Last week I noticed this link to Techcrunch’s article about Squidoo being hit hard by Google on a few boards. It’s not really that surprising, BHs having been using Squidoo for SEO and monetization of competitive keywords for what seems like ages! And, after checking, most of my lenses had tumbled in the SERPs too!

Then, a few days later, every lense-maker got this email from Seth & Co:

Thank you.This is the first time I’ve been able to send a thank you letter to 70,000 people at the same time, and despite the mass nature of it, I hope you can understand how sincere I am in writing to you.

Since we went live with Squidoo just over a year ago, we (okay YOU) have done some amazing things:

* We’ve built more than 100,000 helpful pages, pages that make it easy for people to learn about new stuff online.
* We’ve raised a bunch of money for charity. We’ve built a school in Cambodia, funded scholarships for inner-city kids and done research on juvenile diabetes.
* We’ve built a community of really cool, extremely smart people who spend most of their time helping each other.

I couldn’t be more proud of it.

Last week, a few dozen spammers exploited Squidoo and drove the rest of the Web crazy. They spammed tens of thousands of blogs and built thousands of worthless lenses, violating our Terms of Service with reckless abandon. One spammer in La Paz, Bolivia built more than 400 lenses in one day on exactly the same topic. Sheesh.

Since then, search traffic to Squidoo was also impacted, as was our ability to post on blog comments or some social networking sites.

Here’s the great news: thanks to terrific work by Gil, Corey and Megan, we’ve eliminated the tools that bad actors used to damage the rest of us. We’ve also added a squadron of people who hand review lenses, and we’ve made it easier for you (and anyone else) to report spam.

I’m confident that as the web sees that the problem is solved, we’ll be back on track, and searchers online will continue to discover your good lenses.

In the meantime, the very best thing we can do is what we’ve always done: build great lenses (by hand) and promote them (by hand) to people who want to hear about them.

Thanks again for the great work, for the enthusiasm and for your desire to help.

Seth and the SquidTeam

That was clearly a desperate act in damage-limitation – blame some unknown entity in Bolivia! Anyway, after checking many of my lenses today, I got this:

Which reads: “Hey there. XXXXXXX is still working on this lens about XXXXXX and will publish it to the world soon. Come back soon!”

So, almost all of my lenses have failed a manual, editorial  review! The worst part is, I can’t remember the various logins I used because they were created a while back and I can’t find the file I stored them in… never mind, I’ll just have to build another 300 or so

There are many millions of PR 3, 4, 5, 6 quality websites (and tens of millions of pages) where links can be dropped. For example, there are tons of WP blogs that have ‘do follow’ plugin installed. Commenting on these blogs will get quality links. However, you can’t just include a link to a mortgage, loan, insurance, porn, games site, etc, because most times the blog owners will delete these links; especially if they suspect you’re only commenting for the link or you link to a commercial or unrelated site.

As well, there are many, many authority sites that allow commenting or reviews in one form or another, but, again, they won’t allow any form of link spamming.

Now, imagine if you could fool these site owners into thinking that the links you left on their sites go to non-commercial (advertisement free), nice-looking blogs… which they do! But the search engine spiders, and the link juice, are taken to your commercial sites – the sites where you really want the links to go!

This is exactly what PR Channeller and Dynamic Links Manager help you do. First I’ll explain PR Channeller and then Dynamic Links Manager.

PR Channeller
This is a WP plugin.  See the plugin user-interface below with an explanation of the different fields. 

1. User ID: This is your unique user ID which is embedded in the plug-in. Do not share the plugin or your user id. If a specific user id is abused in any way, the account will be terminated and won’t be reinstated!

2. IP: This is optional. If you add your IP to the edit box, the plugin will treat you as a spider and so you’ll be able see where the spiders are being redirected to.

3. Active: Choosing ‘yes’ and saving the settings, activates the plugin and ensures spiders are redirected to the selected URLs.

4. Messages: This is general info about your account and any potential problems.

5, Update Settings (button): After modifying the settings, you need to click this button to save them!

6. Spider Redirection URLs: Each blog post has an optional URL box where the spiders are redirected to. If the box is empty, the spiders won’t be redirected. (Ensure you use the ‘http’ prefix when entering URLs.)

7. Save Spider URLs (button): After entering URLs, save them by clicking this button – otherwise they won’t be saved!

Here’s how to use PR Channeller: create a non commercial blog with a very appealing theme (this is a theme I typically use), add some content from Ezinearticles.com or anywhere else, install the plugin. Decide on what links you want and the sites you want to promote. Create some pages on the blog and add the URLs of where want the spiders redirected to in the relevant boxes of plugin. Finally, comment on the target blogs/sites and include the links to the blog pages. (For a more detailed description and tactics see below.)

Dynamic Links Manager
This a plugin and theme.  This is a variation of the PR Channeller idea, but instead of a blog you create a fake tiny URL site (which is the theme). Here’s a screenshot of the only page of the theme.

Here’s a screenshot of the plugin user-interface and an explanation of the individual fields.

1 to 5 are the same as PR Chaneller (see above).

6. Human Redirection URLs:  These are the URLs of where humans are redirected when they click links. (Ensure you use the ‘http’ prefix when entering URLs.)

7. Spider Redirection URLs: These are the URLs of where spiders are redirected when they follow links. (Ensure you use the ‘http’ prefix when entering URLs.)

8. Save Human and Spider URLs (button): After entering the human and Spider URLs, save them by clicking this button – otherwise they won’t be saved!

Ezinearticles.com has got tons of quality articles that can be used freely as long as you include the author’s backlink. The problem is, after using and getting them indexed by Google, they will almost certainly go supplemental and generate virtually no traffic! Even combining articles doesn’t help!

But there is another way…

This is another proof-of-concept I developed a while ago but never really got round to testing it properly. Here’s the idea:

You may be aware that articles from article banks (like ezinearticles, goarticles, etc) can be used and won’t go supplemental if additional, unique content is added to the original article. So, let’s say the original article is 500 words, from my experience, if you add another 350 words, it won’t go supplemental!

So, with this mind I created a WP plug-in that takes the original article, manipulates the text and add it to bottom of the article. But, most importantly, it only adds the additional text for the SE spiders, humans see the original article without the additional text. This sounds complicated, so I’ll illustrate it:

Humans see the original article.

While the SE spiders see the original article plus additional text to prevent it from going supplemental. (The additional text is highlighted.)

As mentioned above, the plug-in is just a proof-of-concept. You’ll need to extensively test and fine-tune the function that creates the additional text so that the articles don’t go into Google’s supplemental index. Once you’ve achieved this and they generate traffic, create a large network of sites!

There are three way to monetize blogs with the BH plug-in: embed affiliate and contextual ads, redirection, and displaying a landing page.

Personally, I would not recommend embedding Adsense in blog posts unless you knew exactly what you are doing, i.e., you’re an experienced BH! For one reason, it leaves a huge footprint. Google can and does knock-out entire networks of splogs because of the Adsense footprint!

If you want to use Adsense, I believe a much better alternative is to create fake search engines, one per niche and redirect traffic their which will convert much better than any blog post. I first noticed this tactic last year and it’s very effective, so kudos to whoever employed it first!

The search term is passed on to the fake SE script which embeds it in the title and description tags, between H1 tags, and in the search box. This forces Adsense to display the most precise ads for that term – and usually the highest paying too. Because there’s usually a close match between the search term and the Adsense ads, CTR tends to be much higher, sometimes very high. Here are some illustrative examples of using a fake search engine with Adsense only.

This is just the basic layout. It’s easy to improve the look of the fake search engines and even add graphics and affiliate links, but I’m sure you get the idea. The fake SE script can be downloaded here.

The tactic is to build a network of related splogs that redirects all human traffic to a fake search engine, where you’ll get a much higher CTR and probably the highest paying ads too. Then replicate for every niche you want to target

This is reproduced in whole with permission from an aspiring BH, MORO, who contacted Vanessa Fox (from Google) about the hypothetical sandbox. Here are the original emails.

MORO:

I was wondering if there’s an authoritative resource you could point me to that explains the Google Sandbox. I’m under the impression that a newly registered domain can rank for competitive terms within the first couple weeks of indexation as long as the site attains an authoritative backlink or two. Assuming that the site is of high quality and entirely spam-free, am I under the right impression?

I’m asking because the site in question is going to be the redesigned version of another site that currently sits on a ranking domain. So to further the question, would 301ing the old domain (that has a PR2 and
ranks for competitive terms) to the new domain (newly registered) help the new domain to bypass any sandbox effects?

Vanessa Fox (from Google Sitemaps Team):

I know there are a lot of articles on the web about different people’s ideas about this hypothetical sandbox, as well as lots of posts on places like webmasterworld. However, we don’t have a sandbox as people tend to think. It’s much more as you describe. There are many factors that go into ranking for competitive terms, and it just tends to take newer sites a while to build up those things (I talked about this a bit on my blog actually, in terms of how it ranks for various terms, since it’s so new).

Some things that can help a site rank well that tend to build up over time include -lots of valuable content for the desired terms and high quality links.

I would definitely 301 the old domain to the new domain. That will help transfer the links from the old to the new and will prevent and duplicate content issues (if we find two sites with the same content, we tend to show only one of the pages in the search results and the older page is likely to be the one we show since it likely will have more incoming links and higher PageRank).

So, for new sites, get a number of high-quality links and you can rank for competitive terms. Hmmm… I think I might move this future post forward: Channelling PR from Trusted Sites

You pay top-dollar for a high PR text-link-ad and within a week or so you see some benefit and feel happy.

However, if you could virtually clone that link multiple times, would you feel even happier?

This is something I’ll develop into a future post and plug-in. An easy way to get XSS exploits indexed via blog commenting and cloaking.

I created this little tool early last year when I was playing around with referral log spamming. I’ve modified it now to help get backlinks from blogs. Also, a short while ago I remember someone asking about such a tool on Jon’s affiliate forum.

So, here’s the tactic.

Find a blog in your niche who you’d like a link from. Write a favourable review of their blog or a post on their blog and include the relevant link. Post the review on your blog and use the tool below to spam the referral log of their blog. Then follow up with an email a few days later if you don’t get a backlink. This may sound complicated so I’ll explain the concept behind the tactic.

Imagine if you check your Webalizer stats and find you have hundreds of hits from some blogger who’s written a favourable review of your blog, would you be inclined to link back? I suspect in most cases the answer would be yes. So that’s the idea behind this tactic: write a favourable review and spam the referral log of the target blog, if they don’t link to you in a few days time, send them an email requesting a backlink.

Here’s the referral log spamming tool and the screenshot is below. It’s written in vb.net and I’ve included the executable and source code so you can have play with it. If you haven’t already got Visual Studio 2005, you can download it as a torrent.

Here’s a list of blackhat blogs in no particular order. If I’ve missed one or two (very likely) drop the URLs in a comment.

G-Man: http://www.lookwhatgmanfound.com/ 

Quadszilla: http://seoblackhat.com/

DaveN: http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/

The Blackhat: http://www.seo-blackhat.com/

Gotan: http://blackhatseodiary.org/

Beni: http://mybeni.rootzilla.de/mybeNi/

CDC: http://www.wagerank.com/

Irish Wonder: http://www.irishwonder.syndk8.co.uk/

Smaxor: http://www.oooff.com/

Eli: http://www.bluehatseo.com/

Countzero: http://www.blackhat-seo.com/

MORO: http://www.blackhatseoscripts.com

Levi: http://www.boogybonbon.com/

Esrun: http://www.onlinehoster.com/blog/

SEOIdiot: http://www.seoidiot.com/seoblog/

Busin3ss: http://busin3ss.name/

BHD: http://www.blackhatdomainer.com/

Earl: http://www.earlofgrey.com/blog/