Watshit

With readers like ShoeMoney, Marcus of seofm, Matt Cutts himself and even Mike of Urban75, people have come to realize, that even though we’re not the most active blog on the net, we really mean what we post, and we don’t just post about anything. As much as we respect our readers, we respect the regular webmasters trying to nab a slice of the web hype any way they can, and we respect people who do it the hard and old fashioned way even more.

JUNE, a JavaScript Framework developed by Costin, member of the SZ group is a great example. Going the extra length to provide users with a free platform, a free source as amazing as JUNE. We have looked at it and the doc and we’re pretty impressed by this one man effort, so much so we’re letting all our dedicated readers know about it. For all the webmasters and web developers out there, seriously, just go take a look at JUNE, then decide if it’s worth downloading, and after you’ve tried it and become a JUNE addict, come and thank us, we’ll except money and gifts too!!

We really do think it’s a better way to code JavaScript, it’s simpler, more efficient and more flexible. JUNE let’s you be in control! It’s really just that beautiful. Don’t let the rough edges deter you, JUNE lets you include only the libraries you need, customize it all the way you want, it supports Visual Studio 2008 IntelliSense and it uses Object Literal Notation, to top that off only one namespace is used across the entire JUNE framework!

JUNE is the Swiss knife JS Framework you have been looking for!

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.

We have received numerous complaints in the past about services and directories forcing users to place banners or links on their sites to be considered for a particular service. Directories claim you have a ‘higher’ chance of being listed if you place a banner on your site pointing to them. some state that’s the only requirement, you get listed for free if you link back to them.

Even though Google heavily relies on links to determine the ranking of web pages, they have cranked up the tempo on link exchange schemes and are penalizing site owners for being part of such activities (the extreme). Which raises a red flag on the penalty directories were slapped with not long ago for the paid link submission issue. Could this be another snowball in motion slowly gaining momentum only to slam directories once again?

Most directories online today require users to link back to them in order to be eligible for inclusion in their listings. Could this be a loophole to link exchange schemes that Google will bust soon?

designer.am is one of the many directories we have received complaints about. They are accused of forcing designers to link back to their site in order to be considered for inclusion. Several users sent us emails sent to them by designer.am which contain the following;

…However, we encourage you to try registering in our directory again, after you upgrade your web site and/or post our link or banner on your web site. The web site suggested will have more chances to be accepted and added to the Directory, especially if our link or banner is posted on your web site\’s Home Page…. - designer.am (Design Directory)

Should this be considered as a technique that’s trying to bypass Google’s rules, is this yet another link exchange scheme technique, or should it be accepted? Is it not reciprocal linking? Can submitting to hundreds of directories potentially ruin your sites reputation and rankings if Google takes actions against these directories? We would list most of these directories, but I’m sure we all know about them anyway. I think it’s time these directories cleaned up their act and get on the honest business band wagon already!