The SeedKeys Method Released!
As we mentioned yesterday, we’ve launched a new product! It’s called The SeedKeys Method and we’re really excited about it. It’s a great method for beginners or more experienced marketers looking to make some extra scratch. We’ve provided everything you need to get started and a lot of fresh, new ideas in the manual that no one in the industry is doing yet. Of course, along with this method, including unencrypted PHP code, MySQL import tables, and a site template, we’re including our renowned customer service support.
We hope you guys enjoy this method as much as we have enjoyed developing it and working with it.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us via email or PM.
New Method Being Released Tomorrow!
We’ll be releasing a new method tomorrow. We’ve sent emails to all of our previous customers, but we’re keeping out mouths shut with regards to specific details before the official release. We’ll make a post on the site when the public offer is live.
Is Black Hat SEO Waning?
CNET News posted an article yesterday in which Matt Cutts of Google, as well as others, discussed a waning trend in black hat search engine optimization and an increase in white hat design and techniques. First, a clip from the article:
“We see the majority of the trend is people trying to find legitimate ways” to promote their sites, said Matt Cutts, who as head of Google’s Webspam polices abuse of Google’s search engine. He stopped short of saying the Wild West days of Web site promotion are over, but said, “The hope is you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Google believes it’s made technological progress to stay ahead in the cat-and-mouse game. “Our approach is to try not to do hand-to-hand combat. We try to find algorithms that will shut down a whole technique,” Cutts said. But when it comes to Web sites Google believes are violating the rules, it will take manual action. “Google does reserve the right to take manual action on spam.”
While Cutts is certainly not insinuating that the gig is up, we find it odd that CNET, and potentially Google themselves, are interpreting their position as “ahead.” Quite frankly, and this has been true since the inception of internet search engines, the black hats, or those who choose to exploit chinks in the armor of search engines will always be ahead; it is the nature of their existence.
We’re not implying that all people who consider themselves to be on the edge of black hat SEO are experts, but certainly the individuals who do consistently seek out and act upon easier ways to gain higher rankings have a certain understanding of the underpinnings and business practices that cannot be obscured by changes in algorithm. To assume otherwise is a foolish and has the potential to be a dangerously arrogant perspective to hold.
For every fresh-faced college graduate who gets hired at Google to fight spam, new SEO techniques, or any other number of “nefarious” activities, there are hundreds of equally talented young engineers, computer scientists, and enthusiasts who are struggling in an increasingly competitive, modern economy. Many of these individuals find themselves at a critical juncture. They must decide to either take an often low-paying, unsatisfying job in any number of industries or find elegant ways to support their lifestyles. Luckily for the black hat community, many of these individuals are choosing the latter.
To be a black hat is to be more than an exploiter of computers systems; it is to be an explorer of the unknown. It is to follow the foot steps of previous explorers and to allow one’s own personal imagination and intuition to guide them passed the comfort zones of most inhabitants of this dynamic organism we call the internet. Most importantly, it is to have an understanding and a connection to how it is changing in a way that most people will never be cognizant of.
To say that black hat SEO is waning is to say that the potential for the thrill of financial freedom is coming to end, for what the black hat represents is the most key component of any functional capitalist society, market change. Black hats are some of the most integral agents of change that exist in this marketplace and without them the stagnant conditions that have forced many to the Internet in the first place could just as easily arrive here.
Is black hat SEO waning? We don’t think so, but if a time ever comes that these key members of the Internet community do begin to disappear, we fear that it will mark not the beginning of a Golden Age, but rather the beginning of the spirit of capitalism online resigning.
Final AutoPligg Update
Over the last month we’ve received a considerable amount of traffic to our AutoPligg review and subsequent update. We wanted to make another brief, final progress update on it’s efficacy as relatively powerful SEO tool to those who still on the fence:
This program works. After a series of test runs, we received top 2 placement on Google for more than 5 relatively high volume, competitive keywords for a new domain with minimal back links and no purposeful SEO. The results, still stable after more than a month, are astonishing enough that we’ve even considered leveraging this tool for our white hat ventures, something we just don’t do.
Syndk8’s AutoPligg, now priced at a reasonable $189, gets the blackhatzen mark of approval.
Second Round of EPN Bannings
An eBay spokesperson posted a message on their message board making note of a larger number of recent affiliate bans or “expirations.”
I wanted to address all of the board posts regarding the expiration emails that were sent last night.
These actions were part of our continued effort to focus on delivering the highest quality buyer traffic to eBay via affiliate marketing. To that end, we’ve been analyzing our program closely over the last few months. I know there have been a number of requests to provide insight into all of the metrics via which we are evaluating affiliate traffic, but unfortunately there’s an active black hat community that is pretty effective at exploiting these insights so we can’t go into details on them. However, what I can say is that in addition to earnings per click metrics (EPC), we look at a variety of metrics to see how users are behaving when they come to eBay.com – how engaged they are with our site, and whether the affiliate link clicks lead to incremental buying activity. As we’ve done this, we have seen a big discrepancy in how interested and active the traffic is that comes to eBay from different sources.
Our responsibility in the affiliate marketing channel is to allocate our resources to best drive incremental demand to our sellers. To that end, we need to focus on partners who have had the most success in engaging users who become some of our best buyers on eBay. I understand that these actions do have a very real impact on some of our affiliates who have been working with us over the years. For that, I sincerely apologize, but these decisions are made in the best interest of eBay’s sellers and the overall health of our affiliate program.
We want to be very clear. Affiliates who received these messages of expiration last night are not being asked to stop sending traffic to us due to fraudulent activity or violations of the terms of service. For those of you who received the message, commissions are not being reversed, and you will be paid for all valid traffic you have sent to us to date, and for the next 7 days.
Sincerely,
Steve
Now, quite frankly, the fact that they are blaming this on the blackhat community is a bit ridiculous. It is, in fact, their responsibility to safeguard their own systems. These gentleman essentially skirted around the real question, which is “What does real traffic look like to you guys?” They say they can’t release specific information about the metrics they are using due to the blackhat community exploiting them, but the fact of the matter is that most of the metrics they could use are blatantly obvious and have already been discussed in great detail by people in the know.
The first and potentially the hardest metric to combat is on-site behavior tracking. That is to say, what users that click EPN affiliate links do once they are on eBay. It is unlikely for all users who come from a single affiliate to only go to the first page they are presented. While this might be the case a majority of the time, general traffic patterns indicate that something between 10-15% of users will travel at least one page deeper. This number rises and falls depending on the quality of the on-page content as well the relevance of the link, but this is a good baseline to begin to look at.
Lots of ideas are floating around the office at the moment with ways to combat this, though it should be stated clearly that nothing is in the works yet. We should also note that we’ve received no reports of people utilizing our cookie stuffing method being banned and that we have not been directly effected by these bannings.
Update and EPN Warning
We just wanted to make a quick update and let everyone know that Meta-Marketing: Cookie Stuffing Edition has officially sold out. We’d like to thank everyone who purchased and reviewed this product and ask that you forward any questions you have to us rather than discussing them publicly. We believe in good customer support and would like to keep all questions and comments internal. We’re considering launching a private forum for this very purpose. More on that in the near future.
At the beginning of September, we will be bringing on our second full-time employee. Up until now, the brunt of the work has been done by one full-time individual and a handful of volunteers and contributors. This new member of the blackhatzen crew is highly capable and has known everyone here for quite a few years. We’re very excited and believe that his addition will allow us to provide even better products, ideas, and customer service to our faithful customers and clients.
On a darker note, we’d like to warn everyone that this is the time of the month when people start to get banned from EPN and it seems to be happening on a much broader scale than usual this month. Many black hat sites and forums are beginning to hide or further obscure their information to ensure the security and safety of their users. We believe this is a good idea and will are becoming more tight-lipped about the highest quality techniques and saving them for individuals who are capable of creating sustainable online revenue streams. So, as a word of warning, play it safe.
AutoPligg Progress Update
We posted a review of Syndk8’s AutoPligg roughly a week ago. We wanted to give you an update a week into our experiment. While our test site has received a few hundred unique visitors from Pligg sites, most of the traffic was not well targeted to our niche. This is our fault for deciding to use AutoPligg indiscriminately. However, the real success has been in the SERP increases. We’ve seen movements from top 100 to top 3 for keyword searches ranging from low competitiveness to extremely high competitiveness. Needless to say, one week in and we’re very pleased with the results.
Black Hat World Donation Drive
As many of our faithful readers know, Black Hat World is one of our main points of operation. We love the admins, staff, and VIPs there and consider them good friends. If you frequent BHW, you know that they’ve been having some server issues lately. Instead of talking about the up-time issues, let’s try and fix them. They need a new, bigger, better, and badder server to handle all of the traffic and we’d like to assist them in getting enough donations to make that a financially sound and reasonable solution.
We’d like to offer an incentive. Anyone who joined BHW before today who donates any amount is open for a discount on their next purchase from us. All you have to do to be added to the donators discount list is PM us your PayPal transaction ID on BHW.
We’ve started a Donation Drive thread here.
Meta-Marketing: Cookie Stuffing Edition Almost Sold Out!
We’ve had two more people who asked for us to hold copies back out, so we’ve got another two copies that are open for sale. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. Otherwise, you can purchase and receive instant digital delivery by going to the Meta-Marketing: Cookie Stuffing Edition sales page.
Brief Review of Syndk8’s AutoPligg
While this is not our normal modus operandi, we just wanted to share a new tool we’ve been made aware of and have had the opportunity to test. We are not being paid by the creator(s) nor are we affiliated with their company. We will not provide any technical support for their product. With that out of the way, we’d like to talk about Syndk8’s AutoPligg application.
We have to admit that we were very, very skeptical at first. The long term SEO value of applications like this has never excited us. For a short blast, they can be effective, but generally they are the quickest route to your local sandbox. However, at least for the time being, AutoPligg appears to do what it says it can do and it does it pretty damn well. For those who are unaware, Pligg is an open-source web application that is very similar to the extremely popular Digg platform. This allows a user community to vote and comment on links that they either like or dislike. There are quite a few Pligg sites floating around the web.
Essentially what AutoPligg does is automate the creation of accounts, as well as the submission and commenting of links. It’s as simple as that. While most people will definitely abuse this application and spam their links, we believe that more intelligent marketers will realize the potential of targeting the sites to which they list their stories.
The brief test we did, definitely seemed to show that AutoPligg is effective at increasing the short term SERPs of targeted low volume, low competition, long tail keywords. We can’t speak of the application’s long term value as we haven’t had access to it for a long enough period of time to really tell. It is extremely simple to use and doesn’t seem to be too much of a resource hog in it’s current incarnation. CAPTCHA cracking makes the account creation process much easier and the inclusion of proxy support was a great idea. Last, but not least, it’s price tag, only $189, is definitely in the right ballpark for this kind of application. If the makers keep it updated, this could be one of the better purchases a smart marketer makes this year.
The biggest fault we could find was it’s speed. From what we understand, the makers are working on a multi-threaded version which would make this application, much, much faster and that much better. That said, even though the application isn’t fast, it is automated, which almost makes up for it’s speed. We’d love to see a faster version in the near future.
We’ll post an updated review once we see how our results pan out over a longer period of time.