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BruteForce SEO Next Round: Creates Content, Scrapes eBay

2008-11-21T12:45:00.000-08:00

No mere update but a complete rewrite, making it, among other things, Vista 64 compatible, faster and more reliable - that's what Peter Drew, creator of BruteForce SEO has announced now.

Here are some of the new features:

BruteForce SEO now supplies content - content, moreover, that's infinitely reusable without provoking any duplicate content issues. You can use other's articles (e.g. from article directories, PLR content or your own, no sweat.

Currently 95% completed: the BruteForce Social Bookmarking Submission Tool.

Gold Digger Niche Research Tool: Will now feature the Top 1000 Searches on eBay for each day - an invaluable feature if you're an eBay affiliate and/or to find out what people are really buying rather than relying on mere search engine keyword stats.

It's getting more expensive, too, so if you're interested at all, now is the time to sign up to safeguard against further price hikes.

Of course, our regular readers are familiar with this application as we've blogged about it before, see:

Google Results with BruteForceSEO: 60% Page #1 Domination!

Two Kick-Ass Link Building Tools

Two Data Mining Tools that Will Boost Your Profits

2008-11-19T10:45:00.000-08:00

Once you actually get serious about Internet commerce, you'll soon realize that while all of it is indeed about sales in one form or another, the Royal Road to success isn't about short term profits (aka the "fast buck") at all. Rather, it's about effective data mining, because that's where the real money is. If in doubt, take a closer look at Google - they're doing it to the tune of umpteen billion dollars a year. Hard to argue with that.

You see, it's about your customers, readers, visitors: if you can get them to tell you what they want, what their pain is, what they're running away from and what their main interests and yearnings are.

At the end of the day, most if not all successful marketing will focus on relief or, at the very least, on the promise of such: How can this product/service help me get along better in life? What kind of burden can it take off my shoulders - as an entrepreneur, as a marketer, as an SEO, as a golfer, as a mother, as a lover, whatever? (In the copy writers universe it was the inimitable "shitweasel" Gary Halbert†, I believe, who coined the phrase "starving crowds" and taught us all how to push this concept to the limits and make them all happy, bless him.)

There's a lot of mystique surrounding data mining these days, but when all is said and done it's simply about getting to know your customers, prospects, leads, subscribers, visitors. The more you know about them, both individually and as a collective, the easier it will be to laser target your promotion, zeroing in on what your markets actually want, rather than chasing some fond delusions based on your own gut feelings or "intuition". (To be sure, intuition has its place in life, but data mining is certainly not one of them!) No point in trying to hawk the proverbial refrigerators to Eskimos (oops, sorry: Inuit, to keep this 100% pc...) or attempting to sell lipstick to your average construction bear.

While all of this is fairly obvious and based on simple common sense, pinpointing the tools to actually help you learn as much about your clientele as you reasonably can, is quite another matter. Not only that there's so many of them around - as a savvy marketer you'll probably be loath to fall victim to one of your peers' hard sell tactics. (Hey, it happens all the time, and yours truly is certainly no exception - but that's no reason to actually like what's going on, either...)

One major way of soliciting visitor or client feedback is, of course, running surveys on your site. While their answers may not always be entirely truthful (especially when you ask them about your products' pricing, heh), if you do it right it can be pure gold. And save you tons of advertising failures in one stride as well.

However, most survey software and services really suck: They're a pain to set up, an even greater hassle to maintain, and if you're using third party stuff be prepared to pay through your nose for it. That's probably the #1 reason why most web sites will only run surveys as a one-off operation, if at all.

By contrast, here's a tool that will help you no end in cutting down the entire process to its essentials. It lets you focus on your survey goals, structure, set of questions etc. rather than encumbering you with tons of setup and tech issues.

It will be launched tomorrow at 12 Eastern and only the first 500 buyers are in for a special price. So check out the 5 min demo pre-launch video here: Instant Form Pro

And while we're at it, this is another tool that can help you blow up your signup rates by 25% or more, endorsed by the likes of Michel Fortin and many of the other big boys of copy writing and Internet marketing. Don't miss out on it - for (currently) $27 it's a positive steal: Action PopUp

Combine the two any which way, and what you'll get is a positive killer setup to drive your data mining efforts through the roof!

8 Article Spinner Tools

2008-11-14T16:04:00.000-08:00

Mass content generation being so many webmasters' downright nemesis, we'll continue our series of SEO tools overviews with a list of content generators. It's not comprehensive: can't rule out that I may have missed one or two other good ones here, though very many we've checked out are anything but recommendable, typically due to shoddy programming, unusable kludgy interfaces, bullshit claims, blatant overpricing, etc. (Note that this is not to say that anything missing here falls by default into that category! If this should affect one of your favorite applications, please see note below.)

ContentMania

Wordflood

Power Article Rewriter

Writer Cash

For mass generation, there used to be ArticleBot (currently closed though operational, arguably the most powerful tool out there, but featuring an extremely high learning curve...), so your best bet would probably be one or several of the following:

Jetspinner

Instant Article Wizard Pro

Unique Article Wizard

Website Content Wizard

To dig a bit into the theory and practical handling of content spinning, speed writing and upscaling text generation (not usually autogenned but semi-automated), I'd recommend this tutorial (it's fairly basic, but that's not necessarily a bad thing):

Speed Writing

None of these are decidedly "black hat" tools i.e. they don't scrape content and/or markov it: if used properly, they'll help you create readable and genuine content that's varied enough not to run you into any trouble with the search engines.

Note: If you're a developer of article spinning software and I've missed mentioning your super duper best-thing-since-slice-bread tool here, drop me a line and I'll look into it. No promises, as we won't ever compromise our (and our readers') stringent quality standards, but if it's really as good as you think, we'll be happy to add it to the list.

Nifty SEO Tools to Check Out - 1

2008-11-10T10:56:00.000-08:00

What with the onslaught of purportedly super duper product launches hitting our inboxes 24/7 these days, simply keeping track is becoming a daunting chore, not to mention separating the wheat from the chaff.

Here's a few we've found decidedly useful, promising (at least) and well worth checking out. Your mileage may vary, of course, and what's good for the goose need certainly not be good for the gander in search marketing: far too many different business models, SEM strategies, web site setups and fundamental targets involved to realistically expect a one-size-fits-all solution. This said, here goes.

We've discussed Peter Drew's BruteForceSEO program twice on this blog already, namely here: Brute Force SEO Video - the Fight Club Angle and, featuring first results, here again: Google Results with BruteForceSEO: 60% Page #1 Domination! so it doesn't really require another introduction.

The initial 1,000 slots were sold out fast. This was a $1 test run for a week, so it didn't really come as a big surprise, but retention after that was a stately 60% which is quite good.

Now, the program is being relaunched in about seven hours' time (as of writing this) to fill the remaining 400 slots though at a slightly higher price. Again, you'll start off with a 7 day trial for a buck, after which monthly subscription is $147. If you haven't had a bash at it yet, do go for it here: BruteForceSEO.

Like with most of Peter Drew's scripts, you'll have to live with the bugs and a fairly eccentric how-to documentation in tidbits spread across just about everywhere. In our experience, the bugs will actually get sorted out over time, technical support's very helpful and usually quite speedy (unless overwhelmed by the initial launch onslaught), and the user forum camaraderie is quite genuine and well worth participation as well, especially for Internet marketing newbies. But it does tend to test your patience more than you may care for on occasion.

Tip for affiliate marketers: You may also want to look into signing up for the BruteForce SEO Affiliate program. Sure, it costs a buck to join up which many people don't like one bit (long story...), but conversions are pretty decent and payments are instant via PayPal, so overall it may well be worth it if you have a web site and/or a decent mailing list to promote to: BruteForce SEO Affiliate program

However, for a slightly cheaper and probably better matured application and service that does practically everything the BruteForceSEO setup offers you, and at a (now) lower price as well ($97 per month), you may want to check out the most recent incarnation of SENuke instead (or in addition).

While it does have its quirks, it's a great application that comes accompanied by tons of cut-to-the-chase how-to videos and it supports proxies which in our view is quite indispensable to the power user! (By contrast, Peter Drew feels that proxy functionality would only complicate matters unduly, something yours truly refuses to agree with.)

The trial version comes for free (no $1 for the first week or anything) and certainly merits attention: SENuke

Finally, there's IBP (short for iBusinessPromoter), an SEO application that even comes with a ranking guarantee. Well, sort of:

Why we can guarantee top 10 rankings

Actually, noone can guarantee top 10 rankings except for Google's engineers. However, IBP has a success rate of more than 98% and we will give you your money back if you belong to the very few people who don't get top 10 rankings on Google with IBP.

Expect IBP to achieve your rankings (you define your own keywords) within appr. 90 days - whereas the guarantee is good for a full year, so that's fair enough, we'd say. There's a free demo version available for download and full version pricing's a one-off payment of €249.95, so no recurring monthly fees to factor in which many people may prefer.

We haven't been able to test this thingy in depth ourselves yet, so while we cannot vouch for its efficacy first hand, in view of their reasonable pricing and the money-back guarantee offered we do feel it's a game you cannot really lose at if. Download it here: IBP

(To be continued.)

How to Make Top Dollars with MSN

2008-11-04T22:35:00.000-08:00

Before anyone starts whining - yes, MSN's Live.com is a pathetic dwarf compared to behemoth Google when it comes to search market share.

BUT: There's always been savvy online marketers who didn't fall for the mainstream media's hypnotized focus on the Mountainview 'Plex crowd - while being the #1 search engine may and actually does translate to humungous numbers of searcher eyeballs, on the downside it also entails encompassing the lion's share of junk traffic.

Chances are that your Yahoo! and MSN traffic, while possibly puny compared to Google's, will achieve an astronomically higher conversion rate - certainly nothing you should knock too lightly as it may well prove to be the costliest mistake of your life!

If there's one marketing report you do have to buy this year because it can indeed make you top dollars at a rate you possibly never dared dreaming of, it's definitely this one: Cracking the MSN Code is one of the leanest, meanest and most enlightening reads plus the very best value for money we've come across in long, long while - no "SEO 101" fluff, no lamer's social network spam recipe to make a few cents on the long tail, this is all hands-on power stuff for the really serious Internet entrepreneur.

I mean, persistently achieving #1 position for just about any short tail keywords even with 35 million competing pages on Live or more is nothing to be scoffed at - and this report tells you exactly how to achieve it in speed demon mode: more often than not, you can achieving such rankings within a mere week, while at other times it may take a month or two. More importantly, however, these rankings tend to be extremely sticky, meaning you're likely to enjoy (and profit from) them for years to come with preciously little effort.

Finally, two important tips:

1. Do go for the OTO that will be presented after your purchase. The script offered will help you automate the entire process with a vengeance, and for the price demanded it's a real steal!

2. Another third party application strongly recommended (and justly so!) by authors Dave Kelly and Chris Rempel is Caffeinated Content, a veteran tool that can populate your blog with 100% targeted content within minutes.

Now here's the best part: They've got a promotion running (not mentioned in the report!) till Nov 8 which lets you save $30 if you're savvy enough to purchase it by then. (See details below.) No way you're ever going to get it for less - and it actually is an absolute must have if it's the last tool you'll buy in your life!

So here are the links again plus the special CC promo code for you:

Cracking the MSN Code

Caffeinated Content - Use this link, and to save $30 when purchasing by November 8, put promo code TRICKORTREAT in the appropriate field and be sure to update your shopping cart before signing out!

Google Results with BruteForceSEO: 60% Page #1 Domination!

2008-10-12T13:18:00.000-07:00

Following up on our review of Peter Drew's freshly released BruteForceSEO where we mentioned dominating the first 20 Google results for our chosen key phrase, here's a screenshot demonstrating the power of this SEO tool and the strategy that goes with it.

(Click to enlarge.)

Cornering 6 spots out of 10 on the first Google page, to wit: rank #3 for the main site - a free hosting third level domain, too, really can't get much cheaper than that -plus 5 results for RSS feeds exclusively pointing to that same web site is a pretty impressive success rate for a phrase boasting 7.9 million results.

Moreover, we didn't really invest a lot of effort in this test run - certainly not the full gamut of possibilities BruteForceSEO offers its users, tip of the iceberg, and all that...

Note that this is actually a 100% white hat tool, too. Admittedly, its true fortes are optimizing for the long tail rather than those ultra competitive search terms that require an entire server park (and boatloads of money) of their own to make your mark in that space. But as it's eminently scalable with very little effort, yours truly wouldn't be surprised to see it perform a lot better than average in this field as well.

So do check it out here while the price is still in cut-rate mode!

Two Kick-Ass Link Building Tools

2008-10-12T13:17:00.000-07:00

Today it's time to tell you about two kick-ass link building and SEO tools you really don't want to miss out on. As our faithful regular readers know, we're very sparing with promoting third party products because 99% of them simply don't meet our stringent quality standards. Here are two notable exceptions.

Peter Drew's BruteForceSEO (which we introduced here a few weeks ago) has finally launched and it's arguably the most powerful white hat SEO tool out there money will buy you.

BruteForceSEO covers such nifties as automatic account creation on a slew of different platforms (ranging from Gmail accounts to Wordpress blogs and a chockfull - 40+ - social networks) to RSS feed creation and submission.

Even more powerful, perhaps, is his Gold Digger (ok, never mind the corny name...) niche keyword research tool which lets you drill down to a vast range of highly specific targeted key phrases - which can then be leveraged via the entire setup for optimal results.

It also comes with plenty of explanatory videos and an extensive pdf report outlining the entire process in detail.

Mini case study of our own

Using only one single segment of his recommended tactics and tools we managed to dominate the first two pages of Google with 7 results out of 20 in less than 12 (!) hours yesterday - and that, again, was merely a microscopic part of what his system actually allows you to do!

And a #3 rank on Ask was thrown in for good measure. Really not too bad for about 5 minutes' labor... :-)

Update: See our more detailed analysis including a SERP screenshot here.

You can test drive it for 7 days for a mere buck, after which subscription will be $97 per month which is more than reasonable. Peter has announced that only 1,000 slots will be available at that price. Once filled (as were his 1k affiliate partner slots within appr. 2 weeks), price will go up "by at least 50%" - and if you know him (of BadAssRSS etc. fame) even only a bit you won't harbor any doubts that he's dead serious about this.

So make sure to check out BruteForceSEO here!

Another cool service we've come across is PostLater: this one allows you to post your content in a scheduled manner across tons of different blogging platforms (including micro blogging sites like Twitter) in a scheduled manner: Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, FriendFeed... the list goes on. Note that this even encompasses platforms that don't of themselves allow for scheduled posting - arguably the most convenient aspect of them all!

Scheduled posting allows you to streamline your workflow: set up your submission campaigns in one fell swoop, then forget about them and devote your time to less mechanical and more lucrative tasks such as marketing and customer support.

Admittedly we do have our beef with some features. For instance: once posted, your article lists will disappear from the system without a trace. Thus, if you have to log your submissions in detail (and which power poster and serious, methodical link builder doesn't?) you're out in the woods as far as PostLater is concerned. So make sure you log and save your submission data externally to ensure your capacity for keeping track of your activities.

Also, if you're submitting heavily to free hosted blog platforms you may be a bit peeved seeing how many of them actually prevent remote scheduled posting. This, of course, isn't PostLater's fault: if a platform administrator decides not to implement their API or XML/RPC interface, there's nothing the service can do about it. They will, however, give you a range of helpful tips on how to possibly make it come about all the same, most of which involve getting in touch with the respective platform provider and having them specify a number of technical parameters you can then use to configure submission via PostLater manually.

Furthermore, PostLater supports just about any language including lots of different character sets, be it Western/Roman, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese or whatnot. This is especially useful for all you international and multi lingual marketers out there.

Finally, at only $9.95 a month this service is a real steal.

Check out PostLater here.

The Net’s Baddest Article Rewriter

2008-09-03T08:34:00.000-07:00

Thanks to one of our members in the 20 Links A Day subscribers forum we came across this free online article rewriting service whose name actually says it all: BadArticle - Article Rewrite and HTML Markup Tool for Bad People

It’s a funny mix between a tongue-in-cheek parody of Eastern European black hat gimmicks (including some excruciating English copy, albeit quite reflected) and a bona fide rewriter tool. Rewriting results are less than stellar, to put it mildly, but then they never claimed otherwise. And seeing that it’s free there’s really nothing to complain about.

This said, the kind of stuff it generates may still service your average churn-and-burn black hat site with content provided you’re prepared to put up with being chucked out of the Google index every other week or so.

So do check it out if only to see how these rewriting widgets generally work: BadArticle

Begin Your Year With a Free .COM Domain

2007-12-31T20:31:00.000-08:00

A Happy New Year to all our readers! May your business ventures be successful and may health and well being your life and that of your loved ones!

And to kick start the process, here's one neat way to start making it happen - get a free .com (or .net, .org, .info, .us) domain (first year's registration fee waived) from Register Dot Com:

Take One - First Year Free!

Mosaic Cloaking - Pushing IP Delivery to the Next Level

2007-12-20T08:29:00.000-08:00

This post begins with two quotes, further explained below:

In September 2007, Ralph Tegtmeier & Ed Purkiss coined the term "Mosaic Cloaking" whereby dynamic pages are constructed as tiles of content and only portions of the pages, javascript and CSS are changed, simultaneously decreasing the contrast between the cloaked page and the "friendly" page while increasing the capability for targeted delivery of content to various spiders and human visitors.

[Ref.: Wikipedia: Cloaking]

And:

I am posting this here and now, because I want to set the record straight before anyone else goes off and tries to poach the term. I’ve been talking about mosaic cloaking in the abstract for a while, but the term was actually coined by the Fantomaster himself in September of 2007 when we were having a discussion about it at the Syndk8.

Mosaic Cloaking is essentially componentized IP-Delivery. In other words, you do not cloak the whole page, you cloak portions of it dynamically. In the simplest example, you have a page where you have a blank space. Based on the IP address of the inbound surfer, you may provide keyword rich text, or Adsense, or an affiliate ad – based on the IP address of the surfer. If you do not want Google, for example, to see that you are affiliating for then you might push the code for AdSense out if you sense that it is a Google spider – otherwise you send the affiliate ad.

More interesting mosaic cloaking is sending different javascript, CSS files, or even slightly different components of each that might be used to enhance the “experience” of the surfer, be it a search engine spider or human. Using comments and other tricks, your source files could be exactly the same byte-size as cloaked files, look the same, and only be available in the “spider version” if they came from a validated IP address. It would be extremely difficult to ascertain exactly what was happening, if you were trying to reverse engineer someone’s SEO strategy. Combine that with Google’s Multivariate Testing notions (ie., sending different pages to regular surfers under the guise of market testing) and you have a cloak that is extraordinarily difficult to pierce.

The best mosaics are a combination of surfer experience abstraction, with differing chunks of obfuscated Javascript that has been byte-size balanced, differing CSS external files and IP delivered from the same place dynamically based on a proven spider database such as the Fantomas spiderSpy product.

[Ref: Mosaic Cloaking: An Explanation]

Also, please see Ed's short forum piece here:

Mosaic Cloaking: An Explanation

Indeed, setting the records straight lest someone out there attempts to hijack the term, is what this is mainly about. That, and a friendly heads up by way of a Season's gift to our esteemed readers, offering a sneak peak behind the scenes of what's brewing in the sinister clandestine developer labs of modern bad ass Black Hat SEO. :)

When Ed and I commenced our discussion on Syndk8 forum (registration required) back in September this year, it was he who came up with the basic concept. Being the language junkie I am, I promptly tagged it Mosaic Cloaking™.

And in case anyone's wondering: Yes, it's a protected trademark by usage and publication now - held collectively by both Ed's and my company: “let it be known by all men” and all that… In view of the fact that even a multi billion dollar corporation such as “Do-No-Evil” Google didn't shy away from stealing our trademarked term Shadow Domain™ to the point of abusing it in their Webmaster Guidelines for years (removed now), we feel this to be a direly necessary step to protect our intellectual property rights.

On a more practical level, chances are you'll probably want to know more hands on details about Mosaic Cloaking™. Well, this much we can divulge at the present point: It's still being researched into, developed and tested over a broad spectrum of web sites. No verified metrics we would care to publish yet, but rest assured that you'll read it here (and on Ed's blog as well as his forum) first.

Needless to say, it's a highly sophisticated and fairly complex technology that will enable black hat SEOs to truly push the envelope in terms of well nigh undetectable cloaking/IP delivery to an unprecedented degree of efficiency. It will also effectively dissolve the hitherto clear cut borders between cloaked and non-cloaked pages – Web 3.0 at its very best!

So will it help us make more friends at Google, Yahoo!, Live or Ask headquarters? Probably not. But guess what: We've finally resigned ourselves to the fact that we'll simply have to live with that. Laughing all the way to the bank…

The fantomaster team wishes all our readers a ripping good holiday season and a happy, successful New Year!

SEO Link Value Factors Reviewed

2007-12-11T19:27:00.000-08:00

Wiep Knol has released the results of his survey on link value factors as seen by a slew of well known professional SEOs such as Eric Ward, Aaron Wall, Jim Boykin, Barry Schwartz, Peter da Vanzo and Joost de Valk, not to forget the ever helpful Michael Martinez as well as relatively new but highly competent and well-regarded names such as Hamlet Batista and lots of others including Wiep himself. (And yes, yours truly actually participated as well.)

What's interesting about the results isn't merely the overall metrics – it's the individual comments on various questions such as the perceived linkjuice power of .edu and .gov domains, the value of anchor texts, linking sites' topicality, authority status, and more.

While it may not hold water as being sufficiently representative of the SEO industry's general perception from a formal academic statistics point of view, seen from a pragmatic angle it is arguably the most systematic and comprehensive detailed overview available to date.

And let's not forget that it merely reflects opinions and outsiders' assessments, informed as they may be by tons of practical research and a total of several decades' worth of combined experience. So: Be aware that this isn't the search engines speaking openly to us (as if they ever did…), it's those practitioners who have worked (and, yes: gamed) them for longer than most of them will probably care to remember.

In short: This is the grunts in the trenches sharing their knowledge, the guys and gals who have to deal with search engine rankings on a daily basis.

Nor does this observation devalue the results in any way, on the contrary: It merely puts the survey in its proper perspective, and as such it's as close to to a viable check list and actionable strategy based on real world expertise as you're ever going to get: cutting through all the misleading fluff constituting the search engines' webmaster guidelines and their spinmeisters' obnoxious FUD-cum-Kool-Aid statements.

Thanks, Wiep, for undertaking this effort – and thanks to all our colleagues who participated!

You can read the entire post here:

Link Value Factors

There's also both a color and a printer friendly PDF version available for download on site.

Buyers Making Money Only Hours After Signing Up - The Google Payload Instant Success

2007-11-14T10:27:00.001-08:00

Well, it's not as if we hadn't expected it: Alex Goad's Google Payload is proving to become a massive success - and we're not simply talking sales here, either. They may be nice for the people launching the product, but of course you the consumer will be interested in something entirely different: How it well help you, not them.

Well, less than 24 hours after signing up, people are reporting that they've already started making serious money, based on the techniques and strategies outlined in Google Payload.

Let's face it - even if you don't like PPC (and I've never held back on the fact that I really hate it myself: it's really very much like paying for sex IMV, heh...), you've got to concede that it can be lightning fast. Of course, this can go both ways: Like that Fortune 500 company we knew some years back that decided to assign a 3-months-budget to their first-ever PPC campaign and blew it all in a single week...

But if you know how to play it right, make-or-break control can practically be conducted in real time. And if you follow up on all the great tips, clearly outlined in an easy-to-mimic fashion in this ebook, it seems you can recoup your investment almost in no time. Good to learn after having blogged about it so positively myself.

Oh yes, there's more news even, some excellent, some less so. The best bit first: Alex has announced that he'll be releasing even more hands on material, mainly additional instruction videos to his subscribers probably as early as next week.

The bad part: Price will be raised soon. (Hey, as if we didn't expect that, either! :)

Don't know the details yet, but expect it to hit the $97 - even at that rate it will be worth every penny IMO, but of course if you want to save $20 (or whatever it may actually be in the end), better hurry and get Google Payload now. As it comes with a money-back guarantee, you have nothing to lose, anyway.

So: Check out Google Payload here!

Traffic Arbitrage at its Best - Google Payload Launch

2007-11-12T09:33:00.000-08:00

While we have never been raving fans of the pay-per-click model for various reasons, there's no doubt that this game can be hugely profitable if you play your cards right. This is especially true in the fairly complex field of traffic arbitrage.

Which, however, neatly pinpoints the problem: How do you actually succeed in what has developed into a veritable cut throat environment in recent years? Simply following the old rule of "buy low, sell high" is all very well, but unless you've got your research pat, chances are you'll either burn tons of money learning the ropes the hard way, or you'll end up with mere peanuts for all your troubles.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not bashing this industry one bit. Like always in life, however, you have to know what you're doing to actually make it worthwhile.

Enter Alex Goad and Google Payload. Once again he has teamed up with Chris "X" of Day Job Killer and Affiliate Project X fame. The last product Alex released was Project Black Mask. Teamed with Chris, it was a smashing success selling over 4000 copies. It will be interesting to see if Alex can top that with Google Payload.

Alex was good enough to furnish us with a preview copy. (You might think there's nothing particularly "kindhearted" about promoting your stuff in advance to multipliers - but we're actually no super affiliates or high level promoters or anything, promoting affiliate programs as a mere sideline when opportune and potentially relevant and beneficial to our readers.)

Anyway, I've just finished reading it (yes, every single word) - and it rocks! Not that I'd expect less from an accomplished hands-on guy like Alex, but it's not as if this were the first system to lay claims to giving away the farm. In actual fact I've read them all, but this one beats anything on the market stone cold.

Here you'll find:

Set and forget techniques, so that your business is working 24/7, not you.

Fresh and innovative approach that has never beeen seen in many market segments. This means tons of opportunity for you.

A system that is simple to learn and produces results, i.e. cash, quickly. Less time working and more time counting your profits.

Google Payload addresses questions such as:

where to buy the best profit driving traffic - and which costly mistakes to avoid

the importance of geo-targetting - and how to do it right

how to leverage a unique Quality Score cheat that will shave your expenses and prop up your profits

how to optimize your landing pages for optimal conversions

how to get cheap targeted traffic even from Google AdWords (yes, you read right: you actually can exploit AdWords at a huge profit if you know how to!)

selecting the best exploitable (and profitable) niches

which kind of clientele to avoid

invaluable tools and resources to deploy, saving you tons of time and money

constructing arbitrage pages to achieve the most powerful conversion rates

which on page factors are critical to drive conversions

which off page factors you should invest your efforts in to push traffic, payout rates and conversions

how to generate a substantial secondary income via strategically placed affiliate links

on site linking tricks (sneaky but legit) that can drive up your conversions by 25% or more

optimizing your AdSense revenue (yes, AdSense is anything but dead - if you're smart enough to avoid the countless snares and pitfalls Google has set up now to make life difficult for you)

testing, tweaking, tracking: arguably the three most critical tasks all too easily ignored by traffic arbitragers - learn here how to streamline it all

step-by-step, day-by-day guide to bring it all together - and at stunning profits

personal real life case studies outlining the process (including the mistakes made - now for you to avoid).

The downside? Only one, really: I'd have wished to find a bit on multivariate tracking (especiallly the Taguchi techniques) and the readily available software applications making it a breeze to implement. But other than that it's a no-brainer buy!

An easy make-money-while-you-sleep-without-work scheme? Most certainly not! It's an entire craft and trade in its own right - and Google Payload spells out the rules in all detail.

So: Check out Google Payload here!

Wordtracker Keyword Database Special Promo Extended - Save 15% Now!

2007-11-02T15:51:00.000-07:00

After last month's great success with the Wordtracker special offer they've decided to extend it until November 30, 2007.

Make sure you use this promo code to qualify for your 15% discount on the annual subscription:

us-annual-15

If you've been living under a rock (or depended only on Google for your real life information, heh) the last past month, we'd like to remind you that we’ve been very early adopters of Wordtracker, the industry-standard keyword research tool and database. (Vide the fact that we're affiliate #36!)

The offer comes with the usual Wordtracker 30-day guarantee. If you’re not entirely satisfied for whatever reason, we’ll return your money in full - no questions asked. You have nothing to lose and lots of traffic to gain.

To enjoy this special benefit, make sure to signup for Wordtracker via this link here!

Here's How to Kick-Start Your Own Network of Affiliate Datafeed Stores in a Whiffy

2007-10-29T16:56:00.000-07:00

Generating content for your money sites is an arduous task. And with competition getting fiercer every day, all you can do to compensate is to roll out masses of them. But where to get decent content for those? What a catch-22!

Here's a brand new premium solution. We've known, used and supported Stefan Everaet's niche content material for years: a classical case of quality beats quantity. Carefully selected niches, meticulously hand crafted, complete with one-of-a-kind header graphics, excellently written articles (i.e. not the semi-illiterate braindead crap that's generally being sold for PLR across the board these days), backed up by a top-notch, highly responsive service at a competitive price you'll have to see to believe – if this sounds like a rant, well it is because here's one of a very, very few providers we can unreservedly recommend.

Today, he's launched a new product: Niche Content Stores – ready-to-rumble Wordpress blogs rendering affiliate data feeds, and fully customizable with your affiliate codes, of course. A choice of different top quality themes you won't find anywhere else is included for optimum conversions, and installation is a real breeze.

We've signed up for this product ourselves, of course, and can only advise our esteemed readers to do the same if you're into serious Internet marketing at all.

So check out the newly launched Niche Content Stores program here!

Via fantomNews

Looking for a Search Engine Spammer Messenger Bag, a fantomThong or a fantomWereDog T-Shirt? fantomaster SEO Cartoons Now at CafePress

2007-10-22T20:57:00.000-07:00

With our weekly fantOons series of SEO cartoons now into its third year (hurray!), we've decided to set up a basic shop over at CaféPress where you can purchase your Dr Search favorites on t-shirts, mugs, steins, wall clocks, tile coasters, mousepads, baseball caps, trucker hats, bbq aprons, buttons, stickers, posters, etc. etc.

Need an authentic search engine spammer messenger bag? A fantomTote Bag? A fantomMagnet? A fantomTeddy perhaps? Want to see our one-of-a-kind fantomWereDog T-Shirt?

If so, check out our fantomShop at CaféPress here!

Via fantomNews

Pay Me, or I'll Link to You!

2007-10-13T20:59:00.000-07:00

Find more great cartoon strips on the raging debate about Google's penalization of paid linking here:

Pay me, or I'll Link to You!
How Google spawned a new cottage industry: Negative Paid Linking. And lent a new twist to the old protection racket.

Google's Push for a Shadow Economy
How Google is pushing webmasters (including Shoemoney) into the shadow economy and tax evasion.

How Google Kick Started Link Fraud
ews from the bleeding edge: How Google kick started link fraud.

How Google Determines Paid Links
Google's highly advanced, infallible new method of determining paid links.

Not Buying Paid Links

2007-10-09T19:34:00.000-07:00

Not buying paid links. Never. Honest! (Cartoon)

See it here!

A New Power Tool Launched for Creating Gmail Accounts by the Ton

2007-10-02T14:28:00.000-07:00

Operating in (aka: gaming) the social network space, going for effective link building via forums, blog comments, wikis etc. will typically involve setting up slews of different personas and identities - for most of which you'll need an operative e-mail address to verify your registration these days. Whether you're trying to ramp up traffic and links via Digg, Slashdot, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Propeller, Sphinn or any of the slews of me-toos abounding across the Web, an e-mail account for each persona you're creating is a dead must.

Sure, there's plenty of free services available online that will allow for all kinds of e-mail addresses: throwaway, redirect, auto-delete, anonymous, etc. But try creating, say, 50 or 100 of those in a row and chances are you'll start screaming for their utter lack of scalability.

Not only will this eat up hours of premium time - what's worse, many social network operators have wisened up to them now and will point blank refuse registrations from such addresses, based on an ever expanding list of blackmarked providers. (Obviously they won't allow multiple registrations from identical e-mail addresses either.)

Switching to trusted services such as Google's all-pervading Gmail (you know: the one where they'll parse all your personal messages automatically to do no evil - honest! - with the data collected) seems an obvious alternative, but mass creation of Gmail accounts is nothing that service was ever set up for.

So enter The Mailbot: This recently launched tool is a desktop based application that allows you to create as many valid, functional Gmail accounts as you like.

Read on here: New Power Tool for Creating Gmail Accounts by the Ton

SEO: No Substitute for A Business Model!

2007-09-30T16:18:00.000-07:00

Yes, it sounds trite, elementary, overly obvious - and yet, we're encountering this almost every day: People who inquire about our SEO services who don't seem to have an inkling of what online business is all about in the first place.

I've gone on record year ago stating that “this is the age of the clueless webmaster”: With prices for online access, domain names, web site hosting and dedicated servers dropping for years, even as early as 1998 or so the typical Web entrepreneur newcomer would no longer be a tech savvy nerd with a mercantile trait. Rather, these would be marketers, people who know how to turn a buck and build a business, many of whom had done it successfully offline for years.

The vast majority of them were anything but early adopters of high tech - but adopt it they finally did once they had begun to grasp the full potential of this new and widely unprecedented technology. And with a vengeance, too.

Nowadays, however, it seems there's yet another type of upstart hitting the world of Internet commerce: People who lack business experience both offline an on. Essentially, today I'll have to expand that statement of mine: “This is the age of the clueless webmaster and the inexperienced Web entrepreneur.”

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that offline business experience is mandatory, though it's certainly a great help.

However, the laws of human nature (and the world in general) being what they are, there's no easy workaround and no shortcuts that will absolve you from doing your elementary homework, regardless of what whichever loudmouthed Internet Marketing (IM) snake oil peddlers may claim when trying to sell you on their products and services.

Some of the marketing tools being offered out there are truly excellent and we wouldn't want to miss them for a second. But a tool's no good at all if you don't know how to use it, right?

Which is where SEO comes in. Having heard of the importance of search engine optimization all over the place by now, many people seem to desperately cling to the (entirely mistaken) belief that SEO is the be all and end all of just about every dream of online success they may be nursing.

Read on here!

Why Blogrush Is the Black Hat Spammer's Fun Traffic Pump

2007-09-19T21:37:00.000-07:00

If you've fallen for all the recent hoopla showered upon Blogrush (no, we won't link to it right here - do yourself a real favor and read this post instead and check out the links we do point you to below), endorsed by the likes of John Reese, John Chow, Yaro Starak and Shoemoney, you may either be devastated or delighted to learn that this pathetically blatant pyramid scheme of a blog link exchange for the mathematically challenged and blog illiterati has been "cracked" from no less than two top notch black hat quarters, enabling you to game it to your heart's content until the cows come home:

Read on here: Blogrush - the Black Hat Spammer’s Fun Traffic Pump

What Black Hat SEOs Should Do if Google Actually Gobbles up GoDaddy

2007-09-11T12:36:00.000-07:00

This is (still) merely speculation, but surmise founded on a number of informed guesses offering a reasonable degree of plausibility: Google may be in the process of buying GoDaddy, the world's #1 domain registrar.

Nor is this a mere figment of yours truly's fevered imagination. In fact, there's quite a buzz surrounding this rumor (and let's reiterate: rumor is all it presently can claim to be).

E.g. Frank Schilling is pointing it out here:

More Fuel For the "Google-Daddy Merger" Fire

Domain Name Wire had a piece on this last month: GoDaddy Files Patent for "Domain Name Expiration Protection"

In this overall puzzle of events, Google's patent discussed here would make perfect sense if they were actually to buy out GoDaddy or any other major registrar for that matter.

Then there is eWeek backgrounding the entire affair in great detail: Google-GoDaddy Marriage on Tap? This article is well worth a read and really too long to summarize here without doing it injustice, so please read it in its entirety.

There's also Michael Zielinski on Seeking Alpha offering a short piece listing the bullets: Google to Acquire the World's Largest Domain Name Registrar?

Finally, there's eWeek's Google Watch with a summary piece by Clint Boulton, titled: Google for GoDaddy?

Now of course Google has been a registrar since 2003 already, a fact many webmasters don't seem to be aware of - which is hardly surprising as they've restricted themselves to exclusively adminstering their own domains, not offering open registration services to anyone.

Black Hats Impacted?

So what implications could all this have for the black hat SEO community, assuming that Google and Godaddy did indeed merge? Quite possibly devastating ones!

Because while the rest of the online mainstream media are focusing on a multitude of aspects involved, ranging from the impact this anticipated move may have e.g. on Google's SERPS (as in: deleting trusted vintage domains after a switch of owners), their apps, etc., expectably nobody seems to be considering the implications it would have for black hat SEOs.

Let's say you're holding a couple of hundred domains with GoDaddy, all hidden behind their domains-by-proxy privacy feature (which comes at a price more often than not exceeding the actual domain registration itself unless you buy in bulk), using them for cloaking. The very last thing you would want to see is Google getting hold of your real registration details…

But there's more. Along with GoDaddy would come their Domain Name Aftermarket (TDNAM), a prime resource for catching expiring domains that are still indexed or even enjoy a high PageRank value. As one commentator has it, gobbling up the world's #1 domain registrar would allow Google to detect switch of ownership in real time, making it possible to adjust web sites' rankings. (Which is what a part of their new patents are about, after all - so this would make a lot of sense from their point of view.)

What's a poor black hat SEO to do, then? At time of writing, three immediate solutions come to mind:

Either forsake GoDaddy registrations immediately or spread your risks by using multiple, competing registrars. And take note of the fact that there's no point in simply signing up with any of GoDaddy's affiliate partners who are merely piggybacking on Big GD's status. For example, Namecheap.com is a GD subsidiary and therefore wouldn't qualify.

Hide-your-tracks strategy #1: Even when opting for GoDaddy's Whois privacy service, make sure the account you're doing it from isn't in your own name. Use straw men (friends, family members, co-workers, nominees, your solicitor, etc.) but be aware that it will be they who would be considered to be the legal domain holders in case there's a dispute!

Hide-your-tracks strategy #2: Register your account under a corporate identity (or several). Go offshore, if viable: Even for US citizens there's absolutely nothing illegal about owning an offshore company incorporated in Panama, the Bahamas, the Channel Islands, Gibraltar, Cyprus or even Andorra - as long as you declare it in your tax return statement and don't try to hide it from the Internal Revenue Service, you'll be a-ok. (This is not about tax minimization let alone - illegal - tax evasion, it's about hiding your domain ownership from Google, remember!) For corporate addresses, you can use maildrop services available across the world.

Note: If you're seriously interested in an offshore incorporation solution, please contact me directly via e-mail - see footer of the page - to connect you: While I'm not workin in this industry any longer, I do still have some reliable established contacts who may be able to help you.

Hide-your-tracks strategy #3: Become a registrar yourself! Ok, maybe that's a bit over the top for the average black hat SEO but for all you high flyin' big players out there it may actually be entirely feasible. Here's a short overview of the advantages this offers:

Full control over your domain equity - register what, when and how you want. No worries about domains being deleted or not extended, etc.

Full control over your Whois privacy - contrary to popular belief, there is no central domain ownership database beyond Whois accessible to all registrars. Thus, if your Whois entries are proxied (e.g. by referencing your own registrar entity as the registering party), actual ownership cannot be discerned by others.

No logging of Whois searches by third parties. This can be invaluable if you're in the domaining business and want to check out interesting domain names, expiration dates, owners data, etc. without raising red flags all over the place.

Buy domain names at registrar prices, e.g. pay only $6 for a .com, $4.24 for a .net or $5.75 for a .info domain (plus Icann fees of $0.25 per individual domain transaction).

Domain tasting (aka kiting): Register domains at wholesale pricing and if these domains are deleted within the first 5 days of registration, get a refund. This allows you to check your domains' monetization value (e.g. via type-in traffic) or even short sell them (e.g. by auctioning your kited portfolio or parts of it before you finally decide on buying for keeps or to pass on to your own buyers).

What's even better: You don't have to go the full mile financially to enjoy registrar status anymore. Here's a novel service (actually an industry first) that allows you to lease an ICANN approved registrar with all the benefits involved:

Lease a Registrar Program

It offes an easy-to-use interface enabling you registrar-level control over domains with all the bells and whistles.

Obviously, it's not targeting the black hat SEO industry specifically, but the BH advantages it offers should be obvious from the above.

Your financial transactions will be between you and the registry directly, added to which there is a leasing fee that is determined by the size of the portfolio being managed and the type of domains owned.

Expect that leasing fee to be about $2000 a month, but as this isn't hewn in stone we suggest you contact them directly for a definitive quote.

Note that we aren't affiliated with them in any way, this is an unsolicited pointer and we haven't signed up for their service (which hasn't been fully launched yet, as we understand it) but we're seriously considering our options. Which may be what you'll want to do, too.

Via fantomNews: What Can Black Hat SEOs Do if Google Actually Gobbles up GoDaddy?

How to Game the Social Networks Black Hat Style

2007-09-10T14:14:00.000-07:00

When it comes to gaming the social networks black hat style, there’s really no “secret sauce” involved, so no need to cough up money for expensive e-books trying to sell it to you.

Simply follow the rules outlined below and adjust them as required, employing your #1 resource as an SEO - your head!

1. Give before you take - vote for people’s articles (lots of them), then sign them up as friends (again: lots).
2. Continue voting, then, gradually, send them one of yours to vote for.
3. Monitor closely: Some are anchors and will hardly return the favor (too busy, etc.) - keep them as friends anyway.
4. If someone never votes for yours, chuck them from your friends’ list - no point in wasting time on them.
5. Before you send your message to friends for voting, vote for their most recent articles - as long as they don’t have too many votes yet, yours will stand out and typically they won’t be swamped with reciprocation requests yet.
6. Be prepared to give more votes to power posters than you’ll receive in return. Chances are, they’re too busy to keep track most of the time. But they can be very influential, so for my part, I’ll go for a 3:1 to appr. 5:1 ratio max, after which: see #4
7. If you want to be sneaky, set up multiple accounts (different names, mail addresses, preferably IPs), but don’t overdo it because linking patterns (i.e. voting networks) are fairly easy to spot. Make sure you don’t vote for your own stuff all the time - keep it natural and as “organic” as you can. This little bit of extra trouble can actually make or break every manipulative campaign.
8. Beware votebots: Plenty of those around now - no good for you because most of them are too dumb to spread votes across anything but their masters’ articles. (Generally, their blatantly incestuous behavior makes them highly vulnerable to detection, of course. So don’t fall for that same trap yourself!)
9. If your competitors should start hitting your articles with sinkbots, retaliate in kind and be sure to make no prisoners. If you can discern who’s vote-related to whom, respond to every sink with 5-10 of your own. Then, send them an anonymous mail proposing a truce. If you’re relentless enough and they see no reason to doubt your determination, chances are they’ll want to cut their losses and may even be willing to cooperate with your own voting network further down the road. (Think of mobsters staking their claims and cutting out their respective territories - if they’ll let you work the Cialis racket, you can leave the Viagra promo to them, you get the drift. And be sure to stand united against any new contenders cropping up out of the blue who’ll try to screw both of you.)

Via fantomNews

Funny content generation video

2007-09-04T13:17:00.000-07:00

How to Protect Your Site from DDOS Attacks

2007-09-04T06:47:00.000-07:00

Hamlet Batista features an extensive piece on how to protect your site from Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks, deploying open source tools, notably Jonathan A. Zdziarski's invaluable Apache module mod_evasive .

This has become a major concern for successful SEOs as much as for your run-of-the-mill sysadmin because in the age of Negative SEO, with lots of automation tools around to roll out just about every nasty trick in the book, chances that your well ranked sites will become a target some day are pretty high.

E.g. here at fantomaster, we currently experience a major DDOS onslaught about once a week now. (This is discounting the appr. 35K e-mail spam messages our systems fend off automatically on a daily basis…)

The issue with DDOS attacks is, of course, their being spread across slews of zombie servers, meaning that blocking a single IP (or even a handful or two) will do you little good. As he points out:

This is not a trivial attack by some script kiddie. DDOS is a serious and well-planned attack, usually with the purpose extorting ransom. The idea behind it is to exhaust the target server or network’s limited resources. Small attacks try to exhaust the server's CPU or memory by sending a lot of fake requests. The main challenge blocking the attacks is being able to detect legitimate traffic from harmful traffic.

When it is a single script kiddie running a script to send overwhelming requests to your server, it’s enough to block his or her IP. A distributed attack is a whole different ballgame. Distributed attacks scale to a proportion that, no matter what you do, once your bandwidth is exhausted and your system is unable to sustain the number of invalid packets, your network will crumble.

Of course, like the crucified bunch singing in chorus in the 1979 Monty Python Life of Brian, flic, you are well advised to always look at the bright side of life:

I can't say you will enjoy a DDOS if it happens to you, but think about it this way: you’re big enough to be attracting attacks. You’re a celebrity in your own right now. :)

So find out more about this perfidious method of knocking out competitors and what you can do to effectively protect your valuable web estate against it here:

Success Means Security: How to protect your most profitable web sites from distributed denial of service attacks (an open source approach)

Via fantomNews

German Government Calling for Citizens to Sue Google for Sedition and Antisemitism

2007-08-27T07:43:00.000-07:00

German Ministry of the Interior speaker Christian Sachs has called for citizens to sue Google (Germany) as the legal owners of video platform YouTube for violation of laws banning public distribution of neonazi material.

Seeing that YouTube has ignored over 100 pertinent cease and desist applications by various plaintiffs, the German government feels that this is the only appropriate step to enforce rule of law.

By German law, it is illegal to publish material glamorizing nazi ideology and antisemitism as well as any denegation or playing down of the holocaust.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany has announced it is considering similar steps. Council vice-president Salomon Korn: “I expect both the public prosecutor and, should the need arise, the federal government to stand up against this.”

In an interview with German public tv’s political magazine Report Mainz (scheduled for broadcast on 2007-08-27 at 9:45 PM local), Dieter Wiefelspütz, speaker for home policy of Germany’s Social Democrats (SPD, currently constituting the government in coalition with the Christian Democratic parties CDU/CSU) states: “This has to be stopped. It’s a scandal that something like this is possible in Germany.”

According to Report Mainz, YouTube features nazi propaganda flicks such as Jud Süß as well as illegal music videos of such groups as Kommando Freisler and Landser.

Via heise online and fantomNews.

Unspinning Google’s Eric Schmidt’s Freedom of Information Double-Talk in Aspen

2007-08-26T09:20:00.000-07:00

True: Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has never been exactly famous for his social engineering skills. If their’s one higher echelon they’d better stow away in some dark basement, miles off any mikes and gleeful press hacks eagerly awaiting for the next eminently quotable statement to hit the public’s long suffering sympathy with like just another poke in the eye. With a CEO like that, who needs corporate or public or private detractors?

Well, corporate hierarchies being what they are, it’s probably futile to bewail the fact that such hopes are utterly unrealistic to begin with. Nor could we for our part care less. At the end of the day, it’s all about what things are actually like, not how we may or may not want them to be, as John Andrews rightly points out in both his recent blogs post itself and in the comments section: Understanding the Google

So all that really behooves us to do is monitor the run of events as closely as we can inasmuch as it is likely to impact our activities on the SEO front.

In a newly launched blog titled Knight Crawler the (as yet: anonymous – after all, he is making use of Google’s Blogger platform…) poster takes an exceedingly (and very well worded) dim view of Mr Schmidt’s recent presentation at the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s annual conference in Aspen:

Mr. Google started out his presentation’s main points with a terrible feint. He claimed that his first concern, or point of action, for the Foundation was the importance of the Freedom of Speech. Did I fall asleep or something, and wake up in Cuba? Freedom of speech is at risk here in the USA? This is a relevant action point for the Progress and Freedom Foundation? Not only could Big Bird have made a more profound statement to the Foundation, but if General Eisenhower feinted like Mr. Google, we all would be speaking to Fantomaster in his native language.

There’s a not-too-subtle irony embedded in the Knight Crawler’s historical analogy, mimicking, as it does, that pseudo-argumentative bathos Americans have been subjected to for years, invariable coming from the ranting political right – be it the time worn (and historically inane) assertion that pulling out of Vietnam was a direct causal factor leading to the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, to President Bush’s recent comparison of the Iraq quagmire to the Vietnam war, viewed as insidious if not sleazy by many if not most commentators.

Having been instrumentalized specifically in this discourse, this particular kraut may perhaps be pardoned for pointing out that over here in Europe we have our own, not too savory experiences with stab-in-the-back-legends, the predominant one, prevailing from 1918, heralding in no uncertain terms the advent of that sordid, unprecedentedly bloody rerun termed WW2. But we digress.

Because be that as it may, merely another round of gratuitous Google bashing this certainly ain’t: rather, a shrewd critical assertion that not all may be as it seems – and that, as an SEO, you’d be well advised to focus more on reading between the lines, pushing your brain into overdrive, rather than take the Google spinmeisters’ (or, for that matter, any others’) statements for gospel.

Not that this comes as a surprise, but here’s one nail that still requires being driven home over and again.

Full story: Google’s CEO Gives __ow Job in Aspen

Via fantomNews

A Google Critic's Swansong: CattMutts Going Underground to Evade Matt Cutts

2007-08-23T20:03:00.000-07:00

Following the upsurge of Danny Sullivan's recently launched Sphinn social network site, CattMutts, self-confessed “vocal right-wing flag-waver” and vociferous Google critic of Threadwatch fame, gave it a thorough try, as can be seen from this impressive selection:

Google at 700 Mhz? ...Think About It!

An Open Appeal to Bill Gates About Google Buying Bandwidth

MontereySEO: What's Google Doing Out of the Kiddie Pool?

Not So Fast...Congress Not Swallowing Google's Kool-Aid

The SEO Future is ...You!

Full Speed Ahead...But To Where?

Make no mistake: His critical stance was anything but just another sample of gratuitious Google bashing or brainless linkbaiting for the heck of it:

When I speak up about Google's dangerous global intentions, it's because I have a solid understanding of national and international waves of culture over the last several centuries and I see what's ahead if Google gets its way. And I don't like it. Not in the way that it is personally distasteful, but in that it is not going to be good for us as Americans (note: the Britts, Aussies, etc. are Americans too. So is fantomaster.) That is, it is dangerous to our privacy and our freedoms.

(As an aside I'll confess that, of all unlikely things, I've never ever in this incarnation been termed a cloaked American before LOL - which goes to show that to live is, indeed, like it or not, to learn…)

Now, he's returning underground. After Google's Matt Cutts checked out his profile at Sphinn, it seems he's just about had it:

He can very easily find out who I am, where I am, he can read all of my emails in all of my gmail accounts, read my docs, my spreadsheets, see my pictures, find my websites, etc. etc. I mean any seo could track down my identity and my address. I'm not really hiding or anything. But Google, on the other hand, possesses WAYY more information than anybody should that is not part of your family. From my browsing history, Google can track down my banks, my personal interests, etc. and ascertain something of a profile on me, which, I suspect, is their goal anyway (on everyone, that is, not just me.)

Well, all pigs must die, as they say:

So it is time to go back underground. Matt Cutts has appeared. CattMutts must vanish. Like a phantom (or is that fantom?).

Ok, fellow fantom (or is that phantom?) – I'm not at all worried about losing track of you. Let this particular kraut tell you: Vee heff our ways! :-)

However, I'd venture a guess that there's quite a few alike thinking minds around who'll miss your public schtick, your chuzpah and one of the smartest voices of those that refuse to lend credence to the gallons of the Kool-Aid the 'Plex spinmeisters are feeding to the masses by the minute like opium for the people. But the critics' chorus is a-waxing in proportion, so rest assured your work has not been in vain.

As for our esteemd readers: Do check out his entire piece here (and screw the long tail header typo, they haven't deserved better anyway) unless you're just another Google brown noser, in which case please get lost, will you?

It's definitely reading time well spent:

I Am Naked Before Goolge and Matt Cutts!

Via: fantomNews

Sphinning Spham - the Spam Brigade Is Hitting Home

2007-08-22T01:58:00.000-07:00

If you thought Danny Sullivan’s Sphinn to be the next big thing in search after the invention of the search box, think again. Becomes the spam onslaught has only just begun.

As the screenshot below illustrates, Sphinn has now become the target of spammers relentlessly submitting absolutely irrelevant stuff in the hope of garnering some links (and, possibly, traffic).

It only stands to reason that this trend will escalate.

Here's another comment of ours you may want to check out:

Sphinning the Spham - the Onslaught Has Begun

The Big-Time Black Hat Scoop - Mike Grehan Interviews fantomaster

2007-08-19T23:24:00.000-07:00

Seems it's the interview season over at fantomaster.com these days: Following Peter Da Vanzo's inaugurating his new link building blog Link Juicy by featuring a two part interview with yours truly as reported here and here, next in the queue was our old friend Mike Grehan who has now posted about it in his regular ClickZ column: Big-Time Black Hat

He makes some mention of the black hat industry and its sources. So in case you've still not gotten hold of the Black Mask Project we blogged about weeks ago, better do it here now before your competitors do! And of course you can purchase and download it even if it's 3 o'clock in the morning, yadda yadda. :-)

As for what's in the interview proper, you'll have to check out Mike's piece at source.

Thanks, Mike - as always, it was great to talk to you. And so sorry I really just couldn't give away the entire farm. After all, a man's still gotta spam, heh…

And in case anyone's lost their orientation with all those fancy links above, here's Mike's ClickZ article once more for your convenience: Big-Time Black Hat

Another SEO Test: Advanced Ink Building Interview

2007-08-19T09:59:00.000-07:00

This is another SEO test conducted by fantomBlogger to check for the term advanced ink building interview which, of course, is a typoed version of a topic previously posted about.

For good measure, we'll throw in a link to these two pages on the Link Juicy link building blog:
Advanced Link Building - An Interview With Fantomaster
and
Part Two: Advanced Linking Interview With Fantomaster

The Churchfather of All Linkbait and Inventor of Link Brokering Bob Massa Launches Own SEO Blog

2007-08-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

One of the oldest and most renowned SEOs, the notorious “SearchKing” Bob Massa has launched his own blog titled Ask the SEO Guru.

His notoriety resulted from his sueing Google back in 2003 after they had taken down his link broker network, the very first of its kind. While the law suit was expectably dismissed in court, the brouha it created evolved into what arguably came to be his most brilliant and successful linkbait operation ever.

As Aaron Wall termed it in his Bob Massa Starts Blogging post today, Bob is an “SEO older than dirt” which is really no exaggeration: Bob has probably forgotten more about SEO in his time than appr. 80% of the current industry has yet to learn.

So cordially welcome to the world of SEO blogging, Bob – we’re certainly looking forward to reading new stuff from someone who has always been considered one of the best writers in SEO extant!

Via fantomNews.

fantomaster’s Link Building Interview Published on Link Juicy - Part 2

2007-08-15T20:36:00.000-07:00

Last week we informed you of Peter Da Vanzo’s newly launched link building blog Link Juicy and the first part of the interview he conducted with yours truly: New Link Building Blog Launched, Interviews fantomaster

Well, the second part is out now, discussing two of the major commercial link building networks and what you can (and should not) expect of them, plus some critical remarks on the prevailing PageRank craze.

So check it out here: Part Two: Advanced Linking Interview With Fantomaster

Via fantomNews

Bust a Black Hat - Clobber a Cloaker!

2007-08-15T15:55:00.000-07:00

GSINC, a Birmingham (UK) based SEO agency has release and online Flash application termed the SEO Game where you can clobber such baddy opponents as the Hidden Text Kid, the Keyword Stuffer, Duplicate Content Girl, the inevitable Cloaking Monster (nice one!), Mr Redirect, the Link Farmer and the nefarious Spam Lord, white hat style.

Accompanied by a ’toon representing a beaming, approving Matt Cutts (complete with a “Do No Evil” t-shirt), you’d better watch your energy levels or it’s “game over”.

If you’re really into black hat stuff you’ll probably find the selection of spammy practitioners mildly inane and very much Web 1.0, but that shouldn’t come as a major surprise – after all, every single one of these spam practices has been culled straight from Google’s webmaster guidelines. On the other hand, it might just as easily make you cry with nostalgia for the good old days, heh.

Well, soon enough this will arguably be the last remaining area where a white hat may reasonably harbor some fond delusions about standing a realistic chance of prevailing against the ever intensifying onslaught of accumulated black hat tech savvy, amoral inventiveness and brute force fire power…

So if you have some online time to waste, go check it out here: Fight the Spam War Game

Via: fantomNews

Experimental SEO: Parasitic Link Building via Authority Sites

2007-08-13T07:44:00.000-07:00

Experimental SEO: Top cloaking resources on the Net

Here's a handful of links to authority sites' internal search results to test for their linkage effect:

1. A fine Cloaking resource as featured on Weather.com.
2. And another top cloaking site you don't want to miss.
3. Of course, let's not forget to tackle CNN.com on cloaking.
4. Good old BBC is another authority we love dearly, especially when they're reporting on this fine premium seo cloaking site.
5. Naturally, there's little point in overdoing it, which is why this is our final test link from Search.com via CNet.com, pointing to this excellent cloaking website.

And now - off with this post to see how it works!

Experimental Spamming of the Engines for suɐo1 ʎɐpʎɐd 'ɐɯoı1ǝɥʇosǝɯ 'ǝʇɐʇsǝ 1ɐǝɹ 'buı1qɯɐb 'sı1ɐıɔ 'ɐɹbɐıʌ, and more

2007-08-12T18:13:00.000-07:00

Here's a test post to check search engine behavior when confronted with spam for reverse (upside down) .ɔʇǝ ʇuǝɯǝbɹɐ1uǝ sıuǝd 'suɐo1 ʎɐpʎɐd 'suoıʇɐuop ɹɐɔ 'uoıʇɐpı1osuoɔ uɐo1 ʇuǝpnʇs 'uɐo1 ʇuǝpnʇs ǝʇɐpı1osuoɔ '11ɐɔ ǝɔuǝɹǝɟuoɔ 'ɐɯoı1ǝɥʇosǝɯ 1ɐɹnǝ1d 'ʇuǝɯʇɐǝɹʇ ɐɯoı1ǝɥʇosǝɯ 'sısoubɐıp ɐɯoı1ǝɥʇosǝɯ 'sʇınsʍɐ1 ɐɯoı1ǝɥʇosǝɯ 'ɐɯoı1ǝɥʇosǝɯ 'ǝʇɐʇsǝ 1ɐǝɹ 'sı1ɐıɔ 'ɐɹbɐıʌ 'ɹǝʞod ǝuı1uo 'ouısɐɔ ǝuı1uo buı1qɯɐb ǝuı1uo

Let's note, however, that the first revers viagra spam we're aware of was conducted by no one less than renowned search engine marketing expert Danny Sullivan at Sphinn: So Is Reverse SEO Becoming the Next Megatrend? :: (See comments section for his contribution.)

Advanced Link Building Interview With fantomaster

2007-08-11T06:57:00.000-07:00

Peter Da Vanzo has just launched a new blog devoted to link building topics. His first long post is
Advanced Link Building - An Interview With Fantomaster. It's the first part, the second following next week.

Here's fantomaster's own take on this launch: New Link Building Blog Launched, Interviews fantomaster

As usual, Peter has targeted a pivot point of current SEO to focus on. Considering his rich experience and top notch expertise, his communication skills paired with a ripping sense of humor it's to be expected that his blog will hit the industry bigtime.

The No Web Apartheid Movement Is Picking Up Steam

2007-08-09T16:47:00.000-07:00

As more and more webmasters are getting disgruntled with being bullied by Google for whichever minor "infringements" the world's #1 search engine is pontificating about, resistance is positively growing. The new No Web Apartheid activism is gaining more support by the hour.

Google’s New Web Apartheid

2007-08-07T19:30:00.000-07:00

Branding Google’s latest antics for what they are: a policy of Web Apartheid and unfair segregation of millions of innocent Web sites, born out of utter hubris, arrogance and disregard by the world’s most colossal corporate parasite for the very host they’ve been thriving on for far too many years.

Read on here: What to Do About Google’s New Fangled Web Apartheid

More Disgusting FUD Tactics: Google Bans Reciprocal Linking

2007-08-07T09:39:00.000-07:00

In their ongoing effort to make life as difficult as possible for just about anyone except themselves and their antediluvial ranking technology, Google is pushing the envelope ever further by escalating their customary FUD tactics, now threatening webmasters’ reciprocal linking.

See their freshly released Link schemes for the full story.

Reminds one of the old joke about how everything could be ever so cool and nifty in the hotel and restaurant business were it not for all those damned guests…
Maybe Google would be better advised to set up their own private Internet and exclude everyone except their most ardent serfs and yeasayers.

Via Threadwatcher

Mike Grehan says...

2007-07-24T16:29:00.000-07:00

Mike Grehan says...
... that he'll chair and host SES London 2008 - and we are quite enthused:
Mike Grehan to Chair SES London 2008