In September 2011, Matt Gemmell wrote an article, SEO for Non-Dicks. The gist of that article is this: be nice, write well, write often, and don’t fuck up the titles. It’s a good general guide for the SEO-clueless, though you could do far better by hanging out at the SEOMoz blog for a couple of weeks.
The obverse exists as well: SEO for dicks. It essentially takes the gist of Matt’s approach, chews it up and vomits it out as a nauseating mess of link farms, spam, spun content, and general bullshit. I don’t encourage it, neither do I advocate it. But it exists and by some fortuitous accident, I happen to know more than a bit about it.
The Sorting Hat(s)
Black, White and Grey: the three shades of SEO hats. Whitehat is what most websites purport to support and use, Greyhat is what they actually use, and Blackhat is what they wish they could use without any guilt or repercussions.
Whitehat is when a site dutifully builds up a library of extraordinary content, connects with fellow bloggers/online publications, builds up a relationship with the audience and slowly trudges up the Google rankings by piggybacking on these relationships (and the links they provide). It’s tough, slow, and requires infinite patience, especially in a game in which every other player is cheating.
Greyhat is a combination of extraordinary content and ordinary spamming. It brings together the best of two worlds – the clean-cut ways of the Whitehat, and the dark devilishness of Blackhat. It works because Google finds it hard to detect and webmasters, easy to defend. A majority of top websites you know and love have used some form of Greyhat SEO – an unfortunate outcome of the sheer scale of competition for top spots for lucrative keywords in search engines.
Blackhat is trickier than the devil’s tail. This is the true dark side of the internet. Hardcore Blackhat guys will stop at nothing to extract money from you, including phishing for credit cards and installing malware on your computer. This is the internet equivalent of a street fight: anything goes. It’s what SEO for Dicks is all about.
Spin and Spam
The cornerstone of any SEO for Dicks campaign is spam: massive, mind-numbingly retarded torrents of spam that are littered in the deepest crevices of the internet. A Blackhat SEO campaign begins with a relatively clean main site – called ‘money site’ in industry lingo. By relatively clean I mean that this site is legible and won’t make you vomit away the last ounce of faith you had in humanity. This is the core of the business, the Mothership fed by all manners of spam spawns.
To this core site are connected dozens of scarcely legible web properties built on Blogger, WordPress, Squidoo, Hubpages, etc. These are populated with generously borrowed content (usually from EZineArticles or ArticleBase), “spun” content (more on this below), or stolen articles. All of these web properties link back to the original Mothership and act as a “moat” to thwart the detection of any spam links to the core site.
These web properties are fed by an ever expanding web of outright spam – irrelevant blog comments addressed to no-one in particular about the gorgeousness of your crappy website, forum posts with quotes pulled from WikiPedia, and spam blogs littered with articles that make less sense than Charlie Sheen on cocaine. Since this is outright spam, it rarely links back to the Mothership, lest it be detected and penalized.
This complex web of spam linking to a central hub is called a ‘linkwheel’, although a more accurate moniker would be ‘linkweb’.
Since all these spam web properties need to be populated with content, an “article spinner” is used to create thousands of illegible-but-technically-unique copies of an original piece of content. The article spinner is basically a piece of software that replaces words in the original article through an in-built thesaurus. The end result reads like a Gary Busey rant, but for most purposes, can pass off as “unique content” – something search engines can have a hard time detecting. Google ‘article spinner’ to learn more.
On The Internet, No One Knows You’re a Bot
The above spam wheel takes care of the backlinks, but if the resident social media experts littering your Twitter feed are right, you can’t rank well without social-mediaing the shit out of a website.
That’s where bots come in handy.
Those gorgeous, scantily clad women who always seem to reside in California and tweet endlessly about dating sites? They’re bots. So are the legions of anonymous blog commenters that haunt Matt Mullenweg’s dreams.
Then there are the Craigslist spammers who seemingly reside in a particularly scummy niche of the internet marketing industry. Tactics include, but are not limited to, posting fraudulent job offers to collect leads for work-at-home mail order programs, posing as single girls to solicit sign-ups for pay-per-lead adult and dating websites, and even posting ‘Writers Wanted’ ads and asking for sample submissions to generate free content.
The Tools of the Trade
The typical Blackhat asshole’s arsenal consists of around half a dozen tools that cost between $50-$1000 each. These tools can create thousands of spun copies of an article, leave 100,000 spam comments on blogs across the internet in a matter of minutes, and populate thousands of forums with junk links in hours.
The most expensive is Xrumer, the Cadillac of spamming tools that can create millions of fake forum profiles and post hundreds of thousands of spam links across the internet in a matter of hours. It’s a complicated and powerful piece of software that requires its own dedicated server. In fact, it is so complicated (and expensive) that dozens of businesses have cropped up that offer Xrumer ‘blasts’ for upwards of $50 (just Google ‘Xrumer’ to cop a feel).
The most popular, however, is ScrapeBox – a powerful little tool that can scrape urls and leave hundreds of thousands of spam comments in a matter of hours.
Add to this a whole army of article spinners, all-in-one spam tools like SEONukeX, and of course, a Blackhatter’s best friends: a bundle of clean proxies, and you have all the ingredients needed to spam the living lights out of any website.
And if you’re feeling too indifferent or lazy, you can always outsource some of that for as little as $2 for an article, $100 for ten thousand Twitter followers.
Fortunately, There is a Happy Ending
Google is becoming smarter. With the recent Panda update, it is becoming increasingly difficult to spam your way to the top of the SERPs. Flop about on any Blackhat SEO forum and you’ll see waves after waves of distraught spammers lamenting their fates and begging the Google overlords for reprieve and respite. The question: “what works now?” frequently crops up, and unlike in the past, few people seem to have any answers. Google’s new algorithm makes it difficult for spam to float to the top – and that can only be a good thing.
Awesome!
Everyday on http://taskarmy.com I have to manually approve services from people who offer facebook likes, forum profiles, etc…
Now I have an article to point them to when I want to explain them why they haven’t been approved.
Cheers,
Aymeric
Gorgeous site;-)
“The question: “what works now?” frequently crops up, and unlike in the past, few people seem to have any answers”
Idea: build a bot that reads those forums and answers “Good, appropriate content and nice behavior” to anyone asking that.
Oh you could be much more insidious than that if you think a little aboout it.
Get them to do things that will get their sites delisted in Google for instance
Trust me, this was only a primer. I’ve seen some terrible, terrible things being done to poor webmasters on blackhat forums.
Interesting.
Interestingly enough, the very article talking about SEO blackhatting is being spammed to no end in the comment box right now. It’s a pretty nice live showcase of the material in the article
Darn it. Yet another nofollow site.
You, sir, win an internet medal.
SEO Dicks can still spam their way to the top on Google local results and if they are feeling particularly dickish, they can fuck some real shit up on google mapmaker.
google.com/mapmaker is home for blackhats.
A piece of advice – don’t write about something that You have no idea.
Good job, demotivating uncle.
Good overview, but the conclusion isn’t quite right. Panda addresses content and doesn’t address the mountain of spam that resides below it.
While ranking those spun squidoo and blogger articles is much more difficult, the value that those sites pass on to the actual target site remains. You only need the target to pass the tests that panda throws at it.
While this is definitely a step forward, google will always be susceptible to spam for two reasons:
The algorithm that makes google successful is fundamentally built on backlinks. That’s why people use google, it’s a better algorithm. Backlinks can always be manufactured (even the social kind).
Second, any algorithm that penalizes a target site for webspam, can be exploited to nuke competitors (negative SEO). This is why google is limited to content based filters like Panda. As they introduce any other penalties (which they have) spammers will just blast the competition with spam that matches the penalty algorithm (which some are).
The nature of controlling all internet traffic the world over, is that you’re battling an unlimited number of people. Search for any super high competition keyword and it will be dominated by unique content supported with spam underneath.
True, but from what I’ve seen in the past few months, Google is becoming increasingly adept at understanding language. Spun, unreadable content scarcely makes a dent today (unlike an year ago). And in the future, there is good reason to believe this will continue improving until spamming will become actually harder than creating good content.
And even if that is not the case, I would still like to be a little optimistic. As a writer, I would just like to believe that someday, in some glorious future, our words will actually trump mountains of spam.
Maybe one day the pen will be mightier than the spam.
Looks like these “Blackhats” took hints from Borges: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel#Plot_summary