SEO in S. A.

I recently posted a “top secret black hat seo technique” and avertised in a couple of forums – basically I said that I would teach anybody how to get unlimited free links from .gov and .edu sites in return for a link back from their own sites.

Unlimited free links in return for one link?  Of course it was a lie. A scam! I’m a bad person

Did it work? Well, yes and no.

First let’s take a look at the “technique”. It’s exploits a vulnerability in phpinfo() in some verions of PHP that allows you to dynamically inject a link onto a page through the URL. If you know the first thing about SEO, you will be able to get  Google to spider that page and count the link that you injected as an inbound link to your site and therefore count towards raising you site in the search engine rankings.

Now I got to admit – I only did the smallest of experiments to see if it works or not (I didn’t see any of the links I created counting as backlinks to my site) but I couldn’t have been bothered to waste time on something I was very sure wouldn’t work. Let’s face it, even the most junior of Google engineers would be able to filter against something something as basic as phpinfo() in a minute or two, so even if it  did work it would only be a matter of time until all those links I created were discovered and stopped counting.

But what if it DID work? What if it was something I was pretty sure wouldn’t easily be discovered and algorthmically filtered in a hurry? Would I do it then? HELL YES!! If I could get the top rankings for search terms like “viagra” and “online poker” overnight with a simple trick like this, I’d do it like a shot! If you could rank at the top of the search engines for terms like those, you would be raking tens of thousands of dollars every day!

…and it’s legal!  Some of the more common questions I was asked when I revealed the “technique” were about the legality of the trick and the truth is, like most black hat tricks, it is not against the law anywhere in the world! Against Google’s terms and conditions, sure… but not against the law! Nobody would come and arrest me, there would be no fines or jail time or anything like that. The worst thing that could happen to most blackhat SEOs is that they will be banned from Google. Actually not even that…. only the site that they have have used blackhat techniques on will be dropped from the Google index and, even then, there is a possiblity that it may get back in if they clean up thier act! I would be more than happy to risk a site getting kicked out of Google in 6 months time if it was eaning me $20 000 per day until then!

So, if it were real, would using my “technique” get me dropped from the Google index? I seriously doubt it. Links from other peoples sites are supposed to be out of my control (which is why Google hates link buying and selling so much). If links to a site could cause a site to be dropped from Google, I’d buy millions of links to my competitors sites and get them dropped from the index so that I could claim the #1 postion by default. (Ok  – there are ways of doing this, but I won’t cover that here. )

Another common comment about the technique is that the pages that the links were injected in were PR O  pages – and many beginners believe that links from pages with zero page are worless. Wrong! I’ve got a half finished post about PR and links in my drafts folder that I may finish and post sometime soon.

OK – so the whole thing was just an experiment in link baiting. In total it earned me 50 or 60 inbound links which may sound like a good thing considering how little work it took for me to  generate these links but the overall quality was abysmal. Mostly crappy made-for-adsense sites on blogger.com that get NO traffic what so ever.

What amused me most were the types of people that responded. There were a couple of genuine people who were willing to experiment, but the vast majority of respondents were shitty Indian “SEO” rip offs. The kind of morons who frequest othewrwise decent forums and dumb bomb shit like “u need to build more back links for same” on almost every thread thinking that this is a clever way to sig spam thier shitty SEO sites into some sort of search engine rankings!