Dark SEO Programming
SEO Tools. I code ‘em.

Remember that 10 bloggers who rock post? Apparently I rigged it, here’s the actual comments.

1. 1. rob Says:
      June 3rd, 2008 at 1:50 am this list is no where near complete. In fact, i think this whole thing was rigged.
   2. Harry Says:
      June 3rd, 2008 at 4:15 am I did say it wasn’t complete. You think it was rigged? What are you some kind of conspiracy theorist?

So Rob of Seocracy what did you expect? Some kind of democratic process. Maybe I should have had blog primaries. I guess some people would still say it was tailored towards a particular demographic. Then we could argue the order is all wrong and I’m biased. Then I’d recount the votes and accidentally lose a few. Rigged ballot machines. You name it.

So if it’s so incomplete then fill in the gaps and I’ll link to you from here <—.

Update: Rob was kidding, apparently . Or so he says . Anyway his site’s pretty cool. Check out some of his articles like:

This one

Also this one

How easy is it to get past youtube’s 18+ filters without actually signing up as an 18+ user? Hmmm… well we could… embed the video… That won’t work will it? Omg, it does. Still. I think I mentioned this before on my old blog. Does this not undermine the entire point of having an 18+ filter? It’s completely possible for someone underage to embed the video into a local web page thereby not having to confess up to being a kid.

It could be argued that only sites that have asked people to admit to being 18 will embed these videos, however what if they don’t check? That’s then Youtube’s fault, serving up content to underage people without checks. What if someone puts the video into their youtube profile, no checks there either. Some kid could stumble onto it and play it. That’s not unfeasible, someone with an 18+ video embedded into their profile subscribes to a popular video, thereby showing up in the list of subscribers. A kid clicks through. Some of the embedded videos even automatically play.

Have I become a crusader for all that’s right and fair? Nah, not really, I just think it’s pretty stupid and I wonder if Youtube are breaking the law.

Want to test it for yourself. WARNING: Kids please don’t use this.

It’s pretty simple use the link below, find an 18+ video, type in the watch?v=… url and click the button. I’ve defaulted it to some aladdin video in case you click accidentally . Or maybe I just couldn’t find the right niche in porn for you all .

Click here to test for yourself

I leave you with a quote that just entered my head completely randomly:
“In cyberspace no-one can hear you power up your hard drives… AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!”

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?

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.

Before I post my next post I’m going to make a little list of books which I think are amazing reading.

Persuasion
==========

I find this stuff amazing, there’s only one book I recommend but here’s why. It’s literally a study of the way people react under very similar situations with perhaps a small change to the way you phrase something, with statistics on the differing reactions of groups of people to the new phrase. For instance foot in the door technique is the process of making a small request such as to sign a piece of paper to show they support they would support the local blood bank, and then asking if they would now be intereted in donating blood. On average it is likely to increase the response rate by around 10% to asking the second question only. This is the type of thing this book is about.

Sales/Marketing
===============

I think learning this stuff is essential if you’re doing anything PPC or generally advertisement related. And it’s also extremely interesting.

I recommend this book for the simple reason that the guy who wrote it sold over 20 million pairs of blublocker sunglasses. He must know something about his trade. I’ve read some reviews on this book by people saying it’s only good for direct response. They’re right but PPC and the web is very similar to direct response marketing. Now you could walk into PPC or advertising totally blind without a clue what you’re doing and pick everything up as you go along but when you’re putting hundreds of dollars of your own money on the line you’ll admit that’s a little more than scary? In this book Joesph Sugarman writes about his experiences in producing effective sales copy which should give you a good grounding. Most of the reviews on this book praise it pretty highly.

Coding Techniques
=================

These are intense reading about very defined topics. You’re going to need a ton of caffeine but I’d be amazed if you don’t come away feeling like you’ve truly learned something. (At the moment there is only one in this section but I will probably add more )

Natural Language Processing is extremely interesting because it involves the computer attempting to give the impression of being able to talk as if it understood the world it is trying to describe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing explains the basics of it. The fundamentals of natural language generation involve taking some basic information and forming a natural sounding sentence from it. To do this we can use statistics to analyze the probability of a word appearing after a word or set of words. There are markov classes on the Internet which use basic statistics to rewrite content. It’s a complicated subject by any stretch of the word.

PHP Newbies
===========

If you are new to coding I suggest you only learn one language, PHP. With PHP you will be able to do almost everything you will ever need to and you will be able to write powerful database applications on the web as well as write scripts that run on your own desktop. I think there is only one way to learn to code. Promise yourself to write a little script and work on it until you pull it off. A book is useful to grasp the basics and act as a reference so you don’t have to google every two minutes.

Social Engineering
==================

How to break through many impenetrable security systems with simple phone calls. Certainly makes you think. The whole of the book describes building trust with members staff by gaining different small pieces of information from different departments/staff until the product of that information supplies you with enough credibility that they will believe you are who you say you are. I don’t recommend or do any of this it’s just an interesting read.

Next post will be the Java thing.

I don’t have the skills to set this up myself as it’s a large project and I don’t know how you’d go about setting up an opensource project on this scale. However.

Have you ever used the ALICE bot? I think it’s pretty amazing yet ridiculously simple. Literally anyone who knows basic English can make his own. And that’s my idea. A website like wikipedia based on user input that is moderated so that people all work together putting in a little time to make many different personality bots for a game. Then we get some open source coders to add the finishing touches to the game like the GUI. Sure it might not make money but hopefully it’d push the boundaries of games in the future. I don’t know. Good idea?