One of my good friends has decided to let you in on all of the insider secrets of Black Hat SEO.

Bompa, of Syndk8.net fame, has opened a special boot camp for helping blackhat newbies. If you don’t know Bompa, you should. He has been the special mentor of new blackhats on the forum for a long time.

One of the problems with beginning any web marketing venture is where to get straight advice. Another is the ‘what did I do wrong?’ part. Still another is ‘how does *that* work?

If you want answers to these, and many more, topics, you owe it to yourself to hike over to the Blackhat SEO Boot Camp.

One-on-one coaching. Private tutoring (away from the flames and embarassment). Freebies, scripts, encouragement, and … well just go and see.

A little birdy told me that there are some hidden benefits too.

I am going to GIVE to my first ten members TWO secret locations on the web to obtain almost infinite backlinks.

The backlinks that I am going to GIVE to you are all at least PR3, and most are PR4, with a few PR5s.

You will not have to pay for them. There is no trickery, no cloaking, none of that heavy BH stuff. The only thing BH about getting these quality backlinks will be the automation.

And I am going to GIVE my first ten members the tools to automate the process of getting these infinite backlinks. These are tools that I programmed myself. I have never sold or shared these tools! They are priceless! I have never told a single soul about my secret backlink sources!!!
My first ten members will get good, quality backlinks even while off at the pub or while sleeping. That’s no shit man!

Better get there quick. The number of places will fill up fast.

~dink

Still following the winds of whimsey post I made last time.

After some deep thinking, I think I’ve come up with a reasonable explanation for the upset in the Google serps that began sometime in mid March.  Ya, I know, deep thinking will cause brain blisters.

It appears to me that G has taken another step in reducing the effects of link purchases on their serps.  Whatever changes they made in their ranking algo affected a lot of sites.  Having had the opportunity to see the effects first hand, and having read the tales of woe on other blogs and in various forums, my conclusion is that G was pleased with the latest efforts.

As always, the collateral damage is of no concern to G.  At all.  Sure they devalued a bunch of links, but the algo did away with the power that some (more innocent) links conferred.

Mine weren’t necessarily innocent, but I hadn’t paid for any of them either.

 So, while the Giggle team is trying, valiantly, to rid the serps of paid link buyers, they must not be paying attention to *some* other area(s).

The trick is to find an area that is effective and below the current level of attention.

~dink

“It’s an ill wind that blows no good”
unknown author

The ill wind that blew down the back of my neck this past March was chilling. Downright cold.

As some of you know, the almighty Giggle decided to rain on my parade.  That’s after doing in my network back last summer.

So, I did what any self-respecting webmaster would do.  Cried a lot.  lol

No, I went about other things and left the sites where they were.  Sometimes good advice when G is doing an update or an algo change.

What do you think happened?  For  a change, something good.  One of my famous little one-pagers suddenly came to life.  I didn’t know it was back in the index until I got a check from ShareaSale.  Almost a hundred bucks worth of surprise.

Guess I’d better check on some of the other orphans I’ve left around the web.

~dink

I’ve been meaning to do this for quite a while, but I’m just lazy I guess.

I really liked that nifty bookmarking widget that my friend removed to protect the innocent created. I just didn’t like the way it looked in the sidebar.

So this evening, while a new spammer script was doing it’s thing, I decided to get it placed on the pages better. I like it much better now. What about you?

~dink

**edit. Removed the widget by request

We live and work in an ever-changing world. No news there, huh?

We build webpages. We use our words to market <something>. We use a lot of different methods of bringing traffic to our pages. Some of these methods could be considered ‘questionable’ in certain circles. Mostly we try to beat the search engine placement algos.

The thing is, we tend to keep on keeping on. We find an exploit that works. We tweak it. Then we run it full speed. We do it over and over again. Minor changes maybe, but still mostly the same methods.

Then one day we wake up to find that our exploit doesn’t work any longer. What happened? Well, the various search engine algos changed. Or, we got tapped by a competitor. Or……

Or, we got complacent. Satisfied that our exploit was doing it’s job, we went about pushing the envelope. We tend to forget that change is always with us. Mostly not good change either.

Michael Martinez over at SEO-Theory made a great point (well, he makes a lot of great points, but this one is relative to the post) on his blog the other day. Burn this into your brain:

Blackhat spammers burn out the usefulness of about 10% of all SEO tips, tricks, and techniques that are openly or semi-openly shared on blogs and forums in about 12 months. White hat SEOs, newbies, and SEO gurus burn out the other 90% in 6 months or less.

Michael’s comment is right in line with the real world. What works for us today has very little bearing on what might work tomorrow.

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating. When (if) you discover an exploit, work it to death. Keep it close to your chest and your lips sealed. Chances are that if you tell someone else and they tell a friend of theirs, then that friend tells……….

The search engine spam techs are looking to cut us off at the knees. All the time. We don’t need to speed up the process, so keep it quiet.

Keep asking yourself how it could be done differently. Ask yourself ‘what if…’. Then do something else that Mr. Martinez preaches: experiment, measure the results, adjust. If you do that each time you have a new project, you’ll be far ahead of the pack. That means you have adapted. Doesn’t mean you won’t die, tho. lol

That’s it for this time. See you around.

~dink

P.S. If it sounded like I’m high on Michael Martinez, well I am. If you want to figure out the real deal on SEO, go read his blog. No, you don’t need to tell him that I sent you either. He can speak blackhat, but he ain’t one.

So you have some content. You wrote it, or you paid to have it written. Or, you got it somewhere. PLR? Article services? Elsewhere?

Do you only use it once? You don’t buy a new pair of shoes, wear them once, then toss them out do you? Ofcourse not. Why should your hard earned content get thrown out after only one use? It shouldn’t.

All of the content you have ever gotten, or will ever get, should be saved and used like the gold that it is. Your collection of articles is your content corpus. You can use, and reuse, it time and again.

One way that I reuse content is to add some of my handwritten content to an article I gathered up from *somewhere*. There are two advantages and one disadvantage to this technique. At least that’s from where I’m sitting right this minute.

• If you have a 350 word article that you add 100 words to, you have a 450 word article that is 29% different from the original.
• You can easily include ‘in context’ links and insert your desired keywords where you want them.

The biggest disadvantage to this is that it doesn’t scale very easily. It can be done (I’ve done it), but the results aren’t very good sometimes. Other times it’s perfect. Go figure.

Another way to reuse your content is to ’spin’ it. Now, I’m not endorsing any product here. Neither am I slamming any particular product. So, when I used the term ’spin’, it doesn’t relate to any product that may, or may not, have that term in it’s title or web promotion pages. I merely use it to indicate changing the wording or the meaning of an article.

There are a lot of content spinners around. Some are decent, most are a piece of dog shit. <<–Pardon my french fries. I’ve used several of them. Tried out several more. Paid good money for some of the worst ones.

A great many of the spinners rely on variations of the Markov Chains. I use several different versions of Mr. Markov’s excellent tool myself. You can find several of them around the net. If you haven’t ever tried to mash up some content with a markov() script, you should.

Some spinners use synonym replacement. That’s ok if the designer/programmer built a large enough dictionary of words to use. I’ve seen a couple of them floating around the web so, it shouldn’t be too hard to find one.

Some spinners use a translate/retranslate system. What this amounts to is pasting your article into a translator application, then putting the result back into the application and have it translated back to the original language. Depending on the translation ap and the language you are translating to/from, the results could vary from OK to ‘wtf is this shit’.

You’ll have to judge what method (or combination of methods) provides the best bang for the buck. We each have different ideas about what standards to apply to our content.

That’s it for this trip. See ya.

~dink

Ya. I know. Boring. But, I’m laying the groundwork for something interesting. Well, I think it’s interesting.

In the last episode I talked about what content is, where to find it, and what it is made up of. In this edition I want to explore the way words come together to make our content.

There are a couple of terms that should be defined before I get much farther into this mess.

• Lemma. From wikipukia:

In a dictionary, the lemma “go” represents the inflected forms “go”, “goes”, “going”, “went”, and “gone”. The relationship between an inflected form and its lemma is usually denoted by an angle bracket, e.g. “went” < “go”………….

Lemmas are used often in corpus linguistics for determining word frequency. In such usage the specific definition of “lemma” is flexible depending on the task it is being used for.

• Corpus :

From Apple Developer.

A collection of one or more documents, typically related, and available to an information retrieval system. Plural: corpora.

From Macmillan English Dictionary.

a collection of written and/or spoken language stored on a computer and used for language research and writing dictionaries

Yep, pretty heavy stuff. There’s a point to all of this, so stay with me.

I made a reference to the Oxford site in the last post, and it’s time to revisit that page. The link will open a new window and you may want to leave it open as we study a few things on that page. AskOxford: Language Facts

In the fifth paragraph, the author cites some interesting facts. For instance, “Just ten different lemmas (the, be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, and I) account for a remarkable 25% of all the one billion words used in the Oxford English Corpus. If you were to read through the corpus, one word in four would be an example of one of these ten lemmas. Similarly, the 100 most common lemmas account for 50% of the corpus, and the 1,000 most common lemmas account for 75%. But to account for 90% of the corpus you would need a vocabulary of 7,000 lemmas, and to get to 95% the figure would be around 50,000 lemmas.” The remaining 5% might only show up once in several million.

My takeaway on this is the statement that the 1k most common lemmas will cover 75% of the corpus. The author states that the Oxford corpus is in the range of one billion words!

If my ‘old’ math is working, that means that about one-thousand base words would cover 750 million words (in their corpus). Impressed the hell outa me.

Further, the author states that 25k lemmas will represent the set of most significant words in English: those which occur reasonably frequently and which account for all but a small part of everything we may encounter in speech or writing. It includes all the words that we actively use in general everyday life.

Now, go take a gander at the table the author has under the heading ‘What is the commonest word?’. That’s the 100 most common English words. Are you beginning to see some light in this deep dark cave I’ve built for you?

In the next table down he shows us the most used ‘content words’. And he shows them by nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Are there any gears spinning at your place?

What if we could build our own corpus? Our corpus would be a collection of text articles related to a website subject. Within our corpus would be the common words most used by others relative to the subject, and our chosen keywords. Each webmaster would have a different corpus, and, would very likely have several different corpora.

Most of you do have your own corpus on your hard drive. That is, a collection of articles (scraped or written, doesn’t matter) which you use to generate content on demand. You very likely have several corpora devoted to different niches. Some of you will leave the corpus on the web and retrieve it as/when you need it.

You will use your corpus depending on how you want your content to read. If you are only interested in having some content for spider food, you may leave your corpus intact. Perhaps injecting a keyword here and a link there, but basically intact.

If you are after more than keeping a spider busy, you may elect to massage the corpus a little. Here is where the fun begins. And it’s a good enough place to end this edition.

Stay tuned. Next time I’ll give you my most famous recipe. Frickasie corpora served on crepe Suzieanne with a vintage, (Nov.) tokay. Mmmmmm. Won’t want to miss that one. lol

~dink

I’ve preached the need to have a good selection of keywords often enough for you to be sick of it by now. I’ve mentioned content a time or two. Now it’s time to get down and dirty with content.

Content is KING . . . yaay!

From a strict point of view, a web page is made up entirely of content. That is, everything that is visible from the ‘view source’ tab is content.

From a webmaster point of view, content includes the meta tags, the title and description, and the portion between the <body> </body> tags. There could be content in the footer, but we’ll pretend that there isn’t.

Generally tho, the content we refer to is that which is between the body tags. That is the content we will be discussing here today. To relieve some of the pressure, we will dismiss the possibility of images and javascript being part of our content, even though those are important pieces of some puzzles. I’ll also disregard the navigation portion of the page and the linkage and anchor text.

Since I’m a resident of the U.S., I will be using only English for my discussion. The Brits will be quick to tell you that I don’t have a clue what real English is. I think I agree with that. I only know what I have learned. You are likely in the same boat.

Our content is made up of words. Words strung together to express concepts, ask questions, and so forth. Our English words are made up of letters of the alphabet. There are only 26 of them. Five vowels and 21 consonants. Except that it might be six vowels and 20 consonants depending on how you treat the ‘y’.

Our words are grouped together to form phrases. Phrases grouped together to form sentences and sentences grouped to form paragraphs. A few paragraphs together makes up a page.

Our mission as blackhat marketers is to produce content that will fool the search engine algos into believing that we actually know something. Produce same quickly and (preferably) automatically. Bonus points given if it actually reads well enough to pass a cursory manual inspection.

The very best content is hand written by someone who knows a subject very well indeed. Very best content is difficult to scale, and takes a lot of time.

Good content comes in several flavors and is found in several places on the web. Good content can include hand written content by someone who does not know the subject so well, but has researched enough to make some sense.

Good content includes articles by others, entries in a wiki, entries in an encyclopedia or dictionary, books, magazines, and other publications. Good content could be transcriptions from audio media, translations of foreign language items, and many others.

Good content can be scaled. Good content can be discovered, stored, manipulated, transformed, and republished in many different forms. Good content, and an off-shoot that I call ‘good enough’ content, is what works best for me. Well, in a blackhat sense. (I do a little mango-tango in the wh market now and then.)

The KING is dead . . . long live words

A quick and dirty search on the web indicates that there are about 995,112 words in the English language{1}. That number is suspect for many reasons, but it gives us some place to start.

Here is a little something to think about{2}:

New words are constantly being invented, developed from existing words, or adopted from other languages. Most will be used rarely, or only by a small group of people. Hence an unlimited number of words may occur in speech and writing which will never be recorded in even the largest dictionary.

And, this little item may require head scratching{3}:

…..what exactly is a word? Clearly we should include single units such as cat and dog. But are the plurals cats and dogs separate words? Should we include compounds such as walking stick, which are made up of two existing words? What about abbreviations like BBC and Dr, which may be freely formed in limitless combinations: are they words? What about proper names?

So we have a whole bunch of potential words to work with. Some of the words are very common, some are so rare that they prolly wouldn’t be recognized as English words anyhow. Some are only a single letter, some are like alphabet soup. What shall we do with them?

I know, let’s put them on our web pages and make money. Part two coming soon.

~dink

- - - - - - - - - -

Notes:

{1}Language Monitor

{2}Oxford English Corpus

{3}Sketchengine

I’ve been approached by a group to write a review of their service here on the blog. The offer is for cash. Which is just as good as money. Heh.

“So, what’s the problem with that?”, you asked. “You have posted about a whole bunch of programs on this blog.”

Yes, I have promoted several programs here. But the difference is that I have tried, and use, the programs that I tell you about.

The service that the correspondent asked me to write about is not one that I would use. I wouldn’t even use it just so I could write about it. It doesn’t fit into any of my game plans.

Does that mean one of you wouldn’t use it? No, it doesn’t. What it does mean is that I can’t suggest to you that it is worthwhile. I can’t say if it is or isn’t a good deal. I’ve only investigated it enough to know that I won’t use it.

I have bought a lot of worthless shit. I have been given a bunch of worthless shit. I’m an affiliate for a bunch of worthless shit. I haven’t pointed any of those to you. And I won’t. Now, that doesn’t mean that this service is a piece of shit.

This is my place. I built it. I maintain it. You have chosen to come by here, from time to time, and see what I’m raving about .

Many of you are good friends. All of you are welcome here. I’m not about to jeopardize my friendship (or any future friendships) with you for a few hundred bucks. Note…if we were talking about millions of bucks, you’d be history. LOL

So, why make this post at all? Because I didn’t want to just email the folks and say “no” without an explanation. And, because it really may be of benefit to some of you.

To solve the delemma, I’m going to post a couple of the links the folks gave me, at no charge. You may go see what it’s all about, or not. Completely up to you. That way you have some knowledge that such a service exists, the correspondent gets something, and I leave feeling like I have done my duty.

Here’s a link to the home page of tnx.net. Here is the link to their post over at DP.

Stay outa jail.

~dink

I’m disappointed. Not disappointed in you. Disappointed in me. I’ve failed you. I have let you down.

No emails. No one wanted to participate in this stunt. So, why not? What was it that I did wrong? Let’s see what I can think of.

• Nobody needs inbound links. Doesn’t seem likely. Links are the lifeblood of our business. So, maybe the advanced blackhats can create their backlinks fast enough not to need something like this. That doesn’t explain the beginning bh’s not needing links though.
• The whole idea was stupid. Ya, maybe so.
• Contests are even more stupid than the idea. True. May be the prime reason.
• They went ahead and made blogs but didn’t tell you. Possible. Even probable. I hope at least some of them did.
• They don’t trust me. Also very likely. I mean, do I trust myself? Only sometimes, and certainly not my judgment on this thing.

Well, any and all of those things could be true and could be the reason no one wished to participate.

It was meant to be a learning experience. And a fun competition. Didn’t turn out that way.

Perhaps the whole thing will be remembered, someday, by those who need to get backlinks. Perhaps they’ll think back and say to themselves “hey, wasn’t that what ole Dink was talking about?” Yeah, right.

I’m terribly sorry that I let you down. It’s not my first failure and, certainly won’t be my last. However, I do learn from my follies and don’t repeat them. Often.

**the lil red demon on my right shoulder just whispered in my ear….aw quit yer snivellin and whinin, biatch. Get back to work.

Demons are always right. See you around.

~dink