Dark SEO Programming
SEO Tools. I code ‘em.

Quite a while back, Mark from digeratimarketing.co.uk asked me to review his software autostumble. In the meantime I’ve been messing with it and seeing what it can do. WARNING: Mark didn’t pay for this review so I’m gonna be totally honest

So to start…

What does it do? It’s a database of stumblers who exchange stumbles with you without you begging them for a stumble, kidnapping their close relations, or manually stumbling at a stumbleexhcange place. It sits in your **windoze** task bar. (And yes that does mean it refuses to run in Linux) It’s a ridiculously light program though so you can run it in a vm fine.

Unfortunately I haven’t actually used stumbleupon before because it doesn’t make sense to me. I can understand how digg works, and sphinn, and del.icio.us. But stumbleupon has a toolbar, and I don’t normally trust anything with a toolbar . So in the course of using the software I fecked it up because I hadn’t reviewed my URL and my votes went into the void of cyberspace. The software doesn’t check or notify you if you make a stupid mistake like that. On the other hand there’s only a few of boxes so there’s not many places you can screw up. I just managed to find probably the only one. To be honest if you have half an idea about stumbleupon it’s easy to figure out, just make sure you submit your url to stumbleupon before exchanging stumbles with the program. Doh!

So the page I promoted. Well it has days of nothing and then all of a sudden traffic in a couple of days, but that’s probably explained by my complete screw up. I stumbled the same URL after Mark fixed the database up so it was getting old as an entry and I don’t know if that counts for anything.

You also have to tailor your content for the audience. It’s an obvious one but you’re not promoting to your normal website audience, it’s got to really hit a nerve with the stumbleupon crowd. Now I have yet to discover exactly what makes them tick and I think my page may have lacked something in that direction.

Worth £10/$20 soon going up to £20/$40? I never reached the full potential of this program. I plan to have another go mind you. I’d say it’s definitely worth the price of what is basically a quarter of what you might spend filling your car up for something that will still be there whenever you have an idea and want another way of promoting it.

I reckon if it does gain a *lot* of users over time that could increase your competition, and stumbleupon may notice that their algorithm is being subverted and change it. So I’d recommend buying it early now before he promotes like a madman. That way you get the bonus of being in early and if it does continue to work you don’t pay anything extra.

DigeratiMarketing Site

10 bloggers who post real info.

NickyCakes @ NickyCakes.com - The (mostly) reformed blackhat. What does that mean?!? I’m a mostly reformed alcoholic. Is that the same sort of thing? Moeshtly Reformshed, I aaaam. At the very least he’ll rickroll you.

Paul @ UberAffiliate.com - The victim/reason for Nickycakes arguments? Nickycakes and Paul like to act like an arguing married couple on wickedfire.com. The nice guy of affiliate marketing.

Wickedfire.com - Not really a blogger. More like a busy place where affiliate marketers hang out and play pool whilst talking about affiliate tips amonst other things. I’d go there again but I forgot my username and password.

XCMP @ Slightly Shady SEO - Slightly shady? Who is he trying to kid? If he’s slightly shady, what are the shady people doing?

Quadszilla @ SeoBlackhat.com - If websites wore clothes his would have a suit and shades. I wouldn’t want to meet his website in a dark alley. It’s that overpowering blackness, I often feel like I’m going to get sucked into it. Which reminds me of something I’ve always wanted to do. Join a company that does videoconferencing just so I can sit behind the monitor doing the “trapped in a box” impression. You know the one where you put your hands out and look surprised as they hit some kind of force field. Yeah, I’d probably get fired but it’d be worth it.

Eli @ BluehatSeo.com - Apparently black and white isn’t good enough for Eli. He likes to think in (shades of?) blue. Personally I think it’s discriminatory against colour blind people. Come on Eli, these are the days of political correctness.

Ed @ BlackHatDigest.com - This guy’s blog has some golden nuggets in there. He’s labeled it the dark side for newbies.

Smaxor @ OOOFF.com - Smaxor must have fallen asleep on his keyboard only to realise he’d just registered the most random domain name ever. The ensuing moments were probably along the lines of “oh shit, what shall I do with this? Not again.”. So he starts a blog sharing some of his knowledge to the world.

Lyndon @ CornwallSEO.com - Managed to get FOX news to run a fake news story resulting in 1500+ links in a week (recently at 14,000). That doesn’t make FOX a shit news channel though. You only have to read the abuse he got to realise it was Lyndon’s unethical practices that are the issue. No wait… This just in… FOX are in fact… a shit news channel. Funny, but shit.

Harry @ darkseoprogramming.com - Didn’t see this one coming did you ? (So I only had 9 and 10 is a round number… sue me… actually don’t.) Some total moron shares captcha breaking, scraping, and other blackhat seo tools. Also planning to cover some less blackhat seo tools eventually.

Update: I noticed Mark’s comment in the comment box, and I felt bad at all those decent blogs I’ve missed through not remembering. So Mark @ DigeratiMarketing.com posts some damn good shit… and… any blog post that references his site he is amazingly fast at posting to. That bluehatseo.com one he managed to post to first, and that’s a feat. So Mark, forgive me for missing your blog

No more updates, you should have been the first one to say fuck you to me. It won’t work anymore.

Probably some of you do this already. If you run windows it can sometimes be pretty difficult to get all the necessary compilers working together with php, apache and so on. Not only that but if you go and buy yourself a dedicated server it will probably be running linux. It makes a lot of sense to know how to use linux and write software that runs on linux.

So the easiest way, and also the free way is to get yourself these two things:

Guide to installing QEMU

SLAMPP ISO - This is linux on a CD

So basically all you do is follow the guide to installing QEMU, make sure it boots from a CD and point that CD to the SLAMPP ISO. You’ll then instantly have a fully working linux OS set up as a test webserver. Don’t write the ISO to a proper CD except as a backup precaution.

Basically when you have QEMU installed I think you can either use the QEMU manager, or the way I do it in linux .

qemu -cdrom slampp.iso -hda hardisk.img.qcow -m 256 -boot d

You can remove the -hda hardisk… part but then you won’t be able to save any changes to settings you make.

I felt like submitting something for his challenge so here it is on my blog. Go here for the original challenge. Basically it’s just an add your caption to the picture challenge. Here goes nothing.

Incidentally the last one I posted just because he looks so damn confused. So I thought maybe his body came with a label. He’s like damn, I never even noticed… Did anyone chuckle?

A while back I presented a long-winded algorithm that would crack phpBB3 captchas. However I cracked it a while back and it’s even simpler than I said before. My floodfill routine returns the size of the area it colours in. Soooo… I flood fill background coloured pixels and if it’s a small area we assume it must be part of a letter and keep it. That gives us lots of small segments to join together.

Incidentally we find the background colour by reading the pixels along the top and finding the most regularly occuring colour.

Now we have some small segments we make them touch each other by blurring them and then we force the picture into only two colours. Then using the average density of vertical lines in each letter we rotate them to an approximately correct position. It may throw a few upside down but as long as that letter always comes out that way up the computer doesn’t care.

Now just train Gocr or a neural network or <<insert cunning program here>> to read those letters. Simple. And surprisingly accurate too. We could further improve it with colour checking routines etc but hey, it works.

This is totally pointless, but I wasn’t aware that this was actually possible until today.

Google Trips Out

If it looks normal for you then I guess it didn’t work.