Watshit

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.

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.