Blackhat SEO – Esrun

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.