Blackhat SEO: For all the bad ideas I have…

Collective Thoughts has an interesting list of the Top 12 Resons to Distrust Google, which include gems like:

• Google earns huge money off splogs (Spam blogs) and MFA (made for Adsense) sites with no real content
• Google is literally a black box company and accountable to nobody, we simply don’t know how exactly they manage our most precious asset: the knowledge of humanity
• Google discontinues services like Google Answers or the Google API without prior notice to it’s employees who are then laid off

I don’t know if believe that last one–I was under the impression that after hiring the smartest people in the country, Google wouldn’t be stupid enough to fire them?

Check out this email from Twitter:

We’ve received a request regarding the release of a trademarked username. It has come to our attention that your Twitter account http://twitter.com/timbaland is in violation of our basic Terms of service, specifically article 4 which mentions impersonation:

1. You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users.

In this case “impersonation” is the issue. Impersonation is against our terms unless it’s parody. The standard for defining parody is, “Would a reasonable person be aware that it’s a joke. To settle this issue we have changed the username to timbaland1 to eliminate confusion. You can change your user name:

1. Visit Twitter.com/settings
2. Edit the Full Name and Username fields
3. Click “Save”

Sorry about that! If you’d like a t-shirt, send us your address and size and we’ll send one right out.

The upside is that I get a T-shirt out of it. However, it was an account I created for parody–the entries were something like “OMG I’m ripping off Scott Storch’s beatz yo!!!!”

Update: This was in their latest press email:

Sure, Timbaland and his MTV pals Twitter by txt but you don’t have to be a rock star to send and receive Twitter updates on the fly.

Twitter sold me out for an MTV partnership.  Well, I’d do it too.

Benjamin Flesch points out seven Wordpress XSS exploits that could be used partially or en totalis to create a 0day Wordpress worm that could:

1. Spread automatically around the blogosphere
2. Inject a payload into Wordpress

In the blackhat world, the best target would be to find a Wordpress.com XSS exploit. Then you could easily write a script looking for high-PR blogs and inject a hidden link for yourself, probably without too many people noticing. If you were careful and acted slowly you’d have the most powerful Web 2.0 botnet before anyone noticed!

#2 has been shown to be easy.  However, none of the exploits seem to offer #1, that is the spread of a true worm.  The author’s worm cannot spread unless you follow a complicated self-commenting procedure.  So for now at least, there will be no Wordpress 0day firestorm.

Google has a new way to show Adsense, in different kinds of rounded boxes now.  Presumably, this is to help their advertisements blend better with the newer style of Web 2.0 sites we’re seeing more of of.  There are three levels of rounding available, but the text is poorly layed out inside the ad block:

See how it mashes into the right edge and almost runs off the left?  A little padding can set this frame right:

This could significantly improve your CTR, but Google will have to fix it on their end, as it’s against the TOS for us to do it

I got this somewhat amusing email from Auction Ads:

We have noticed that your AuctionAds account is sending an extremely large number of dynamic keyword requests.  While it may seem like that method would provide the best experience for your users, and the best conversion, that is not the case.  Dynamic keywords put a strain on eBay, AuctionAds, and most importantly do not display those ads anyway because of the caching delay.

Please remove instances of dynamic keywords.  One method publishers have used is to create an array of common keyword searches on your site.  If a user enters a common term, that can be sent to AuctionAds.  Other, random keywords should default to a common popular item.   As a result of the strain on our network, further violations will result in your account being banned from the AuctionAds network.

We appreciate you as a publisher and hope you will see to fixing this issue.

Apparently they’re having some growth issues, and are sending this out to try and decrease load.  Something tells me their big publishers, regardless of usage, didn’t get this in their inboxen.

As you know, Twitter pushes pagerank.  So, I’ve linked myself from Twitter to this blog.  A good trick would be to register a number of users, or pay users, to link to your blog.  Just like every other social network, people are going to start paying for links on Twitter…

What a shame that we can’t leave these beautiful apps alone.

Do you believe that there’s a Google “-950 positions” over-optimization penalty?  If you don’t, here is the proof:

That’s right, over the course of a day one of my sites dropped by about 90% of its traffic.  How did I correct this?  Well, I was using a plugin which generated a list of terms.  If you came to this post, it would look something like:

• Google Penalty
• Overoptimization penalty
• SEO -950 google

You get the idea–sequential, similar terms.  It’s not just the terms density that triggers this penalty, but their relative locations to each other, and the relative density of phrases on the page.  Google wants things to be nicely spaced out, so I changed this to a tag cloud view:

• google penalty seo -950 optimization

Within a day, the penalty was removed and traffic was restored.  Be careful when putting out tag clouds, or other clumps of similar branding or keyword content in your pages or you might fall afoul of a Google filter.

Google’s relatively new Hot Trends of the Day features all the keywords you need to create your own highly optimized made for adsense (MFA) page:

The algorithm for exploiting Google Trends is simple:

• Scrape their hot-trends page in as many languages as you like
• Query technorati for that language and term and get stories
• Post some excerpts on an optimized MFA page

You could probably be making money instantly from organic serp results. If you were slightly cleverer, you could rewrite the sources full text into your own post dynamically using markov chain analysis based on the sources, and using standard english di/trigram frequencies to fill in any missing bits.

Since this is what people are looking for, this is what your pages should be on.