Grayhat SEO

Will Google Author Accounts Become the Next Spam Tactic

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In the last few weeks, Google has announced its support of Google Author Profiles. While the rollout and acceptance has been limited, for those of us who have been around the block a few times, it’s easy to see that this will become the next big spam tactic like link exchanges, article directories, guest posts, [...]

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Who’s Afraid Of The Big Gray Wolf? 1 in 7 SEOs

I’ve been promoting my advanced SEO book‘s free chapter for a while now and, since virtually the beginning, I’ve seen a remarkable trend in my data. That trend is a roughly 14% unsubscribe rate. About 1 in 7 people who choose to get a free sample chapter go on to unsubscribe. Aweber email stats show [...]

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You’re All Wrong! Paid Links From Offtopic Sites Do Count

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“Paid links from off topic sites get devalued and flagged.” A common claim by otherwise savvy SEOs such as Ross Hudgens. Ross, would you take three links from the Wall Street Journal if its reporters write about internet marketing? Would you buy those links?

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Creating Better Auto-Generated Text

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Over the past two weeks we’ve taken a look at different aspects of copywriting, including aspects such as the value of good copy, outsourcing your content, and tools to make your content better. To round out the series I thought I’d touch on auto-generated content and how to make it better.

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Using Sponsored Blog Themes For Reputation Management

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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

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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

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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

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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. – [...]

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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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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 [...]

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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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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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The Paid Link Blog Meme

Since it’s been over 48 hours since the last what are your 5 favorite toothpaste flavors meme I think I’m safe to start a new one. However this one’s going to be a bit different.

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How to Be Crafty and Mask Affiliate Links

Fine since Matt started this whole thing on hiding links and how people do it in really silly ways like putting nonsense in the onMouseOver WindowStatus I thought why not have a little fun and throw out a nice tip on how to mask your affiliate links.

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How To Shoot Yourself in The Foot With Bad Plan and a Bad CMS Implementation

One of the biggest mistakes really large publishers make today is doing SEO like it’s 1999. They throw up hundreds, thousands, and sometimes millions of pages, with the belief that more is better. This has grown exponentially with web 2.0 and blogging apps and cross-tagging, listing and publishing content in multiple spots. Here’s an example [...]

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Dave Pasternack of Did-it.com Spamming MyBloglog

I got a tip that our friend Dave Pasternack has taken to spamming MyBloglog now. Pretty nice, one community is his own bio page at Did-it, the other is Did-it.com main site and the third is his CafePress shop. Which is particularly funny because they left out the Did-it.com actual blog, way to go for [...]

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