Blackhat Archives - Web Marketing School

Bulk Image Link Spam Going Un-detected?

I was asked earlier whether using badges for building links is a good idea. Its certainly not a new concept, enterprising SEO’s (myself included) had used this technique, or variants of it, for years.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I also talked extensively about this practice and my experiments in avoiding penalties by rapidly varying … Read more

Sorry: Negative SEO Does Exist

UPDATE: Please check the end of this post for some final notes, following communications with Google. Rand Fishkin published a post yesterday saying: “webmasters are forced to police their own links through webmaster tools, and be in constant fear of negative SEO“ (I’m paraphrasing, the full post is here). Rand goes on to call on … Read more

Angry with Big Brand Spam?

I’ve been contacted a handful of times over the past two years by webmasters complaining about Expedia outranking them, or for having some links of questionable value. While I never put myself forward as the Spam Police, when you’re a high visibility member of staff on social networks, and SEO is in your job description, … Read more

Negative SEO vs. MattCutts.com

Negative SEO has been a hot topic for a number of years now, and we all know the typical routes to demoting your competition: 1) buy loads of crappy links (ie. xrumer/fiverr blasts) 2) duplicate the target site across hundreds of other domains, (squidoo lenses for instance) 3) breach GWMT security and de-index 4) manipulate … Read more

Banks Offer Spamming Advice

SEO is an interesting game, we know how big brands (like Interflora) sometimes get it totally wrong and buy links resulting in google penalties – and you really shouldn’t play with fire unless you’re either: a) an experienced professional SEO or b) comfortable with having your site removed from Google. I’ve seen a case today where Santander … Read more

Interflora SEO Penalty Analysis 2013

Yesterday evening, well known florist brand Interflora was wiped off the face of the internet.  Well, in search marketing terms anyway… Searching for the terms [Flowers], [florist], [flower delivery], [flowers online] and hundreds of other related search terms yielded the interflora.co.uk domain in first place – until yesterday afternoon.  Now the website does not even … Read more

Twitjack 100,000 followers!

Hey folks, a bit of a quick and dirty post here, very little prep has gone into this, and the whole point is that I have to have a “give it up” tip at MozCon 2012, and as I didn’t speak about any nefarious or blackhat techniques, here it is! How to get 100k (real) … Read more