Slightly Shady SEO | Blackhat is Back, Baby.

Alrighty. So I get a low amount of spam in on this blog, but every so often, I get a particularily juicy piece of link spam, and I can learn from it.
And when I say every so often, I mean just once. Because it’s the same fuckin guy who spams this blog all the time.
As always, for those who bitch about me “outting” a blackhat, be quiet. I’m eliminating all given urls/aff-ids, except for the ones that really really don’t matter. In addition, this is just a new spin on an old trick that I happened to find really interesting.

So I recieved a piece of online-pharmacy spam in the comments of this blog. Of course, it had the typical 404 protections(making sure users came from only proper sources), but by forging my referrer, I was able to access what the page ACTUALLY looks like to a real visitor. Via another handy trick, I was able to access it as if I was a search engine.

Here’s what a User Sees(click to enlarge):
Now, take a look at that, and notice something. First of all(although I eliminated the URL), that’s not really Google! Second, notice the url in the status bar. When that screenshot was taken, my mouse was over the first link. Once again, I had to blur that out a bit, but the URL was a completely different site. Indeed, no matter which search result you click, you go to the exact same pharmacy affiliate site! It’s an awesome idea to build up a higher degree of trust, although I imagine the user would be a bit confused when he clicked a search result, and was subsequently taken to yet another search page. But still, ClickThrough Ratio on that must be well above 40%.

Here’s what the Search Engine Sees(click to enlarge)
Now, take a look at what the search engine sees. I had to eliminate the body text, and a few other things though, so that it would be harder for some random do-gooder who sees this page to find the same site I did(although I believe it’s been de-indexed now). Each instance of “tramadol” was bolded, but that’s not the cool part. First, I liked the fact he had a classy looking template going on. Secondly, the way he shoved in his money keywords, and backlinked them(passing internal anchor text weight) was by faking comments. So it essentially looks like he HIMSELF was comment spammed. Although on a comical note, he actually has a functioning CAPTCHA on the page, if you yourself wanted to comment.
He didn’t bother to spin articles properly for this though, so the text he has entered is obvious gibberish. It appears as if he’s using 2-6 word blocks of other sites content, primarily REALLY old blogs(think 1999), and randomally inserting his keyword. By doing that, his site stays on topic, but picks up longtails not typically associated with sites such as his.

Interestingly, I was not able to find any backlinks from him. But that’s probably because he uses a 3rd party redirector to spam his URLs out, and I can’t see what’s going on behind the scenes there.

Enjoy.
-XMCP

Posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 2:51 pm in the category:Link Spamming, cloaking, seo. Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Comment it , or trackback this post.