Blue Hat SEO-Advanced SEO Tactics

If you find portions of my writing style on this blog hard to understand, overly complicated, different then my writing style elsewhere or just generally outside the realm of normal blogging; It’s not because I’m trying to hide something, trick you, cover up a lack of experience, or prevent you from learning the technique. In fact I’m not blogging at all. I’m writing pseudocode.

Thanks for understanding,
-Fishy Eli

I got a great question on my SEO Empire post from Ryan at NetSEO. I figured it was worth addressing in a post rather than leaving a really long comment.

Eli,
Can you be so kind and explain why this is:

“Primary domains can pass a penalty to subdomains. Subdomains can’t pass a penalty to a main domain unless the main domain holds a relation to the subdomain (ie. a link).”

Happy to answer Ryan

Anytime I make a statement like that I am usually making a reference to an exemption to the general This-Is-My-Site -> This-Is-Google -> This-Is-The-Value stream of things. Sometimes I’m a bit presumptuous in assuming readers caught the reference. In this instance I’m talking about the exception given to protect free hosts from penalties, particularly those who give their users subdomains such as Hypermart, Xoom, Wordpress.com, Blogger, Tripod etc. This exemption can’t only cover the popular free hosts otherwise no new freehosts would ever stand a chance. As soon as they got a single spammy user their whole site could get banned and poof goes their legit business. Likewise algorithmically it can’t cover all free hosts because then the biggens like Wordpress.com and Typepad would all be penalized. On a foresight this would also include profile based social sites such as Myspace and outbound linking social sites such as Delicious. Anyone remember when Geocities sites used to rank so well. Yet at the same time with a lot of splog platforms out there manual reviews would be a nightmare and unfeasible. So there is a line drawn. That line has to consist of some sort of relationship between the primary domain and the subdomain of a site that’ll evaluate if the “subsite” belongs to the main site or if it’s a separate entity. By way of algorithms that relationship is very tough to determine. In fact it’s damn near impossible to do with 100% accuracy. Unfortunately for them, they have the burden of relying on internal linking relationships between the two which would include the above statement as well as other protective factors that would encompass other exceptions such as nonstatic links (like Furl & Delicious would use).

This area of unsureness gives us SEO peeps room to do things such as create splogs and do subdomain spam. As long as we know what they’re looking for (the antispam teams) we know what not to provide. Most sites that contain ownership of their subdomains link from their mainpage down to the subpages to the subdomains and so on and so forth. So when in doubt do the opposite. It’ll provide less of a chance for a relationship between the maindomain and subdomain to be found and if you’re worried about linkjuice get it from other sources via deeplinks.

Guess what I’m in the mood to talk about? You guessed it. Captchas! In fact I feel like dedicating a whole week, maybe more depending on if any downtime occurs. to talking about nothing but captcha breaking. We’ll break every captcha in the book and even by the end of this post the captchas that haven’t been created yet. Furthermore, for this week only I am accepting any and all captcha related guest posts. So if you got a captcha solved or want to discuss techniques to breaking them feel free to write up a guest post and email it to ELI at BLUEHATSEO.COM in html form. You can stay anonymous and not only will I put it up but I’m also willing to put up any ad you’d like. Pick any text or banner ad you’d like to put up with your post and I’ll include it. With as many readers as this place has I’m sure it’ll get clicked. Also be sure to include your paypal address. If I really like your guest post I may even send you a $100 as a thank you. Also, all you bloggers are welcome to repost any of the captcha related posts on this blog. I now declare any captcha related posts on this blog public domain and republishable under full rights. For some odd reason I feel like blowing the captcha breaking industry the fuck up. Like my favorite saying goes, if you’re going to wreck a room you might as well WRECK it. Lets begin by visiting one of my first captcha related posts; the Army Of Captcha Typers.

The Army of Captcha Typers is a great technique because it doesn’t require loads of programming and is 100% adaptable to any captcha. I suggest you go back and reread it, but in interest of keeping this short here’s a quick summary.

You use a service, I used a proxy site as an example, to get the users to type in the captchas for you. It records what the user typed in as the solution to the captcha and you use that to solve it. The more pageviews the service provides per user the more effective it is to breaking captchas. Why pay Indians or tediously code it yourself?

Normally I like to leave most of the code and creative portion out of the written technique in interest of not ruining the technique and to help the methods be more effective through use of spins and unique code. I don’t write this blog to ruin techniques, and those people who claim I do are just insecure and like to claim they already know everything. As common sense as most of the stuff I post is, I haven’t met a person yet who hasn’t in some way learned something from this blog. That truth brags a lot louder than most SEO blogs I’ve seen. But! If we’re going to wreck something lets wreck it. In that spirit I see no reason why every newbie on the planet shouldn’t be able to easily throw up their own web proxy site that solves captchas for them so here’s the script to do it.

Captcha Solving Web Proxy

This a modified version of CGIPROXY that I mentioned in the post. Basically you install it following the included instructions (README file). Then you setup your web proxy site. Target a niche such as kids behind a school proxy or something similar. There is an extra file included called captcha.cgi. Upload it to the cgi-bin in the same folder as the nph-proxy.cgi and give it 755 chmod permissions. Make a folder one directory below your cgi-bin called captchas. Give it read/write permissions (777 should work all else fails). Then anytime you got a captcha to solve upload it to that directory with a unique filename. This can be done automatically with whatever script you’re using to spam a captcha protected site. On the very next pageview the webproxy will require the person to type in the captcha and disguise it as a human check to prevent abuse. Any captcha works. Once it gets their response it’ll delete the captcha from the folder and write out the solution along with the filename to a new file called solved.txt. Format: characters|image.jpg\n . Remember to make some kind of reminder or code for the filename so you know which image is which when you go to use the solutions. Get enough users to your webproxy (which is very easy) and you can solve any captcha in moments.

Enjoy!

Roady also wishes everyone a happy holidays.

This question just in from Till

Hi Eli,

is an old domain just worth if it has quite a lot backlinks or is an old domain also worth if it’s just in the index of search engines, but has almost no backlinks (0-20).

Regards

Till

Great question. It captured my attention because theres always a lot of talk in the SQUIRT forum about expired domains. Several members of the community are talking about how they’re building their SEO Empires with snagged expired domains. I kind of cringe when I hear that not because expired domains are bad, but because I personally have no idea about the history of the domain. Frankly it could sway either way. The practice of using expired domains could be good or bad. The problem I have with it is the unpredictability, which I’ll get to in a moment. For now I assume the people know what they’re doing when they buy the domain and are making wise decisions. Much like buying a used car always do your research and find out the background of what you’re buying. The inherent problem is, the odds are stacked against you. If it was a good domain with value someone would of kept it. Yet, mistakes are made and there are some definite gems out there and if you aren’t on the field you can’t score. So while I think buying up expired domains for SEO reasons is a good thing if you know what you’re doing I am hypocritical in the fact that I don’t do it myself. The main reason is due to a question I have myself.

This question just in from Eli

Hi handsome!
About 8 months ago I had several domains expire on me and never managed to pull them out. They were good domains with links, never banned or penalized and were part of several different projects. I reregistered them quickly and managed to get them back. I had no real purpose for them so I added them to a common platform site network I was working on with several other new domains. All the sites had the same structure and went through the same promotion, but for some reason the expired domains took nearly 3 weeks longer to get indexed than the brand new domains. 8 months later they still seem to perform about the same as the other sites, but I’m curious with all their previous backlinks and such why did those exact domains take longer than the others to get reindexed. Any ideas of why that was?

I still don’t know. I don’t have the attention span long enough to buy some control domains and wait a year to expire them out and hope I manage to get them back in order to do any tests and figure it out. Anyone else experienced this by chance?

Either way I see buying expired domains for SEO reasons as having the following benefits.
1. Established inbound links
2. Aged inbound links

Other than that your still starting from scratch. So my philosophy is, unless the domain is a gem, such as either a good name or it having phenomenal unique backlinks (ie lots of links or saturation like you mentioned) than its easier and more predictable to just work with new domains. Not to mention it saves a bit of headaches and time, and even sometimes money. Which brings me back to the predictability thing. I sometimes get questions from people about a particular basement or foundation site that was an expired domain like it suddenly dropped in ranking, or it got banned, or it lost a bunch of pages in the index. Anything out of the ordinary.

BTW I’d like to take this moment to remind everyone that in case you never noticed, every year right before Christmas sites tend to drop in saturation levels in Google. Its probably due to the upcoming updates that usually happen in January, I don’t know. Either way it seems to happen every year near the beginning of December.

So in cases like this you can look at stuff and maybe find a problem, or you can just write it off as the search engines being weird, but when your dealing with a new site on an previous registered domain you get that extra variable. Is the problem caused by a problem with the site, search engines being weird, or the history of the domain causing problems? It makes the job of diagnosing problems and learning from mistakes that much harder. For me personally, I’m still going to be doing this in 5 years so theres no point in forcing unneeded shortcuts on myself. All my domains will eventually become old, all my domains will eventually get link age. I just let time do its thing and in the mean time work on new exciting projects. <- its a good life

Which nearly answers the question about old domains. Old domains aren't something I think people should stress about. Every single site I build, while I'm building it, I'm wishing the domain was old. Hell when I'm buying the domains I wish they were old. Yet in a year none of it matters and nothing has changed. I'll still be wishing the domains I am buying now were older like the domains I bought last year and the year before that. It's like playing Sim City, it doesn't matter if you have it on fast mode or slow the strategy is still the same. Because the beautiful thing about age factors are, they are done for you

PS. Please read my Follow up post to SEO Empire if you haven’t already. It talks a lot about shortcuts and how to speed up the process of rankings, which I think is where time is best spent. The more experience you have with that the less you have to worry about domain age.

Well I’ve been working extremely hard this coming Christmas season. Got several personal big launches coming out as well as loads of other fun business. I’ve been writing nearly every day on SEO Empire Part 2. I also got several large followup posts in draft. It occured me though, as if I couldn’t with the flood of emails, that I haven’t updated in a month. So I thought it would be fun to throw out a few short and to the point posts before I dig down into my presents and finish up this bitch of a season.

So lets take on a few open questions. A public dialog between yourself and I and the other readers. I know theres lots of great SEO and marketing questions out there and frankly I can talk about it all day. Fire off any questions you got in the comments and for the next week I’ll be answering as many as I have time for.

Have fun and happy holidays!

This is a little technique I call The Next Day. April Fools day is such a badass holiday, hell its right up there with Fourth of July when you get to spend all day blowing shit up and boobie trapping everything with flammable fireworks. The only problem with April Fools is that everyone is expecting it. So you got to pull all your good jokes the NEXT day when people are more likely to fall for them. Muhahaha. Com’n this is a thinking outside of the box site right? What did you expect?
So for those of you who called Charlie’s Gay Bar hoping to get in on me and Jon’s podcast, much appreciated! Bonus points if you followed through and made “heavy breathing noises.” Haha. Kudos.
For those of you who are now faced with the dilemma of having to face your wives after they find the phone bill and realize you made a long distance call to a gay bar. Don’t worry I got your back! I wrote this quick utility that will automatically write and print an apology letter for you to use in your defense. So when she’s yelling and screaming and trying to take legal custody of the kids just fill out this quick form, print it off and hand it to her. Everything will be “hunky dory”

I do it cus I luv ya,
-Eli

Thought I might share a neat Awstats hack of mine that I use to read my referer data better. This simple hack/addon is nothing more than a bit of regex. It takes your search traffic data and puts it into separate Yahoo, MSN, and Google tables. It also grabs your traffic from Digg.com and puts them into a nice table organized by referring page.

ScreenShot (Click To Enlarge)

Installation
All you got to do is append the code below into your sites’ conf file. Your conf file on a standard Cpanel setup is usually located in the /tmp/awstats/awstats.mydomain.conf folder below your root in the ftp. Place the code at the bottom, save, and reupload. Be sure to make a backup of your previous conf file even though this should be pretty foolproof.

If you got any requests for additions to this hack drop a comment and let me know.

Whewww! Been busy lately guys! Sorry I haven’t had much time to get posts out. I’ve been working with some serious project volume lately. I got a couple posts ready but I’ve been trying to include some example code and scripts to improve the quality of them. I also got a wicked idea for a Blue Hat Tool. Can it actually top QUIT?(which has already received tons of mentions for being the only SEO tool on the market that not only gets more spiders to your site faster than any others out there, but for actually boosting rank as well). Big pimpin for a single form submit! What do you think it’ll be? I’ll give you a hint, it’ll be a traffic generator. It’ll be a bit of time but I promise I’ll get it all done and out sooner than not. While I’m rolling on the railroad of excuses I’m also going to mention that I’m finally taking some vacation time this month. So I’ll be out for about 2 net weeks. Yay! So we’ll see how much I can get your way, but expect some temporary slim pickings this month while I get my shit in gear. In the downtime please keep the awesome contributions coming!

In the mean time I’ll still be responding to comments and emails as often as I can. Although I got to admit that I’m addicted to reading the spam comments I’ve been getting. If you’re interested in some serious black hat shit give reading your Akismet filter carefully a try. Those pharmaceutical affiliates are downright brilliant at times. In particular I’ve been watching some of their parasite hosting techniques.

One in particular that I’ve been monitoring closely is doing something that I think is damn cool. From what I’m gathering he’s downloading a ton of CMS’ and using directory structures to make a list of identifiable footprints. Then they use Yahoo to find exploitable .EDU sites using these CMS’ for their student homepages. Than (s)he is signing up guest accounts and creating redirecting cloaked doorway pages to pharmaceutical affiliate sites. Then building linkage to those urls through blog spam. I’m like a kid in a candy store watching these guys send me their URLs to easily exploitable edu parasites. Sure I’ll take that one! Ooo! that one too! Is that a plone parasite? I’ll take six!

Starting now I’m going to make a list of my favorite blog spam that passes through here. Not for humor purposes but strictly learning. Than when I got a decent enough sized list I’m going to post every single one here. Gitty Up!

If you get any cool ones to your own blogs feel free to email them to me to be added to the list.

Uhhhhhhg I have recently gotten very very sick. I never found the time to get my flu shots this year. Bad move on my part.

However on the bright side, me getting sick somehow put me into a good mood. I may just be weird but for some reason I hate that feeling when you’re getting sick, but when I actually get sick and I just feel like utter crap, I get in a much better mood. Maybe its just knowing that the symptoms are the last phase of being sick. Eitherway I am back to my normal happy-go-lucky self and I am definitely back in the Christmas spirit. My body may be failing but my mental state is still strong. Despite the fact that no one wants to go near me and my germs this is definitely turning into a good week.

Going back to business. I got some really cool posts coming up. First will probably include my Complete Guide To Scraping Pt. 3. Which will detail the actual scraping of content and work seemlessly with the crawler script presented in Part 2. Soon after that will probably be the Wikipedia Links Pt. 4. Can you guess what that post will require knowledge of? Haha yep…scraping, and as promised to the Blackhatters it will be badass. Whether or not it will include the attached code is still being debated. The chances are not looking so good. Either way I know better than to doubt the brilliance and skills of the readers here so the code portion should be the easy part.

Speak of the devil! I’ve been getting emails from people who have finished coding Parts 2 and 3 from the Wikipedia Links series. I have also gotten TONS of emails from people wanting to buy the script from me. Just so you know, I WILL allow you to sell your builds in the comments. Just as long as everyone is honest and follows through I have no problems with people sharing and making a bit of cash from it.

Back on topic, I also got another Blue Hat technique I gotta throw into the mix sometime as well as a few white hat posts. I also got a massive post regarding free traffic ideas that was an idea emailed to me from a very benevolent reader here several months ago however I’m having a hard time finishing it. For some reason it just seems shitty (my writing not the idea). I’ll have to do a bit more work on it before I let you take a gander. Eitherway we have a very fun Christmas season coming up for the Blue Hatters (do you consider yourselves blue hatters YET?! nope? okay haha nevermind then). The only thing that will hang me up from getting all these posts out are which order to put them in. It all just seems too damn organized for my A.D.D. lovin’ tastes. I may just have to mix things up because confusing people is fun!

If you guys/gals have any ideas for a post you would like to see please be sure to either comment it up or email it to me. You all know how much I love fresh ideas and it would be a big help to me. My slow brain can only handle so much.

Have A Great Christmas!

In the mean time entertain yourself with this awesome affiliate rap song from Eureka’s Diary