Youtube music player

August 15, 2008 on 4:45 pm | In Blackhat SEO | 47 Comments

There’s a project I have wanted to do for a long time but I can’t see myself ever having the time. However I’m sure someone out there might be interested so here it is…

Everyone knows you can find pretty much any song old and new on youtube, I myself use it quite often instead of downloading songs.

What would be great is a community site where you can enter an artist (similar to Last FM I guess) and it brings back all songs by that artist, maybe split into correct albums if you know the right places to scrape and use as a consolidating database.

You could then select the album you wanted to listen to and using a fancy ajax front end, automatically switch between each song so you can just leave it open and running in a firefox tab.

Each song/video could be rated on its accuracy and quality by users and also have its youtube ratings checked since there are usually many variations of songs available on Youtube, some better than others.

The system would let you save, search and rate others playlists.

So if you’re bored, sitting there thinking what you could be coding…. do this!

Linking to bad sites

August 14, 2008 on 2:32 pm | In Blackhat SEO | 5 Comments

I recently performed a test which actually quite suprised me.

For years there has been the obvious talk of linking to bad neighborhoods but its always been hard to know for sure which sites Google considers “bad”. When I started seeing those “This site may harm your computer.” warnings last year, it got me thinking. But I never really made anything out of it until recently.

When you search for certain terms in Google, you sometimes see sites marked with the aforementioned warning and when you click them, you get taken to a second page giving you another warning about the site having badware (malware,spyware etc). The great thing is, the warnings are based on reports from StopBadware and they provide a wonderful tool which lets you search for Badware sites.

The great thing is, you don’t have to know any urls, you can do a general search such as “online.com” and get back a nice list of sites:

So we have a list of badware sites submitted by Google, sites they have absolutely without a doubt considered to be bad/harmful.

Next I updated a range of different pages to link to these bad sites. Blog posts, blog comments, profile pages and a normal web page. I threw some links at all these sites I had modified and waited for Google to visit them. To my suprise Google visited them, updated the cache showing the badware links but their positions in the serps were not effected at all!

I probably should have also tested it as a sitewide link on a site to see if this would change the outcome. Also I should try changing the links from badware to spammy networks(e.g sites which have recently lost their PR for being spammy/selling links etc) and see how that works out. But in general, is linking to bad sites going to hurt you? Unlikely…

Not to say interlinked networks don’t get hurt ;)

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