Sebastian’s Pamphlets

In todays GWC doctor’s office, the webmaster of an innocent orphanage website asks Google’s Matt Cutts:

[My site] is showing up for searches on ‘girls in bathrooms’ because they have an article about renovating the girls bathroom! What do you think of the idea if a negative keyword meta tag to block irrelevant searches? [sic!]

Well, we don’t know what the friendly guy from Google recommends …

… but my dear readers do know that my bullshit detector, faced with such a moronic idea, shouts out in agony:

There’s no such thing as bad traffic, just weak monetizing!

Ok, Ok, Ok … every now and then each and every webmaster out there suffers from misleaded search engine ranking algos, that send shitloads of totally unrelated search traffic. For example, when you search for [how to fuck a click], you won’t expect that Google considers this geeky pamphlet the very best search result. Of course Google should’ve detected your NSFW-typo. Shit happens. Deal with it.

On the other hand, search traffic is free, so there’s no valid reason to complain. Instead of asking Google for a minus-keyword REP directive, one should think of clever ways to monetize unrelated traffic without wasting bandwidth.

You want to monetize irrelevant traffic from searches for smut in a way that nobody can associate your site with porn. That’s doable. Here’s how it works:

Make risk-free beer money from porn traffic with a non-adult site

Copy those slimy phrases from your keyword stats and paste them into Google’s search box. Once you find an adult site that seems to match the smut surfer’s needs better than your site, click on the search result, and on the landing page search for a “webmasters” link that points to their affiliate program. Sign up and save your customized affiliate link.

Next add some PHP code to your scripts. Make absolutely sure it gets executed before you output any other content, even whitespace:

<?php  Show all code

function getReferrer () {
return $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"];
}
function getOffsiteUri() {
$searchQuery = stristr(getReferrer(), "q=");
$trash = stristr($searchQuery, "&");
$searchQuery = str_replace($trash, "", $searchQuery);
$searchQuery = str_replace("+", " ", $searchQuery);
$searchQuery = str_replace("&", " ", $searchQuery);
$searchQuery = str_replace("%20", " ", $searchQuery);
while (stristr($searchQuery, " ")) {
$searchQuery = str_replace(" ", " ", $searchQuery);
}
// map irrelevant search queries to sponsor URIs
if (stristr($searchQuery, "teens in bathroom")) {
return "http://someteenpornsite.com/landingpage?affID=4711";
}
}

$betterMatch = getOffsiteUri();
if ($betterMatch) {
header("HTTP/1.1 307 Here's your smut", TRUE, 307);
header("Location: $betterMatch");
exit;
}
?> Refine the simplified code above. Use a database table to store the mappings …

Now a surfer coming from a SERP like
http://google.com/search?num=100&q=nude+teens+in+bathroom&safe=off
will get redirected to
http://someteenpornsite.com/landingpage?affID=4711
You’re using a 307 redirect because it’s not cached by a user agent, so that when you later on find a porn site that converts your traffic better, you can redirect visitors to another URI.

As you probably know, search engines don’t approve duplicate content. Hence it wouldn’t be a bright idea to put up x-rated stuff (all smut is duplicate content by design) onto your site to fulfil the misleaded searcher’s needs.

Of course you can use the technique outlined above to protect searchers from landing on your contact/privacy page, too, when in fact your signup page is their desired destination.

Shiny whitehat disclaimer

If you’re afraid of the possibility that the allmighty Google might punish you for your well meant attempt to fix it’s bugs, relax.

A search engine misinterpreting your content so badly, failed miserably. Your bugfix actually improves their search quality. Search engines can’t force you to report such flaws, they just kindly ask for voluntary feedback.

If search engines dislike smart websites that find related content on the Interwebs in case the search engine delivers shitty search results, they can act themselves. Instead of penalizing webmasters that react to flaws in their algos, they’re well advised to adjust their scoring. I mean, if they stop sending smut traffic to non-porn sites, their users don’t get redirected any longer. It’s that simple.

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Minutes after the launch of Google’s famous Real Time Search, the Internet marketing community began to spam the scrolling SERPs. Google gave birth to a new spam industry.

I’m sure Google’s WebSpam team will pull the plug sooner or later, but as of today Google’s real time search results are extremely vulnerable to questionable content.

The somewhat shady approach to make creative use of real time search I’m outlining below will not work forever. It can be used for really evil purposes, and Google is aware of the problem. Frankly, if I’d be the Googler in charge, I’d dump the whole real-time thingy until the spam defense lines are rock solid.

Here’s the recipe from Dr Evil’s WebSpam-Cook-Book:

Ingredients

• 1 popular topic that pulls lots of searches, but not so many that the results scroll down too fast.
• 1 landing page that makes the punter pull out the plastic in no time.
• 1 trusted authority page totally lacking commercial intentions. View its source code, it must have a valid TITLE element with an appealing call for action related to your topic in its HEAD section.
• 1 short domain, 1 cheap Web hosting plan (Apache, PHP), 1 plain text editor, 1 FTP client, 1 Twitter account, and a prize basic coding skills.

Preparation

Create a new text file and name it hot-topic.php or so. Then code:
<?php
$landingPageUri = "http://affiliate-program.com/?your-aff-id";
$trustedPageUri = "http://google.com/something.py";
if (stristr($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "Googlebot")) {
header("HTTP/1.1 307 Here you go today", TRUE, 307);
header("Location: $trustedPageUri");
}
else {
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Happy shopping", TRUE, 301);
header("Location: $landingPageUri");
}
exit;
?>

Provided you’re a savvy spammer, your crawler detection routine will be a little more complex.

Save the file and upload it, then test the URI http://youspamaw.ay/hot-topic.php in your browser.

Serving

• Login to Twitter and submit lots of nicely crafted, not too much keyword stuffed messages carrying your spammy URI. Do not use obscene language, e.g. don’t swear, and sail around phrases like ‘buy cheap viagra’ with synonyms like ‘brighten up your girl friend’s romantic moments’.
• On their SERPs, Google will display the text from the trusted page’s TITLE element, linked to your URI that leads punters to a sales pitch of your choice.
• Just for entertainment, closely monitor Google’s real time SERPs, and your real-time sales stats as well.
• Be happy and get rich by end of the week.

Google removes links to untrusted destinations, that’s why you need to abuse authority pages. As long as you don’t launch f-bombs, Google’s profanity filters make flooding their real time SERPs with all sorts of crap a breeze.

Hey Google, for the sake of our children, take that as a spam report!

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I stole this pamphlet’s title (and more) from Google’s post Hard facts about comment spam for a reason. In fact, Google spams the Web with useless clutter, too. You doubt it? Read on. That’s the URI from the link above:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/11/hard-facts-about-comment-spam.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed
&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FamDG+%28Official+Google+Webmaster+Central+Blog%29

I’ve bolded the canonical URI, everything after the questionmark is clutter added by Google.

When your Google account lists both Feedburner and GoogleAnalytics as active services, Google will automatically screw your URIs when somebody clicks a link to your site in a feed reader (you can opt out, see below).

Why is it bad?

FACT: Google’s method to track traffic from feeds to URIs creates new URIs. And lots of them. Depending on the number of possible values for each query string variable (utm_source utm_medium utm_campaign utm_content utm_term) the amount of cluttered URIs pointing to the same piece of content can sum up to dozens or more.

FACT: Bloggers (publishers, authors, anybody) naturally copy those cluttered URIs to paste them into their posts. The same goes for user link drops at Twitter and elsewhere. These links get crawled and indexed. Currently Google’s search index is flooded with 28,900,000 cluttered URIs mostly originating from copy+paste links. Bing and Yahoo didn’t index GA tracking parameters yet.

That’s 29 million URIs with tracking variables that point to duplicate content as of today. With every link copied from a feed reader, this number will increase. Matt Cutts said “I don’t think utm will cause dupe issues” and points to John Müller’s helpful advice (methods a site owner can apply to tidy up Google’s mess).

Maybe Google can handle this growing duplicate content chaos in their very own search index. Lets forget that Google is the search engine that advocated URI canonicalization for ages, invented sitemaps, rel=canonical, and countless high sophisticated algos to merge indexed clutter under the canonical URI. It’s all water under the bridge now that Google is in the create-multiple-URIs-pointing-to-the-same-piece-of-content business itself.

So far that’s just disappointing. To understand why it’s downright evil, lets look at the implications from a technical point of view.

Spamming URIs with utm tracking variables breaks lots of things

Look at this URI: http://www.example.com/search.aspx?Query=musical+mobile?utm_source=Referral&utm_medium=Internet&utm_campaign=celebritybabies

Google added a query string to a query string. Two URI segment delimiters (“?”) can cause all sorts of troubles at the landing page.

Some scripts will process only variables from Google’s query string, because they extract GET input from the URI’s last questionmark to the fragment delimiter “#” or end of URI; some scripts expecting input variables in a particular sequence will be confused at least; some scripts might even use the same variable names … the number of possible errors caused by amateurish extended query strings is infinite. Even if there’s only one “?” delimiter in the URI.

In some cases the page the user gets faced with will lack the expected content, or will display a prominent error message like 404, or will consist of white space only because the underlying script failed so badly that the Web server couldn’t even show a 5xx error.

Regardless whether a landing page can handle query string parameters added to the original URI or not (most can), changing someone’s URI for tracking purposes is plain evil, IMHO, when implemented as opt-out instead of opt-in.

Appended UTM query strings can make trackbacks vanish, too. When a blog checks whether the trackback URI is carrying a link to the blog or not, for example with this plug-in, the comparision can fail and the trackback gets deleted on arrival, without notice. If I’d dig a little deeper, most probably I could compile a huge list of other functionalities on the Internet that are broken by Google’s UTM clutter.

Finally, GoogleAnalytics is not the one and only stats tool out there, and it doesn’t fulfil all needs. Many webmasters rely on simple server reports, for example referrer stats or tools like awstats, for various technical purposes. Broken. Specialized content management tools feeded by real-time traffic data. Broken. Countless tools for linkpop analysis group inbound links by landing page URI. Broken. URI canonicalization routines. Broken, respecively now acting counterproductive with regard to GA reporting. Google’s UTM clutter has impact on lots of tools that make sense in addition to Google Analytics. All broken.

What a glorious mess. Frankly, I’m somewhat puzzled. Google has hired tens of thousands of this planet’s brightest minds –I really mean that, literally!–, and they came out with half-assed crap like that? Un-fucking-believable.

What can I do to avoid URI spam on my site?

Boycott Google’s poor man’s approach to link feed traffic data to Web analytics. Go to Feedburner. For each of your feeds click on “Configure stats” and uncheck “Track clicks as a traffic source in Google Analytics”. Done. Wait for a suitable solution.

If you really can’t live with traffic sources gathered from a somewhat unreliable HTTP_REFERER, and you’ve deep pockets, then hire a WebDev crew to revamp all your affected code. Coward!

As a matter of fact, Google is responsible for this royal pain in the ass. Don’t fix Google’s errors on your site. Let Google do the fault recovery. They own the root of all UTM evil, so they have to fix it. There’s absolutely no reason why a gazillion of webmasters and developers should do Google’s job, again and again.

What can Google do?

Well, that’s quite simple. Instead of adding utterly useless crap to URIs found in feeds, Google can make use of a clever redirect script. When Feedburner serves feed items to anybody, the values of all GA tracking variables are available.

Instead of adding clutter to these URIs, Feedburner could replace them with a script URI that stores the timestamp, the user’s IP addy, and whatnot, then performs a 301 redirect to the canonical URI. The GA script invoked on the landing page can access and process these data quite accurately.

Perhaps this procedure would be even more accurate, because link drops can no longer mimick feed traffic.

Speak out!

So, if you don’t approve that Feedburner, GoogleReader, AdSense4Feeds, and GoogleAnalytics gang rape your well designed URIs, then link out to everything Google with a descriptive query string, like:

?utm_source=sebastian&utm_medium=pamphlet&utm_campaign=thou+shalt+not+fuck+with+my+uris

I mean, nicely designed canonical URIs should be the search engineer’s porn, so perhaps somebody at Google will listen. Will ya?

Update:

I’ve just added a “UTM Killer” tool, where you can enter a screwed URI and get a clean URI — all ‘utm_’ crap and multiple ‘?’ delimiters removed — in return. That’ll help when you copy URIs from your feedreader to use them in your blog posts.

By the way, please vote up this pamphlet so that I get the 2010 SEMMY Award. Thanks in advance!

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Now that IE is quite unusable due to the lack of websites that support its non-standard rendering, and the current FireFox version suffers from various maladies, more and more users switch to browsers that are supposed to comply to Web standards, such as Chrome, Safari, or Opera.

Those sexy user agents execute client sided scripts in lightning speed, making surfers addicted to nifty rounded corners very very happy. Of course they come with massive memory leaks, but surfers who shut down their browser every once in a while won’t notice such geeky details.

Why is that bad news for Internet marketers? Because Chrome and Safari screw your analytics. Your stats are useless with regard to bookmarkers and type-in traffic. Your referrer stats lack all hits from Chrome/Safari users who have opened your landing page in a new tab or window.

Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari do not provide an HTTP_REFERER. (The typo is standardized, too.)

This bug was reported in September 2008. It’s not yet fixed. Not even in beta versions.

Guess from which (optional) HTTP header line your preferred stats tool compiles the search terms to create all the cool keyword statistics? Yup, that’s the HTTP_REFERER’s query string when the visitor came from a search result page (SERP). Especially on SERPs many users open links in new tabs. That means with every searcher switching to a sexy browser your keyword analysis becomes more useless.

That’s not only an analytics issue. Many sites provide sensible functionality based on the referrer (the Web page a user came from), for example default search terms for site-search facilities gathered from SERP-referrers. Many sites evaluate the HTTP_REFERER to prevent themselves from hotlinking, so their users can’t view the content they’ve paid for when they open a link in a new tab or window.

Passing a blank HTTP_REFERER when this information is available to the user agent is plain evil. Of course lots of so-called Internet security apps do this by default, but just because others do evil that doesn’t mean a top-notch Web browser like Safari or Chrome can get away with crap like this for months and years to come.

Please nudge the developers!

Here you go. Post in this thread why you want them to fix this bug asap. Tell the developers that you can’t live with screwed analytics, and that your site’s users rely on reliable HTTP_REFERERs. Even if you don’t run a website yourself, tell them that your favorite porn site bothers you with countless error messages instead of delivering smut, just because WebKit browsers are buggy.

You can test whether your browser passes the HTTP_REFERER or not: Go to this Google SERP. On the link to this post chose “Open link in new tab” (or window) in the context menu (right click over the link). Scroll down.

Your browser passed this HTTP_REFERER: None

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I couldn’t care less about PageRank™ sculpting, because a well thought out link architecture does the job with all search engines, not just Google. That’s where Google is right on the money.

They own PageRank™, hence they can burn, evaporate, nillify, and even divide by zero or multiply by -1 as much PageRank™ as they like; of course as long as they rank my stuff nicely above my competitors.

Picture 1 shows Google’s PageRank™ factory as of 2007 or so. Actually, it’s a pretty simplified model, but since they’ve changed the PageRank™ algo anyway, you don’t need to bother with all the geeky details.

As a side note: you might ask why I don’t link to Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan discussing the whole mess on their blogs? Well, probably Matt can’t afford my advertising rates, and the whole SEO industry has linked to Danny anyway. If you’re nosy, check out my source code to learn more about state of the art linkage very compliant to Google’s newest guidelines for advanced SEOs (summary: “Don’t trust underlined blue text on Web pages any longer!”).

What really matters is picture 2, revealing Google’s new PageRank™ facilities, silently launched in 2008. Again, geeky details are of minor interest. If you really want to know everything, then search for [operation bendover] at !Yahoo (it’s still top secret, and therefore not searchable at Google).

Unfortunately, advanced SEO folks (whatever that means, I use this term just because it seems to be an essential property assigned to the participants of the current PageRank™ uprising discussion) always try to confuse you with overcomplicated graphics and formulas when it comes to PageRank™. Instead, I ask you to focus on the (important) hard core stuff. So go grab a magnifier, and work out the differences:

• PageRank™ 2009 in comparision to PageRank™ 2007 comes with a pipeline supplying unlimited fuel. Also, it seems they’ve implemented the green new deal, switching from gas to natural gas. That means they can vaporize way more link juice than ever before.
• PageRank™ 2009 produces more steam, and the clouds look slightly different. Whilst PageRank™ 2007 ignored nofollow crap as well as links put with client sided scripting, PageRank™ 2009 evaporates not only juice covered with link condoms, but also tons of other permutations of the standard A element.
• To compensate the huge overall loss of PageRank™ caused by those changes, Google has decided to pass link juice from condomized links to their target URI hidden to Googlebot with JavaScript. Of course Google formerly has recommended the use of JavaScript-links to prevent the webmasters from penalties for so-called “questionable” outgoing links. Just as they’ve not only invented rel-nofollow, but heavily recommended the use of this microformat with all links disliked by Google, and now they take that back as if a gazillion links on the Web could magically change just because Google tweeks their algos. Doh! I really hope that the WebSpam-team checks the age of such links before they penalize everything implemented according to their guidelines before mid-2009 or the InterWeb’s downfall, whatever comes last.

I guess in the meantime you’ve figured out that I’m somewhat pissed. Not that the secretly changed flow of PageRank™ a year ago in 2008 had any impact on my rankings, or SERP traffic. I’ve always designed my stuff with PageRank™ flow in mind, but without any misuses of rel=”nofollow”, so I’m still fine with Google.

What I can’t stand is when a search engine tries to tell me how I’ve to link (out). Google engineers are really smart folks, they’re perfectly able to develop a PageRank™ algo that can decide how much Google-juice a particular link should pass. So dear Googlers, please –WRT to the implementation of hyperlinks– leave us webmasters alone, dump the rel-nofollow crap and rank our stuff in the best interest of your searchers. No longer bother us with linking guidelines that change yearly. It’s not our job nor responsibility to act as your cannon fodder slavish code monkeys when you spot a loophole in your ranking- or spam-detection-algos.

Of course the above said is based on common sense, so Google won’t listen (remember: I’m really upset, hence polemic statements are absolutely appropriate). To prevent webmasters from irrational actions by misleaded search engines, I hereby introduce the

Webmaster guidelines for search engine friendly links

What follows is pseudo-code, implement it with your preferred server sided scripting language.

if (getAttribute($link, 'rel') matches '*nofollow*' &&
    $userAgent matches '*Googlebot*') {
    print '<strong rev="' + getAttribute(link, 'href') + '"'
    + ' style="color:blue; text-decoration:underlined;"'
    + ' onmousedown="window.location=document.getElementById(this.id).rev; "'
    + '>' + getAnchorText($link) + '</strong>';
}
else {
    print $link;
}

Probably it’s a good idea to snip both the onmousedown trigger code as well as the rev attribute, when the script gets executed by Googlebot. Just because today Google states that they’re going to pass link juice to URIs grabbed from the onclick trigger, that doesn’t mean they’ll never look at the onmousedown event or misused (X)HTML attributes.

This way you can deliver Googlebot exactly the same stuff that the punter surfer gets. You’re perfectly compliant to Google’s cloaking restrictions. There’s no need to bother with complicated stuff like iFrames or even disabled blog comments, forums or guestbooks.

Just feed the crawlers with all the crap the search engines require, then concentrate all your efforts on your UI for human vistors. Web robots (bots, crawlers, spiders, …) don’t supply your signup-forms w/ credit card details. Humans do. If you find the time to upsell them while search engines keep you busy with thoughtless change requests all day long.

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Today I’ve removed all instances of the thunderbird icon from my computers, and from my memory as well. I’m finally done with email. I’ve forwarded¹⁾ all my email accounts to paid-links@google.com, and here’s why:

Sebastian’s Pamphlets

Dear Sebastian,

I visited your web site earlier today and it seems you are also a seo company like us. As an SEO company we are in this field since 1998 in India(CHD). We have developed and maintained high quality websites.

We understand link building better than other because of our 11 year experience in linking industry and we follows the right manual link building approach in seeking, obtaining and attracting topic specific trusted inbound links. We have different themes related sites, directories and blogs and i would like to make a request to enter a mutual understanding by EXCHANGING LINKS with your website in order to get targeted visitors, higher ranking and link popularity.

We look forward to linking our site with yours, as exchanging links would Benefit both of us.

You\’ve received this email simply because you have been found while searching for related sites in Google, MSN and Yahoo If you do not wish to receive future emails, simply reply with this email and let us know.

Waiting for your positive and quick response.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS NOT A SPAM OR AUTOMATED EMAIL, IT\’S ONLY A REQUEST FOR A LINK EXCHANGE. YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS HAS NOT BEEN ADDED TO ANY LISTS, AND YOU WILL NOT BE CONTACTED AGAIN.

Regards:
Lara

Lara
Megrisoft
lara@megrisoft.info

Direct message from Spamdiggalot

Hi, Sebastian.

You have a new direct message:

Spamdiggalot: hi!I think you should like my article “12 addons to get the most out of safer-sex”, here: digg.com/x010101 please RT!

Reply on the web at http://twitter.com/direct_messages/create/Spamdiggalot

Send me a direct message from your phone: D SPAMDIGGALOT

our company proposal

Dear Sebastian Pamphlets,

My name is Vincentas and I am member of board in multi-location hosting company - Host1Plus (http:// www . host1plus . com). Our servers are in U.S., U.K., the Netherlands, Germany, Lithuania and Singapore.

I just visited your website which I found interested and it provides excellent complementary content.
We would like to offer you free hosting for your site in Host1Plus hosting service the only thing we would ask you is to place our visitors counter to your website here is the link http:// www . count1plus . com or it could be any other feature.

So let me know if you are interested for my offer and I hope that offer is interested to you. Hope to hear you soon.

Kind Regards,
Vincentas Grinius

Host1Plus.com Team
part of Digital Energy Technologies Ltd.
26 York Street
London

W1U 6PZ
United Kingdom
T: +44 (0) 808 101 2277
E: info@host1plus.com
W: http:// www . host1plus . com

Vincentas Grinius
Host1Plus.com
vincentas@host1plus.com

Link Exchange

Hi,

I think if I receive something like this I would pay more attention to that.
\”Dear Webmaster I am so happy to find your website and I like it so much! So I want to be a link partner of your site.

If you are interested to make us your link partner , please inform us and we will be glad to make our link partner within 24 hours.

Our Link Details :

Title: Social Network Development UK

URL: http:// www . dassnagar . co . uk/

Description: Web Development Company UK: Premier Interactive Agency, specializing in custom website design, Social network development, Sports betting portal development, Travel portal design, Flash gaming portal design and development.

Link\’s HTML Code:

<a href=\”http:// www . dassnagar . co . uk/\” target=\”new\”>Social Network Development UK
</a> Web Development Company UK: Premier Interactive Agency, specializing in custom website design, Social network development, Sports betting portal development, Travel portal design, Flash gaming portal design and development.

Please accept my apology if already partner or not interested.

Reasons to exchange link with us.

1. Our site is regularly crawled by google, so there are better chances googlebot visiting your website regularly.
2. We ask you to link back to only those pages where your url is present, indirectly you are increasing your own link value.
3. By linking to our articles and technology blog you can provide useful content to your visitors.

This is an advertisement and a promotional mail strictly on the guidelines of CAN-SPAM act of 2003 . We have clearly mentioned the source mail-id of this mail, also clearly mentioned the subject lines and they are in no way misleading in any form. We have found your mail address through our own efforts on the web search and not through any illegal way. If you find this mail unsolicited, please reply with \”Unsubscribe\” in the subject line and we will take care that you do not receive any further promotional mail.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Kind regards,
Tom
Webmaster

John
dassnagar . co . uk
rdcouk@gmail.com

Trust me, quitting email is a time-saver. And yes, I’ve an idea how to waste the additional spare time: Tomorrow I’ll have paid me a beer for a link to myself. And I can think of way more link monkey business that doesn’t involve email.

¹⁾ Actually, “forwarding” comes with a slighly shady downside:
If you continue to send me your (unsolicited) emails, you’ll find all your awkward secrets on literally tons of automatically generated Web pages –nicely plastered with very targeted ads and usually x-rated or otherwise NSFW banners–, hosted on throw-away domains.
I’m such a devil.

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I’m truly excited. Two of my pamphlets made it in The Rubber Chicken Award’s Top 10! That’s 50% success (2/4 nominated pamphlets), so please help me to make that 100%: vote for #3 and #4!

Just in case you, dear reader, are not a hardcore SEM addict who reads search blogs even during the holiday season, let me explain why a Rubber Chicken Award Top 10 nomination is a honor.

The Rubber Chicken Award honors the year’s most serious SEO research. Extra brownie points are given to the dullest draft and the most tedious wording.

Rumors are swirling that Google’s search quality spam task force has developed the complex RCAFHITSI^©™ algo^{patent pending®} which compiles and ranks search blog posts presented to Mike Blumenthals’s Rubber Chicken Award Jury:

• Bill Slawski
• Greg Sterling
• Rand Fishkin
• Danny Sullivan
• Matt Cutts (suspected final arbiter and extremely busy, so we don’t know whether he’ll show up or not)

Here is the cream of the crop of the search world, the 2007 Top 10 search blog posts nominated in the Rubber Chicken Award for the dullest and most boring/serious SEO/SEM article:

1. Want traffic? Rank for High Traffic Keywords…
2. We Add Words to AdWords… Google Subtracts them
3. Why eBay and Wikipedia rule Google’s SERPs
4. SEOs home alone - Google’s nightmare
5. 13 Things to Do When Your Loved One is Away at Conferences
6. SEO High School Confidential - Premiere Edition!
7. The Sphinn Awards - Part I & -Part II.
8. Top 21 Signs You Need a Break From SEO (2007 version)
9. 10 Signs That You May Be a Blog Addict
10. The SEO’s Guide to Beginners
11. The Internet Marketer’s Nightmare
12. Mission Accomplished—Top Ranking in Google
13. Google Interiors - the day my house became searchable

I’ve selfishly marked the two posts you want to vote for. Because all nominations are truly awesome, just vote for everything but make sure to check “5” for #3 and #4:

Thank You, Dear Reader!

Update: I can’t post another voting whore call to action today, but of course I’d very much appreciate your vote in the Best SEO Blog of 2007 category at SEJ’s 2007 Search Blog Awards.

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If only this headline would be linkbait … of course it’s not sarcastic.

Rumors are out that Microsoft will launch a porn affiliate programm soon. The top secret code name for this project is “pornbucks”, but analysts say that it will be launched as “M$ SMUT CASH” next year or so.

Since Microsoft just can’t ship anything in time, and the usual delays aren’t communicated internally, their search dept. began to promote it to Webmasters this summer.

Surprisingly, Webmasters across the globe weren’t that excited to find promotinal messages from Live Search in their log files, so a somewhat confused MSN dude posted a lame excuse to a large Webmaster forum.

Meanwhile we found out that Microsoft Live Search does not only target the adult entertainment industry, they’re testing the waters with other money terms like travel or pharmaceutic products too.

Anytime soon the Live Search menu bar will be updated to something like this:

Here is the sad –but true– story of a search engine’s downfall.

A few months ago Microsoft Live Search discovered that x-rated referrer spam is a must-have technique in a sneaky smut peddlar’s marketing toolbox.

Since August 2007 a bogus Web robot follows Microsoft’s search engine crawler “MSNbot” to spam the referrer logs of all Web sites out there with URLs pointing to MSN search result pages featuring porn.

Read your referrer logs and you’ll find spam from Microsoft too, but perhaps they peeve you with viagra spam, offer you unwanted but cheap payday loans, or try to enlarge your penis. Of course they know every trick in the book on spam, so check for harmless catchwords too. Here is an example URL:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q= spammy-keyword &mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP

Microsoft’s spam bot not only leaves bogus URLs in log files, hoping that Webmasters will click them on their referrer stats pages and maybe sign up for something like “M$ Porn Bucks” or so. It downloads and renders even adverts powered by their rival Google, lowering their CTR; obviously to make programs like AdSense less attractive im comparison with Microsoft’s own ads (sorry, no link love from here).

Let’s look at Microsoft’s misleading statement:

The traffic you are seeing is part of a quality check we run on selected pages. While we work on addressing your conerns, we would request that you do not actively block the IP addreses used by this quality check; blocking these IP addresses could prevent your site from being included in the Live Search index.

• That’s not traffic, that’s bot activity: These hits come within seconds of being indexed by MSNBot. The pattern is like this: the page is requested by MSNBot (which is authenticated, so it’s genuine) and within a few seconds, the very same page is requested with a live.com search result URL as referer by the MSN spam bot faking a human visitor.
• If that’s really a quality check to detect cloaking, that’s more than just lame. The IP addresses don’t change, the bogus bot uses a static user agent name, and there are other footprints which allow every cloaking script out there to serve this sneaky bot the exact same spider fodder that MSNbot got seconds before. This flawed technique might catch poor man’s cloaking every once in a while, but it can’t fool savvy search marketers.
• The FUD “could prevent your site from being included in the Live Search index” is laughable, because in most niches MSN search traffic is not existent.

All major search engines, including MSN, promise that they obey the robots exclusion standard. Obeying robots.txt is the holy grail of search engine crawling. A search engine that ignores robots.txt and other normed crawler directives cannot be trusted. The crappy MSN bot not even bothers to read robots.txt, so there’s no chance to block it with standardized methods. Only IP blocking can keep it out, but then it still seems to download ads from Google’s AdSense servers by executing the JavaScript code that the MSN crawler gathered before (not obeying Google’s AdSense robots.txt as well).

This unethical spam bot downloading all images, external CSS and JS files, and whatnot also burns bandwidth. That’s plain theft.

Since this method cannot detect (most) cloaking, and the so called “search quality control bot” doesn’t stop visiting sites which obviously do not cloak, it is a sneaky marketing tool. Whether or not Microsoft Live Search tries to promote cyberspace porn and on-line viagra shops plays no role. Even spamming with safe-at-work keywords is evil. Do these assclowns really believe that such unethical activities will increase the usage of their tiny and pretty unpopular search engine? Of course they do, otherwise they would have shutted down the spam bot months ago.

Dear reader, please tell me: what do you think of a search engine that steals (bandwidth and AdSense revenue), lies, spams away, and is not clever enough to stop their criminal activities when they’re caught?

Recently a Live Search rep whined in an interview because so many robots.txt files out there block their crawler:

One thing that we noticed for example while mining our logs is that there are still a fair number of sites that specifically only allow Googlebot and do not allow MSNBot.

There’s a suitable answer, though. Update your robots.txt:

User-agent: MSNbot
Disallow: /

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This is a guest post by Tanner Christensen.

What are you doing to make Internet marketing a better industry to be a part of? As it sits now: Internet marketing is one big popularity contest, and that’s not a good thing. Internet marketers are making it nearly impossible for the average person to find valuable content.

The real online content providers - the websites who deserve all of your attention - are becoming harder and harder to discover because of Internet marketers like us. Though Internet marketers - both you and I - can’t really be blamed, our job is all about getting attention. The more attention we get for our website(s), the more popular our website(s) become, the more money we can make.

But because of the recent surge of interest in Internet marketing and search engine optimization, websites that focus on providing content - rather than getting attention - are being ignored. And because these content-focused websites are being cast into the shadows of attention-focused websites, they too are jumping on the Internet marketing popularity contest bandwagon.

Even though every webmaster and his or her mother is jumping on the bandwagon, it’s not accurate to say that Internet marketers are making all less-important, less-helpful, and less-useful websites more popular than really helpful website, but there is definitely the possibility of real news and information being masked by attention-seeking content.

So what do we do? What do Internet marketers and search engine optimizers do to make sure that the Internet popularity contest doesn’t become a contest of lies and attention-seeking tactics; but rather a contest of quality, helpful, interesting, important, groundbreaking content?

The first step is to become a part of the online community. I’m not talking about the Internet marketing community - it’s biased in a lot of ways. I’m talking about the real online communities. Doing so will help create a universal feeling of online morals; or what’s good information and what is bad information.

And discovering where the real helpful and important websites are online will help Internet marketers such as ourselves learn where the websites we work with really should be ranked.

Sure, there are still those people who don’t care about quality of content and only care about the all-mighty dollar sign. But poor-content will eventually catch up with them, when websites that really deserve attention in the online popularity contest are lost in the fold and the dollar sign loses it’s value.

Tanner is a Web specialist and designer who writes helpful, inspiring, and creative internet-related articles. A while ago I’ve contributed an article to his blog Internet Hunger: The anatomy of a debunking post. I think “can agessive SMO tactics push crap on the long haul” would be an interesting, and related discussion. I mean, search engines evolve too, not only in Web search, so kinda fair rankings of well linked crap as well as good stuff not on the SM radar might be possible to some extent.

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OMFG, yet another post on Sphinn? Yup. I tell you why gaming Sphinn is counter productive, because I just don’t want to read another whiny rant in the lines of “why do you ignore my stuff whilst A listers [whatever this undefined term means] get their crap sphunn hot in no time”. Also, discussions assuming that success equals bad behavior like this or this one aren’t exactly funny nor useful. As for the whiners: Grow the fuck up and produce outstanding content, then network politely but not obtrusive to promote it. As for the gamers: Think before you ruin your reputation!

What motivates a wannabe Internet marketer to game Sphinn?

Traffic of course, but that’s a myth. Sphinn sends very targeted traffic but also very few visitors (see my stats below).

Free uncondomized links. Ok, that works, one can gain enough link love to get a page indexed by the search engines, but for this purpose it’s not necessary to push the submission to the home page.

Attention is up next. Yep, Sphinn is an eldorado for attention whores, but not everybody is an experienced high-class call girl. Most are amateurs giving it a (first) try, or wrecked hookers pushing too hard to attract positive attention.

The keyword is positive attention. Sphinners are smart, they know every trick in the book. Many of them make a living with gaming creative use of social media. Cheating professional gamblers is a waste of time, and will not produce positive attention. Even worse, the shit sticks at the handle of the unsuccessful cheater (and in many cases the real name). So if you want to burn your reputation, go found a voting club to feed your crap.

Fortunately, getting caught for artificial voting at Sphinn comes with devalued links too. The submitted stories are taken off the list, that means no single link at Sphinn (besides profile pages) feeds them any more, hence search engines forget them. Instead of a good link from an unpopular submission you get zilch when you try to cheat your way to the popular links pages.

Although Sphinn doesn’t send shitloads of traffic, this traffic is extremely valuable. Many spinners operate or control blogs and tend to link to outstanding articles they found at Sphinn. Many sphinners have accounts on other SM sites too, and bookmark/cross-submit good content. It’s not unusual that 10 visits from Sphinn result in hundreds or even thousands of hits from StumbleUpon & Co. — but spinners don’t bookmark/blog/cross-submit/stumble crap.

So either write great content and play by the rules, or get nowhere with your crappy submission. The first “10 reasons why 10 tricks posts about 10 great tips to write 10 numbered lists” submission was fun. The 10,000 plagiarisms following were just boring noise. Nobody except your buddies or vote bots sphinn crap like that, so don’t bother to provide the community with footprints of your lousy gaming.

If you’re playing number games, here is why ruining a reputation by gaming Sphinn is not worth it. Look at my visitor stats from July to today. I got 3.6k referrers in 4 months from Sphinn because a few of my posts went hot. When a post sticks with 1-5 votes, you won’t attract much more click throughs than from those 1-5 folks who sphunn it (that would give 100-200 hits or so with the same amount of submissions). When you cheat, the story gets buried and you get nothing but flames. Think about that. Thanks.

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