Blackhat SEO - Esrun

The missing blackhats

Seoidiot went missing due to heavy work.. I went missing due to a kite surfing holiday and just arrived home to a warm 2 degrees outside and a £92 bill for a taxi from Gatwick to Billericay GRRRR.

Lesson learnt: Do no one any favours and rely on no one.

I’ll try and get a blackhat post up this week and I’ll probably post a bit on my holiday.

MSN/LIVE API Scraper

Check out the new script I have released. It shows you how to scrape the msn/live api service using php cURL rather than having to rely on SOAP!

You can download the script from the MSN Live API Scraper page. Comments appreciated

Scraping google

Just to be clear, this blog will still offer scripts, tips and ideas. It’s just that it will also include a few personal posts!

Lately I have been working on some new systems and I really wanted to concentrate on the scraping side of things since this is ultimately the only limit to your spamming! I have picked up several tricks along the way and I’m going to share one of them with you now. At some point in our scraping we have all come across the following:

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

If you havn’t seen this error before then try searching google for “powered by phpbb”. After a few pages you should see this error. After awhile you will also start being presented with a captcha. You can change your preferences to display 100 results per page which obviously is a start and the chances are if you’re scraping then your script is doing this anyway.

Now go over to the google labs project Google Accessible Search . Google describe this service as “Google Web Search With Results Optimized For Visually Impaired And Blind Users.“. Perform the same search on here and you will not hit the aforementioned error! Continue reading Scraping google…

Rally driving

Whilst I was not blogging, I was out having fun trying numerous different things such as paragliding and rally driving.

I bought a £50 ford fiesta and decided it would be a great rally car, unfortunately it picked up a lot of damage within a couple of months due to numerous unexpected incidents. All of which I blame purely on the car not being up to rally spec.

Unfortunately I can’t really go into too much detail about what happened with the car due to amount of cases lately where people have blogged about things like speeding and then had a visit from the police! I would like to make clear that all driving was on private property and the car was kept to road legal standards at all times.

Anyway here’s a few pics of the car from its birth(when I bought it :p) and its death a couple of months later when it was taken away on a trailer to the scrap yard.

I did learn some valuable lessons from the experiences with this car. I now consider myself a competent panel beater for a start! I’m also now reasonably good at bodging together old cars to keep them running.

The car as I bought it. No damage other than what appears to be a bullet like hole in the door(lol)

The following shows the car after some rally driving. After taking a corner too fast the car slammed side on into some trees and then forward into a tree. The picture isn’t all that clear but you can see a pop in the bonnet where someone’s was leg pressing against the tree and the car to try help get it back on the track, a damaged light, a crack in the corner of the bumper, dented in front wing and both side doors dented in.

muddy car

The following shows the car after me and a few friends tried our hand at panel beating. Looks pretty smooth right?

Next we have the car sitting in a ditch. It took three of us about 2 hours to get the car out! The main problem was that the back of the car was in the air and the front wheels were just slipping in the mud.

The fiesta also got to spend the day visiting the airport. It’s great that you can get so close to the planes isn’t it. Don’t you love security.

The fiesta had many crashes during its rally driving career. Unfortunately its last crash was the one to put it out of service. The fiesta hit a rather solid object and then continued over it, causing a large amount of damage to the front of the car and underneath the car. At this point the car failed to meet road legal status and was retired to the junk yard.

Teach yourself to paraglide

It has always seemed to me that pretty much anything you wanted to know could be found on the interent, this was of course until I tried to find information on learning to paraglide! I have always enjoyed playing around with powerkites and kite surfing so paragliding seemed like a good route to take for a challenge.

After failing to find any useful info on the basics of paragliding I decided that I’d work on imitation and set about watching as many videos as I could find on the subject, thanks youtube!

Since I have only just relaunched this blog, I have a couple of weeks worth of attempted paragliding to document. Just to give you a heads up, I now have a proper paraglider.

We started by using a 3.5 meter power kite which had 25 meter lines and terminated to a bar rather than handles as many people use. Since we have experienced flight using this kite in high winds, we decided to draw out a technical diagram of our initial idea:

Now to start with, we drove to the local airport which has a lot of back roads with reasonably long run ways and found a road which allowed us to drive against the direction of the wind which means the kite shape wouldn’t get disrupted by cross winds and end up folding inside out or such like.

I have a fair bit of experience with power kites and in winds of 20+mph a 3.5m kite is able to lift a person if pulled through the power zone(main bit of wind). Now the way i saw it was that if you were to drive at 20mph then you’re not only supplying a 20mph wind but its constant which means the kite should keep a strong high position and be able to lift a person.

The first test was to let the kite out on about 5 meters of line and have my friend sit in the open boot holding onto the bar. Then I drove forward at a max of about 10mph while he tested how controlled it was and the force that was put on his arms. Control of the kite was quite erratic but no worse than I expected with such short line let out. The force put on his arms holding the bar was very strong(Excellent!).

After driving around for an hour or so looking for a more suitable place to do the next test (grass!) we ended up back at our start point for the next test, concrete

For this, we again let off about 5 meters of line but this time secured the bar in the boot and closed the lid to hold it in place. A quick test drive forward proved that the kite was being kept tense and acting as a parachute brake for the car. Excellent.

So the next test was for my friend to jump in the car and drive while I held onto the thicker bits of rope/string where the lines connect to the actual kite, my friend then drove forward while I ran behind the car holding onto the kite, waiting for it to get enough wind hitting it to raise and hopefully lift me up with it. We got up to about 20mph with me still running behind the car so I shout for my friend to stop, expecting him to gradually slow down but what does he do? Slams the bloomin brakes on and I nearly run into the back of the car!

Disappointing, it didn’t feel like it had anywhere near enough lift to take me up with it. Meaning faster speeds are required and/or a larger kite. The obvious problem with the faster speeds is that there are obviously limits to how fast I can run! So we’d require some kind of dragging to occur which I don’t fancy doing on concrete!

This was the end of our initial tests.

Blackhat SEO blog returning

Well I managed to scrape together the backup of my blog and get it back online. I’m going to be using the blog for things other than blackhat seo, for example it will have posts about sports I do like snowboarding, kite surfing and most recently my attempt to teach myself paragliding.

There are a few reasons for widening the scope of the blog, firstly because talking purely about SEO can get a little tedious and secondly because of the amount of times I have searched for things online and been able to find the information easily, so I can use the blog as a place to dump this info for others to find. Some people won’t be interested in my sports and what not so I’ll try and keep each post clearly in its own category so you can just read the SEO bits if you like :p