Slightly Shady SEO | Blackhat is Back, Baby.

I was recently involved in a heated discussion on link spam and the like, and I found myself actually giving a few suggestions(if a bit sarcastically) on how to block blog spam, and I thought I’d share one with you guys, as it’s one that I haven’t done myself. It won’t do much to stop blackhats who already have your blog URL, but hey, it’ll do it a lot to stop future ones from finding you. This also helps prevent splogs from duping your content.

What are Footprints?
For you new readers, footprints are static pieces of text that show up on a piece of software. Where most content is dynamic in most software(wordpress, openld, phpld, etc), there is almost always some hardcoded phrase that shows up in most all of them. Searching for this phrase brings back a list of sites with the software installed.

How Your Blog Gets Found for Link Spam
Search engines, how else? All scripts have footprints, so we just look for a specific software set. Most of this post will be going through the footprints Wordpress leaves, and eliminating them. I’m sure I’ll miss a few(and perhaps not want to mention a few), so use your own imagination and judgement.

But XMCP, Why Are You Helping These People?! It Hurts Blackhats!
I will smack the first whiney blackhat that comes to me about this post. Ok. These are the people that track down your sites, and submit your comments on clean proxies as spam. You should not WANT to link spam them, and you’re an idiot if you do.
The Types of Footprints We’re After:
Within any software installation, a few words or phrases remain constant. We’ll break this down into 3 categories of footprints

1. Exact Match Footprints - Phrases that show up almost 100% uniquely on sites running the given set of software. “Powered By XYZ” for example
2. Combination Footprints - Single words or small phrases that all show up on a lot of different sites. When combining these words together though, and searching for them all at once, the pool of sites is greatly narrowed down, offering us a fairly targeted selection
3. Filename Footprints - Some scripts have filenames that exist almost exclusively in sites running that particular piece of software. Combining these with a combination footprint is also quite common.

Dealing with Your Exact Footprints
Exact footprints are the easiest to handle, but they’re everywhere. And they all need to be eliminated. “Powered By Wordpress”? Yeah. Kill it. I don’t think Wordpress is having any problems ranking for their own software title name.
Now, they’re not all that simple. That “About Me” page you never edited? Change it. The affiliate program that was built into your web cart software but never setup? All the default phrases are footprints (Example). Run through your files, and just delete them. No harm done. Having backlinks to people that designed your theme are much lower risk, but still, you might want to kill it, depending on what the licensing agreement says, and if you care.
Make sure to look carefully. Things like “You can use these tags:” wordpress can be an issue.

Dealing With You Combination Footprints
Combination footprints are a tricky beast, but thankfully not as common. Swap out the 1 or 2 most common ones, and move on. Inserting spaces can even help. For example, a search for blogroll returns 32 times as many results as “Blog Roll”. Common category names, headings, and sections are all suspect here.

Dealing With Your Filename Footprints
Wordpress isn’t as bad as many with these. But still, start cleaning. Any filename that is somewhat unique to the software, open up the code and start swapping it out. Bear in mind as well, that included in this category are any arguments/query strings that come AFTER the filename. They’re all searchable, and are actually normally more unique than the filename itself?

An Example: Some of SlightlyShadySEO’s Footprints:
All text highlighted in red are exact footprints, everything in blue is a combination footprint
Yes, I’m FULLY aware Archives is spelled wrong. No, I’m not changing it. Consider it a footprint I don’t have, that you probably do!

With that, I’m off to finish eliminating a few of my own footprints. I don’t get much link spam, so probably just the exact ones for now
I’m not going to work to hard at it though. This entry actually contains several footprints in the content…so I’m kinda screwed. Haha.

Enjoy!
-XMCP

Posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 4:59 pm in the category:blogging. Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Comment it , or trackback this post.