Archive for the 'Black Hat SEO' Category

This post has a very Black Hat SEO flavor. I do not endorse any of the techniques below. They are a collection of techniques to keep your text hidden on a webpage. Google is vigilant about discovering anyone “spamming” their engine, and if they discover your site hiding text, there is a good chance you’ll be penalized/removed from their index. Remember, BMW?

So, if you want to test how well a Black hat technique like hiding text on a webpage can be, then you should buy a throwaway domain (one you don’t care about), and use it as a testing ground. Make sure the Whois info is different from your primary domains.

14 Methods to Hide Text:

1) Using “Display:none” in your CSS.

2) Noscript tag - Will hide text, but there is disagreement whether or not links within noscript tag pass PageRank.

3) Blend text color into background color.

4) IP Cloaking. Using Cloaking Software like Kloakit, or Search Engine Cloaker ca get the job done.

5) Using the Div tag to hide text:

6) Use the position command to place the text off the viewable screen area;
.hideme {
position : absolute;
left : -1000px;
}

7) Use the “visibility : hidden” command to cause the browser to keep the text in the div hidden;
.hideme {
visibility : hidden;
}

Use the z-index command to place the text below the viewable layer. SO, it only appears after a user takes some kind of action…like clicking on a button.

9) Hiding text labels within Forms on a data table.

10) Using Flash files to hide text, and sFIR

11) Font size. Make the font super small. Like -10000px.

12) Alt attribute text. Although, the Alt attribute is not really hidden, because it appears when you mouse over the image.

13) Link Title attribute. This is like an Alt tag, but for a hyperlink.

14) Including text behind an image.

Not all invisible Divs are used in a spammy way.

I’m not sure if Google requests & spiders the CSS, so these particular methods of hidden text might be beneficial for awhile. But, you’re certainly playing with fire. Check out this recent find by Matt regarding hidden text.

Did you know that if you use mod rewrite you have to 301 redirect the old url? If you’re using the URL rewrite feature on Wordpress then you have a problem. You have a duplicate content issue! The reason is because you now have 2 urls to the same page. Fortunately, there is a plugin on wordpress called the ” Angsuman’s Permanent Redirector Plugin - WordPress Plugin for Permanent Redirection of Posts“.

If the URL’s never get 301 redirected from the natural url to the rewritten url, then there will be a duplicate content issue, and a vulnerablity to a Black Hat SEO attack.

This is not as big a problem for linkjuice. Even though there’s a dynamic url, and a static URL, people will only see the static url. Hence, the static url will get all the linkjuice.

The Wall Street Journal published a story that stated all the good domain names have already been taken.

So, what’s a cyber-squatter to do? In recent years, Cyber-squatters have received a lot of money from holding for ransom the trademark name of large companies and/or product names. Has Cyber-squatting come to an end?

Not at all. Cyber squatting is alive and well. Cyber-Squatters are buying domains that contain trademarked terms in foreign country codes.

Recently, The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) published a report trying to establish a standardized (and voluntary) best practices for all countries to follow regarding domain name registration. Kinda like an international Whois. One of the main purposes of these best practices, was to resolve Trademark infringement. However, trademark owners will find it extremely difficult enforcing their rights in foreign countries because each country has it’s own policies regulating buying and selling domain names ( ccTLD ).

China has the newest and fastest growing bunch of cyber-squatters. They are pirating everything from pharmaceutical brands, celebrity names, consumer product brand names, and just about anything else they think they can hold for ransom.

So, what if someone bought a Trademarked name ccTLD, developed an affiliate marketing website, and did a ton of SEO for it? They’d probably get noticed real quick.

In case you’ve been trying to get an “authority link� for the purpose of SEO, and you find it next to impossible, then this post might be for you.

Have you ever tried to edit a page of Wikipedia, and then you go back later and find it removed?

Here are the 3 Golden Rules of getting high quality links in Wikipedia:

1. Get yourself a few helpful edits under your belt. It seems that admins there are much more receptive to link spammers who appear to be contributors.

2. Get a “friendly� admin to back you up. It seems that other admins are unlikely to reverse the decision of another admin, even when evidence of stolen content is clearly given.

3. Don’t add the actual content into the Wikipedia, that just defeats the whole reasoning behind getting your link in the first place.

I’m feeling very dark today.

Last year there was a new term coined: Googlebowling.

Definition: GoogleBowling is when you put site-wide links on multiple sites, and the link is pointing at your competition for the sole purpose of eliminating them from the Search results. Google’s ranking algorithm will penalize the target site, and the target site will disappear from the SERP’s. You just bowl them over.

GreyWolf details the “original� how to of Googlebowling your competition.

Does Googlebowling work anymore?
Search engine algorithms have changed. Is googlebowling just a lot of meaningless talk nowadays?

Question: Will multiple site-wide links qualify as googlebowling as per the original definition last year?

Is it possible that too many site-wide links will trigger Google’s spam filter? And effectively Googlebowl your competition.
Okay, here’s my first bold statement: There is no such thing as too many links.

Basically, Google doesn’t count the sitewides any more. Google will only give the site credit for 1 backlink. And, Google isn’t penalizing for a sitewide links. Think about blogs. All those links are sitewide. And, you just get 1 citation rather than 1 for each page. So, if you’re buying a $1,500 site-wide link to rank on Google; it’s WAY overpriced. But, people are willing to pay for it. The benefit of site-wide links is on Yahoo and MSN. So, should you throw out the theory of Googlebowling?

Here’s the catch, and how Googlebowling can work…Linking the competitor to bad neighborhoods will trigger Google’s spam filter, and get the site penalized on Google.

I guess the NEW definition of Googlebowling is: Site-wide inbound links coming from bad neighborhoods, and using a competitive term as the text link’s anchor text.

However, some “authority sites� are impossible to googlebowl. Eg: 10 years+ in the index and thousands of inbound links already.

Furthermore, with Google, it usually takes multiple offenses to get de-indexed. So, just bad links alone won’t do it. Although, bad links + cloaking will. But, it’s really difficult to knock a strong site out of the index. Just look what happened to BMW. They already have 1 offense for cloaking. So, I wonder if they are highly susceptible to be Googlebowled by Mercedes-Benz. hehehe

But, you can Googlebowl if the competitive site doesn’t hold much creditably with Google.
Yahoo and MSN are a different story. A lot of site-wide links will boost you to the top SERP’s on Yahoo and MSN.

Why can’t you “YahooBowl� or “MSNbowl�? That’s because on Yahoo and MSN, there is a major hole in their algorithm.
Using sitewide links are probably the #1 Black Hat strategy to rank on Yahoo and MSN.

Hence, Googlebowling. But remember, Googlebowling only works if the links come from bad neighborhoods, and the site has multiple offenses.

Single-Target link farms vs. Multi-Target link farms.
Which works better? Which is harder for the search engines to identify?

From the Stanford research paper :

The Stanford research paper primarily discusses how Link Farms affect PageRank. However, our discussion will focus on Search Engine Ranking. The paper concludes:

All such optimal farm structures share the following properties:
• All boosting pages point to and only to the target,
• All hijacked links point to the target,
• There are some links from the target to one or more boosting pages.

Questions:

1. What does the optimal Link Farm structure look like?
2. Do they have to be on a different c-class IP block?
3. If you start 100 blogspot blogs, will that work?
4. Or, how about using several free blog farms such as: blogspot, wordpress, modblog, typepad, etc to form a mini link farm?
5. Is the optimal link farm structure, to have all boosting websites have sitewide-links to a single target website, or multiple target websites?
6. Do they all have to be on a similar subject matter? Or will just a single relevant webpage suffice? Or doesn’t the relevancy matter at all?
7. Is the optimal link farm structure to have outbound links on the boosting pages pointing to authority sites?

If you use a free blog farm, the blog should ideally have a forum so the creation of new webpages will happen with each new thread/post. And, the blog/forum needs site-wide links, and each should be on a separate c-class IP block.

Single-target link farms are too easy to be detected from the search engines, and should be avoided. Additionally, there is a strong chance they might not be effective anymore, as the search engine algorithm’s are becoming more sophisticated.

Conclusion:
Link farms with an irregular structure (multiple target pages) should be used with their boosting pages containing 3-4 outbound links to authority sites like dmoz, wiki, etc. This linking structure works best, and is harder for the search engines to detect. See below:

Link Farms are a quick method to get into the top positions in the SERP’s. And, you don’t necessarily need to use a Link Farm.
Basically, to outrank just about anyone on the SERP’s, you’ll need a site-wide text link with your keyword in the anchor text, on about 6 websites that have 20,000+ pages each. So, buying links is a viable option.

To see the power of linking, just do a search on Google for “failure“. We all know who comes up #1 for that term. I’m sure the President is not optimizing for that term. This just demonstrates the power of off-site linking.

Question #6 remains unanswered.

Unfortunately, there is not much anyone can do to prevent a 302 hijack.
However these three quick tips might minimize your exposure to a 302 hijack.

1) Use the HTML tag
“The base element specifies a base URL for all the links in a page.�

2) Using absolute links within the site, where you include the full domain name each time, are also recommended.

3) Add the current time on each page, so each time the page gets spidered, the page content will be slightly different.

More information on the hijack and solutions:
http://clsc.net/research/google-302-page-hijack.htm
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/28741.htm
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/32534.htm