Blackhat SEO - Esrun

What is the point in london

You pay to go over bridges to get to london, you pay a congestion charge to drive in london, you get fined for speeding because they change the limit to 20mph with one tiny little sign, you get fined for driving in a bus or taxi only lane because you take a wrong direction and are confronted with a ‘taxi only’ sign at which point it’s too late. If you do the actual speed limits then you get tail gaited so bad that its only a matter of time before someone crashes into the back of you. Parking is stupidly high, living in london is stupidly expensive. Walking around london is like walking in a foreign country. Fuck london.

Oh and londonseo was an interesting night. Had a quick chat with Mike Nott and Jason D before they ran out and then didn’t really know anyone else there! Although I did chat to a few different people which was nice and the wordtracker guy was there. “Have you heard of onlinehoster.com… esrun…?? DITY!?”- “Oh DITY, the spammer yeah”.

Back in the U.K

Well I just arrived back home and it’s nice to be able to lay back in my own place. I got stopped for a “random” customs search and I ended up stuck there answering questions for 30 minutes or so. The main problem was that I was unable to provide any proof of where I had been staying within the EU. One comment made by a customs officer which made me laugh was “And you know it’s illegal to bring guns and drugs back into the country?”… why on earth would it be LEGAL!?

Some pics… Some were taken while driving so aren’t that great.

My route:

Random:

Eiffel tower:

The police in Paris chased after this vehicle and stopped it in front of the lights I was waiting at. After a short time they had the other people from the car in cuffs and on the floor:

When in Belgium I think there was a football (soccer) match on or something and there was such a huge police and military presence.

Ugh good morning amsterdam

lol its about 5a.m and I’m feeling a bit rough. I got chatting with a couple of canadian guys in one of the ‘coffee bars’ yesterday and ended up spending the day with them getting pretty wasted. We went on the hienikken factory tour where you’re given 3 tokens to get beers while walking around but people keep giving us their tokens because they didn’t have time or just didn’t want to drink… we had a hell of a lot to drink there. I’m feeling a little worse for wear this morning but oh well I’m off to Dunkerque now.

Amsterdam here I am

I didn’t get a chance to go online last night but I did make it to Belgium.. I stayed in Brussels. To be honest I didn’t think much of Belgium. It was okay I guess but it just seemed a bit … I dunno just not that Great.

I have literally just pulled into Amsterdam and there are hundreds of open wifi points which beats paying 4.50 euro an hour! Looks good, I think a lot of places are closed though because its sunday and/or because its early. Oh well I’m off to explore now.

I’m in Paris!

I left for Dover (UK) at about 7pm thursday evening and boarded the ferry at about half 9. The ferry departed at about 10-10:30pm and arrived at around midnight in Dunkerque (France). My initial idea was to drive straight from Dunkerque to Germany but I decided that since I was pretty tired then maybe I’d go for something a little closer to start with and sent an SMS to a friend back in the UK asking for the postcode of the eiffel tower in Paris.. Over 200 miles later I’m in the centre of Paris at about 3:30am and decided to get some rest at a ‘rest stop’ and got a couple hours sleep in my car. I set off to find a hotel at about 9am.

Let me tell you, driving in France is madness! The roads are generally poorly maintained and most have no lighting nor cats eyes in the ground. Many roads don’t even have lane markings so traffic kind of just merges into one big lump with everyone trying to fight for some space. I supose I got the raw end of the deal being in Paris because its obviously going to be one of the busiest parts of France but its just so crazy I cannot even explain it. It’s just dangerous.

Anywayyyy, I managed to find a hotel and had an nice shower and change my clothes then I went and spent today at the eiffel tower (it was SO SUNNY!) where I met a lovely little ladie who taught me the tradition of kissing goodbye… whoooo lol.

Right now I’m using a wifi at 4.50 euros an hour which isn’t too bad I guess. I’m trying to decide what to do next. No matter what; I will be sleeping in Paris tonight but I just don’t know about tomorrow. If I don’t leave for Germany early in the morning then it’s just not going to be possible to make it there, do something and make it back to Dunkerque by Monday. So I have to decide whether to stay in Paris for a couple more nights and check out some museums and such like… maybe even disney land LOL I like crazy rides OR find something to do in germany.. Or a whole different country!

Edit: Oh bollox! I thought going to Paris would actually bring me a bit closer to Germany but its added about an hour!!!!

Edit2: With the help of a mate I have decided on going to Belgium and then Holland and then back to Dunkerque. Wahey let the good times roll!

Mac speedcamera detector

I tried my hand at a bit of C programming a good few months back and it was a bit of a nightmare. It reminded me of when I use assembly on PICs; having to declare everything and be so strict. This really makes you realise how slack your PHP code is!

Anyway it was coded for use on mac os X and basically reads data from a bluetooth gps device and then compares the data against a speed camera database and prints out how close you are to a camera and what type of camera it is. It is ran within the terminal.

All I wanted to say is I hope people who code in PHP realise how fortunate they are to use a language which is so laid back lol.

I have attached the code just incase anyone wants to see it. I am certain it could have been coded better but it was the first thing I had written with in C.

Download: mac speedcamera detector

France to germany…

I am thinking about going away to france and then drive through to germany. My idea is to leave Dover(UK) and get a ferry with my car over to Dunkerque(france) and then drive through to germany. I’m just curious if anyone can offer an insight into any potential problems and the time it will take.

I intend to leave tomorrow evening and return Monday night.

Any ideas readers!?

Google maps suggests just over 6 hours..

Update: I have just booked my ferry tickets and ordered a new sat nav. Way wah woo wah!

Typo Generator

Going for typos can be great if you are knocking out pages in bulk. For example if you had the original keyword “blackhat seo” then the script would bring back typos such as vlackhat seo or blcakhat seo. Obviously these terms will have less competition but the bottom line is people do make typos when searching so its an easy bit of traffic.

Go to the typo generator page to download the script.

I <3 Wales!

Lately I have felt that things have been building up on my mind and when I got home friday I decided that I needed a break. A couple of weeks ago I went swimming at one of my friends indoor pools and one of the girls there was welsh and I absolutely loved the accent. I decided pretty much then that I wanted to goto Wales at some point!

So I got home at about 6pm friday and started looking around online for things to do in Wales. I found a lot of sites that suggest activity breaks in Wales and decided that I’d do something like kayaking or quad biking or just something a bit exciting! I started calling several different places but most either didn’t answer the phone(out of hours) or couldn’t help me at such short notice until finally I got through to a guy in north wales who runs an activity place and said he had some people doing some activities on the Saturday and that I could join in with them if I wanted and stay at the place on a B&B scenario.

So I went and got a sat nav unit from someone I work with and left Essex at about 8pm. I arrived in North Wales at about half past midnight which is pretty quick. I drove into St Asaph and asked a couple of local lads for direction, unfortunately they didn’t know the way but I couldn’t help but smile when they started speaking welsh to each other lol. I ended up talking to a couple of girls who had been in the pub and we drove around a bit looking at stuff like ‘tha vallaaay’ lol. In the end they showed me where the place was and I took them home and then arrived at the adventure place at about 2am.

Where I was staying was a big mansion type place which was so large that I kept getting lost walking around it! On Saturday I did some quad biking, mountain biking, archery and in the night I went up into the caves with one of the guys(staff) I made friends with.

Wales is an amazing place! The water and air are just superb and the people are amazingly friendly. I will definitely be going back but for a longer time, maybe a week.

I dropped a couple of people off in Birmingham on my way home which unfortunately added a couple of hours to my journey, taking about 6-7 hours to drive from north Wales to Essex.

I’d highly recommend that if you have never been to Wales before you should go!

Link spamming targets

I seem to hear from a lot of people who seem to have their heart set on spamming but simply have no idea where to start. Generally you will find that if you have an idea of where you could link spam then so have a hundred over people but don’t let this put you off! The links will still be of value.

There are many many places to spam and in this post i’ll try and go through some of them.

Trackback spamming - Trackbacks are generally used on blogs to let another blog know you have written about one of their posts. For example if you liked a post written by Anne on the Spamhuntress blog and decided to post about it on your own blog then you’d send a trackback(your blog software will usually do this automatically) to the specific post on the Spamhuntress blog, the blogs way of saying “Hey, I have blogged about what you have written.”. There will now be a link from the post on Spamhuntress back to your own post. Now it is obvious to see how this system can be abused, you can send a trackback with the URL of your own post being any spam site you like and not even blog the topic. Many people however have security now days which check that your suposed URL is actually linking to their blog and such like. Some people go to the length of creating cloaked blogs to trick trackback checks but others just spam in such bulk that it doesn’t matter if only 50% of their trackbacks stick.

Guestbook spamming - I don’t know many people who havn’t tried their hand at guestbook spamming. You may remember DITY which was a free guestbook spammer I created and is still widely used. Generally people will search around to find out which guestbooks are popular and then find footprints which allow them to find large amounts of people using them on search engines. For example if the guestbook always said “Powered by SpamBook Pro” then it would make for an easy scrape. Whilst this can be an effective method of building up links, it is a hugely saturated practice now with every man and his dog spamming guestbooks.

Blog Comments - Comment spamming on blogs has really taken off in the last couple of years. Since there are only a handful of popular blogging packages such as wordpress and movable type it means it is extremely easy to hit thousands upon thousands of blogs without modification to your code. Whilst there have been huge advancements in anti-spam plugins there are still such a large amount of unprotected blogs that it can really pay off to use this method. Many people comment on older posts in the hope that admins will not notice. Another trick is to scrape someone elses comment and then use just a small part of it in the hope the admin doesn’t look too closely and thinks its genuine.

Directory Submission - You can automate the submission of your sites to directories which is a very easy way to help get a site indexed. It’s not generally a mass solution but it can help.

Referral Spamming - Each time you visit a website, your browser sends a referral tag which tells the website where you just came from. For example if you were to goto google and click through to this website (you wouldn’t because this site is banned on google) then my stats software would log that you came in from google.com. Many people makes these statistics open to the public and search engines meaning you can trick thousands of websites into thinking you came to them from your own spamsite.com which will then show as a link back to your site in their stats pages.

A few more to look into but I don’t have time to write about right now:

Social bookmarking

Social networking sites (myspace etc)

Classifieds

Article submissions