There's no word for this practice that I'm aware of, so I've coined one - Social Media Poisoning (SMP). The practice involves proactively generating spammy comments, posts, links, etc. from a competitor's domain in order to make bloggers, social media contributors, forum owners, etc. ...
In the current search marketing environment, it's exceptionally hard to find a website that's ranking highly for competitive queries in niche fields that isn't employing paid link tactics to bolster their position. To illustrate, I'll dig into 5 random queries that I've just pulled off the top of my head: There are a few very good link networks in the world of SEO that ha...
There can be little doubt that JohnSabia.com, a Fort Lauderdale real estate agent's site, was engaging in some very manipulative linking practices in the past. However, John's a reformed gray hat turned white and knows quite a bit more about the world of SEO than he did prior to Google's ...
Last week, I interviewed the head of Google's spam team, Matt Cutts, about a lot of different issues. One of the most intriguing to webmasters appears to have been the discussion in the 2nd video (around 6:00) where we go into a chat about the real estate industry online, where thousands of websites have recently lost rankings due to participation in egregious manipulation through reciprocal li...
Beware SEOmoz readers. This is not your typical blog entry from Rand. It contains not only foul language, but a glorification of those parts of the search and online world that I shy away from. It's not for the delicate of heart, but I figure my writing style could use a bit of a shakeup, and what the heck, it's midnight Friday in Beijing, what better time to author something scandalous? ...
Search engines reps have been calling out web spam individually on their sites for some time. Tim Converse used to do it. Matt Cutts has done it plenty of ...
I was shocked today to see how incredibly effective parasite hosting has become. If you're not familiar with the concept, parasite hosting refers to a spammer's creation of a keyword targeted page on a strong, legitimate domain. The idea here is that if they can control that page's content, they can rank for searches and re-direct the traffic to whatever site/page they choose. For example, I ju...
Another Friday afternoon and another great opportunity for a quick and dirty SEOmoz Vidcast. This time around Rand walks us through one of his oh-so-famous (at least to us Mozzers) white board illustrations explaining the justification and methodology behind cloaking (the white hat variety anyway). This is probably a little bit remedial for some of our more high-level readers,...
Last week in London, I sat in on the organic listings forum, where myself, Dave Naylor, Greg Boser, Mikkel DeMib & Barry Lloyd fielded a slough of great questions. One exchange in particular stands out to me - the lone white hat on the panel (though I've certainly been accused of being at least a bit gray hat for my public views on link buying). It featured a question from the audience rega...
As you probably know by now, G-Man has a blog (yay!).Now that I've been noticed, I have started to get a bit of comment spam. Since spam is a hobby of mine I've decided to categorize the top five types of comment spammers Sex for Fantasy - These are the guys who live in a fantasy world where everyone who sees the...
Bill brings up some interesting points in the comment on this thread about the search engines blocking the pages that give the rank and/or links out from the XSS exploitable pages. In some cases, I think this is possible. For instance, there's one XSS exploit that I used for almost a year that gav...
I happpened across this post today about de.licio.us and their effort to combat spam when I saw this comment by Randfish that I found interesting.......The cloaking prevents both unauthorized agents (though anyone "unauthorized" is also likely to ignore robot commands) and discourages pot...
Three of the top six results at Google are user-hijacking, cloaked re-directions to low quality ads disguised as SERPs, i.e. Note that the UCLA page goes to a listing at Jercys.co...
I'd like to preface this entry by saying SEOmoz does not practice or endorse blackhat SEO techniques. This is not intended to be an instructional blackhat SEO article or a list of websites you should all go take advantage of. The goal of this post is, rather, to "out" a significant weakness that can be exploited by savvy users. While reading EGOL's ...