Watshit

We hate spam, and there’s nothing worse than a contest that condones it. SEOs love to spam links almost anywhere they can, sometimes these links have no meaning, and mean nothing, the content they build around these links is also almost always useless. Nothing constructive can be picked out of most spam blog posts, but we’ve seen a changing trend, although a slight one, like this BlackHat Fish post by a Slovenian Designer who is part of an ongoing SEO contest.

His post took time, he designed something for the contest, not only that but provided his readers with something related to the contest he entered. Origami? It was still creative, and very useful. But in general, we all know that most BlackHat SEO contests, or any sort of contest run by or for SEOs is most usually going to result in an amazing amount of spam.

Contestants will look for blogs to comment on dropping their links when possible, they’ll find forums to spam too, add links on all their own sites and do almost anything to get that extra boost. To them it’s fun, it’s making some money, it’s winning a contest, to the www users, it’s spam, it’s sifting through junk to find what we want, it’s having to deal with all these spam comments on our blogs.

So are SEO contests useful, some can be if they all were expected to be creative link in this blackhat fish contest over at Shouting Zone. Remember, it’s the quality of the links and content around the links that matters most, not only the quantity. Don’t help make spam more of an issue than it already is.

What better site to start our ‘Website Review’ series of blog posts here at watshit.com. ShoutingZone.com is one of the fastest growing blackhat forums out there that discusses everything from blackhat seo tricks to marketing strategies to topics on how to improve your sites design.  Usually BlackHat Forums and sites in general get 2 thumbs down from us, but this community is unlike many we’ve come across online. It’s not about breaking all the rules, not about deceiving or hurting other people to get to the top, ShoutingZone is a BlackHat community that pushes webmasters and users to think outside the box, to be daring in trying new techniques that don’t necessarily break the rules set forth by Search Engines.

Shouting Zone is not only a community though, it’s way bigger than that. It’s an entire network of sites all funneled into one. It’s a blackhat blog, a directory and they have listed there very own Blackhat SEO Tools to ‘help’ webmasters optimize their sites, the right way! They have a nifty tool that enables people to search a huge list of sites for reciprocal linking, in hopes of finding link farms to stay away from and it’s also a way of giving value to a link you want to acquire.

Their blog, and forums discuss everything web related, from domain names, to design and online/offline marketing. They are by far the whitest of the blackhat forums we have come across in a long time, and truth be told, they are way better. They tell you it how it is, the truth, the whole truth and sometimes, a little more truth than you would care to hear.

We found a ton of great things about SZ, but like any site, they did have their down falls. Now this to many people could be considered a plus, to us, it’s only going to give them headaches in the future. The ’share your shit’ section, where people can shares software, templates and other web related things. Warez is what it looks like, even though they ask members to share their own material, we all know what that means, free for all. Now we do understand that none of the software is hosted on ShoutingZone.com’s servers, but it’s still risky.

All in all this is a very promising site, the design is simple and dark hatish, the logo a very unique one (asking one of their staff they explained the logo was a symbol of an apple, the world wide web, and the snake a worm, a dark evil worm, virus, some sort of thing eating away at the Internet - creative). It’s all valid coding which to us is a first, the forums are easy to navigate through, they are active and seem to have a handle on things. Doing a quick background check we’ve found no signs of spamming coming from Shouting Zone so it seems that they are ranking their site the old fashioned way, which for a BlackHat community is a miracle.

The use of BlackHat Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques is at an all-time high. More and more webmasters are practicing the dark arts of SEO. With Pay Per Click (PPC) being abused by blackhat SEOs, Pay Per Install (PPI) becoming more popular among BHers, and link dropping spreading like a plague, BlackHat SEO is very much alive and seems to be getting stronger. With every push from the Google spam team to stop these acts, more and more techniques come into play in an attempt to outsmart the Search Engines and the users.

Things like the Jessica Alba Sex Tape chain of fake sites trick users into clicking a download link, only to enter their email and make the site owners as much as $2 per lead. Sites like these get thousands of  unique hits a day. With BlackHats making this much money per site, it leads us to wonder what regular site and online business owners will do in the future. All that happens to these blackhats is they get de-ranked or banned from Google, but is that enough?

What’s stopping them from spreading on social networks and via email spam?

BlackHats, as we have mentioned before, really do come in many different shapes and sizes. Without knowing it, popular web figures arm blackhats with  potentially devastating knowledge. Do they care? Apparently not. ShoeMoney.com a popular SEO related website has in the past been a great aid for the Webmaster community. Then comes the post “How hackers areusing google to ‘pwn’ your site.” Sure, this is not a post telling people to go around and hack their competitors, but what it does, regardless of it’s intentions to spread awareness, is provide BlackHat SEOs/Hackers with another tool they may not have heard of or used. This, in our view, is a very irresponsible post and by showing off as many web figures do these days, Jeremy Schoemaker provided detailed links and the means for potentially troublesome individuals to use and take advantage of.

Not only has Jeremy Schoemaker been linked to a Cookie Stuffing scam executed by seofm.com as well as other related scams (including the ever so popular Fake Auction ads scam), but has, in the past, been accused of working for azoogle. All in all, what we’re trying to get at is BlackHat is a far greater issue than it is believed to be, even those who seem to denounce BlackHat ways seem to be involved some how.

Corruption is a way of life and there is no avoiding it, we just need to figure out a way to control it, and come up with effective measures that should be taken when it comes to penalizing these online criminals.

If you feel a user is exploiting Digg in some way, please report them by shooting Digg an email at abuse@digg.com.

It is a well known fact that social bookmarking networks have been an increasingly popular target for blackhatters, Digg is one of these networks being exploited time and time again.

The popular BlackHat blogger QuadsZilla had even blogged about DaveN’s blog on ‘messing with Digg’ . What this does is spark interest, and we’re not talking about the interest to get creative and constructive. A lot of people read these blog posts and think that if these guys are doing it, why shouldn’t they, which leads to the practice of going about getting Diggs the wrong way. The funny thing here is, you’re not only cheating Digg you’re cheating your loyal readers! By doing such acts, as creating a 301 redirect, you’re simple misleading your readers.

Now it seems that most of these sites have not read the obvious TOS;

with the intention of artificially inflating or altering the ‘digg count’, blog count, comments, or any other Digg service, including by way of creating separate user accounts for the purpose of artificially altering Digg’s services; giving or receiving money or other remuneration in exchange for votes; or participating in any other organized effort that in any way artificially alters the results of Digg’s services; - Digg

It has come to our attention that many users have opted to doing things the BlackHat way. They have gone and used a proxy server to register many, many times (In some cases as many as 150 times) and then go on to Digg’ing their own articles and such. Most are not smart enough to Digg other articles too and not log in and out of accounts using these fixed IP addresses while just Digg’ing their one article. Some do this over a certain period of time, and add friends using these different accounts so as to blend in nicely. Which in truth is simply deceiving. We would post a list of such user names involved in such acts but we’ll leave it to Digg to sort this issue out.

Another popular tactic that is being abused more and more is the Digg mine I’ll Digg yours communities popping up all over the place. Popular places such as Blog Catalog and the likes have communities up where people post each others articles to be Dugg by other members in return for an exchange of Digg requests.

We believe Digg.com provides us with a really useful service, whereby users go to read popular articles, well written ones and even interesting ones. By cheating your Digg count users are simply fooling us to read rubbish, pushing up their articles to the front page in order to get read is ridiculous and more should be done to stop them. Some of these users who practice such acts do so to sell a product, advertise a service, some just do it because they know how, if you suspect someone of tampering with their post count or asking to be part of a Digg exchange program for the sake of ranking higher, please report them today to abuse@digg.com

For years people have been trying to rank their businesses high up in the search engines in hopes of widening their potential client base and gaining more exposure. Somewhere along the lines, early on that is, people started to give up with original content, related link building and quality blog posts as well as real unique articles and so forth, basically all that used to help in ranking sites for certain keywords. SEO became hot and with anything hot like that, it started to get abused.

With what first started out as fixing headers, site titles, targeting certain keywords in anchor text, optimizing a page and it’s navigation to push up a site in the Search Engines, turned into a keyword stuffing, web page cloaking spam fest. The practice of Search Engine Optimization took a 90 degree turn and headed into the realm of no return, the realm that we now call Black Hat SEO. With more and more webmasters and business owners realizing that Black Hat SEO worked better with a faster response time when it came to ranking, it spread like a plague.

So what about all those companies claiming to be able to handle YOUR SEO work for you, and they claim to do this the WhiteHat way, the old fashioned legal way, how can you be sure these companies wont cause you heart ache in the long run and get your site or business banned from ranking in any Search Engine?

Below is a list of common and not so common Black Hat Techniques.

• First, and one of the best known BlackHat Techniques a BH SEO uses, is Spam, and lots of it. Here’s an example, WideCircles. Now these guys are not even original, barely note worthy,  scavenging the internet registering on Black Hat forums, BH networks even on Web Master communities to spam their site and claim to be the best in the world. They claim to be an SEO company that can do wonders for you and also go on to claim they will rank your site high up in the search engines for almost any keyword you want. With sites outranking them for almost every keyword known to man, even their own domain name keyword ‘Wide Circles’ these crooks, these scam artists, these fake SEOs prove only one thing, that even when it comes to spam, they fail…miserably.

• Which brings us to the second technique used by these SEOs, duplicate content. It’s easily caught by Search Engines these days but surprisingly it’s still widely used. WideCircles for example spam forums with the same phrase in hopes of ranking for a combination f the same keywords they stuff into this phrase.

• Now duplicate content is not only posts, it’s blogs, articles and even multiple sites. Some submit the same keyword stuffed articles to hundreds and hundreds of article sites in hopes of not only ranking for such keywords and key phrases but also scoring extra backlinks. This does not help, these backlinks are devalued due to the nature of the duplicate article. Best submit it to one or two strong article sites and write new articles with unique content!

• Beware of domains  registered through a proxy domain server as this usually means the site owners are hiding and don’t want to be found. Only logical reason is they plan to pull a scam then drop the name and run.

• Backlinks, these days BH SEOs will do anything for extra backlinks, they will just about go to any length to add keyword rich anchor text links that will help them. Some look for exploits on .edu related sites, some even hunt .gov sites because they know, a backlink from either one will help them. These blackhats make simple searches using google to find exploits in blogging scripts used by these .edu and .gov sites.

Link selling is now pretty much against SE regulations and rules, but new Black Hat Techniques are still found and used that outsmart Search Engines, and even manual inspections, one such technique that is being used more and more is the fake adsense.

Passing off a link as if it were part of an adsense box, when in truth it was simply a paid link posting with not only anchor text but a little description to make it that more valuable.

• Cookie stuffing is something BlackHaters do to get referral fee’s and commission for users they did not really refer. How they do this is simple, they load the site on a page they lure the user on, with several different hidden frames that contain the said referral web pages, this stores the affiliate cookie in the users browser and if they end up buyng things from those said affiliates, the Black Hat will get the commission. It’s pretty much day light robbery. To help you spot this iframe, some black hats slip up and don’t cover their tracks well, this leaves a mark such as the one circled bellow, that is a mini window with the referral url loaded in it!!!

There are hundreds, possibly thousands other Black Hat Techniques being used as we speak, the important thing is not to fall victim for any of them. Please, whenever you do business with an online company of any sort, check their contact page and make sure their is a real address there, check their #’s and if they are providing a service that requires some sort of license then check with the proper authorities to make sure they are actually registered. Never fall for an online scammer who is too afraid to give his/her/their contact details. They expect you to trust them enough to pay, you should accept nothing less than a phone number to confirm they are real or who they say they are.