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!

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.

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 emails consisted of email snippets and screenshots, detailing conversations between clients (4 in total emailed us this week) and KimHuges.com (we wont disclose email address, screenshots, or private info until we have heard from Kim Huges on this matter.)

After the clients consulted with kimhughes.com about Branding and Marketing packages, one also asked about Blog marketing/design/installation, these clients were presented with a quote, for the fees. As per the emails received, that will go on record if need be, The clients were all asked to pay 30% of the sum to start off with, which they all did as they felt comfortable dealing with this online real estate virtual assistant! Suprise suprise, after that, their emails were ignored, calls ignored also and when someone did answer, they were informed that ‘Kim’ would get back to them, and to leave a message?? Come on people…are you serious? They would inform the clients that it would take time for their orders to be processed (right, how that is possible we don’t know) - only to wait several days with no reply.

This is not good news for the Online Real Estate Virtual Assistant community, because up until now they have held a clean record as being honest hard working individuals/companies. Never have we heard of such complaint.

We hope Kim finds the time to email us or comment back in a reply to these 4 individuals, who’s personal information we are only willing to disclose with Kim herself for clarification reasons.

A sad day on the web, to know that Scam’s happen in all fields online, not just the well known ones. Here I was thinking of hiring an online real estate agent next month.

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!

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.

Now normally we would not have bothered with this as the evidence is not at all outstanding, and we focus more on enlightening the general web public and warning them of mass scale scams and pointing out BlackHat Tactics to watch out for. However further inspections by Jason himself lead us to focus on the issue at hand and as we delved into it moren things started to unravel and a nice evil little plot revealed itself.

Usually when you hear someone cry out SCAM online, people scatter in all directions away from the so called ’scammers’. After receiving an email from the so called victim, in which this person contradicted himself several times mind you, we were forced to use them as an example. Contacting CSSAGlobal only proved Jason right, the Scammer in this case, was the said victim himself. This happens, and it’s not uncommon for the victim to win such cases by claiming a scam has befallen them. The scammer (unhappy client) emailed CSSAGlobal representatives threatening that this defamatory crusade would continue and he would go on to calling them scammers till the end of time, if a refund was not issued, this of course was well after the so called ‘victim’ went public with false accusations.

… our stand has been fairly justified and despite a thorough grudge and unrealistic approach shown towards us - with racist comments and unjustified demands, we have not bowed down to threats - Mandar (original quote)

This is to simply show people, that it’s not only companies that turn bad, unhappy or unsatisfied clients can turn into scammers too. This individual tried to soil the reputation of a company that would not cave in to ridiculous demands, in return CSSAGlobal by simply standing their ground and denying all allegations made against them proved these scammers wrong.

This should be an example to all those scammers who believe that by threatening to defame a company online one will get what they’re after. It’s not so, innocent people don’t plead guilty because they’re afraid of a little name calling, innocent people stand tall and prove their accuser wrong!

Customer service and customer satisfaction is a big thing for us, we definitely do our lot - Mandar (original quote)

CSSAGlobal have handled this issue the way professionals would, thumbs up to them! - Jason (watshit.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

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.

[iframe src=”http:///refer_f1ac5f82a479affb2274″ name=”Auctionads” frameborder=”0px” height=”1″ scrolling=”no” width=”1″][/iframe]

The practice of cookie stuffing is as blackhat as you can get, and it’s illegal. SEOFM.com once called those that practice Black Hat SEO techniques Scum, what do we call them? Nothing, we just call them out on their illegal activities, and ask you to stay away from their site. The cookie stuffing attempts have been forwarded to Auctionads, hopefully they’ll do something bout it.