment for some reason (blame it on the chemo - yeah right!), if you're working for yourself or even if you're not there's something that you absolutely, without a doubt should think about. What am I talking about? Catastrophic insurance. It's the type of inurance that will protect you from calamaties when you lose your job because o...
12/28/2006 As you probably know by now, G-Man has a blog (yay!).Now that I've been noticed, I have started to get a bit of comment spam. Since spam is a hobby of mine I've decided to categorize the top five types of comment spammers Sex for Fantasy - These are the guys who live in a fantasy world where everyone who sees the...
11/3/2006 I worked out a $20 discount with WordZe for SEOMoz readers. This is reduced from the normal price of $45. It only lasts two days, so take advantage of it quickly before the price goes up. Just to refresh your memory, if you're wondering what WordZe is, it's a new keyword research tool. ...
10/23/2006 I recently had the opportunity to interview Jeremy Schoemaker : Thanks to Jeremy for answering these questions. Your answers were very enlightening!*Edit from Rebecca*: I cleaned up the grammar in Shoemoney's responses so it would read eas...
10/12/2006 Bill brings up some interesting points in the comment on this thread about the search engines blocking the pages that give the rank and/or links out from the XSS exploitable pages. In some cases, I think this is possible. For instance, there's one XSS exploit that I used for almost a year that gav...
9/7/2006 I recently had the opportunity to renew 1000 of my spam domains.Since the domains only cost me 99 cents each when I bought them and renewal was nearly $6 at the time, I decided it wasn't worth it.In fact, my evil plan was that I was going to simply let these sites expire and then buy them back once they expired and went into the domain pool...Imagine my surprise...
9/3/2006 The most common question I receive after I've written any of my posts is: How can I get started and learn what you know? And that's a difficult question to answer. Not because I don't think it's possible, but because there is so much that you can do in the SEO field. Let's take black hat out of th...
8/25/2006 Matt Cutts brought up an interesting point about the Google Terms of Service. Basically that scraping them is against their Terms of Service. Most websites these days have some type of TOS but I've never heard of one actually being enforced. I know that if you're being a good guy and a...
8/24/2006 The story as it stands so far... One of the things I've done in the past couple of years is to scrape the search engines for content. Once I get that content, I sometimes tweak it, but invariably it ends up on my network of sites to feed the search engines more of what they're looking for. (Ok, maybe that's a stretch but they DO crawl and index my sites :)) Occasiona...
8/22/2006 AOL search data - why am I posting this under Google? Because AOL uses Google for their search.I recently grabbed a copy of the AOL search data that was released earlier this month. The dataset is rather large - 450MB compressed - over 1.4GB uncompressed in MySQL.This...
8/16/2006 So you're familiar with the US laws and think that you're safe because you're not breaking them? It's time to rethink that notion because of a treaty that the US signed up for. From the ArsTechnica article: According to the EFF, "The treaty requires th...
8/15/2006 I've been watching a trend lately in the Internet Marketing arena. For the past year or so, more and more marketers have started creating forums as an add-on to their product. Usually it goes something like this... Furthermore, you'll get complete access to our private forums where you can get the latest information on XYZ. Of course, what they're usually implying ...
4/21/2006 When cloaking is mentioned, most people start to shiver and shudder. They point to all the nifty doorway pages, Google's TOS and say how horrible and evil it is.But is cloaking really that evil?Take, for instance, a high trafficed site that gets a million hits a day. Serving no ads to the bots as well as other streamlined code could result in significant savings...
4/7/2006 Oh come on! Saying stuff like that does not help me fly under the radar people!Not to mention I really don't think I'm all that advanced. There are plenty more people I know that are better than me.G-Man...
4/3/2006 I'm not here to debate whether click fraud is a problem or isn't although personally I think it is.I've recently had the opportunity to speak with several people in the underground who, quite understandably, do not want to be mentioned. Some of what they told me, as well, I won't mention. However, I can let some information come out.I'll mention some of my favor...
3/23/2006 A little background reading first for those of you who are not familiar with what a Ponzi scheme is.I would assume most of you are doing your daily activities because you want to make some form of money and, you also hope that you'll be able to retire comfortably one day.That's an admirable goal and the Internet has spawned a...
3/22/2006 I was recently asked by a friend of mine why I still bother with my nefarious black hat activities.As he put it, I could spend the time I'm building throwaway sites to pump out some sites that get repeat visitors. Of course, he's always harping on this particular subject but I decided to go into a bit more depth this time and play with the numbers a little bit......