Blackhat SEO - Esrun

SEO sales calls

I know many people cant stand sales calls, I simply love them! You know the deal, your phone rings and you answer it to hear a pause and then someone answering the phone… quite obviously an automated calling system connecting you to operators. I love to wind up these callers and they’re usually trying so hard to build up a good rapport with you that they don’t even realise you’re leading them down an amusing path.

For instance I just got off the phone to someone claiming to be calling from BT business and offering me a guaranteed increase in customers. After a short chat I determined that this would work by them simply running PPC for me. When the woman said “So you’re in XYZ business yeah?” I replied saying that I was actually in the adult industry and sell things like adult videos.   She wasn’t sure if they could promote the adult industry so put me on hold and came back rather sheepishly saying they couldn’t do it “due to Legal issues”. At this point the conversation took a funny turn:

Woman: Actually I just checked and we cant actually do the adult industry due to legal issues, which is a real shame because we would have got you a lot of new customers.

Esrun: Okay well that’s a shame but nevermind. Would you be interested in coming to work for us at all? You know, maybe make a few videos…

Woman: *Nervous laugh* oh no, I couldn’t and I’m working full time in Ireland right now

Esrun: That’s perfect, I love Irish girls! We can get you setup straight away.

Woman: *more nervous giggling and general embarrassment* I can’t, I have kids but uh oh uh thanks for the offer.

Oh well, it was very fun for me :p I had another call not that long ago from another SEO place which had a name like ‘monkey business’ or similar and I managed to get the sales guy to make monkey noises. It was great amusement for everyone listening on the loud speaker in our office.

So the moral? Don’t get angry with sales people, just play along and have some fun!

Macbook pro warranty

Well some readers will remember that about 10 months ago I purchased a macbook pro and have been using it pretty much constantly since and it has been a joy. Unfortunately along the way a few problems did start to appear.

Macbook pro pitting paint

After about 2-3 months of using the laptop it started to develop loads of little black dots where my palms rested, pretty much wrecking the appearance of the laptop. I called to report this to apple expecting them to offer to fix it but instead they told me it was a cosmetic issue which wasn’t covered by warranty. This got me pretty mad considering their warranty states defective materials and If you ask me it wasn’t upto the task of what it was built for and certaintly didn’t last a reasonable amount of time before becoming damaged which to me indicates it to be a defective material! The problem is discussed throughout the internet but apple refuse to accept it as a problem. Anyway I figured that it doesn’t really impact the use of the laptop other than the resale price and of course appearance if used in a meeting or such like so I decided to just ignore it and carry on. The image below shows the problem, although mine was much worse than this.

Fading paint on strip under keyboard on macbook

Soon after another issue appeared which is a strip just under the keyboard which also started to show paint issues. Again I ignored this since I knew what the responce from Apple would be.

Red light coming on when unplugging headphones from macbook

Sometimes I would unplug my headphones from the laptop and a red light would come on where you plug in the 3.5mm headphone jack and it would disable my speakers. I searched for this problem and found out it was a little switch in the hole which enabled/disabled digital output for fibre or something like that. To get around this you simply plug in and remove the headphones several times until it resolves itself.

After experiencing a few more issues I decided to take the laptop into an apple store before the 1 year warranty ran out. Handy tip for those thinking about buying a mac… buy from a John Lewis store and you will get an extended warranty of 2 years.

Right hinge worn out

Macbook latch doesn’t work causing it to not close properly

Optical drive wont eject disks (Resolved by blowing into the drive and then hitting eject, oddly enough!)

When I showed the “genius” my macbook he said it was the worst condition he’d ever seen a mac laptop in and that he’d been working there for many years. I tried to explain that I used the laptop every day and wasn’t just your average user but he just said “Well most people use their laptops everyday”. Oh well, I couldn’t be bothered to explain the different between those who use their laptop and those who really use their laptops, if you get what I mean. He argued that the issues were cosmetic and unlikely to be covered by the warranty but to leave the laptop with them and they’d let me know. He asked me to sign a form which confirmed that I was leaving the laptop with them and that I had declined the £30 backup, I duly signed the form and left the shop with my laptop in their hands. I declined the backup because the harddrive has only just been replaced with stock HD so doesn’t contain any sensitive information, just the operating system.

Anyway, I left the store after about 30 minutes of talking to the genius and giving him all the information about me and my macbook. I got into my car and started to read through the form he got me to sign and it had some text about possible charges and T&C in faint on the back. I was a little annoyed that he advised the form was simply to confirm I was leaving it with them and declined the backup when infact it discusses possible fees etc. Okay fair point you should read all documents in full before you sign them but when someone explains to me what the form is that I’m signing then I generally just accept what they say and sign the document, especially when its somethign so trivial like warranty issues. Annoyed about this and the fact that they were arguing issues which i consider to be covered within warranty I wrote to(well, emailed) Steve jobs on saturday and this morning I recieved a call from a rep on his behalf who spoke to the staff in the apple shop and sorted everything out for me.

Provided it has all indeed been sorted out then I think I’ll buy the new imac when I go to pick my macbook up. I’m a little annoyed that I have had so much hassle getting warranty issues resolved because I have had ipods replaced with pretty much no questions asked in the past so I expected a similar level of service. If there are continuing issues with this warranty claim then I’ll probably not buy the imac just out of principal. I can get dell systems for half the price and with next day business replacement for half the price of the mac systems. Okay I admit it will not look or feel as nice but I reckon I could get over that knowing that if/when something goes wrong they will be on it straight away. You can install mac os x on a standard pc now anyway so that’s not a problem! Get a bog standard dell system, install os X, plug in a mighty mouse and mac keyboard, job done

Funny little argument

Well there is quite an amusing argument going on right now between David Naylor and his aftervote website and Jason Calacanis Mahalo

What is Aftervote?

Well dave I sent you a IM… I can’t be bothered to actually write a description. Put a shorter one on your site for a copy/paste job! Click here for the about aftervote.

What is Mahalo? (taken from mahalo.com , not written by me!)

Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven’t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.

The argument?

Jason C seems to be getting baited quite well from Dave. I don’t think Dave is really bothered about any of this but like the typical British, he loves an argument Jason C is arguing that the way aftervote is scraping search results is illegal and against various T&Cs. This is one thing which has always bugged me… when Google, Yahoo or MSN scrape your pages, cache them, take your images and make money out of all this by sticking adverts next to them and calling it a search engine no one has any problem with it. When I scrape your sites and put adverts next to the results I’m called a scraper or spammer or god knows what else. Wake up and smell the coffee! Anyway Jason D had a similar view and posted probably one of the funniest videos I have seen from an SEO… So check out the Jason D Mooney.

SEO Bookmarklets

Seoidiot has just done a cool post on using bookmarklets for search purposes. If you’re fed up with having to keep changing your search preferences like setting google to display 10 or 100 results then this is the perfect solution.

Threadwatcher suspended

Oops for the syndk8 crew… threadwatcher site showing a ’suspended’ page from their hosts AQhost.

Back in the UK

Well It’s 5am and I have just arrived home. I’m not really up for blogging right now so I’ll just put up a couple pics. Thanks for Ralph over at Fantomaster for his hospitality and help while I was over there. I have a good idea of what I intend to write about this trip but obviously now is just not the right time.

Back to Europe

Regular readers will remember that I went over to Europe and drove around a bit about a month and a half ago… well I have decided that I want another little break so I’m going back! I just booked an 8pm ferry tomorrow night to Dunkurque and a return ferry Midnight on tuesday.

If anyone has any suggestions on where I should go then let me know! I’ll be looking over flash earth tonight to see what my options are, I love driving through different countries so no matter where I go it should be good.

The funny thing is I have spent forever looking at new cars since I think it’s about time I bought a nice car. I currently drive a rather basic renault clio but only drive about 10 miles a day so there’s never been a good reason to get a decent car. Anyway I have spent so much time looking at new cars but no time at all on this trip lol oops.

Comment if you have any suggestions

Update: I decided to go see a friend tonight and have a few drinks(read: A LOT of drinks) since I’m going away and he plays guitar quite well and made a song up on the fly which I recorded on my cell phone so I thought i’d stick it up here …*file removed. back 14th july*

Blackhat SEO

Well I’m back up and running as you can see! After releasing the xml incoming link builder tool the site was attacked as usual with denial of service attacks but someone took it one step further this time and actually rooted the server(hacked in to get administrator priviledges) and basically messed things up.

I couldn’t really be bothered to sort out the backup so its taken me awhile to get back up and running. But never fear, esrun is here (hahaha Cunt.). Anyway the blackhat seo blog is back and I will hopefully be posting something good soon.

XML Feeds link builder

People have been gaining links out of false xml feeds for a long long time but it’s only recently that it has been so publicly discussed on blogs and in forums.

The basic idea is that you generate XML feeds with auto generated content and have each story within the feed link to a site you wish to generate links for. Once the feed has been created and you ping blog search engines like technorati then the idea is that scraper sites will pick up your feed and then link to the site listed as the author within the feed. This is obviously a very simple explanation but there are hundreds of people talking about it right now so I don’t think I need to go into too much detail.

I have updated one of my tools to be a bit prettier looking and put it into the scripts area. So go check the XML Feed link builder out.

Legal action against spam hunters

Every now and then you get a new boy scout who feels it’s their duty to go hunting for spammers and “out” them to the public. They wont do something constructive like come up with a real solution, such as improving captcha systems.. no because that takes brains! They just fixate on certain people and spend all their free time (highlights their sad lives) trying to track down spam and make a big deal about it.

I don’t know if spamhunters are stupid or naive but outing someone as a spammer won’t stop them spamming, at worst they’ll loose a batch of sites. Everyone I know in this business builds sites over different domains, servers and whois details so you would never actually close down someones whole operation.

Sometimes I feel that it is necessary to take legal action against people to protect my reputation, often these people make libel comments online and think they can just get away with this - they cannot. I was speaking to a friend this morning about taking action against someone who has been making comments which I consider defamation of my character and they said they weren’t 100% if the comments would be considered libel…… Okay fair enough I said but the bottom line is most people don’t want to go to court or simple can’t afford it. Even if I loose its going to cost them a reasonable amount of money defending themselves which should teach them a good lesson.

I’m laid back enough to take shots against me, take the piss out of me.. but it goes one step further when people start trying to publish details about you and make you out to be a criminal. Even if the information is already public and known by most, its just the intention made by these people that bugs me.