Blackhat SEO - Esrun

Number10.. number 404!

Its a depressing time when your countries government website has a “beta” label on it and shows a 404 on the homepage - http://www.number10.gov.uk/

Another Euro Drive

Woooo! Well It looks like I’ll be doing another drive across mainland Europe in January

The first time I did a drive across Europe I didn’t even bother taking a camera but the second time I did a little post on it with some pics.

I actually found an old MP3 which I recorded the night before I went on the drive. At the time I was doing SEO for an insurance company and because I wanted a break and I’m impatient I booked the ferry for the next day! The night before I saw my friend and we had a few drinks and he sang this on the fly.

The great thing about Europe is once you’re in, that’s basically it, no hassle! Just drive anywhere at anytime without any problems.

I’m torn between attempting a long drive to somewhere like Russia or visiting multiple countries. I like the idea of driving to Russia and back because its quite a challenge since its such a distance and you travel through a fair amount of countries but I wouldn’t really have time to do anything in the countries but have a quick nap before moving onto the next.

If however I decide to visit multiple countries then I’m thinking something..

Ferry from Dover(UK) to Dunkirk(France)

Dunkirk to Frankfurt(Germany)

Frankfurt to Zurich(Switzerland)

Zurich to Rome(Italy)

Rome to Geneva (France)

Geneva to Paris(France) or Dunkirk(France)… depending on timing

Not an easy drive to do in a short time (7 or 10 days) but that kinda makes it more challenging

If you have any suggestions on places to visit or changes to the route then feel free to comment! Nothings set in stone.

Quad Core Mac

Well I finally got around to building a quad core mac!

>> SCREENSHOT (kalyway 10.5.2) <<

>> SCREENSHOT (ideneb 10.5.5) <<

I followed the OSx86 hardware compatibility list (HCL) to ensure the parts I bought were compatible with the mac operating system.

The motherboard of my macbook pro died a few months back and I’ve been missing the power ever since. Since it died I’ve been using an MSI wind laptop with mac os x 10.5.4 installed but the processor isn’t huge and its really meant more as a portable device than a daily work machine.

A lot of people still don’t realise that since Apple went over to the Intel platform a couple of years back, its quite easy to install the operating system on a whole range of standard desktop and laptop computers using either a retail disc or a special ‘hacked’ version such as kalyway 10.5.2 or Ideneb 10.5.5.

Because I used the OSx86 HCL, everything worked out of the box for me and was a breeze to setup. The only problem I had was finding a compatible wireless card. I tried a few usb wifi sticks I had laying around but couldn’t get any to work. I even tried buying a PCI wireless card which is meant to be compatible but couldn’t get that to work but to be fair I think this is an issue with the card or motherboard since it didn’t physically fit well in the first place!  Eventually I managed to find a Netgear WG111 (version 3) and installed it using the RTL8187B drivers for Mac.

For those concerned about copyright/pirate etc. I do have a leopard license that currently isn’t being used so bah!

Hardware

Processor - Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4ghz 8mb L2 cache
Motherboard - Intel BLKDG35EC
RAM - 2 x 2GB Kingston DDR2 PC800
HD - Western Digital 320GB 7200RPM SATA
Graphics - Nvidia Inno3d 8600GT PCIE 512mb S-video/DVI/VGA
Case - Basic case
Power - ACBEL INTELLIGENT POWER 610W ACTIVE PFC
Networking - Netgear WG111 (version 3)

Total cost: About £380

Total time putting hardware together and installing OS: 2-3 hours

Moneybookers mayhem

Myself, I’m a fan of Paypal. I don’t think much of their ebay monopoly schemes and don’t feel confident as a seller but as a buyer its great.. widely accepted, easy to use and good buyer protection.

However sometimes you have to pay people who live in the middle of a desert and such like. Not being a fan of scammers union western union, it kind of limits your options. So I decided to use moneybookers (MB) since it’s pretty widely used in those out of the way areas.

However moneybookers have these big warnings about doing a bank transfer to your moneybookers account from a bank account thats not in your name.. It’s a pain in the butt that you have to manually send them the money rather than them debit it like Paypal but hey ho.

So the account was funded but accidentally from an account in a different name to that which the MB accounts was in. Thinking it would be rejected as their site says, another transfer was made from the correct bank account.

Today I login and get a huge rant in red bold letters saying this..

IMPORTANT INFORMATION:
YOUR RECENT MONEYBOOKERS DEPOSIT

No cash or 3rd party deposits!!! You attempted to fund your Moneybookers account from a bank account in someone else’s name:

Amount: GBP XYXYXY
Bank: Lloyds TSB

While obtaining the bank details for your 3rd party you were clearly warned that Moneybookers does not allow 3rd party deposits for funding of E-MONEY accounts.

ALL FUNDS MUST ORIGINATE FROM A BANK ACCOUNT HELD IN YOUR NAME!

You were expressly warned that you will be charged all banking and administrative costs should you attempt a 3rd party deposit to your Moneybookers account. We have therefore credited this deposit to you with a deduction of EUR 10.– administration fee.

WARNING! This is a one-time exception! Should you attempt further 3rd party deposits, you may make yourself suspicious of money laundering activities.

I might make myself suspcious of money laundering activities? Hey, I’m already suspicious but I think it the russians! Seems like some MB employee sitting behind his desk woke up on the wrong side of the bed today!

Namecheap checkout referal

I actually can’t beleive this! I had to renew some domains in Namecheap so I sign in and choose to use funds already in the account. Should be a 1 minute job I think..

I get an error saying my checkout request was invalid.. so I hit back and click proceed again.. same error. Then I decide I have no choice but to read the error. You must have referral data turned on! WHAT THE HELL!? I have my browser referal data disabled in firefox and I can’t believe there are people out there using referal data for checkout/basket systems.

Get with the times namecheap!

AOL Hometown alternative host

Want to make a quick buck? There’s still money to be made in free webhosting. All that free content, all those places to inject links or for those darker people maybe even drop a little something.

Anyway, AOL Hometown is closing its doors which means there’s currently thousands of people looking for a new free host and most of them have no clue how to move their stuff over or where to go because… well because they’re AOL users.

Go buy yourself a cheap dedi, chuck together a script that will automatically scrape the users content (or use their FTP details) and host it for free.

You’ll get good publicity for being their savour and you’ll suddenly be in control of thousands of sites

Why don’t I do it? I’m busy!

Youtube music player

There’s a project I have wanted to do for a long time but I can’t see myself ever having the time. However I’m sure someone out there might be interested so here it is…

Everyone knows you can find pretty much any song old and new on youtube, I myself use it quite often instead of downloading songs.

What would be great is a community site where you can enter an artist (similar to Last FM I guess) and it brings back all songs by that artist, maybe split into correct albums if you know the right places to scrape and use as a consolidating database.

You could then select the album you wanted to listen to and using a fancy ajax front end, automatically switch between each song so you can just leave it open and running in a firefox tab.

Each song/video could be rated on its accuracy and quality by users and also have its youtube ratings checked since there are usually many variations of songs available on Youtube, some better than others.

The system would let you save, search and rate others playlists.

So if you’re bored, sitting there thinking what you could be coding…. do this!

Linking to bad sites

I recently performed a test which actually quite suprised me.

For years there has been the obvious talk of linking to bad neighborhoods but its always been hard to know for sure which sites Google considers “bad”. When I started seeing those “This site may harm your computer.” warnings last year, it got me thinking. But I never really made anything out of it until recently.

When you search for certain terms in Google, you sometimes see sites marked with the aforementioned warning and when you click them, you get taken to a second page giving you another warning about the site having badware (malware,spyware etc). The great thing is, the warnings are based on reports from StopBadware and they provide a wonderful tool which lets you search for Badware sites.

The great thing is, you don’t have to know any urls, you can do a general search such as “online.com” and get back a nice list of sites:

So we have a list of badware sites submitted by Google, sites they have absolutely without a doubt considered to be bad/harmful.

Next I updated a range of different pages to link to these bad sites. Blog posts, blog comments, profile pages and a normal web page. I threw some links at all these sites I had modified and waited for Google to visit them. To my suprise Google visited them, updated the cache showing the badware links but their positions in the serps were not effected at all!

I probably should have also tested it as a sitewide link on a site to see if this would change the outcome. Also I should try changing the links from badware to spammy networks(e.g sites which have recently lost their PR for being spammy/selling links etc) and see how that works out. But in general, is linking to bad sites going to hurt you? Unlikely…

Not to say interlinked networks don’t get hurt

Free PR links

This is a method of getting free links. The links:

• Have Google PageRank (PR)
• Allow you to use your keywords as the anchor text

I’m not going to argue about how accurate PR is. At the end of the day, it’s a quick and easy way to see how much a link is likely to help you. If a page has a PR4 for example then the chances are it has at least a few external links going into it and wil benefit you in the serps.

After you have done your on-page SEO, it comes down to links links links! If you want to rank for the word “Bingo” then go ahead and buy/spam/socialise(link bait etc) 1,000 links from high quality sites with the anchor text “bingo”.

I was actually using this method quite a few years ago but in a slightly different way which I will save for the next post

Quick overview
The basic idea is to look for forum posts which already have PR, we then signup to the forum and post a relevant message on the post. After a day or two, we return to the post and edit it to include our link.

Full process

Step 1
Install an add-on for your browser which allows you to view the pagerank of each search result in Google. This allows us to quickly see which forum posts have PR without having to visit each individual page. You could use SEO For Firefox or SEOQuake

Step 2
We start by searching for forums, it’s that simple. For example, we might perform a search for vBulletin Forums.

Step 3
Select one forum from the results of step 2 and do a site: search on it.

In the screenshot above you can clearly see there is an internal thread which has a PR2 (a tell tale sign for vBulletin forums is the use of a default URL structure.. showthread.asp?t=xxx).

Step 4
Signup to the forum and verify your account. Make a relevant post on the previously found thread.

Step 5
Repeat step 2-4 many times and ensure you keep a note of all the posts and your login details.

Step 6
Leave it a day or two and return to each of your posts, login and edit the post to include your link!

Great, a free link with my chosen keywords as the anchor text from a PR2 internal page!

Top Tips

• Ensure the thread you’re looking at has only one page worth of posts, so that when you make your post, you’re also on the page with PR
• Take the time to write a relevant on-topic post. These are free, reasonable quality links and worth putting the few minutes of time! If your first post is spammy or “Wow, great thread!” then it will be removed as spam within minutes on most forums.
• Most of the threads with PR will be reasonably old, this is because toolbar PR obviously only gets updated every now and then. As such you should come up with a convincing reason for why you’re dragging up a post that is 3 months or even 3 years old! The way to do this is to associate yourself with the thing being discussed, if someone is talking about a problem then describe how you have the same problem and even if there’s a solution, state that it doesn’t help you and request further advice.
• The longer you can leave the post without editing it the better. If you leave it for a short amount of time only then there is a chance someone will notice the edit and report you to the administrator. Be aware that some forum software does put a time restriction on how long you have before you can edit a post, I haven’t ran into this problem many times.
• Mix up your search in step 2 so that you don’t hit the same forums as other people.

Side note
Because I’m making this blog post, there is a good chance that the owner of the forum I used as an example will notice and remove the link. Don’t be put off by this

MSI Wind review

Well I finally got my hands on the MSI Wind which in my opinion is better than the eeePC. It compares closely to the eeePC 901 which hasn’t been released yet.

It uses the new intel atom processor and has an 80gb standard HD rather than a smaller solid state like the eeePC 901 uses. It’s slightly larger than the 901, but only just! They have made good use of the space to fit in a 10″ screen and a larger (more usuable) keyboard than the 901 by stretching it right to the sides of the chasis.

I haven’t done much testing yet but I can confirm it came with windows XP service pack 3 and it comfortably plays age of empires 2 and 3 To save battery I hit FN+F10 and it turns down the screen brightness and underclocks the CPU to 800mhz.

I took some pics comparing the MSI Wind to my macbook Pro and a 2g eeePC…

MSI wind VS Macbook Pro

MSI wind VS 2g eeePC

Image 2

Image 3

Oh and I also got it to run Backtrack3 from an SD card… Image 4
. How?