Blackhat SEO - Esrun

Dropping affiliate cookies

So I have run into a bit of a debate on the syndk8 forum about the legalities of the whole cookie dropping thing.

Let me make something clear from the get go, I personally don’t give two hoots about people doing this. I have tried it in the past as proof of concept and in the end decided against it for the moral reasons. I have and probably will again do worse in the future so don’t think I’m against other people doing this for moral reasons.

Talking about click bots for adsense on the forum is a complete no-no and will result in an instant ban, why? Because it’s click FRAUD.. you’re earning money in a fraudulent way.

What is an affiliate?

To increase traffic and sales, certain companies run affiliate programs where they will pay you a nice bit of money for each person you put through to them who purchases an item. For example someone may run an ebay banner on their site and if a user was to click onto that and buy something then the site owner running the banner would earn a little bit of money.

What is cookie stuffing?

Each time you send someone through to the affiliate site, e.g ebay then a cookie will be dropped onto their system which lets ebay know exactly where the user originally came from and then if they buy something you will be sure to earn a little cream off the top. Cookie stuffing or cookie dropping basically involves forcing this cookie onto visitors computers without them even knowing its happening and never sending them onto the affiliate site (e.g ebay). The normal place for this to happen is large busy forums which have thousands of users passing through every day and having multiple cookies dropped onto their systems for different companies without even knowing.

What’s wrong with this?

• The affiliate is paying you on the basis of you introducing traffic and sales to their website. However you’re not actually doing this, you’re forcing cookies onto their systems in the background and when they go and buy something from ebay you’re claiming a little bit of money for it. Ebay are paying you for traffic you didn’t even introduce and therefore you’re defrauding them. They were going to have the sale regardless of you, the only reason you’re being attributed for the lead is because you used shady tactics to drop a cookie.
• Another problem with this is that your cookie may overwrite the cookie of a legitmate affiliate who is working hard to generate genuine traffic. So you’re taking money that they would have earnt.

Let me compare this to another regular online fraud.. People have been known to run google adsense on their sites but instead of having legitimate clicks, they use javascript to force the user to click on an advert without even knowing. By having the advert clicked they have just cost the advertiser money for a lead and earnt themselves a little bit of cream. Usually the end user will not see the resulting page of the ad click. Similar level of fraud.
What affiliate companies does this effect?

The methods used are pretty universal and can be used effectively against everyone from ebay to poker companies.

How are the cookies dropped?

See my page on cookie stuffing.
Temporary conclusion

I’m not lawyer and I’m not really one to judge what’s right or  wrong. I’m going to send an email to a couple of companies I have largish affiliate accounts with and get their views on the legality of it. To me, you’re claiming money for putting leads through to them which you actually aren’t which seems like fraud but I will update this post as and when I get some answers Please do leave comments!

Update: For those who have gone around bitching that I’m a snitch for emailing ebay then grow the fuck up. My email will be completely separate from onlinehoster/esrun and none of my accounts relate back to this blog in anyway. So stop the silly bollox rumors and get back to trying to rank your sites.

Quick post

This is just a quick post with no real seo focus.

To start with, I have a special promo for Boysstuff this week! 25% of anything in their catalog. Okay their prices are a little high to start with but with 25% off they’re pretty good! Just use the coupon code RTN25 before 31/03/2008.

The old saying is that the way to a mans heart is threw his stomach.. the way to an SEOs contacts or knowledge also seems to be the same way as I recieved a box of kitkats today from SEOIdiot as a bribe lol! He knows I would tell him anyway but he does like to have his little jokes. So thanks for that

I’m going to be doing a few posts on targeted offline spamming</strike> I mean advertising soon. I’m sure everyone has thought about it before so keep an eye out for the future posts

I’m also going to start offering online versions of some of my scripts so you can use them quickly online without having to download them and put them on your own hosting

Negative SEO - Duplicate content

Duplicate content has been a problem for people for a long time. The basic idea is to create many copies of the content on someone elses website to confuse search engines about which one is the true author of the content and force them into supplemental results. Generally this method is unlikely to work on a large, long standing authoritative website but for reasonably newly launched websites, sites with low authority (low links, low quality pages etc) then it can be an effective method of keeping them out of the serps.

If you’re unsure why you’d want to do this then maybe you’re on the wrong website! Lets say you have a couple sites up high for the term “office printers” and you see a few new guys pop up, you’d simply get as many other sites indexed with the same content as these new guys to confuse the search engine about who is the real owner of the content and have them penalised. The more links you can point at the proxy urls to get them indexed and healthy the better.

Spreading the content out over different sites can be an expensive and time consuming process, especially if you want to replicate a lot of content. One way around this is to use a web proxy url maker just like the one I created. This works by using a list (right now, about 1000) of different web proxies and generating a list of web addresses based on the address of the content you want copied.

So for example if you were to enter the address http://www.esrun.co.uk as the address you wanted to be duplicated then the software would output a list like the following:

http://fatmonkey.ch/index.php?q=SFR0UDovL1dXdy5lc1JVbi5jby5VSw
http://hidewebsites.com/index.php?q=aFRUcDovL1d3dy5Fc3J1bi5DTy5Vaw
http://compensates.info/index.php?q=SFR0cDovL1d3Vy5lc3J1Ti5DTy51Sw
http://unblocking.cn/index.php?q=aHR0UDovL1d3dy5FU1J1bi5DTy5VSw

There are actually other benefits of using this software. For example if you were spamming a social network and was fed up of having your spam detected based on the same constant URL then you could simply generate a list of web proxy urls to use instead.

Check out the Proxy url creator now

ukskydiving.com moan

So 2 days ago I book a sky dive with ukskydiving.com who are “North london parachute Centre”.. North london my arse, it’s in March, Cambridge and cost me a ridiculous 4 hours travelling (1 hour into London then 3 onwards) and the ticket from London to March station was £77! What a joke, they want people to use public transport but its dog slow and costs a fortune. Fuck the environment, I can’t afford to care for the environment with prices like these.

The guys at the airfield said the weather has been terrible and unsuitable for days so I’m not sure why ukskydiving.com let me book it just 2 days ago knowing full well it was absolutely more than likely I’d be wasting my time and money. What a load of bollocks.

Scraping adlabs search funnels

Just uploaded a new script for scraping keywords from AdLabs search funnels, go ahead and check it out

Download: AdLabs keyword scraper

Keniki

Well Keniki, you were successful! You finally managed to get a whole post dedicated to just you on my blog

Keniki (Greg) popped up quite some time ago, I first encountered him on Matt Cutts blog and at first he seemed like your average do gooder anti-spammer, fair enough me thinks. However unlike your average spam hunter who tries to gather some proof and actual facts about spammers, this guy simply throws wild accusations around like seo is some kind of dangerous cult and hopes that he might catch something slightly along the line of truth.

According to Greg, I own several large web hosting companies, I have multiple online (well known) personalities and I’m an all round bad guy! Or to put it in Kenikis words, I’m a prick

Keniki has had a go at just about everything and everyone and has had run ins with the likes of cutts, dave naylor and seoidiot. For just a sample of this wierdos ramblings check out this Keniki post.

I have spoken to Greg numerous times on the telephone he seemed drowsy and was slurring his words. Does anyone know if he has a drinking problem? Or is he mentally ill? I couldn’t determine for sure He often posts random abusive comments at throughout the day and night and appears to set alarms for odd hours to get up purely to post a comment and then go back to sleep, that’s the way I understood it after speaking to him anyway so yeah to be fair the guy does have problems in his head. Each time I speak to Greg he says he Is going to back off and stop making up random things but each time he pops back up with more comments.

So Greg, I called you today after your most recent tirade and it seems you don’t want to speak to me anymore… you were quite obviously available and then I’m patient enough to wait and you simply hang up the call on me! Then when I call back you refuse to answer.. poor show buddy. I saw you were trying to get Seoidiot into a boxing ring, lmao! SES London is on this week, why don’t you come up and say hello to everyone? Maybe you’ll like us OR Maybe you could just do like you originally said and just move on and stop trying to harass people? No one is interested in you or out to get you (regardless of how paranoid you get), just leave people alone and everyones happy.

£1 UK domains

Just a quick post this one. Signup as a new customer at uk2.net and you can use the voucher code CJ20080331 to get a UK domain for just £1.15! Just process each domain you want as a new order and use the coupon code each time

Create unlimited gmail accounts

Well last time I wrote about a simple Gmail account creator I made and I talked about how I would be improving it and releasing updates. Unfortunately I don’t think I will be simply because I can’t be bothered. I didn’t use it myself and only made it as a little something to give out since a lot of people were talking about wanting one.

Anyway for those who encountered the limit of how many accounts they could create per IP address there is a way around it. When you create too many accounts from one IP address then google start giving you a captcha image which says “Sorry, we are unable to handle your request at this time. Please try again later.”

Make the captcha request from one IP address but then submit the signup information from a different IP. Google will only block the IP address that is used to submit the data and the IP address is only blocked from making a request to the captcha, not from submitting signup data. Therefore with just two IP addresses you can make unlimited gmail accounts. There is currently no cross checking to make sure the account used to request the captcha is the same as the account submitting the signup information.

So mod the script and go make your unlimited accounts

I couldn’t remember where I got this tip from because it was quite a long time ago but have since had a good smack round the back of the head since I wasn’t meant to out it.  Props goes out to Seocracy.

Links from oscommerce stores

It would appear that many people install oscommerce but then fail to actually implement it. If you happen to be in control of a oscommerce installation then obviously you can modify it to your requirements, including putting any links on there that you like to.

If you wanted to find other insecure or abandoned installations then you could try search google for something like:

inurl:create_account.php “Installation directory exists at”

Obviously you would then contact the owner and let them know about the problem, not just install and modify it with your own links.

Available 2 character UK domains

There are very few 2 character UK domains left available and they get snapped up pretty quick so without further delay I have provided a reasonable list below Go get yourself one today just for the hell of it :p

At the time of posting these are the ONLY 2 character UK domains (.co.uk, .me.uk, .org.uk) available to register.

• b0.me.uk
• d0.me.uk
• e0.me.uk
• f0.me.uk
• i0.me.uk
• j0.me.uk
• k0.me.uk
• l0.me.uk
• m0.me.uk
• o0.me.uk
• p0.me.uk
• q0.me.uk
• r0.me.uk
• t0.me.uk
• u0.me.uk
• v0.me.uk
• w0.me.uk
• x0.me.uk
• y0.me.uk
• z0.me.uk
• 9a.me.uk
• 0b.me.uk
• 4b.me.uk
• 5b.me.uk
• 6b.me.uk
• 7b.me.uk
• 8b.me.uk
• 9b.me.uk
• 0c.me.uk
• 3c.me.uk
• 5c.me.uk
• 6c.me.uk
• 7c.me.uk
• 8c.me.uk
• 9c.me.uk
• 1d.me.uk
• 5d.me.uk
• 6d.me.uk
• 7d.me.uk
• 8d.me.uk
• 9d.me.uk
• 0e.me.uk
• 1e.me.uk
• 5e.me.uk
• 6e.me.uk
• 7e.me.uk
• 8e.me.uk
• 9e.me.uk
• 0f.me.uk
• 1f.me.uk
• 3f.me.uk
• 4f.me.uk
• 5f.me.uk
• 6f.me.uk
• 7f.me.uk
• 8f.me.uk
• 9f.me.uk
• 0g.me.uk
• 1g.me.uk
• 5g.me.uk
• 6g.me.uk
• 7g.me.uk
• 8g.me.uk
• 9g.me.uk
• 1h.me.uk
• 3h.me.uk
• 4h.me.uk
• 5h.me.uk
• 6h.me.uk
• 7h.me.uk
• 8h.me.uk
• 9h.me.uk
• 0i.me.uk
• 6i.me.uk
• 8i.me.uk
• 9i.me.uk
• 0j.me.uk
• 3j.me.uk
• 4j.me.uk
• 5j.me.uk
• 6j.me.uk
• 7j.me.uk
• 8j.me.uk
• 9j.me.uk
• 4k.me.uk
• 5k.me.uk
• 6k.me.uk
• 7k.me.uk
• 8k.me.uk
• 9k.me.uk
• 0l.me.uk
• 3l.me.uk
• 4l.me.uk
• 5l.me.uk
• 6l.me.uk
• 7l.me.uk
• 8l.me.uk
• 9l.me.uk
• 0m.me.uk
• 7m.me.uk
• 8m.me.uk
• 9m.me.uk
• 1n.me.uk
• 3n.me.uk
• 4n.me.uk
• 5n.me.uk
• 6n.me.uk
• 7n.me.uk
• 8n.me.uk
• 9n.me.uk
• 1o.me.uk
• 3o.me.uk
• 4o.me.uk
• 5o.me.uk
• 6o.me.uk
• 7o.me.uk
• 8o.me.uk
• 9o.me.uk
• 3p.me.uk
• 4p.me.uk
• 6p.me.uk
• 7p.me.uk
• 8p.me.uk
• 9p.me.uk
• 0q.me.uk
• 1q.me.uk
• 3q.me.uk
• 5q.me.uk
• 6q.me.uk
• 7q.me.uk
• 8q.me.uk
• 9q.me.uk
• 1r.me.uk
• 3r.me.uk
• 4r.me.uk
• 5r.me.uk
• 6r.me.uk
• 7r.me.uk
• 8r.me.uk
• 9r.me.uk
• 0s.me.uk
• 1s.me.uk
• 3s.me.uk
• 7s.me.uk
• 8s.me.uk
• 9s.me.uk
• 1t.me.uk
• 4t.me.uk
• 5t.me.uk
• 6t.me.uk
• 7t.me.uk
• 8t.me.uk
• 9t.me.uk
• 0u.me.uk
• 1u.me.uk
• 3u.me.uk
• 5u.me.uk
• 6u.me.uk
• 8u.me.uk
• 9u.me.uk
• 0v.me.uk
• 1v.me.uk
• 3v.me.uk
• 4v.me.uk
• 5v.me.uk
• 6v.me.uk
• 7v.me.uk
• 9v.me.uk
• 1w.me.uk
• 3w.me.uk
• 4w.me.uk
• 5w.me.uk
• 6w.me.uk
• 7w.me.uk
• 8w.me.uk
• 9w.me.uk
• 0x.me.uk
• 5x.me.uk
• 7x.me.uk
• 8x.me.uk
• 9x.me.uk
• 3y.me.uk
• 4y.me.uk
• 5y.me.uk
• 6y.me.uk
• 7y.me.uk
• 8y.me.uk
• 9y.me.uk
• 0z.me.uk
• 3z.me.uk
• 4z.me.uk
• 5z.me.uk
• 6z.me.uk
• 7z.me.uk
• 8z.me.uk
• 9z.me.uk
• 02.me.uk
• 03.me.uk