SEO.. Blackhat?
I enjoy developing software, little tools to solve problems that I have. For example - I created a little tool to read Bid Buddy (now the rebranded Tradedoubler Searchware 4) bulk URL outputs and work through each URL and search for 404 responses in the server returned http header. If anyone is particularly interested in this, i’ll happily e-mail it out.
A screenshot of Social Spam Buddy’s interface
One of my more interesting projects was a tool I developed at my former search agency. Essentially this tool was designed to spam social bookmarking sites with client bookmarks under several hundred accounts. I believe there are commercial solutions out there, but an in-house solution is always the best option if the time scale for development is small (the tool took about 15 hours of total production, minus documentation).
10 bookmarks * 10 bookmarking sites * 100 accounts = 10,000 back links.
(at a post rate of about 2-3 per second single threaded)
This turned out to be highly successful for Yahoo and MSN, but had a negligable effect upon google rankings. I’m not entirely certain on the results though, I just coded it and sent it to the optimization monkey’s. The back link figures are particularly impressive really, however, social bookmarking sites are an obvious target for spammers due to their very nature - they are essentially just huge link farms. Additionally, the api’s that several of the sites have (delicious, furl, spurl etc) make them ideal targets for software such as mine.
I made several interesting additions to this software in my own time, that I chose to never push live or allow into the public domain.
The first was the introduction of TOR ip masking. Although slightly fiddly - you had to install the TOR software, and then my software would interact with it via telnet, it worked - albeit significantly slower. I never pushed this build live for two reasons;
- Ethically, I find the use of the onion router for commercial gain and spamming to be extremely distasteful. I think that project is extremely important for the more repressed regions of the world.
- I always hated spam, it would have made it far too successful and realistically difficult to track.
The second was revolving and auto changing text, to hide the visibility of the spam. For example; anchor text would stay the same, the url would remain the same but the text of the description would be modified slightly in order to hide from spam detection. Combined with IP masking, this was simply far too powerful in terms of evading detection. I doubted the spam would ever be found realistically when combined with the final addition to the software.
The final unpublished option was the simple spam management option, this would post the bookmarks at random times to random accounts throughout the day (or any arbitrary timeframe that you desired). Coupled with the previous options this just made the spam far too successful.
Essentially, prior to my involvement the company had a large team of people spamming these links manually throughout the day. Now - realistically, is this project blackhat? Most would say yes, although during my work on the software I didn’t stop to consider the implications of my work. Had it been more appreciated, would I have given out the completed solution? Possibly. I do believe that action such as this signals the death of the social bookmarking websites that don’t adapt to fight spam. They are basically dinosaurs now, and this is reflected in the google ranking of the links themselves - regardless of sites such as delicious having an excellent pagerank.
Yahoo does, however, remain important regardless of the rejection by Google. As delicious (incidentally, one of the easiest bookmarking sites to spam) is more and more integrated into the Yahoo search platform, will the backlinks that are created in this online solution become more valid within the engine? Only time will tell - currently they purport that they have relatively no value, but I find this hard to believe in an industry where successful assimilation of multiple platforms (read: google and its many wings) is the situation that is aspired to.
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