From the category archives:

Grayhat SEO

Using Sponsored Blog Themes For Reputation Management

This is the second time I’ve encountered this technique in the past few months so I thought I’d spend some time explaing what it is, what to watch out for, and how it could be problematic for you.

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How to Invalidate Wikipedia Articles

Recently Google announced they are experimenting with including Wikipedia in Google News. Personally I’m not a fan of Wikipedia, so I think this is the perfect opportunity to share some tactics on how to make Wikipedia a whole lot more fun.

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How to Practice Kamikaze SEO

One of the key aspects of any SEO strategy is knowing the risks of the tactics you use. As those tactics approach or break Google’s guidelines the more likely they to get you penalized or banned. Knowing where you are on the risk scale helps you know when it is imperative that you take precautions [...]

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Did Matt Cutts Expose a Hole in Digg

Last week Matt Cutts made a post about how to connect your Linux computer to a Wii balance board using Bluetooth. This post happened to make the Digg homepage, however what was really interesting is the way he did it, which has exposed an exploitable hole in Digg.

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Link Payola in the A-List Blog World

Added: The following comment is from Guy Kawasaki about this incident, I moved them to the top since it is relevant to the issue – mg
I was given the camera because I am doing a big favor for a photo conference. Arguably, the camera cost me $15,000. I didn’t have to review it. – Guy [...]

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Hey Match.com Trying to Hide Some Text Below the Fold

Look at this screenshot, looks an awful lot like match.com is trying to put a lot of text down below the fold …
If you don’t believe me try coming up with a reasonable explanation for putting the H1 tag “ONLINE DATING AT MATCH.COM” below the “Copyright 2008″ …

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Hey Network Solutions Sniffing Domain Searches By Chance …

People have been making accusations that domain companies have been sniffing customers searches for quite some time now. No one has any hard conclusive proof, but you have to admit it’s hard to make a case why network solutions might have registered this one, check out the whois
http://www.youguysseriouslyregistereverythingisearch.com/

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Google Knols and Opportunity

Since I spent the early part of the week discussing how Google Knols will ruin the internet, I thought it might also be fun to discuss potential ways you can use it to your advantage.

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Duplicate Copy in Action

Think Google is a good as they would have you believe they are about detecting duplicate copy, then take a look here [fireproof safe with power]. Since result two links to result one I’d say result two is probably the original and Google got it wrong.
In this case the comments probably played a big role [...]

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Netscape and the Voting Bots

Ok listen Netscape it’s embarrasing now. really you guys need step up to the plate and fix this. Looking at the state of things there are more vote bots than regular people casting votes. It’s so painfully obvious it’s not even amusing anymore. Either throw in the towel and pull the plug or fix it [...]

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Best practices with Voting Bots

Sometimes I see things that make me shake my head and wonder who’s at the wheel. If you’re running an automated voting bot, you want to use it just enough to nudge your story onto the homepage. Keeping it running after that is dangerous and just plain stupid. Letting it run to the point where [...]

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Let’s try some Wiki Jacking

Let’s try some wiki-jacking
Matt Cutts
Marissa Mayer
Eric Schmidt
I’ve got the wiki-nofollow plugin, so I won’t be passing any link juice, but I’m sure some of the people who scrape me aren’t using the plugin. Of course feel free to contribute in a similar fashion to see what happens. Why be jerk and do something like this, [...]

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Cloaking Your Hummer

While I’m generally not in the habit of outting websites who are bending or breaking the rules, when you reach the level of BMW or even Hummer the gloves are off, and you’re fair game …

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A Good Accountant or a Blackhat Spammer SEO

So here’s a question for the Jason Calacanis’s and Robert Scoble’s of the world. Why is an accountant who knows the regulation and codes and takes advantage of tax loopholes that save you thousands of dollars each year good, But SEO’s who take advantages of loopholes and flaws in Google’s algorithm to bring you traffic [...]

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Wiki Jacking

Rand’s got an interesting video up about wiki-jacking watch it and then read my commentary

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Article Syndications Sites

Who’s using or has used article syndication sites heavily in the past? Seen any changes in your rankings lately? Are you using Webmaster Central, do sites who’ve syndicated your content show in your backlinks? Try popping some of those URL’s into Google to see if they are in the index, what do you see? Share [...]

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Mahalo Spam Free and GoDaddy.com

Wow I’ve got to say that the Go Daddy stuffed Advertisement Domains by proxy page really shows how great a human edited search engine is and how it isn’t subject to being abused by internal favoritism at all …

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Mahalo Blog Gives Links to People it Thinks Are Spammers

So over on the Mahalo Blog they give a nice example of how sites get included, who stays on the waiting list, and who gets banned.
The priceless part is the person who’s site they say doesn’t meet their editorial standards actually gets a free straight link! Jason c’mon you need to think these things through [...]

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EBay Subdomain Spammers

At SMX someone from EBay had the nerve to say they weren’t subdomain spamming, sorry I beg to differ, while looking for a white desk with a return [white desk return] I came up with one indented ebay listing followed by two additional listings, cruise to page two the non spamming continues with two more [...]

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Tip for the Keyword & Link Footer Stuffers

If you’re going to stuff your footer with #EEFFFF (very light gray) colored text on #FFFFFF (white) background, you probably should go through the trouble of camouflaging the links as well. If you don’t it just looks like a bunch of random blue underlines floating in blank-ish white space.
Not that I’m advocating stuffing your footer [...]

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